Free Republic

Before turning against the U.S. military to command the Confederate army, Robert E. Lee served as the superintendent of West Point, the hallowed military academy that produced patriots like Ulysses S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower.But in the coming days, the storied academy will take down a portrait of Lee dressed in his Confederate uniform from its library, where it has been hanging since the 1950s and place it in storage. It will also remove the stone bust of the Civil War's top southern general at Reconciliation Plaza. And Lee’s quote about honor will be stripped from the academy’s...

WARNING: THIS IS NOT AN EDITORIAL NEW YORK (AP) — Looking out at a sea of faces at a Texas fairground, most of them white, former President Donald Trump seethed about his legal troubles and blamed them on malicious prosecutors. “These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick, they’re mentally sick,” Trump said, before warning his audience: “In reality. They’re not after me, they’re after you.” He repeated his charge of racism, but skipped over an obvious detail: Those prosecutors are Black. His diatribe left the clear impression that Trump, who rode the politics of white...

NEW YORK (AP) — As political muscle goes, bigger doesn’t always mean better. Just ask New York, Los Angeles and Chicago every four years, when those cities become mostly irrelevant blips on the Electoral College map. But as congressional redistricting gets underway, some of the country’s most populous cities are taking prominent roles in reshaping the balance of power in Washington. And that’s good news for Democrats. Robust growth in the liberal strongholds of New York and metropolitan Chicago are poised to give Democrats an edge as their political maps are redrawn to adjust for changes in population over the...