Free Republic

“I am not a crook.” “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Just joking.” That last line may be the Trump administration’s way of maintaining plausible deniability when dangling pardons. The Washington Post reported this week that Trump has told aides that he will pardon them if they have to break laws to build a border wall. Trump’s statement reportedly came as he pushes aides to build a border wall before the 2020 election to make good on his campaign promise, even if it requires seizing private land and disregarding environmental rules. When aides have protested that some...

When CNN's Brian Stelter isn't worrying about whether or not Sean Spicer's foxtrot around ABC's dancefloor will cause lasting damage to America's social fabric, he's bringing guests on 'Reliable Sources' to sound off cockamamie psychological theories around President Donald J. Trump. Today, Stelter had on a psychiatrist who suggested that President Trump is 'more destructive' than Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong combined.Ex-Townhall contributor and current Washington Examiner writer Julio Rosas picked up the exchange. Dr. Allen Frances, former chairman of the Psychiatry Department at Duke University, told Stelter that he is not in favor of psychologists and psychiatrists...

Late Saturday night, the Wikipedia page for "the Jessica Yaniv waxing case" disappeared. Activists had tried to delete the page earlier this week, and it appears their efforts were successful. A biological male originally named Jonathan, Yaniv claims to identify as a woman and has attempted to force female-run waxing studios to perform Brazilian waxes on his private parts. When the studios refused, he filed human rights complaints against them. One of the women shut down her business because of his complaint. The case is currently before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.

Buddy. Confidant. Cat herder. Betsy Ebeling, 73, who was known as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s best friend and first childhood school chum, died Sunday in Arlington Heights after a long battle with breast cancer. Ebeling and Clinton had a long history together dating back to when they were sixth-graders at Eugene Field School in Park Ridge. “It’s so sudden because Betsy was always busy gathering Hillary and all of us who had been close — especially her Park Ridge school buddies, which she jokingly likened to herding cats,” said Kathy Burgess, a close friend. Ebeling was working on getting everyone together...

Donald Trump is not someone who accepts losing. Whether in his decades in the business world or his second career as a politician -- and President -- his career is marked with a refusal to acknowledge when he has come up short. He appeared triumphant after declaring bankruptcy. He touted his victory after a Republican Congress failed to fully repeal the Affordable Care Act. He said, without evidence, he would have won the 2016 popular vote if 3 to 5 million illegal votes had not been cast. And on and on it goes. Which brings us to Wednesday morning --...

She's been called "Kerosene Maxine" and gaveled off the House floor for accusing Republican men of badgering women. She dismissed President Donald Trump and his allies as thugs and predicted his impeachment before he was sworn into office. No one, Maxine Waters once observed, should be surprised by her. But after nearly three decades in Congress, the 80-year-old California lawmaker is in an eye-opening role as the highest-ranking African American woman in the country. She's wielding the gavel of the bank-regulating Financial Services Committee with the power to investigate Trump where some say it counts most: his business dealings. The...

Do you recall this golden promise from Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign? “We’re going to make America wealthy again,” he promised. “You have to be wealthy in order to be great.” Well, Trump voters, how is that working out for you? After almost two-and-a-half years with Trump in the White House — including two years with Republican control of both houses of Congress — the middle class is getting squeezed to a pulp. The rich got their Trump tax cut. GDP looks good. And the stock market is doing great for people with money to invest. But it is...

A couple of very long years ago, 62.9 million Americans voted to make a racist reality star — who, by his own account, had no experience at governing, but plenty at groping random married women — their president. By the time these votes were cast, Donald Trump had called for banning all Muslims from the United States, led a movement contesting the first black president’s legitimacy, insinuated that the bulk of Mexican-Americans were drug dealers or rapists, praised his supporters for assaulting (nonwhite) protesters, and vowed to subject each and every one of America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, including those...

“Israel is a reality, Arabs and Israelis must negotiate their future together.” When those words appeared on my screen last week, they looked like good advice from a European or American source, the kind of advice that Arabs usually ignore. Instead, they turned out to be from an interview with the deputy head of the Oman journalists association. Oman is a small (population: four million) oil-rich Sultanate in the Arabian Peninsula. And Oman’s foreign minister has remarked that Arab nations must reassure Israel that they do not pose a threat to its existence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently paid a...

PLYMOUTH, Pa. — Twice a month, half a dozen men gather in Plymouth Meeting to help each other work through past traumas. Their chosen method of healing? Cuddles. It may seem odd, but members of the Men’s Therapeutic Cuddle Group say the practice has helped them cope with everything from childhood sexual abuse to the loss of family members when they were young.

American supporters of gun control are aflame with admiration for New Zealand, whose government needed only six days after a mass shooting to enact a strict new gun law. “See. It’s not that hard,” tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. “This is what leadership looks like,” marveled Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. It was notable that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern pushed through a ban on so-called assault weapons with so little opposition. Also notable were the claims about what it will achieve. “Every semi-automatic weapon used in the terrorist attack on Friday will be banned in this country,” she said. The result...

The notion of “intelligent design” arose after opponents of evolution repeatedly failed on First Amendment grounds to get Bible-based creationism taught in the public schools. Their solution: Take God out of the mix and replace him with an unspecified “intelligent designer.” They added some irrelevant mathematics and fancy biochemical jargon, and lo: intelligent design, which scientists have dubbed “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” But the tuxedo is fraying, for intelligent design has been rejected not just by biologists but also by judges who recognize it as poorly disguised religion. Nevertheless, its advocates persist. Among the most vocal is Michael J....

A ‘BRITISH’ gunman who is believed to have filmed himself slaughtering Muslims in a New Zealand mosque wrote a chilling manifesto before the “terrorist attack”. The white-supremacist shooter, 28, who was born in Australia, said he wanted to take revenge for the "thousands of European lives lost to terror attacks". He boasted that he chose to use firearms so he could influence politics in the US. “Finally, to create conflict between the two ideologies within the United States on the ownership of firearms in order to further the social, cultural, political and racial divide within the United states," he wrote....

Announcing his second bid for the presidency March 2, Sen. Bernie Sanders drew a massive crowd in Brooklyn, estimated at 13,000 by his campaign. But can he do the same in Peoria?

Former first lady Michelle Obama tied with former Vice President Joe Biden as the top choice among Democratic voters when asked who should be the party's nominee in 2020. A Hill-HarrisX poll released Tuesday found that 25 percent of Democrats said they would back Obama in the party primary over nine other declared or potential candidates, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas).

The Golden State Warriors visited former President Obama on Thursday shortly before their game against the Washington Wizards in the nation's capital. The NBA team posed with Obama in a picture of the moment that surfaced on social media on late Thursday.

In early November, gale-force winds whipped a brush fire into an inferno that nearly consumed the town of Paradise, California, and killed at least 86 people. By the second morning, I could smell the fire from one foot outside my door in Berkeley, some 130 miles from the flames. Within a week, my eyes and throat stung even when I was indoors. Air quality maps warned that the soot-filled air blanketing the Bay Area had reached “very unhealthy” levels. For days, nearly everyone wore masks as they walked their dogs, rode the train, and carried out errands. Most of those...

Former President Barack Obama wished his social media followers a happy holiday on Monday with a festive but oh so adorable photo. Indeed, Obama's 2018 Christmas greeting featured a sweet moment under the mistletow with his wife and former first lady, Michelle Obama. "Enjoy the holiday season with the ones you love," Obama wrote in a short-but-sweet holiday greeting shared on both Instagram and Twitter. "Michelle and I wish you a very Merry Christmas!" Alongside his message of holiday cheer, the former president shared an adorable photo of himself planting a kiss on Michelle's cheek as the two stand beneath...

If you were elected president after decades of politicians doing nothing about the millions of illegals pouring into our country every year, committing crimes, dealing drugs, driving drunk, molesting children and killing Americans like Kate Steinle, and your central campaign promise -- repeated every day -- was to build a wall, wouldn't you have spent the entirety of your transition period working on getting it done? Wouldn't you have been building prototypes, developing relationships with key congressional allies and talking to military leaders about using the Seabees or the Army Corps of Engineers to build the wall? Wouldn't you skip...