Free Republic

Is there anything liberals can do about Ron DeSantis other than quietly seethe, loudly condemn him every time he makes headlines and hope that his political flaws — his distaste for glad-handing, his less-than-inspiring public-speaking style, his conspicuous unlikability — will take him down before he gets anywhere close to the presidency? It would be tempting to write off DeSantis, the bombastic Republican governor of Florida, as another unelectable right-wing lunatic unfit for national office. We’ve made that mistake before. It’s reliably depressing to revisit 2016 and the misbegotten liberal conviction that America couldn’t possibly elevate Donald Trump to the...

Florida Gov. DeSantis is emerging as a bigger potential threat to President Biden than former President Trump, polls indicate. Though he’s not as well-known to voters overall, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is emerging as a bigger potential threat to President Joe Biden than former President Donald Trump, according to a new nationwide poll conducted for the conservative Club for Growth. The poll shows Trump losing to Biden 41-48% — an 8-percentage point disadvantage for the Republican that’s outside the poll’s 3-point error margin. But in a head-to-head matchup against DeSantis, Biden gets 42% of the theoretical vote compared to 45%...

VLADIMIR Putin has been forced to pull back his jets and helicopters from Crimea after a massive blitz on Russian military bases - as humiliating video shows mutinying soldiers refusing to fight. Ukrainian intelligence sources claim some 24 fighter jets and bombers along with 14 choppers retreated deeper into the Black Sea peninsula - or back to mainland Russia. The dramatic withdrawal follows the heavy bombardment of Putin's military bases on the Russian-occupied peninsula over the last nine days from Ukrainian special forces. A devastating series of explosions at an air base last week destroyed 20 jets and caused £1bn...

Pictures have emerged from the streets of Ukraine showing the smouldering wrecks of Russian tanks destroyed amid brutal urban fighting as Putin's invasion of his neighbour continues. Huge convoys of Russian armour have rumbled into several Ukrainian cities, only to be met with fierce resistance as well-armed troops used a mixture of their own and NATO-supplied anti-tank weapons to wreak havoc on the invaders. Some of the most shocking images of the devastation inflicted on Russian armour came from the town of Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv, where an entire column of tanks and armoured vehicles were obliterated. Taken...