Free Republic

New documents show the crew on board the United States' newest aircraft carrier are growing increasingly frustrated by design flaws that lead to regular failures in the ship's toilet system. The USS Gerald R. Ford has been deployed for seven months since it left Norfolk in June. On board the carrier, the crew is battling a toilet system that the General Accountability Office reported in 2020 was undersized and poorly designed. The system continues to fail during deployment, forcing the crew of 4,600 sailors to live with a system that randomly breaks down during their months at sea. NPR has...

[snip] Jordan accused members of the administration of treating the war like a “video game” and implied they were using the conflict to compensate for personal insecurities: “And far too many members of this administration have been treating it like it's a video game and some way to, you know, exercise their repressed masculinity that they have issues with, I guess. But all of the faux bravado, it just, it really does make me want to puke in my stomach.Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

A classified report by the US National Intelligence Council concluded that the Iranian regime was unlikely to be toppled even by a large-scale assault, the Washington Post reports. Three people familiar with the report tell the newspaper that the assessment, completed around a week before Israel and the US launched their assault on the Islamic Republic, outlined small- and large-scale assaults as scenarios for potential succession. The report concluded that protocols would be followed if supreme leader Ali Khamenei were to be killed to ensure the regime’s survival, with it “unlikely” that Iran’s opposition would take control. The Post says...

As we move to an era where distinguishing reality from fiction becomes as tricky as ever, a new viral sensation has stolen the internet's attention in just couple of days. In the middle of the ongoing tensions in the Middle East, and the boom of military content, a new figure has emerged from the deepest rooms of social media. We are talking about Jessica Foster, a woman who has accumulated nearly one million followers on Instagram thanks to her persona as a glamorous military girl and a real patriot who is always surrounded by the world's most powerful leaders. But,...

Nonfarm payrolls were expected to increase 50,000 in February while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%, according to Dow Jones consensus estimates

@amuse@amuseSABOTAGE? Why would a sitting GOP Senator wait until the filing deadline to announce his retirement? Montana GOP Senator Daines announced that he will not seek reelection just hours before the deadline for filing.March 4, 2026

President Donald Trump has spent months touting his planned White House ballroom, but this week the public gets its first chance to formally offer him their thoughts. The verdict: They don’t like it. Members of the public sent more than 35,000 comments about the project to the National Capital Planning Commission ahead of its Thursday hearing to review the ballroom, according to a Washington Post analysis of comments posted on the commission’s website. The “vast majority” of comments came from those who oppose the plan, commission staff said. The Post found that more than 97 percent of comments were critical...

The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party started a group chat primarily for conservative students last fall — and within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.” In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics. Interspersed throughout were discussions about events promoting the Republican Party at Florida...

By a margin of two votes, North Carolina's most powerful politician is losing a primary election to his home county's sheriff. With all precincts reporting Tuesday night, Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page had recorded 13,077 votes. Senator Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, had recorded 13,075 votes. If the race is within 1% — and this one certainly is — the losing candidate can request a recount. There are also outstanding provisional ballots and military and overseas ballots that could still be added to the total. "Every vote counts," Berger told assembled media after the results came in. "We will continue through the...

Thomas Massie: "PSA: Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won't make the Epstein files go away, any more than the Dow going above 50,000 will."

Clearly, the “Saturday Night Live” writing team had a lot of work to do on Saturday, as they opened the show with a sketch about President Trump’s early morning attack on Iran. In the Feb. 28 cold open, Trump (played by James Austin Johnson) gives a press conference about the military action. “It’s me, Donald Trump, FIFA Peace Prize winner and Nobel Peace Prize taker,” he began. “Remember that? I launched this attack after me and my board of peace…we were bored of peace. As we all know, Iran has been two weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon for...

You’ve heard of Optimist International, the global service organization. If there were a “Pessimist International,” MS NOW military analyst Barry McCaffrey could be kicked out of it — for being too darn negative. Caution is warranted when predicting U.S. success in foreign military operations. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq remain sobering reminders. But appearing on MS NOW’s continuing Iran coverage last night, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey — Bill Clinton’s former drug czar — took pessimism to new heights. In roughly two minutes, McCaffrey declared success in key American objectives in Iran “unlikely” four separate times — and added a “not likely”...

In the wake of Iranian Supreme Leader Aylatollah Khamenei coming down with a killer headache after getting a U.S. warhead on his forehead, on Saturday, The Washington Post published one of their infamous glowing remembrances of Islamic terrorists. The paper fondly remembered the brutal Islamic dictator as a “avuncular figure” with an “easy smile” and love for “Persian poetry.” Readers might remember when The Post fluffed up the former leader of ISIS as an “austere religious scholar”; well, they're back at it again with Khamenei in their obituary titled: “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is dead at 86.” The...

The United Nations chief condemned the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran on Saturday and called for an immediate return to negotiations “to pull the region, and our world, back from the brink.” Secretary-General António Guterres told an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council that everything must be done to prevent further escalation. “The alternative,” he warned, “is a potential wider conflict with grave consequences for civilians and regional stability.” Guterres said the U.S. and Israeli airstrikes violated international law, including the U.N. Charter. He also condemned Iran’s retaliatory attacks for violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan,...

Give me a phone and a list of registered Democrats, and I’ll find you one who thinks Donald Trump's the greatest thing since sliced bread — and Gavin Newsom is the devil incarnate. That’s essentially the level of polling rigor Audie Cornish brought to Tuesday’s edition of CNN This Morning. Discussing issues ahead of the State of the Union address, Cornish said: “We called up one of the people we polled, a Republican voter, Sean from New Mexico. He said: ‘I think people were expecting Trump to provide a bit of relief to their suffering. Grocery prices are just through...

Fulton County, Georgia, officials said Wednesday that the FBI seized original 2020 voting records while serving a search warrant at the county's Elections Hub and Operations Center. The FBI earlier Wednesday said they were conducting court-authorized activity at the facility. The development comes after President Donald Trump has repeatedly said there was voter fraud in the 2020 election, specifically in Georgia, that contributed to his election loss. Georgia officials audited and certified the results following the election.

Tommy Robinson, Britain’s self-styled free speech warrior, has been allowed to enter the U.S. despite a long criminal rap sheet. On Thursday, Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, posted a video on social media from an airport in the U.S. announcing, “I’ve arrived!” He said the trip was “last-minute” after he’d been informed only hours earlier that he’d gotten a visa, and hinted at plans to throw himself into U.S. politics. That apparently included a meeting with Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, a longtime peddler of MAGA election conspiracy theories. Sharing a photo of himself shaking...

Economic growth cooled near the end of 2025 while inflation held firm, according to data released Friday that could complicate the Federal Reserve’s interest rate path. Gross domestic produce rose at an annualized rate of just 1.4%, according to Commerce Department numbers adjusted for seasonality and inflation. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a 2.5% gain.

On Wednesday’s CNN This Morning, host Audie Cornish and her panel managed to recast enforcement of federal civil rights law under Donald Trump as “enforcing ideology,” while a Democratic consultant insisted that DEI “was never a problem” until Trump took office. [snip] Cornish framed the issue this way: “What it means is the actual government now is involved in enforcing a different ideology, so to speak.”No. It means the federal government is enforcing the law. Democratic consultant Antjuan Seawright went further, claiming: “DEI was never a problem until Trump became President of the United States."Seawright also suggested that scaling back...

On Wednesday’s CNN This Morning, host Audie Cornish and her panel managed to recast enforcement of federal civil rights law under Donald Trump as “enforcing ideology,” while a Democratic consultant insisted that DEI “was never a problem” until Trump took office. [snip] Host Audie Cornish framed the issue this way: “What it means is the actual government now is involved in enforcing a different ideology, so to speak.” No. It means the federal government is enforcing the law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race. Get the rest of the story and view the...