Free Republic

I have been on the record as saying that Michael Bloomberg will never become the president of the United States. The line I wrote in 2016 holds up: “An anti-teachers’-union, anti-gun, pro-nanny state, pro-Wall Street, pro-stop-and- frisk, pro-inequality, pro-immigration, pro-surveillance, pro-Iraq War neoconservative is almost surgically designed to repel practically every American voter on some level.” For that reason alone, the flirtation with making this guy the Democratic nominee should cause serious alarm to anyone who wants to defeat Donald Trump. Plus, Bloomberg has vowed to spend his money until November no matter who is the nominee, instantly undercutting the...

Charles Portis, an El Dorado native best known for his 1968 novel True Grit, died on Monday at a Little Rock hospice facility. He was 86. The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, which was diagnosed in 2012, said his brother, Jonathan Portis. Portis published five novels — Norwood (1966), True Grit (1968), The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985), and Gringos (1991) — and the non-fiction Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany (2012). True Grit, the story of fictional 14-year-old Mattie Ross from Yell County, Ark., who recruits U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn to avenge...

When 18-year-old NASCAR star Hailie Deegan heard that President Donald Trump was going to attend the Daytona 500, she went on a quest to get Trump to sign her helmet. It was a quest that only the president’s son could facilitate. Ahead of the big race, Deegan jumped to Twitter to let fans know that she was in the hunt for the president’s autograph. Hailie Deegan ✔ @HailieDeegan Today’s goal. Get my helmet signed by Trump https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1228810073171951621 … Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump Remember, will be at Daytona 500 tomorrow! Amusingly, Don Trump, Jr., saw the tweet and made one...

A New York University professor is one of the masterminds behind the anarchist group that organized the rampage through the subways last month, destroying turnstiles, stranding thousands of commuters and spray-painting “F–k Cops” on station walls. Amin Husain, 44, is a co-founder of Decolonize This Place, which urged its radical followers in a social media campaign to “f-ck sh-t up” on Jan. 31 in a violent assault on the city’s transit system that concluded with 13 arrests and $100,000 in damage. Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was “repulsed” by the hooliganism, and Police Commissioner Dermot Shea called the so-called...

RUSH: Let me start with an attempt – I still have the remnants of the flu, but everything is fine, folks. I need to find a way beyond what I’ve already done to express my heartfelt gratitude and thanks and appreciation for the outpouring that continues to come in from people. I can’t respond to all of it. I’m starting to feel guilty about it. Because so many people are sending me — people that I haven’t heard from in I don’t know how long and finding a way to reach me, finding a way to get through to me...

Attorney General Bill Barr has tapped a growing number of federal prosecutors across the country to review high-profile Russia probes involving Trump associates and consider emerging allegations tied to Ukraine, in a bold but risky move that comes as he faces mounting criticism and even resignation calls from congressional Democrats who allege he's protecting the president. Meanwhile, Barr has tapped other several federal prosecutors to review DOJ cases. Last week, Barr confirmed that the Justice Department was reviewing information about Ukraine coming to the agency from the president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and others. Barr has tapped U.S. Attorney Scott...

Boeing's 737 Next Generation airliners have been struck by a peculiar software flaw that blanks the airliners' cockpit screens if pilots dare attempt a westwards landing at specific airports. Amid the various well-reported woes facing America's largest airframe maker, yet another one has emerged from the US Federal Aviation Administration; a bug that causes all pilots' display screens in the 737-NG airliner family to simply go blank.

RUSH: This Mayor Pete stuff. What do you think the main reason the Drive-Bys went batty over this? I didn’t lecture Mayor Pete on anything. I didn’t say anything anti-gay. I didn’t even offer an opinion of my own. I was asking people to analyze — asking people to imagine how the Democrat power base was looking at their options after the Hawkeye Cauci and New the Hampshire primary. I’ll replay the bite for you. It takes about two minutes to go through, but at no point was there a lecture of Mayor Pete on family values or anything else....

Massachusetts Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D) and Ed Markey (D) expressed “grave concerns” in a letter Sunday about reported plans to deploy Customs and Border Protection (CBP) SWAT teams into so-called sanctuary cities. In the letter to the heads of CBP, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the two addressed the CBP announcement that its Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) will be deployed to several cities that refuse to cooperate with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement. "The BORTAC deployment to Boston and other cities is unnecessary, unwelcome, and dangerous. But the specter of heavily...

Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler's profits slumped by almost two-thirds in 2019 as the legal costs of the "dieselgate" scandal and heavy investments in electric technology took their toll. The German carmaker's net profit fell to €2.7bn (£2.3bn) for 2019, it announced on Tuesday, almost €5bn worse than the previous year's performance. It also slashed its dividend from €3.25 per share to only 90 cents to help preserve cash to plough into electric vehicle technology. Daimler is carrying out swingeing cuts to its global workforce as it tries to save more than €1bn in costs. In November it said it would cut...

Tom Steyer leads a tight race in the Nevada Democratic Caucus with a slim 2-point lead, according to a poll commissioned and conducted by Point Blank Political; however, the top five candidates are all within the poll’s 5.6 percent margin of error. Steyer, Klobuchar, Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg led the pack, while Warren and Gabbard were decidedly behind the leaders. Point Blank Political surveyed 256 likely Democratic caucus-goers from February 13th through February 15th. The survey results were weighted by race, gender, and age using a Random Iterative Model and the model’s weighting efficiency was 84 percent, resulting in an...

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump raced from the Daytona 500 to his namesake DC hotel Sunday night for the wedding of senior adviser Stephen Miller and Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary, Katie Waldman. The affair took place at the Trump International Hotel and included a ceremony officiated by Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, senior adviser to US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, according to the couple’s New York Times wedding announcement. Former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and wife Sally were also in attendance. The former Republican National Committee chairman posted a photo of him and his...

The Democratic senator who mocked President Trump after Trump ordered the killing of Iranian general and terror leader Qassem Soleimani, saying Trump had ‘made us a literal laughingstock” around the world, held a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the Munich Security Conference last week, according to a source briefed by the French delegation to the conference. The Federalist reports that Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who had mocked Trump in early January, joined other Democratic senators for that secret meeting. What makes Murphy’s action particularly hypocritical is that in the past, he has bitterly slammed...

Giving birth to a child is “the worst thing you can do” to the climate, says philosophy professor Patricia MacCormack of Anglia Ruskin University. The professor, author of The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene who describes herself as an “old school goth,” says that the only way to save the planet is to stop having children and allow humans to become extinct. According to the official description of the book, MacCormack “actively embraces issues like human extinction, vegan abolition, atheist occultism, death studies, a refusal of identity politics, deep ecology, and the apocalypse as an optimistic...

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Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and other Democratic senators had a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the Munich Security Conference last week, according to a source briefed by the French delegation to the conference. Murphy’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment by press time. Such a meeting would mean Murphy had done the type of secret coordination with foreign leaders to potentially undermine the U.S. government that he accused Trump officials of doing as they prepared for Trump’s administration. In February 2017, Murphy demanded investigations of National Security Advisor Mike Flynn because...

Actress-singer Cher sounded a note of panic over the 2020 presidential election, saying that Joe Biden carries too much negative baggage and appears unable to run a smooth presidential campaign. The Oscar-winning Moonstruck star also said she thinks none of the current crop of Democratic candidates will be able to beat President Donald Trump. Cher threw Sen.Biden (D-DE) under the bus in a tweet saying that the former vice president has “many strikes against him.” She added that Biden is a “good, honest man” who could be president, “but not run 4 pres.” Cher also dismissed the entire crop of...

Some members of the mainstream media have issued mea culpas for building up now-disgraced attorney Michael Avenatti, while others have shirked responsibility and some have even blamed President Trump – but it all falls flat for critics who watched his rise from lawyer for a porn star to potential Democratic presidential candidate. Avenatti, who represented adult film actress Stormy Daniels in a lawsuit against President Trump, appeared on CNN and MSNBC a combined 229 times over two years, according to the Media Research Center. CNN’s Brian Stelter was Avenatti’s biggest cheerleader, once declaring that he was a “serious” contender to...

LAS VEGAS - With the Nevada caucuses days away, campaign officials and Democratic activists are increasingly alarmed that they might prove a debacle as damaging as the vote in Iowa, further setting the party back in its urgent effort to coalesce around a nominee to take on President Donald Trump. Campaigns said they still have not gotten the party to offer even a basic explanation of how key parts of the process will work. Volunteers are reporting problems with the technology that's been deployed at the last minute to make the vote count smoother. And experts are raising serious questions...

Employees at software giant Oracle are demanding that the company’s Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison cancel a fundraiser for President Donald Trump set to take place this week. Recode reports that following Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison’s decision to host a fundraiser for President Trump this week, employees at the company have demanded that Ellison cancel the event. Breitbart News reported that President Donald Trump is expected to attend a campaign fundraising event at Ellison’s Rancho Mirage estate on Wednesday, just two weeks before California’s Super Tuesday primary. Ellison will be hosting supporters on a golf outing at his home on...