Free Republic

President Trump in the Executive Box at Game No. 5 at Yankee Stadium would be epic. He would have 50,000 giving him a standing ovation. Let's see if Kamala shows up at Game #6 (if needed) at Dodger Stadium, and how the crowd there would greet her.

BISMARCK, N.D. (North Dakota Monitor) – Rick Becker, the driver of the statewide measure to essentially abolish property taxes, said he sees the fundraising efforts of the “vote yes” and “vote no” camps as a classic David-and-Goliath matchup. Supporters of Measure 4 have raised just over $105,000 for a group called End The Unfair Property Tax. The coalition opposed to Measure 4, Keep It Local, has raised more than $1.8 million, according to campaign finance reports available as of early Friday afternoon. Becker described the donors supporting Measure 4 as “regular North Dakota folks.” [snip] Education-related groups have made the...

DETROIT (AP) — The union representing 45,000 striking U.S. dockworkers at East and Gulf coast ports reached a deal Thursday to suspend a three-day strike until Jan. 15 to provide time to negotiate a new contract. The union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, is to resume working immediately. The temporary end to the strike came after the union and the U.S. Maritime Alliance, which represents ports and shipping companies, reached a tentative agreement on wages, the union and ports said in a joint statement. A person briefed on the agreement said the ports sweetened their wage offer from about 50% over...

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (WFLA) — Gov. Ron DeSantis spoke out against the Hillsborough County School Board’s lawsuit over a proposed property tax increase to help fund teacher salaries. “You do not need to raise anybody’s taxes,” the governor exclaimed in his most animated response to a question at a news conference in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. “Why are you trying to raise property taxes in the midst of some of the worst inflation we’ve seen in the modern history of this country?” During a special meeting Tuesday, the school board voted to file a lawsuit against the Hillsborough County Commission...

TAMPA, Fla. — The Hillsborough County School Board is asking voters to decide on a property tax increase to ensure competitive salaries to retain and recruit high quality teachers and staff. The referendum will be on the November ballot. We asked voters about the referendum and many of them support it since it benefits teachers. "Especially since COVID, it's more important than ever to retain the people who are the most important to giving our children an education," said Melissa Spring. If the millage passes, the tax will remain in effect for four years (July 1, 2025 to June 30,...

The governor announced the state would be conducting its own investigation on the incident. He said he does not believe it is “in the best interest” of the state to have “the same federal agencies that are seeking to prosecute Donald Trump leading this investigation.” “I think [the federal government has taken] the position they don’t want the state of Florida to be involved in this. But here’s the thing, there were multiple violations of Florida law across multiple jurisdictions,” DeSantis said on the Ingraham show. DeSantis said Routh, the suspect, committed potential violations of Florida law, and the state...

Former President Trump takes questions from reporters at a press briefing in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Muir's first question to Harris began as follows: Vice President Harris, you and President Trump were elected four years ago...."Oh, really? After that one, the remainder of Muir's question made no sense at all. I would have thought Trump would have jumped on Muir's gaffe immediately and corrected it--"You meant Crooked Joe Biden, right? (snicker)". He didn't. So Muir's "Freudian slip" revising the winning ticket of the 2020 election didn't get called out. Not by anyone. I'll leave it to the collective Free Republic imagination as to just what Ronald Reagan would have done to Muir with that one.

I don't know where you all were hiding during the Trump Administration. For four years, conservatives had front row seats on C-Span as Kamala Harris in hearing after Senate committee hearing excoriated every single one of President Trump's nominees for federal office. Harris was brutal, rude, and discourteous, to say the least, treating every Trump nominee as though they were criminals. But she was never once reprimanded by any of her peers for her atrocious "prosecutorial" behavior. Fast forward to all of the ridiculous prognostications by alternate media and conservative bloggers showing up on this site in 2024 as to...

A Penzeys Spices insider says founder and CEO Bill Penzey's frequent left-wing rants in emails to customers have lost the company more than half of its retail business over the past five years. "It's been devastating," explains the insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "In 2017, our retail operations department flat out said that Bill's attacks had cost the company 50 percent of our customers." Penzey has for years made political assaults on Republicans and conservatives a routine part of his "A Note from Bill" emails to customers, but the insider says he ratcheted up his rhetoric after Donald...

Some Republicans believe that they are better off with Trump winning the White House on the grounds that he will be theoretically term limited and thus can be shoved off the stage after 2028. Should he lose to Harris this fall, the thinking goes, "he would once again insist he was cheated and hold out the possibility of a fourth consecutive bid, prolonging the party’s capture." Other Republicans, however, want to have Trump gone as quickly as possible and they think that they could hold off major policy advances by a Harris presidency by retaking the Senate this fall and...

DEI director Loucious Hires said when every Secret Service agent makes DEI a 'mission imperative' the agency will have 'achieved our ultimate goal' Andrew "Drew" Cannady, a supervisory attorney-advisor for the Secret Service’s Office of Chief Counsel, explained how the agency has been going to Pride events to recruit candidates and has seen more transgender people in the service as a result. "We like every other organization. We benefit from diversity. And I actually am seeing more openly… trans recruits out of the training center, law enforcement recruits, which is great," Cannady said on the agency podcast in 2022.

Ruling roughly six months before the November general election, a federal judge has declared unconstitutional a state law banning noncitizens from helping to register voters and ordered Secretary of State Cord Byrd and Attorney General Ashley Mood not to enforce it. U.S. District Chief Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee ruled Wednesday that the law discriminated against noncitizens based on their status. He cited the harm the law inflicted on Veronica Herrera-Lucha and Norka Martínez, two of the plaintiffs in the case.

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday called for increased immigration, insisting "we need more people, especially with AI coming." "We're going to let a lot of people come in, because we need more people, especially with AI coming and all the different things," Trump said. "And the farmers need, everybody needs but we're going to make sure they're not murderers and drug dealers."

Pennsylvania Secret Service chief Timothy Burke is among five agents put on ‘administrative duties’ as part of a probe into failures that allowed 20-year-old Thomas Crooks to shoot Donald Trump last month. Burke is the Special Agent in Charge (SAIC) of the Secret Service Pittsburgh field office, and has been in the role since at least 2016. When reached by phone, Burke, 48, told DailyMail.com said he could not comment on the case.

Hillsborough's GOP-led commission doubled down in its fight to stall the school board's tax referendum, voting to appeal a court order to place it on the ballot. Why it matters: It's the latest escalation in a feud between the two government entities, leaving teacher raises in limbo. The vote lands two weeks before the printing deadline for the November ballot — and the county's appeal alone, if not expedited, endangers the referendum. Catch up quick: Commissioner Joshua Wostal (R) made a motion in July to punt the ballot referendum to 2026, citing "increases in the costs of inflation." The school...

In a significant turn of events. A circuit judge has overturned the Hillsborough County Commission's decision to block a crucial millage referendum from appearing on the November ballot. We are very happy that the voters of Hillsborough County will get to decide the fate of this very important referendum. Commissioners expressed concern over the timing of the tax increase amid high inflation hoping to push it back to 2026.Some might argue that it's a waste of taxpayer dollars to go forward, but I'll leave that to another day.

Ahead of potential landfall of Invest 97L in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis issued Executive Order (EO) 24-156 (Emergency Management – Invest 97L) declaring the following counties under a state of emergency: Alachua, Baker, Bay, Bradford, Calhoun, Charlotte, Citrus, Clay, Collier, Columbia, Dixie, Duval, Escambia, Flagler, Franklin, Gadsden, Gilchrist, Gulf, Hamilton, Hernando, Hillsborough, Holmes, Jackson, Jefferson, Lafayette, Lake, Lee, Leon, Levy, Liberty, Madison, Manatee, Marion, Monroe, Nassau, Okaloosa, Orange, Osceola, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Putnam, Santa Rosa, Sarasota, Seminole, St. Johns, Sumter, Suwannee, Taylor, Union, Volusia, Wakulla, Walton, and Washington counties.

TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — The Hillsborough County Classroom Teachers Association is urging voters to say yes to a property tax increase measure that would increase teacher pay. However, voters may not even have a say on the issue this November. The Hillsborough County Commission decided to delay the vote until November of 2026. This prompted the Hillsborough County School System to sue the county over the issue.

[snip] To be fair, some people who watched the speech thought that the first 10 minutes or so, in which Trump recounted being injured, were good, even thoughtful. I thought they were terrible; although Trump and his people have emphasized Trump’s defiance in the moment after he was hurt, his blow-by-blow account of the incident came across to me as creepy and solipsistic rather than brave. Contrast that with Ronald Reagan, the previous president injured in an attempt on his life. Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post reminded us today that Reagan appeared before Congress a month after he was...