Free Republic

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court is potentially poised to take down one of the nation’s oldest and most restrictive gun-control laws this summer. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen will be the court’s first major Second Amendment case in more than a decade and happens to be coming amid rising national gun violence and an uptick in gun sales in recent years. What the justices decide could unravel laws across the nation restricting who can carry guns in public. Here’s what’s happening. The case: Can New York place severe restrictions on who can carry a...

Sometimes news is newsworthy not because it is particularly revelatory but because it confirms something obvious that lacked confirmation or because it provides something broadly understood with a sense of scale. This certainly applies to the revelation — uncovered by the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns and reported by CNN’s Brian Stelter — that President Biden views Rupert Murdoch, founder of Fox News, as “the most dangerous man in the world.” Obvious in broad strokes but now confirmed and with a sense of scale. But this top-line assessment of the face most associated with the right-wing cable...

Sarah Longwell serves on the Leadership Council for Conservatives Against Discrimination and is the chief executive of Longwell Partners. Last week, when I picked up my 3- and 5-year-old from school, I found myself drawn to the family pictures that adorn their classroom walls. The teachers asked us to send these photographs along with our children on the first day of school, as both a comfort measure as well as to help the kids get to know each other better. There’s me and my wife, smiling along with our two boys — all of us wearing helmets as we paused...

U.S. judges including those appointed by Republican presidents are increasingly sentencing defendants who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol to three-year terms of court supervision, fearing they could be misled into committing political violence in the 2024 presidential election.

You can always tell how insular a person has become in their politics when a term that has been used regularly regarding a topic that has been in the news for years strikes them as something "new."Of course, people who don't share columnist Monica Hesse's Bryn Mawr value system have actually been using the word for some time.Okay, I shouldn't be so hard on Bryn Mawr. After all, it has a politically diverse student body with only around 42% identifying as "liberal" and the rest identifying as Marxists.

Russia has effectively legalized patent theft from anyone affiliated with countries “unfriendly” to it, declaring that unauthorized use will not be compensated. McDonald’s said Tuesday that it would temporarily close its 850 restaurants in Russia, a significant decision for a company that gets 9 percent of its revenue from Russia and Ukraine. Without trademark protections, Russia could “take those McDonald’s that got shut down and … just let local operators operate the restaurants and call them McDonald’s,” Gerben said. Russia’s removal of intellectual property protections during wartime is not without precedent. Smithsonian Magazine describes how the German company Bayer lost...

Floundering in his attempts to wield political power while lacking a political office, Donald Trump looks increasingly like a stray orange hair to be flicked off the nation’s sleeve. His residual power, which he must use or lose, is to influence his party’s selection of candidates for state and federal offices. This is, however, perilous because he has the power of influence only if he is perceived to have it. That perception will dissipate if his interventions in Republican primaries continue to be unimpressive. So, Trump must try to emulate the protagonist of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”...

A recent alleged assassination plot against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was foiled over the weekend and the Chechen servicemen sent from Russia were “destroyed,” a Ukrainian security leader said Tuesday. Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said during a broadcast marathon airing on Ukrainian TV channels that officials were recently tipped off that a unit of Kadyrovites, elite Chechen special forces, was on its way to kill Zelensky. After Ukrainian officials were informed by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the Chechen special forces were killed Saturday on the outskirts of Kyiv, Danilov said. “We are...

As Russian forces advance on Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, people all over the country are being urged by officials — and sometimes compelled by necessity — to fight back in whatever ways they can. The country’s former president is patrolling the city streets with a civilian defense force, armed with an AK-47. Civilians have been called to find their own weapons and make molotov cocktails — a type of crude, homemade explosive named, mockingly, after a former Soviet foreign minister. Roughly 18,000 weapons have already been distributed in the Kyiv region, according to the government. At the country’s borders, Ukrainian guards...

Give Washington Post reporter Amy B. Wang credit for being very speedy -- specifically in writing up a slam of a Republican. At just after high noon on Tuesday, it was announced that Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds would deliver the Republican response to Joe Biden's State Of The Union address on March 1 and just a little over an hour later at 1:27 PM EST, Yang had completed her article on Reynolds along with the requisite slams.

Six months ago, the transatlantic alliance was on shaky ground, with President Biden’s promise of a reinvigorated NATO under U.S. leadership severely undermined by the Afghanistan debacle and a foreign policy that seemed unready for prime time. Today, Biden and his team have redeemed themselves in the eyes of many NATO allies, with a tough stance on Ukraine and the successful wrangling of the often-fractious alliance to support it. Ukraine’s fate, and Russia’s future relationship with the West, remain uncertain. Biden has said he is convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin, with more than 150,000 troops and massive weaponry amassed on...

Conservative figures have launched an online furor this week, claiming that the government planned to spend $30 million on pipes for smoking crack cocaine. The heightened concern came months after the Department of Health and Human Services announced a federal grant for local programs that provide myriad "harm reduction" tools, or services that minimize the risks associated with drug use. Republicans seized on "crack pipes," causing the phrase to trend on Twitter on Tuesday, the latest in continued resistance from the GOP against harm-reduction techniques at a time when people are dying of drug overdoses at record rates in the...

How would you describe the scent of winter? Unlike spring, summer and fall, which have strongly defined aromas (flowers in bloom, beaches, decaying leaves), the current season is marked by the scent of nothing. Nothing’s growing. Nothing’s dying. It’s a kind of olfactory pause. But snow has a scent, and researchers say that scent depends on what’s in the ground and the air. And as both the atmosphere and the land are getting warmer, the scent of snow is getting stronger. How would you describe the scent of winter? Unlike spring, summer and fall, which have strongly defined aromas (flowers...

In the battle over voting rights, an idea is starting to move around in Republican circles: designated police forces designed to hunt down voter fraud. On the basis of available evidence, this is a solution in search of a problem. It is another example of what comes from former president Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has put a proposal for such a force in his new budget. In Georgia, former U.S. senator David Perdue, who is running as a Trumpian candidate in the GOP primary for governor against incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp...

WASHINGTON — When President Joe Biden steps up to a lectern in the East Room of the White House in front of a roomful of reporters Wednesday, he will be playing a presidential game of catch-up that many say he has no desire to win. A year into his presidency, Biden's 4 p.m. news conference will be just his second on U.S. soil and his sixth overall, according to historians who track interactions between presidents and the press. When solo, joint and foreign news conferences are factored in, Biden has held fewer than Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W....

Regular folks and history buffs who believe Maryland leaned strongly toward the Confederacy during the Civil War era have never lacked evidence for the claim. It was a Marylander, after all, on the U.S. Supreme Court who wrote the opinion in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott case, which found that Black people were not citizens — a ruling that helped spark the fighting. And Marylanders voted for a Southern sympathizer, not Abraham Lincoln, for president in the election of 1860. Then, some 20,000 Marylanders took up arms for the Confederacy. But such facts can be deceiving if looked at in...