Free Republic

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice late Monday invoked the “state secrets privilege” to block a federal judge from obtaining information about deportation flights carried out under a wartime law. District of Columbia District Judge James E. Boasberg has been trying to determine if the Trump administration violated a restraining order he had placed in connection with the deportations of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The Trump administration said Monday further details could not be provided about the flights to El Salvador, where the alleged gang members were sent to a mega-prison. The filing, signed by Attorney...

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's efforts to eliminate the racist and sexist Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies of his predecessor Lloyd Austin are being undermined by hold-over Biden Administration bureaucrats. Their strategy is "malicious compliance." Hegseth's intent is to elevate merit and competence over DEI's racial, ethnic, and gender quotas for hiring and promotion. However, this intent has been twisted by a moronic effort to eliminate the word gay and African-Americans from all Department of Defense photos. Examples include photographs of the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima because "Enola Gay" appears on the nose of...

this is the best thing you’ll watch today. this is white house deputy chief of staff stephen miller speaking in the white house press briefing room. pop some corn. just sit back and enjoy the next 1 minute and 46 seconds. (link) if he had ended with “thank you for coming to my TED talk” i would have died laughing. i cannot tell you the untrammeled and unalloyed joy i’m experiencing just watching competent, confident people step up and take clear, sane, reasonable, principled stances. the time of having to walk on eggshells and pretend that DEI and performatively contrived...

A New Jersey law that removes a requirement for teachers to pass a reading, writing and mathematics test for certification will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. The law, Act 1669, was passed by Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June in an effort to address a shortage of teachers in the state... Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass a “basic skills” test ... Just months earlier, Murphy signed a similar bill into law that created an alternative pathway for teachers to sidestep the testing requirement....

The combined cabal of woke and the teachers’ unions have struck again. This time, the target was New Jersey. Effective Thursday morning, public school teachers in New Jersey no longer must pass even the most basic educational skills test. The test was not for complicated subjects such as calculus. This now abandoned test verified teacher’s ability to read, write, and calculate simple math problems.Jersey governor Phil Murphy approved eliminating even these most basic requirements for teaching applicants in those three essential areas. Democrat state senator Jim Beach sponsored the bill, further dumbing down the state’s educational system. Beach said, “We...

The Left’s march through Western institutions in the forms of DEI/CRT, “social justice”, and all manner of woo-woo wokeism has consequences. Let’s take schools of medicine for $200, Alex. One of the premier medical schools, UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, is failing. Up to half of UCLA medical students now fail basic tests of medical competence. Whistleblowers say affirmative action, illegal in California since 1996, is to blame. ... “One professor said that a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot. Another said...

President Biden Thursday night hit rock-bottom as he gave a mean-spirited distortion of the special counsel’s report. And in the process, Biden further embarrassed himself, his toady press, and the country at large. In sum, the press conference disintegrated into an embarrassing free for all. Note that following: 1. To prove that he is cognizant, and does not believe that some dead European leaders are still alive, Biden assured us that President el-Sisi of Egypt was actually the President of Mexico, and almost seemed to believe that the Gaza corridor to Egypt was on our southern border. The more he...

Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign is more of a well-oiled machine than his first scattershot bid when he learned on the fly and threw together an operation that ignored the traditional nuts and bolts of running for president. The more professional nature of his campaign’s structure and the legwork his allies are putting in to prepare for a presidential transition is setting the stage for a far less chaotic scene if Mr. Trump seizes the nomination and then returns to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded in 2021 to promote Mr. Trump’s policies, is...

Back in 1984, President Reagan got the age question and turned it around masterfully by bringing up Walter Mondale's youth and inexperience. I was watching and he got reelected that night. Just for the record, Mr. Reagan turned 78 two weeks after completing two terms. Mr. Biden will be 81 this year!President Reagan had another huge advantage, i.e. a successful presidency based on a good economy and a sense that he commanded respect around the world. It didn’t hurt that the VP was a man named Bush rather than a woman named Harris. Over at the New York Times, Bret...

Race to the Bottom describes the process of competitive devaluation, where value is gutted to remain competitive with those who are grabbing market share by stripping out quality, value, durability, transparency, accountability and competence.We see the global Race to the Bottom in everyday products: the quality of goods has plummeted as manufacturers compete to reduce costs to maintain high profit margins by stripping out the quality and durability of components. We see it in shrinkflation, where the cereal box contains less cereal while the price ratchets higher.We see it when cereals that once contained no sugar are now sickly-sweet because...

Bad news for the future of medicine and the future of human life. While radical politics had consumed the ‘soft sciences’ and most impractical academic fields, the practical ones, especially the sciences, were generally intact. In the last decade, all of academia has crumbled.Quotas are everywhere and woke mandates have displaced academic ones.That means people will die. Because we’ll have doctors who got there by talking about their victimhood, but are not qualified to do anything more than posture and virtue signal about their pain.Forty-four percent of medical schools have tenure and promotion policies that reward scholarship on “diversity, inclusion,...

Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) said Monday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that the midterm voters rejected the Republican “chaos.” Anchor Nicolle Wallace said, “Congressman, you were a voice on what voters really seemed to come out and respond to, and that was a call to protect our very democracy. Tell me how you are feeling one week after the midterm elections?” Swalwell said, “Feeling very good, Nicolle. The voters clearly rejected chaos, and that’s what the Republicans ran on. And they awarded competence. We ran on the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, the Rescue Plan, and that frame worked in our direction....

Reagan Economic Advisor Arthur Laffer explains what we need to do in order to beat 9.1% inflation

Chief of naval personnel Vice Adm. John Nowell Jr. wants to resume the practice of including photos of officers up for promotion in the information packets reviewed by selection boards. “The premise that excluding photos would combat racism in the decisions on who would be promoted isn’t working,” the Admiral said. Photos were excluded under the orders of former Defense Secretary Mark Esper in July of 2020 to “prevent discrimination, prejudice and bias and promote equal opportunity, morale and the readiness of the force.” “I understand the intent was to reduce the chances for race to influence the decisions on...

During an interview aired on Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” 2020 Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden stated President Trump has “no competence” on handling the coronavirus and that the market is falling because people don’t trust what the president says. Biden stated, “[T]his gets down to competence and capability. And the — unfortunately, the president has very — no competence in how to handle this crisis. Not that there’s any clear answer that you’re just going to make this all go away, but the idea that he shows up at the CDC and says that...

Just beyond the windows of Satsuki Kanno’s apartment overlooking Tokyo Bay, a behemoth from a bygone era will soon rise: a coal-burning power plant, part of a buildup of coal power that is unheard-of for an advanced economy. It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity — at 17 different sites in the next five years, just at a time when the...

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) issued a statement taking issue with a recent Trump Administration policy reversing an Obama policy pushing racial diversity guidelines. “The Administration’s policy of encouraging universities receiving federal aid to focus solely on merit when deciding which students to admit leaves us deeply concerned,” the statement reads. “The assumption that competence is more important than diversity when determining who will be allowed to practice medicine is a departure from the directive given by the immediately previous administration.” “We don’t deny that that competence should play a role in the process, but it should not...

Vice-President Joe Biden explained the difference between a Clinton and a Trump administration in a raucous speech to the Democratic National Convention, contending that Trump’s catchphrase from his Apprentice reality show “’you’re fired,’ reveals a gaping existential chasm between Democrats and Republicans.” “Just because a person can’t handle a job doesn’t mean he doesn’t need that job,” Biden pointed out. “Yet, Trump would callously cast employees aside based merely upon performance. Is this the kind of man we want to place at the head of our government?” “In contrast, our nominee has the compassion to understand that competence is not...

People size you up in seconds, but what exactly are they evaluating? Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy has been studying first impressions alongside fellow psychologists Susan Fiske and Peter Glick for more than 15 years, and has discovered patterns in these interactions. In her new book, "Presence," Cuddy says people quickly answer two questions when they first meet you: Can I trust this person? Can I respect this person? Psychologists refer to these dimensions as warmth and competence respectively, and ideally you want to be perceived as having both. Interestingly, Cuddy says that most people, especially in a professional...

Presidential campaigns are -- first and foremost -- about political issues. This is why the media spends so much time analyzing the TV debates, rally speeches, and policy papers of the candidates. But when Americans choose a President, the issues are only one factor on their minds. Americans also weigh less tangible factors to determine how well a candidate would do in office. In short, no presidential campaign can succeed unless sufficient attention is paid to optics -- the process of building an aura of leadership and competence around the candidate. Good optics was certainly a big factor in the...