Free Republic

On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) responded to questions on if she saw signs of President Joe Biden’s decline by saying that she didn’t see Biden that often and she “can’t speak to that directly.” Co-host Pamela Brown asked, “You were a co-chair of the Biden-Harris campaign. You stuck with Biden until he dropped out of the race. Given your position in the campaign, what signs of decline did you notice?” Whitmer responded, “I have not read the book. I can tell you this, that, if, as the book reports, Cabinet members didn’t have...

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A wrongful death federal lawsuit has been filed against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Explosives (ATF) and at least 10 agents after Bryan Malinowski, who was a director at the Clinton National Airport, was killed in an early morning raid. The lawsuit was filed by attorneys for Maria "Maer" Malinowski, the wife of Malinowski, and alleges "agents chose the most aggressive tactics available" to serve a search warrant on March 19, 2024. The complaint alleges the constitutional rights of the Malinowskis' were violated, with attorneys calling his death a "needless and a direct result of...

House Republicans’ “one, big, beautiful” tax bill includes a new temporary $4,000 deduction for older adults. The change, called a “bonus” in the legislation, is aimed at helping retirees keep more money in their pockets and provides an alternative to the idea of eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits, which President Donald Trump and other lawmakers have touted. The temporary provision would apply to tax years 2025 through 2028. The deduction would start to phase out for single filers with more than $75,000 in modified adjusted gross income, and for married couples who file jointly with more than $150,000. As...

And the Air Force has a general for every 22 planes.. The US Navy has under 300 ships and under 300 admirals. The ratio of one admiral to one ship seems absurd but of the hundreds of admirals in the Navy, few actually command ships. Take Rick ‘Rachel’ Levine, the transgender health secretary of Pennsylvania, whose previous naval experience had been limited to cruises to the Bahamas, who was commissioned as a four-star admiral by the Biden administration making him both the first transgender four-star admiral, and the first four-star female admiral or the first four-star female impersonator. While Rick...

A Ukrainian diplomatic source said the Russian side demanded during the meeting that the Ukrainian army withdraws from several areas inside Ukraine in return for a ceasefire."Russian demands are detached from reality and go far beyond anything that was previously discussed", the source said

New Jersey Transit train engineers went on strike Friday, leaving an estimated 350,000 commuters in New Jersey and New York City to seek other means to reach their destinations or consider staying home. The walkout comes after the latest round of negotiations on Thursday didn’t produce an agreement. It is the state’s first transit strike in more than 40 years and comes a month after union members overwhelmingly rejected a labor agreement with management. “We presented them the last proposal; they rejected it and walked away with two hours left on the clock,” said Tom Haas, general chairman of the...

President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. has given Iran a proposal for a nuclear deal. "Yeah they have a proposal, but more importantly, they know they have to move quickly or something bad, something bad is going to happen," Trump said. Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned this week that the United States is facing a critical moment with Iran to curb its efforts to develop a nuclear weapon and limit its uranium enrichment. TRUMP WARNS IRAN FACES ‘VIOLENCE LIKE PEOPLE HAVEN’T SEEN BEFORE' IF NUCLEAR DEAL FAILS The International Atomic Energy Agency, often referred to as the...

A man attacked a woman with a knife and then fatally stabbed a man before another man shot and killed the knife-wielding suspect in self-defense Tuesday at a South Hill apartment complex, according to the Spokane Police Department. Officers were called about 5:15 p.m. to an altercation at the Hart Terrace apartment building, 3308 E. 11th Ave., police said in a news release. Lt. Jay Kernkamp told reporters Tuesday that officers found two people injured in the parking lot of the complex. Police and other emergency personnel tried to save them, but both died, according to the release. Detectives believe...

A U.S. judge in New Mexico on Thursday dismissed trespassing charges against dozens of migrants caught in a new military zone on the U.S.-Mexico border, marking a setback for Trump administration efforts to raise penalties for illegal crossings. Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Gregory Wormuth began filing the dismissals late on Wednesday, ruling migrants did not know they were entering the New Mexico military zone and therefore could not be charged, according to court documents. Assistant Federal Public Defender Amanda Skinner said Wormuth dismissed the charges against all migrants who made initial court appearances on Thursday. The migrants still face charges...

The world is on the brink of a climate apocalypse—one caused not by gradual greenhouse emissions but by a sudden exchange of nuclear weapons, a possibility made more salient by the current conflict between India and Pakistan. While the long-term effects of emissions are uncertain, we know that a nuclear war would result in an immediate nuclear winter. When we think about nuclear apocalypse, we tend to think of the immediate effects: thermonuclear explosions that incinerate cities and vaporize populations. But the worst consequences unfold long after the weapons have detonated. A major thermonuclear exchange would shroud the atmosphere in...

Ed Martin, who left his position this week as the top federal prosecutor in Washington, DC, to take another job within the Justice Department because his chances of being confirmed to the post were dwindling, is facing an ethics probe, according to a letter reviewed by CNN. Martin told his entire staff on his last day as interim US attorney, that he is under investigation by the DC Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates claims of misconduct against attorneys.

Things continue to spiral for the embattled UnitedHealth.UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurer in the United States, is reportedly the subject of a federal criminal investigation for potential Medicare fraud, according to an exclusive report by the Wall Street Journal.The investigation, led by the U.S. Department of Justice’s health-care fraud unit in New York, has been underway since at least the summer of 2024 and centers on the company’s Medicare Advantage business practices, according to the report.Medicare Advantage, a program that provides private insurance alternatives to traditional Medicare, serves over 8.2 million members through UnitedHealth, making it a significant revenue...

There are at least six million job openings in the U.S., yet we have a record number of working age men not working. Maybe one reason is the Feds are still paying people welfare not to work. Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey of the Institute for Family Studies report: The 2024 Current Population Survey indicates that 31% of men ages 25-40 who are not working full-time collected some form of cash or cash-equivalent benefit in the form of food stamps, Social Security for disability, Supplemental Security Income, or unemployment insurance in the prior year. Such benefits are particularly common among...

Since he first started running for president in 2016, Donald Trump has sought a 15% corporate tax rate. Unleash Prosperity co-founders Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore were in the room with him nine years ago when he first started talking up that rate. In the 2017 bill we got the rate down from 35% to 21%. Corporate revenues increased. Trump ran on 15% in 2024 and won. Still the House GOP tax bill has no rate cut. Even the scaled back 15% rate for made-in-America companies is nowhere to be found. This could have easily been paid for with the...

In a chaotic scene, roughly two dozen protesters stormed the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s budget reconciliation markup, protesting rumored cuts to Medicare. Despite the shameful and potentially illegal actions of the protestors, Democrats capitalized on the event by thanking the protestors, prompting widespread condemnation. For context, since the January 6 debacle, Democrats have treated the date as if it were a national day of mourning. Despite the broad media support for the dangerous George Floyd riots, far-left pundits in the mainstream media have reduced themselves to hysterics while discussing the events of the Capitol riot. Breaking the news on...

Remember this story from 2018? An armed man shot up the lobby of the Trump National Doral Hotel in Miami (see update), forcing a temporary evacuation while the perp dragged around an American flag. One police subdued him, Jonathan Oddi went off on weird rants during his police interrogation, claiming to have been part of a sex-trafficking ring run by Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and other rappers, while also spewing some nonsensical claims about Barack Obama and Donald Trump as well. Police at the time figured Oddi was in a manic-psychotic state after having stopped taking meds. Well, back that...

Middlebury College professor Gary Winslett somehow got the Washington Post (of all places) to print this list of the key ingredients that caused the Midwest to rust and the South to boom. It reads like a greatest hits of HOTLINE themes: Right-to-work laws, cheap energy, affordable housing, low-cost land, fast permitting, low taxes, immigration. That’s a powerful combination, and it has had big effects. In 1992, there was not a single auto plant in Alabama. Today, Alabama is the No. 1 auto-exporting state, producing more than 1 million vehicles a year. That’s brought more than 50,000 jobs and billions of...

NASA has revived a set of thrusters on the nearly 50-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft after declaring them inoperable over two decades ago. It's a nice long-distance engineering win for the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, responsible for keeping the venerable Voyager spacecraft flying - and critical one at that, as clogging fuel lines threatened to derail the backup thrusters currently in use. The things you have to deal with when your spacecraft is operating more than four decades beyond its original mission plan, eh? Voyager 1 launched in 1977. JPL reported Wednesday that the maneuver, completed in March, restarted...

The entrepreneur tells Michael Odell about inheritance, his new London hotel, dancing on the tables at 74 and why he has stopped afternoon drinkingSo what does a billionaire business tycoon eat for breakfast? I’m sitting with Sir Richard Branson in his spanking new, 120-room Virgin Hotels London-Shoreditch, where I imagine they served him something delicious this morning. I am wrong. “I went to E Pellicci in Bethnal Green, it’s a proper old East End restaurant,” he beams. “The welcome you get and the size of the breakfast is incredible. You should go there — 84-year-old Maria Pellicci still runs the...

Much like its creator, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was preoccupied with South African racial politics on social media this week, posting unsolicited claims about the persecution and “genocide” of white people. The chatbot, made by Musk’s company xAI, kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa. One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence...