Free Republic

Born 300 years ago, the legendary libertine had a utilitarian relationship to faithAccording to Margarethe Weissenstein, the Vienna-born Jewish author of The Power of the Charlatan, Casanova — who was born 300 years ago in 1725 — was an itinerant charlatan who manipulated credulous nobles and other moneyed clients through 18th century Europe with promises about numerology, supposedly derived from the Kabbalah. Historian Pawel Maciejko notes that Casanova studied some Hebrew, encountered European Jews although sometimes unhappily, and at age 16 defended a doctoral dissertation on the subject Whether the Hebrews can build new synagogues. He was also an aspiring...

A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a $5-million verdict that E. Jean Carroll won against Donald Trump when a jury found the U.S. president-elect liable for sexually abusing and later defaming the former magazine columnist. . . . . The May 2023 verdict stemmed from an incident around 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan, where Carroll said Trump raped her, and an October 2022 Truth Social post where Trump denied Carroll’s claim as a hoax. Though jurors in federal court in Manhattan did not find that Trump committed rape, they awarded the former Elle...

Changing leaves, the World Series, Halloween, the New York City Marathon. Then, in a blink, Election Day. The classic quadrennial late-fall cycle in America. Now it’s the final stretch, the final sprint. The race currently seems so tight, it is impossible to predict with confidence who will win, or what ultimately will be the deciding factors for the voters. Yet in a few short days, we will likely know the answer. Then Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah , Christmas, New Year’s, and at last, Inauguration Day. On January 20, 2025, the next POTUS will take office. Former President Donald Trump may...

Finally, President Donald Trump chose to lob a verbal grenade in the general direction of his old VP Mike Pence last Sunday night — regarding Pence’s ability to formally contest the results of the stolen 2020 election. This was, for many Trump supporters, long overdue. Here is Trump’s statement on the matter:

Kari Lake, the Republican who lost the Arizona governor's race this past November, could beat both potential competitors Ruben Gallego and Kyrsten Sinema were she to run in 2024 for the latter's Senate seat, according to a recent poll. The survey, released January 11 by website Blueprint Polling, imagined a scenario in which Sinema, a former Democrat turned independent who's held her Senate seat since 2019, runs for reelection against Lake and Gallego, a Democrat who represents the state's 3rd Congressional District. Lake, who rumors say is considering running for the seat but has not confirmed this, polled at 36...

President Biden would easily beat former President Donald Trump in a hypothetical 2024 election matchup — but would lose if he faced off against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to a recent poll. In a rematch of the 2020 presidential contest, the 80-year-old Biden would prevail over his 76-year-old predecessor by eight percentage points in the popular vote — 49% to 41% — but would fall to the Sunshine State’s Republican governor by 45% to 42% in a head-to-head contest, the WPA Intelligence survey released Jan. 13 found.

Jan. 6 (UPI) -- Half of the world's glaciers will melt and disappear before the turn of the next century, according to alarming new research that predicts greater fallout from global warming despite meaningful efforts in recent years to address environmental concerns. The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, projects that nearly 50% of the Earth's natural ice will dissolve by the year 2100, which is much quicker than scientists previously calculated if the planet warmed by only 1.5C -- a benchmark set by hundreds of nations to cut emissions and protect more land for nature and the environment....

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is warning GOP House members to vote for him for Speaker or else. The GOP barely took over the US House of Representatives after this latest election steal but they somehow squeaked it out. The number of seats going to the GOP should have been 40 more based on history but we have a new way of electing people today and it’s based on whoever comes up with the most votes, legal and illegal. After winning the House, the GOP must select a Speaker. Normally this would be the Minority Leader but not this year....

Former Trump Justice Department head William Barr, in the course of reiterating his strong preference that his party nominate a less deranged presidential candidate next time, expressed a fear that has been in wide circulation: If defeated in the primary, Donald Trump “will burn the whole house down by leading ‘his people’ out of the GOP.” One version of this is that Trump will either form a third party or simply refuse to endorse another Republican, thereby dooming his party’s chances. Those of us considering the question from a less friendly standpoint than Barr — I consider the Republican Party...

The media can’t stop talking about Donald Trump, which makes two groups happy: Democrats, and Donald Trump. You can argue that this is the administration’s strategy, that the Mar-a-Lago raid was as much a political ploy as a legal proceeding. But Trump, as he always done, has used his legal troubles to raise even more money, call for the ouster of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and relitigate the 2020 election. President Biden’s team couldn’t be more thrilled. For every moment that the conversation is about Trump, or Trump demanding fealty from fellow Republicans, is a moment not spent talking...

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene - the controversial, far-right Georgia congresswoman who lost her committee assignments earlier this year for endorsing political violence - just wrote a 17-tweet long Twitter thread that outlined several areas of "common ground" between her and the Nation of Islam. "One of the benefits as a Member of Congress is visiting different types government facilities to provide oversight," she wrote on Twitter. "On my recent visit to the DC Jail one of the things I picked up was some religious material." SNIP Greene said that prisoners are offered "religious material," choosing between "Christain [sic] and Islam,"...

In a bombshell new video, the Senate Majority Leader in Michigan, Mike Shirkey, is secretly recorded confessing that the January 6 U.S. Capitol takeover was “staged” in order to secure an impeachment against President Trump. He went on to claim that, not only was it “pre-arranged”, but Mitch McConnell was “part of it”. In the video, an unknown individual asks Shirkey about the events that occured in DC on January 6. “Thats been a hoax since day one, that was all pre-arranged,” replied Shirkley.

The head of the UN World Food Program repeatedly warned us that we would soon be facing “famines of biblical proportions”, and his predictions are now starting to become a reality. We have already seen food riots in some parts of Africa, and it isn’t too much of a surprise that certain portions of Asia are really hurting right now. But I have to admit that I was kind of shocked when I came across an article about the “hunger crisis” that has erupted in Latin America. According to Bloomberg, “a resurgence of poverty is bringing a vicious wave of...

Washington(CNN) President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump requested mail-in ballots for Florida's primary election on Tuesday, according to Palm Beach County records, despite the President's frequent attacks on voting by mail. The records from the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections website show the ballots were mailed Wednesday to Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club, which he made his permanent residence last year. Despite Trump's rhetoric about voting by mail, the President has recently claimed that Florida's voting system is secure, tweeting earlier this month: "Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is...

It’s called “falling in love with your source.” I did it, my colleagues did it, intelligence professionals collectively do it, and none of us are ever the better for it. Here’s how it happens, at least from the collector level. I spent 20 years in the U.S. Army as an interrogator and strategic debriefer, with most of my second decade of service spent in and around embassies in the Middle East. My job at the embassy was to debrief walk-in sources, defectors, visa applicants of particular interest who agreed to talk to me, and anyone else of interest to the...

This from Associated Press: "A mass grave containing the remains of babies and young children has been discovered at a former Catholic orphanage in Ireland, government-appointed investigators announced Friday in a finding that offered the first conclusive proof following a historian's efforts to trace the fates of nearly 800 children who perished there." "A great many people are always asking what is the good of keeping these children alive? I quite agree that it would be a great deal kinder to strangle these children at birth than to put them out to nurse." -- Doctor Ella Webb, June 18, 1924,...

So, listen, to get this out of the way, I am sure there are a lot of Donald Trump supporters who are not garbage human beings. I am sure there are quite a lot of them who just quite frankly don’t know about the abominable things he’s done since he started this campaign (including his mockery of a disabled reporter, his likening Ben Carson to a child molester, his multiple intentional lies about his own past positions, his open courting of white supremacists, or his lengthy history of supporting Democrats, including Hillary Clinton). Some (many?) of his supporters just see...

The phrase "follow the money" is supposed to help explain human behavior, especially in politics. So why has Donald Trump embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin? Why has he denied the evidence of Putin's killing of Russian journalists and dissidents? A savvy businessman, Trump is certainly not dumb. There must be something else to it. Reports dating back to 1987, during the time of the old Soviet Union, reveal that Trump has been seeking business in Russia and attempting to build a "Russian Trump Tower" in Moscow and perhaps other Russian cities. At this particular time in history, with Putin's cronies...

Paul Ryan has bold economic ideas. Or maybe he doesn't. It's really hard to know what Mitt Romney's VP pick thinks, since his budget plan includes Obamacare's $716 billion in Medicare savings over 10 years, but his election plan has him saying he would restore those spending cuts. Romney is accusing president Obama of "robbing" that money from today's beneficiaries. Let's set the confusion aside for a moment and look at where the projected cuts would be made. First off, none of the savings comes from changing eligibility or benefits. The president's health care reforms actually add benefits to Medicare....