Free Republic

National political correspondent Maggie Haberman signaled Friday that President-elect Trump likely doubled down on Pete Hegseth as his pick to lead the Pentagon after support for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) as an alternative fell short. “What changed was a couple of things. One was… Trump could not find a single person in his orbit, or even really outside of it, who liked this idea of making Ron DeSantis — the governor of Florida — the Defense secretary choice,” she added. DeSantis, Trump’s formal GOP primary rival who was floated as a top contender, said he was “seriously considering” the...

ABC News and George Stephanopoulos have reached a settlement with Donald Trump in his defamation suit. The network will pay $15 million to a charity and will issue an apology. The settlement was filed publicly Saturday and reveals ABC will pay $15 million as a charitable contribution to a “presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for the Plaintiff.”......... The judge wrote in August 2023 that Trump “raped” her in the broader sense of that word, as people generally understand it, though not as it is narrowly defined by New York state law.

VIDEORage over plunging ratings. Rage over likely salary cuts. Rage over possible/probable cancellation. Watch as Morning Joe goes on a wild RAGE rant over his audience plunge due to crawling to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring of President Donald Trump after spending years of calling him a dictatorial Fascist monster.The looooong rant you see in this video was actually the tail end of an extensive rant over what David Frum said (smeared) the previous day on Morning Joe about Pete Hegseth that Mika subsequently apologized for. Later that day, Frum wrote an article about the incident in "The Atlantic" magazine...

MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace said Wednesday on her show “Deadline” that former special counsel John Durham, former Attorney General Bill Barr and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe are “a nightmare for the rule of law.” Wallace said, “Durham never had anything except a tip to open an investigation into Donald Trump. And that was something he couldn’t even answer for today.”

Russia carried out a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears to have failed while President Joe Biden was in Ukraine on Monday, according to two US officials familiar with the matter. Russia notified the United States in advance of the launch through deconfliction lines, one official said. Another official said that the test did not pose a risk to the United States and that the US did not view the test as an anomaly or an escalation. The test of the heavy SARMAT missile – nicknamed the Satan II in the West and capable of delivering multiple nuclear...

Russians left desperate for the loo as toilet exports are banned to 'punish' Putin Sinking to grimy lows, Russian troops are well-known for thieving lavatories out of Ukrainian homes to send back to their families as Western sanctions of "bidets, lavatory pans, [and] flushing cisterns" bite The EU included lavatories, bidets and flushing cisterns in its list of banned products The EU included lavatories, bidets and flushing cisterns in its list of banned products

As Russia steps up its offensive in eastern Ukraine, weeks of failed attacks on a Ukrainian stronghold have left two Russian brigades in tatters, raised questions about Moscow’s military tactics and renewed doubts about its ability to maintain sustained, large-scale ground assaults. The fighting has also come at a cost for Ukraine, which is expending vast amounts of ammunition to repel Russia’s growing numbers of ground troops, often supported by heavy armor, artillery and close air support. That has added urgency to Ukraine’s pleas for more ammunition, while Western allies this week expressed increasing concern about their ability to meet...

WASHINGTON — As President Joe Biden prepared to deliver one of the biggest speeches of his presidency, he met with a close group of aides at the White House and read drafts aloud from top to bottom. He practiced in front of teleprompters at Camp David, making sure the language was relatable and clear. And, in quiet moments ahead of the State of the Union address Tuesday evening, he marked up his speech with subtle lines and dashes that he has long used as a signal to take a breath, pause between his words or steer through a tricky transition....

NEVSKE, Ukraine — In a tiny village in eastern Ukraine at the epicenter of the next phase of the war, Lyudmila Degtyaryova measures the Russian advance by listening to the boom of incoming artillery shells. There are more and more of them now. And they are coming more frequently, as Russian troops grind their way forward. “You should see the fireworks here,” said Degtyaryova, 61, as the sounds of artillery howled all around. “It is like New Year’s.” Russia’s military is preparing to launch a new offensive that could soon swallow Degtyaryova’s village of Nevske, and perhaps much more in...

The media: Real life: We got a peak into the way this propaganda machine works on Friday when iHeart, the written news side of iHeart Radio, covered the recent physical assault of a young girl on a school bus. According to WPLG, the incident occurred in South Florida on Wednesday when, after a short argument, a group of boys from Coconut Palm K-8 Academy in Homestead began physically assaulting a small 9-year-old girl. At least one of the boys appears to be at least a few years older than the girl. In this particular incident, the perpetrators happened to be...

On Friday, Politico published an analysis by Paris-based journalist Claire Berlinski. At first, the article is about the rapid advances in recent years in accurate translation technology which is making important changes in how we communicate as she revealed in "The Surprising Reason Europe Came Together Against Putin." But near the end, its revelations about Twitter are transformed into just another rant against Elon Musk's takeover.

Nearly seven years after most media abandoned standards of fairness in a stampede to defeat Donald Trump, it is widely accepted that those outlets can not be trusted to deliver accurate reports. Rather than perform the journalists’ duty of informing the public of news, many of today’s reporters and editors concoct narratives about events that consistently align with the agenda of the Democratic Party.

Editor’s Note: If you had asked me yesterday if artificial intelligence could write an article in the style of a popular columnist and few if anyone could tell the difference, I would have said we’re probably a few years away from that dystopian circumstance. I would have been wrong. The article below by Frank Miele of Real Clear Politics is partially written by ChatGPT. Can you tell the man from the machine? The Brave New World of Artificial Intelligence As a journalist and commentator, I have closely followed the development of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab founded by Elon...

Former President Donald Trump and a host of Republican personalities have canceled their scheduled appearances Friday in Greensboro. News of the cancellation comes as Axios reports Trump, his son, Donald Trump Jr., and his daughter, Ivanka Trump, have been scheduled to testify under oath Friday in an investigation into Trump’s finances. The American Freedom Tour had announced in May appearances in Greensboro by Trump, Trump Jr., television news personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, former New York state judge Jeanine Pirro, Pinal County (Arizona) Sheriff Mark Lamb and political commentator Dinesh D’Souza. The American Freedom Tour did not publicize that the event would...