Free Republic

Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters refused to concede his race against Democrat incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly Saturday, hours after news outlets called the election in Kelly’s favor — and vowed to fight on until “every legal vote is counted.” “For my people who knocked doors in 115-degree heat, and for the million+ Arizonans who put their faith in me, we are going to make sure that every legal vote is counted,” Masters wrote in a statement posted to Twitter. “If, at the end, Senator Kelly has more of them than I do, then I will congratulate him on a...

Politics bites. A Michigan GOP county chairwoman has accused a rowdy Democratic protester of chomping her on the arm at a rally for Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon — the latest act of mayhem as the midterm elections approach. “I’ve never been bit by an adult in my life, or anyone over 5,” Wayne County Republican Party chairwoman Cheryl Costantino told Detroit’s WXYZ News on Thursday, showing off bruising and teeth marks on her upper left arm. “I couldn’t even raise my arm, like, it was even uncomfortable just to drive,” Costantino said. The demonstrator, a special education teacher in...

“The Inflation Reduction Act has to do with your ability to get tax credits for buying — if you need a new coffee machine, a new washer, a new refrigerator,” Biden said. “And you buy an efficient refrigerator, efficient coffee machine, you get a tax credit for it.” Earlier in the speech, Biden appeared to blank on the name of Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden — calling him “THAT OTHER GUY I just talked about in the Senate” — just moments after warmly thanking the Democrat for helping to get the bill passed.

Vladimir Putin...named a notoriously brutal replacement...Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, is the infamous “Butcher of Mariupol” who ordered some of the Ukraine invasion’s worst atrocities — including an airstrike on a maternity hospital and an attack on a theater that was sheltering hundreds of children.

The FBI raid of former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf club could accelerate a widely expected presidential announcement, insiders close to the billionaire told The Post. “There are more and more people telling President Trump to announce right now. He’s got people calling him,” said one person in Trump’s orbit. There is an increasingly widely held belief among Trump’s friends and hangers-on that the energy and outrage generated by the federal search is the perfect springboard for an announcement in the months before the midterm elections in November. “In the days after the raid we saw all fundraising records broken. This...

Former Vice President Mike Pence said he took no classified material along with him when he left office last year – but refused to condemn his former boss, Donald Trump, for allegedly having shipped boxes of top-secret documents to his Florida home. “I honestly don’t want to prejudge it before, until, we know all the facts,” Pence said Friday during a visit to the Iowa State Fair, an obligatory stop for politicians weighing a White House bid. The former veep’s two-day Iowa swing followed a Wednesday speech in New Hampshire, another must for potential presidential candidates, where he drew the...

Woke staffers at James Madison’s Montpelier are scrambling to give themselves a patriotic image makeover — after public outcry over The Post’s report on the shameful treatment the Founding Father has been receiving at his own Virginia home. Inflammatory political content was scrubbed from the landmark’s website within days of The Post’s July report. Just this week, Montpelier announced a freshly expanded, month-long “Constitution Day” celebration to mark the Sept. 17 anniversary of the document’s adoption.

The globalist billionaire who funded the woke transformation of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello paid for a similar overhaul of James Madison’s house — where the author of the US Constitution has been shoved into a supporting role, while slavery and racism take center stage. No American flags fly at Montpelier, Madison’s plantation home in rural Virginia, and not a single display focuses on the life and accomplishments of America’s foremost political philosopher, who created our three-branch federal system of government, wrote the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, and served two terms as president. Instead, blindsided tourists are hammered by...

President Trump is betting big on the primaries. With no serious challengers for the Republican Party nomination and high approval numbers among the GOP’s rank and file, Trump could have cruised through the spring campaign season like most incumbent presidents do. Instead, he traveled to 18 states for campaign rallies and spent more than $155 million to rack up high primary-vote totals for a nomination he had no chance of losing. “I don’t remember any uncontested primary campaign for a sitting president like this,” Stony Brook University professor Helmut Norpoth told The Post. “People don’t normally turn out in large...

The handcuffed woman glowered as federal investigators swarmed the Cherry Hill, New Jersey, storage unit where her “combat materials” were stashed. But not even a hardened homegrown terrorist like 29-year-old Susan Rosenberg was ready to die this November night in 1984. “Put out the f–king cigarette,” she growled at an officer who had unwisely lit up. Rosenberg knew that the unit was stuffed with 740 pounds of leaking explosives. The nitroglycerine oozing from her poorly maintained cache of dynamite — stolen from a Texas construction firm four years earlier — was dangerous and highly unstable. Rosenberg and an accomplice, Tim...

Immigration officials were not to blame for the deaths of two migrant children while in US custody last December, a government watchdog has ruled. The Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security “found no misconduct or malfeasance by DHS personnel” in the deaths of Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin, age 7, and Felipe Gomez Alonso, 8, according to statements released Friday. Both children died of sepsis, investigators said, after illegally crossing the US-Mexico border with family members.

President Barack Obama’s first act as a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2009 — nine months after he took the oath of office — was to try to wriggle out of accepting it. “The morning the prize was announced, his staff investigated whether anyone had failed to travel to Oslo to receive their prize,” writes Nobel insider Geir Lundestad in “The World’s Most Prestigious Prize” (Oxford), out this month. Apparently, the president was among the 61 percent of Americans who believed he didn’t deserve it. “It is true, Obama did not do much before winning,” Lundestad, 74, a member of...

A campaigning Mayor Bill de Blasio called for a boycott of Walmart Saturday in the wake of last week’s mass shooting in El Paso — and also took aim at President Trump and his “tiny little hands.” “I’ve got a little message for President Trump,” he said to polite applause at an Iowa gun-control forum Saturday. “Mr. President, it’s not Hollywood. It’s not video games … It’s the guns that are the problem.” “Take those tiny little hands of yours, pick up the phone, call Mitch McConnell, and say the Senate has to vote for gun safety measures right now,”...

Albany’s congestion pricing plan will hit the wallets of all New Yorkers — not just drivers — because it impacts 5 million delivery trucks serving Manhattan retailers each year. “It’s really basic: if people want to eat in New York City, it’s going to cost them more,” said Zach Pickens, a farmer in upstate Montgomery. “That’s just the bottom line.” Every truck delivering food and goods into Manhattan south of 61st Street will be slapped with the new fee, expected to be about $25 for commercial vehicles of all sizes, once state legislators hash out a budget deal that they promise will...

“Wow, 19,000 Texts between Lisa Page and her lover, Peter S of the FBI, in charge of the Russia Hoax, were just reported as being wiped clean and gone,” Trump posted Saturday morning. Page and Peter Strzok, who worked on both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the probes into Trump’s campaign, reportedly texted each other about plans to “stop” Trump from winning the presidency. The Justice Department revealed Thursday that thousands of their messages to each other had disappeared, blaming the loss of data on a technological failure. “Such a big story that will never be covered by the...

Republicans raged Saturday at the expanding number of top New York Democrats who are giving their challengers the silent treatment rather than debate them. So far, Gov. Cuomo, and two top Dems — Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and attorney general candidate Letitia James — are ducking debates with their darkhorse opponents.

Meghan McCain tore into an absent President Trump at a memorial service for her father, Arizona Sen. John McCain, in Washington on Saturday. “We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness,” McCain, a co-host of “The View,” said at the National Cathedral. “The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege.” “He was a great fire who burned bright,” she said in a speech punctuated by sobbing. “A few have resented that fire… but my...

Racism is to blame for Puerto Rico’s dire fiscal situation, Mayor de Blasio charged Saturday. “The backs of the United States government turned on them, while a health-care crisis grows, a humanitarian crisis grows, the Zika crisis grows,” he said in a speech at the National Action Network in Harlem.

A perceived insult by Marco Rubio fueled Gov. Chris Christie’s bombshell endorsement of Donald Trump, The Times reports. Rubio placed a condescending call to ask for the governor’s backing after Christie dropped out of the presidential race. The 44-year-old candidate all but patted Christie, 53, on the head in a voicemail message, saying he “had a bright future in public service,” sources told The New York Times.