Free Republic

In a Republican-led Congress defined by deference to President Donald Trump, there's a small but steadily growing cohort who have found themselves more willing to break with the White House. Although the president maintains a firm grip on Republican voters, the expanding club could hinder his agenda on everything from the Iran war to immigration funding at a moment when his party holds a tenuous majority on Capitol Hill. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is the newest member of the club. Just days after losing his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, Cassidy on Tuesday reversed himself on legislation involving the...

ALBANY - Activist and comedian Dick Gregory said yesterday he suspects CIA and FBI "thugs" had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Gregory told the New York State Black and Puerto Rican Legislators annual conference that bits of evidence overlooked by most of the mainstream media show some people in power had knowledge of the attacks beforehand. "You all sit around and really believe that some little snot-nosed punky Arabs could pull off something ... the Russians in their heyday ... didn't have the intelligence to come into the country and blow up a building like these...

Democrats still searching for a way out of the rubble of the 2024 election got a peek in Tuesday’s primaries of what their voters want for the future. The races spanned a mix of competitive and safe-blue seats across six states — including a pair of crucial swing states. The result: A slate of disparate candidates who won’t give them a much clearer sense of their future. State Rep. Chris Rabb, a progressive firebrand and self-styled “rabble-rouser,” won the open primary for the bluest House district in the country in Philadelphia. In a nearby Pennsylvania House battleground, Democrats nominated Bob...

ATLANTA (CN) — An 11th Circuit panel on Friday unanimously overturned an $8.2 million jury verdict in favor of former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore in his defamation lawsuit against a Democratic super PAC, ruling the Republican politician failed to show the group knew there were implied falsehoods in a TV ad recounting sexual misconduct accusations against the 2017 U.S. Senate candidate. Moore claimed an advertisement created by the Senate Majority PAC (SMP) implied he solicited sex from Wendy Miller, a then-14-year-old girl who was working as a Santa’s helper at a shopping mall. The ad, which the group helped...

New Vegas betting odds heavily favor former Biden Cabinet official Xavier Becerra in California’s crowded governor’s race — and it’s not even close. Prediction market Polymarket currently gives Becerra a commanding 52% chance of winning the 2026 gubernatorial contest, far outpacing his nearest rival, billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer, who trails at around 32%. The sharp divide underscores just how dramatically Becerra has surged from early uncertainty to become the race’s dominant frontrunner.

Colin Jost and Travis Kelce bonded over their high-profile relationships with Scarlett Johansson and Taylor Swift, respectively. The SNL star shared he is more "approachable" than his wife, who people fan over constantly. "I'm probably approached more because she's less approachable... Because I'm on TV ... I'm in their living room, so they're just like, 'Hey what's up man, how's it going?'" "She's actually almost so famous that they don't believe it a lot of times," he said of passersby. "We've been traveling and we've been standing at the passport check and the person's looking at her passport and he'll...

Principled advocacy of the free market requires an understanding of the differences between genuine free enterprise and “state capitalism.” Although the Left frequently exaggerates and overemphasizes the evils of corporate America, proponents of the free market often find themselves in the awkward position of defending the status quo of state capitalism, which is in fact a common adversary of the free marketer and the anti-corporate leftist, even if the latter misdiagnoses the problem and proposes the wrong solutions... Indeed, corporatism, implemented by the state — whether through direct handouts, corporate bailouts, eminent domain, licensing laws, antitrust regulations, or environmental edicts...

A brief moment at Donald Trump’s high-stakes meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping has sparked fresh attention after the U.S. leader was seen raising a glass and appearing to take a sip during a formal reception. Footage from the event shows Trump holding a stemmed glass alongside Xi and other officials before bringing it to his lips. The moment stands out because the president has presented himself as a lifelong teetotaler—making even routine diplomatic gestures open to closer scrutiny. The reception formed part of a tightly choreographed state visit, where symbolism and protocol carry as much weight as policy discussions....

This article is part of “Unaffordable America,” a series examining rising economic inequality in the U.S. and the policies that drive it. PHOENIX — The line outside a suburban office building was already 15 people long when Tiffany Hudson showed up with her 7-year-old son cradling his blanket. It was 7 a.m. At the front of the line was a woman hooked up to an oxygen tank who had arrived 90 minutes before the building opened. Like others there, Husdon had come to the Arizona Department of Economic Security office in Surprise, a Phoenix suburb, to find out why the...

For more than a decade, Guy Shoemaker pitched military service to potential new recruits with one key promise: healthcare for life. “You’re going to have medical and dental for the rest of your life,” said Shoemaker, a retired Army sergeant first class and recruiter who spent a year in Afghanistan. “I used that phrase too many times.” That promise held up when Shoemaker, 64, of Fort Worth, Texas, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2021. TRICARE — the military’s healthcare program for active service members, retirees and their families — covered the chemotherapy, radiation and years of follow-up care that...

In one universe — the one inhabited by Nicolle Wallace and her Deadline White House on MS NOW— Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s lengthy, high-energy White House press briefing was an embarrassing disaster. Within 90 minutes, President Trump supposedly turned him into a “liar or fool,” a “jackass,” and the “loser of the day.”In the universe the rest of America watched, Rubio delivered a commanding, substantive, and at times inspirational performance that drew praise across the board for its policy depth, wit, and poise. Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

President Donald Trump’s abrupt reversal on his plan to help ships go through the Strait of Hormuz came after a key Gulf ally suspended the U.S. military’s ability to use its bases and airspace to carry out the operation, according to two U.S. officials. Trump surprised Gulf allies by announcing “Project Freedom” on social media Sunday afternoon, the officials said, angering leadership in Saudi Arabia. In response, the Kingdom informed the U.S. it would not allow the U.S. military to fly aircraft from Prince Sultan Airbase southeast of Riyadh or fly through Saudi airspace to support the effort, the officials...

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned new rulings have “spawned chaos” in Louisiana after the court agreed on Monday to speed up a previous order that a map drawn by the state was found to be unconstitutional for racial gerrymander and that the Voting Rights Act did not require the state to create an additional majority-minority district. ... Jackson, one of the three liberal justices in the court, dissented, writing that “the Court’s decision in these cases has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana,” and highlighted the timing of elections in the state and that mail-in ballots were...

Rural America has long been where the rest of the country sends what it doesn’t want nearby: prisons, power plants, landfills. These days, two more intrusions have been added to the list: immigrant detention centers and data centers. In December, Larry Bender, the supervisor of Tremont Township in Schuylkill County, Pa., learned to his great surprise that the federal government had purchased the largest commercial property in the township: a 1.3-million-square-foot warehouse that had been a Big Lots distribution center. It would now be used for immigrant detention. Tremont is home to about 300 people. The facility was designated for...

Support for President Donald Trump’s war with Iran has dipped to the same levels as unpopular wars like Vietnam and Iraq, according to a new poll. A survey released by ABC-The Washington Post-Ipsos shows support for the ongoing conflict in Iran is continuing to fall, with six in 10 Americans calling the military action a mistake and just 2 in 10 calling the campaign a success. “President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is as unpopular among Americans as the Iraq War during the year of peak violence in 2006 and the Vietnam War in the early 1970s,” The Washington Post...

LAS VEGAS — Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo is trying to run a reelection campaign befitting the neon-drenched, sagebrush-pocked desert he has for five decades called home. President Donald Trump is making that hard. The Republican governor started the year with a sevenfold fundraising advantage, double-digit net favorability ratings and the tailwinds of a swing state the GOP presidential candidate carried for the first time in two decades. Five months later, he finds himself in a neck-and-neck race with Democrat Aaron Ford, the state’s attorney general, yoked to a highly unpopular president, a wobbling economy and a Middle Eastern war that...

Hilarious 1 Minute Video at link.........

Liberal columnist rushed to blame free speech law, Trump A guy holding a provocative sign with the n-word on Kansas State University’s campus is actually black, not a white guy blackface, according to the student newspaper. Last week someone showed up at the public university campus holding a sign that read “Say [n-word] win candy.” The incident understandably upset a liberal columnist, but he also rushed to blame a recently passed free speech law as well as Donald Trump supporters. He later had to amend the article after it came to light the sign holder was not a white person...

History does not whisper. It warns. Empires do not collapse because of a single moment of weakness. They erode from within, slowly hollowed out by overreach, moral ambiguity and the false belief that their power exempts them from consequence. The question before us is not whether America is strong. It is whether we are wise enough to endure the burden that comes with being the world’s lone superpower. Scores of empires have come before us. Each one believed itself indispensable. Each one believed its reach was justified. And each one eventually fell, often not at the hands of foreign enemies...

On Monday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “The Weeknight,” Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) said that the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is “about how it comes from our leaders. When people talk about destroying civilizations or calling people name[s], normalizing all of these things, we should not be doing that.” Rosen said, “I can tell you that he always turns everything to himself. And this is not about a ballroom or an auditorium or any place at all. It is about how people in the public sphere treat each other, how they talk to each other.” She added that...