Free Republic

Monday's off to a busy start! As investors and traders await any developments from Washington DC, Tom White points out the fact that in the previous 5 government shutdowns equity markets actually rose higher. He joins Diane King Hall to set up the trading week before turning to a pair of big premarket movers. AMD (AMD) is jumping on news that it reached a deal to sell a potential 10% stake to OpenAI in tranches. And, Micron (MU) begins Monday's action with an upgrade at Morgan Stanley and a new price target to $220. Market Rally: AMD/OpenAI Deal, MU Upgrade...

The White House has cut or paused billions in funding to Democratic-run cities and states since the federal government came to a halt.President Trump has embarked on a legally dubious campaign to weaponize the federal budget during a contentious government shutdown, halting more than $27 billion in approved funding in a bid to punish Democratic-led cities and states. Rather than broker a legislative truce or seek to ameliorate the fallout of a costly fiscal stalemate, the president has leveraged the crisis to exact revenge on rivals, slash federal spending and pressure Democrats into accepting his political demands. Since the shutdown...

President Donald Trump’s second term had already brought misery to the nation’s 2.1 million civilian federal workers: unprecedented mass layoffs, strict return-to-office requirements and more red tape regulating everything from travel to printer paper. Now, with the government shut down, 750,000 federal staffers have been furloughed and many others are working without pay, even as Trump and his top lieutenants vow to put more federal jobs on the chopping block. “When did we become the enemy?” said one National Institutes of Health employee who, like other workers interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of...

During a panel discussion featuring world leaders and philanthropists in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon, Alex Soros said the $23 billion philanthropic organization he leads would not cave to pressure from President Trump. Mr. Soros, the son of the billionaire investor and Democratic megadonor George Soros, defiantly told attendees that it had done nothing wrong and would back away from its human rights work “over my dead body,” according to two people who attended the panel who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was an invitation-only event. The remarks came in response to a question about a report in...

In an era when most Americans struggle to understand why their $50 political donations barely make a dent, a sprawling network of tax-exempt organizations has built a political Death Star hiding in plain sight. Arabella Advisors, through its nonprofit subsidiaries, has constructed the most powerful political machine in American history—operating with billions in "dark money" while exploiting the very tax code everyday citizens fund. The following are 20 revelations exposing not just the scale of this operation, but the breathtaking cynicism with which it manipulates public opinion, election outcomes, and policy decisions while masquerading as charitable work. 1. Billions in...

What if I told you that cartels and other bad actors from around the world conspired to undermine the integrity of the health care system in the U.S. and came way too close to succeeding? If you didn’t hear about the bust of 324 people; the U.S.-based cartel shell medical supply companies; the pill mills pushing opioids; the doctors on the take; or how law enforcement captured many of the bad guys at the U.S. border and airports as they rushed to escape, that’s understandable. The feds revealed this potential $14.6 billion "depth charge" planted inside the Medicaid, Medicare, and...

Hundreds of federal employees who were laid off following Elon Musk's cost-cutting measures through DOGE are being asked to go back to work. The employees were given until the end of the week to accept or decline reinstatement by the General Services Administration, which manages government workspaces. Anyone who accepts must report for work on Oct. 6 after what is being described as a seven-month paid vacation, during which the GSA has racked up high costs to stay in properties whose leases were slated for termination or were allowed to expire, reported The Associated Press. "Ultimately, the outcome was the...

(...) Kraus ran as a Democrat and declared he was running for president to dissolve the presidency. He proposed breaking the country up into four regions, "to break the control of the Deep State, British agents, Rhodes scholars, and the Jews," according to the Globe story. His campaign website was banjews.com, according to a short profile posted to the website of Temple University's Klein College of Media and Communication. (...) "They had just planted tomatoes," Calabrese recalled of the last time she saw them about eight years ago. "And then they were gone the next day." (...)

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) this week, but on Tuesday morning, he took some time out to make the morning show rounds on several networks. He didn't shy away from promoting the Donald Trump administration's "America First" policies.AdvertisementOn ABC, George Stephanopoulos seemed obsessed with cuts to foreign aid, claiming they've led to deaths around the world. Rubio wasn't willing to play along with that tired narrative that I thought the left finally gave up on months ago. As the secretary has pointed out numerous times, USAID was a "dysfunctional...

Video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7WJeqxuOfQ We have subversives in elected office and the State Department who are trying to cram as many people as they can into the U.S. Many of our large cities are already suffering from overpopulation. The U.S. passed the 300 million mark in 2000 and some demographers say our population will almost double by 2050 and, if immigration is not curtailed, exceed ONE BILLION before 2100. The last thing we need is more legal or illegal immigrants. If the American people don’t rise up and take action to get rid of the subversives who are trying to destabilize...

Elon Musk on DOGE, Optimus, Starlink Smartphones, Evolving with AI, Why the West is Imploding | 44:47 All-In Podcast | 907K subscribers | 681,617 views | September 9, 2025

PBS informed 34 staffers Thursday they were being laid off as part of a broader downsizing effort that's resulted in 100 jobs being cut in recent months. The cuts were triggered in part by the Trump administration’s rescission package, which slashed over $1 billion in federal funding for public broadcasting. "Due to the loss of federal funding, PBS eliminated close to 100 positions over the last several months, including 34 valued PBS staff members notified yesterday their employment is ending. In this unprecedented moment, we remain focused on what matters most: ensuring our member stations can deliver quality content and...

FIRST ON FOX: President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Friday to alter the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, reverting to the agency’s former namesake, Fox News Digital has learned.

BREAKING: President Trump just announced the relocation of the US Space Command HQ to Huntsville, Alabama. (video)

President Trump has cut hundreds of thousands of jobs from the federal work force, disproportionately affecting Black employees.When President Trump started dismantling federal agencies and dismissing rank-and-file civil servants, Peggy Carr, the chief statistician at the Education Department, immediately started to make a calculation. She was the first Black person and the first woman to hold the prestigious post of commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. As a political appointee, she knew there was a risk of becoming a target. But her 35-career at the department spanned a half dozen administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first term, and she...

The crumbling facade at the CDC is finally collapsing—and it took one of the world’s most credentialed voices in medicine to pull the curtain back. On Sunday, Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer of mRNA vaccine technology, clinical researcher, and now a new member of the ACIP, shredded Biden’s radical “Pro-Gay Orgy Czar” Dr. Demetre Daskalakis in a fiery exchange over the collapse of credibility at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Malone posted bluntly on X about the wave of resignations rocking the CDC: “The real reason for the recent CDC resignations is that the ACIP Subcommittee on COVID...

There are times when reading a list of projects funded by the United States federal government sounds more like parody than reality. The Department of Government Efficiency — unlike Congress, it seems — is still working hard every day to identify and eliminate waste and fraud from the federal government funded by our taxpayer dollars. And this week’s update included some profoundly idiotic programs and grants that were, until now, recipients of our hard-earned cash. DOGE normally releases a contracts update on X on Fridays highlighting some of the stupidest agency contracts that it has discovered in the last week,...

Foreign aid agency’s closure has saved US taxpayers “tens of billions of dollars,” Secretary of State says US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Friday he was handing USAID over to the Office of Management and Budget to “oversee the closeout”Shortly after returning to office in January, US President Donald Trump launched the process of dismantling the agency, which has long served as Washington’s primary funding channel for political projects abroad. He accused the organization – often criticized by conservatives as promoting liberal causes – of being run by “radical lunatics” and enabling corruption “at levels rarely seen...

It has been fully recognized since the November election that the Democratic Party has been hobbled more than a three-legged gelding, but things refuse to improve for that lot. Throughout this year, the party has seen its prospects withering across the board, whether it is in internal operations, public approval, voting efforts, fundraising, or media outreach. And much like the condition of the national media industry, there is no desire exhibited by them to change what is not working. And this week it became even worse. It was announced that the Bill Gates Foundation was suspending its monetary involvement with...

If you thought the Trump Administration was finished making cuts to government spending, think again. No other institution on earth can spend money like the U.S. government—the effort by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to get spending under control and cut waste has never happened on this level before. On Sunday, the DOGE team announced another round of major cuts, nearly $2B worth: Contracts Update!Over the last 5 days, agencies terminated 163 wasteful contracts with a ceiling value of $1.9B and savings of $647M, including, a $35M USAID contract to “acquire contractor support to establish and manage a flexible,...