Free Republic

The real problem with nationalism, the kind that President Trump campaigned on, is that it offers true and therefore intolerable normality in a clown world. It is normal to want to stay out of foreign wars, to preserve your religion, language, people, and culture.

SAN DIEGO -- A federal judge ruled Monday that the Trump administration is operating within its authority when separating families stopped at the Mexican border, rejecting arguments that it was quietly returning to widespread practices that drew international condemnation. The American Civil Liberties Union argued that the administration was splitting families over dubious allegations and minor transgressions including traffic offenses. It asked the judge in July to rule on whether the government was justified in separating 911 children during the first year after the judge halted the general practice in June 2018.

What a difference a year makes. 2018 was tough on investors, and it ended with stocks in retreat. The decline was triggered by growing fears of a prolonged U.S.-China trade war fueled by President Trump’s “I am tariff man” tweet on December 4.In addition, the Federal Reserve was in a multiyear cycle of rate hikes. Nobody knew it at the time, but the last hike occurred on December 18, 2018. Across nearly every major asset class, 2018 was a bad year. Fast forward to December 2019.A yearlong rally accelerated in the fourth quarter, with stocks ending the year at...

A new Media Research Center analysis found that the three major network evening newscasts only gave President Donald Trump’s booming economy and U.S. trade nine minutes of coverage since the House Democrats’ impeachment push began on Sept. 24, 2019.

U.S. coal-fired power plants shut down at the second-fastest pace on record in 2019, despite President Donald Trump’s efforts to prop up the industry, according to data from the federal government and Thomson Reuters. Power companies retired or converted roughly 15,100 megawatts (MW) of coal-fired electricity generation, enough to power about 15 million homes, according to the data, which included preliminary statistics from the Energy Information Administration and Reuters reporting. That was second only to the record 19,300 MW shut in 2015 during President Barack Obama’s administration. The replacement of coal with power generation from natural gas and renewables has...

In a bid to capture one of the most quickly growing segments of American voters, American Latinos United has launched a new political action committee focused on defeating President Donald Trump in the upcoming 2020 presidential election. Led by former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and entrepreneur Fernando Espuelas, the committee will specialize in Latino voter engagement in key swing states in hopes of propelling the Democratic nominee, whoever that turns out to be, to victory. "President Trump captured about 30% of the Hispanic vote in 2016. If he falls under that threshold in 2020, key battleground states will be...

On Monday, during an interview with the Des Moines Register, 2020 presidential hopeful mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg said drug possession should not result in jail time. Buttigieg said, “Incarceration should not even be a response to drug possession. What I have seen is while there continues to be all kinds of harms associated with drug possession and use, it is also the case that we have created in an effort to deal with a public health problem, we have created an even bigger problem — a justice problem, and it’s own form of a health problem when...

Department of JusticeOffice of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEThursday, January 9, 2020Jorge Costilla-Sanchez pleaded guilty to an international drug trafficking conspiracy to distribute cocaine and marijuana into the United States.Costilla-Sanchez, 48, was an active member of the “Cartel Del Golfo” (CDG or Gulf Cartel). CDG is a violent Mexican criminal organization engaged in the manufacture, distribution, and importation of ton quantities of cocaine and marijuana into the United States. In the late 1990s, the Gulf Cartel recruited an elite group of former Mexican military personnel to join their ranks as security and enforcers who became known as Los Zetas. The...

* Fewer suicides occur when minimum wages are higher during periods of elevated unemployment, according to a new study. * Every $1 increase in the minimum wage is associated with a 6% reduction in suicide for high school grads. * Boosting the minimum wage by $1 could have saved 27,550 lives from 1990 to 2015, the study says. Raising the federal minimum wage, which hasn't increased in more than a decade, might accomplish far more than simply offering U.S. workers a boost in pay. New research suggests that lifting the baseline wage could also stop thousands of Americans from killing...

In her letter published in The Salt Lake Tribune on Jan. 4, Phyllis Pope asked if “Flippy” Mitt Romney wants “to be one of the frightened sheep or the principled and thoughtful leader?” While I understand her frustration, she needs to remember that Romney is in politics, as he was in his endeavors at Bain Capital, very risk averse. This question answers itself with only slight alteration: Romney is one of the frightened sheep who wants to be seen as the principled and thoughtful leader. There, now it is fixed.

Forensics officials in the western Mexican state of Jalisco are trying to determine how many victims are accounted for in 26 plastic bags... The Jalisco state prosecutor’s office said in a statement that it began to collect the bags Tuesday in the municipality of Tonala on the outskirts of Guadalajara. Officials initially recovered 14 bags of body parts. They returned Wednesday and found 12 more.

Trump administration officials will announce Friday that they have completed construction on 100 miles of new barriers along the southern border with Mexico. Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf will announce the completed construction in Yuma, Ariz., The Washington Post reported. He will be joined by senior border officials and Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.). The announcement will come just days after a federal appeals court in New Orleans lifted an injunction from a lower court that had blocked the Trump administration from using military funds to help build the border wall. The Wednesday decision will allow...

If you went to bed early Tuesday, you were surprised to wake up Wednesday and learn that World War III has been delayed. No doubt you were also shocked that Iran blinked, oil prices were tumbling and the stock market was soaring. Once again, the Chicken Little chorus got everything all wrong. The sky isn’t falling and Donald Trump pulled off a huge victory. Oh, and he’s still president. Iran’s decision to pretend it was retaliating for the death of Qassem Soleimani by lobbing ineffective missiles is terrific news for America and freedom-loving people everywhere. So was Trump’s Wednesday offer...

Will Donald Trump make a triumphant entrance to a joint session of Congress to hail his new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada? And will that be before or after he gets acquitted in an impeachment trial? Yes, says Chuck Grassley to all of the above. Speaking just prior to a committee vote on the USMCA, the Finance Committee chair said Trump could have USMCA completed by the end of the week, or the end of the month at the latest: “It’s going to be overwhelmingly approved,” Sen. Charles Grassley says about the USMCA trade deal. “It’s very bipartisan.”...

Mexicans seeking asylum in the United States could be sent to Guatemala under a bilateral agreement signed by the Central American nation last year, according to documents sent to U.S. asylum officers in recent days and seen by Reuters. In a Jan. 4 email, field office staff at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) were told Mexican nationals will be included in the populations "amenable" to the agreement with Guatemala. The agreement, brokered last July between the administration of Republican President Donald Trump and the outgoing Guatemalan government, allows U.S. immigration officials to send migrants requesting asylum at the...

Spanish special-operations police, their faces covered with balaclavas and their weapons visible, attempted to force their way past Bolivian police at the Mexican Embassy in La Paz on Dec. 27. The effort failed but it left behind troubling questions about whether rogue interests inside the Spanish government are working with Mexico on behalf of former Bolivian officials, some of whom face criminal charges. Spanish elite police had already escorted the Spanish Embassy’s chargé d’affaires and its consul to the Mexican Embassy earlier that morning. When two more cars, carrying masked members of the same counterterrorism unit, showed up later and...

CIUDAD VICTORIA, Tamaulipas -- An American family returning to the U.S. after a holiday visit to Mexico came under attack just south of Texas on Saturday night, with armed gunmen killing a 13-year-old and wounding three other people. The attorney general's office in the state of Tamaulipas said the child was a U.S. citizen and that the parents were permanent residents of the U.S. They did not release the victims' names. The family was traveling in a Chevrolet SUV with Oklahoma state plates, returning from a holiday visit to relatives in the state of San Luis Potosi. SNIP

Martha Doss, who was naturalized in 2017, is an example of the complexities of Texas’ political landscape amid the immigration debate.On the day Martha Doss became a U.S. citizen in 2017, she couldn’t stop thinking of her mother. “She wanted to desperately be an American,” she said, remembering the woman who brought her and her twin sister from Mexico to the United States when they were children in the mid-1980s. Becoming a citizen meant her mother’s dream of a better life for her children had, in some way, been fulfilled. It also meant that in 2020, Martha could vote in...

California's New Dystopian Laws Californians, are you ready for the twelve-hundred new progressive laws that take effect this year? Get ready because many of these new rules come with stiff penalties. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8FhWH4uSdk&feature=emb_title  

The only thing that rivals President Trump’s tally of kept promises is the endless list of inaccurate predictions his critics have made about the U.S. economy.  Of course, we heard these apocryphal predictions even before Donald Trump won the 2016 election. For instance, in October 2016, the far-left publication Politico boldly declared that “Wall Street is set up for a major crash if Donald Trump shocks the world on Election Day and wins the White House.” The ability of Trump’s critics to predict our economic future hasn’t improved with age. Throughout 2019, numerous so-called “economists” and “experts” have taken a...