Free Republic

"I'm Senator Elissa Slotkin."

Today’s Republican Party is big on manliness and masculine virtues. The MAGA right in particular is forever obsessing over who is the biggest, the strongest, the most fearless among them.This is why, watching President Trump’s fight to keep a lid on the Epstein files, I have been struck, delighted even, that among the vanishingly few Republican lawmakers with the courage to defy him have been three fire-breathing congresswomen: Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.Love ’em or hate ’em, these House troublemakers bucked their party leadership, stared down their president and made...

President Trump on Tuesday called for ABC News to lose its license after one of its reporters peppered him with Oval Office questions — including whether his family’s business dealings with Saudi Arabia constituted a conflict of interest. ABC’s Mary Bruce used Trump’s meeting with the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to also ask about the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “People are wise to your hoax,” Trump said. “Your crappy company is one of the perpetrators. “And I’ll tell you something, I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake and is...

Belem, Brazil) — Crowned by global media outlets as the most important American at the United Nations “climate” summit in Belem, far-left California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) slammed U.S. President Donald Trump as an “invasive species” while signing deals with hostile foreign governments. The American president, Newsom suggested, must be stopped in order to save the world from alleged man-made climate change. Among other major announcements, Newsom inked a number of unconstitutional quasi-treaties with foreign governments — several of which are dominated by self-proclaimed communist and socialist leaders hostile to the United States. These “partnerships,” signed on the third day...

Home Depot's recent earnings report has raised alarms about more than a retail slowdown, signalling stress in the U.S. housing market and financial pressures on homeowners and potential buyers alike. The home improvement giant posted a 0.2% gain in same-store sales for the quarter and lowered its full-year profit forecast, citing persistent challenges in housing and consumer spending. Analysts say the numbers reflect broader concerns about affordability and economic uncertainty in the nation's housing sector. Rising mortgage rates, higher building costs, and inflationary pressures are keeping many prospective homebuyers on the sidelines. Homeowners are also postponing major remodelling projects, opting...

The Trump administration is issuing a $1 billion loan to help finance the restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.Three Mile Island was the name of a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, one of whose reactors partially melted down in 1979, becoming one of the U.S.’s highest profile nuclear incidents.Last year, Microsoft and Constellation Energy announced a deal to reopen an unaffected reactor at the plant to power data centers. It was last operational in 2019. The Department of Energy announced Tuesday that it was closing a $1 billion loan with Constellation to help finance the project, known...

Western nations face a breaking point as elites push policies their people reject, leaving the future of Western civilization hanging in the balance. Decades in the making, Western civilization faces a profound crisis in its political leadership. The problem the West confronts is clear: for too long, Western leaders in Canada, Europe, and the U.S. willfully abandoned the core principles of Western Civilization. They adopted policies that were both foreign and antithetical to the historical civilization of their countries and the societies that their fathers and mothers knew, which had, in fact, nurtured the very leaders who then labored to...

The USDA used the shutdown crisis to shine a light on flagrant food-stamp fraud.It’s amazing, and somewhat depressing, that this year marks two full decades since Hurricane Katrina blew through the central Gulf Coast and inundated the city of New Orleans once its defective levees broke from the strain of the storm surge. Just acknowledging that time span has a way of making one feel quite old. But a memory from just before Katrina’s arrival — a couple of weeks earlier — remains relatively fresh. It’s of a newspaper article from the New Orleans Times-Picayune about efforts by the...

President Trump is redefining the bargain between America and its allies by radically altering post-World War II Western security arrangements and the conditions that fostered market-driven globalization. He has successfully secured commitments from Europe and Japan to contribute their necessary shares to the common defense against Russia, China and their axis allies and imposed asymmetrical deals that raise U.S. tariffs. Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on the legality of those tariffs, the president’s new arrangements are inherently unstable. Among the accomplishments in creating the 1995 World Trade Organization was the extension of rules governing trade in services, similar...

A person was in custody Tuesday after a woman was set on fire while riding a CTA Blue Line in Chicago's Loop the night before. The woman remained in the hospital late Tuesday afternoon. According to Chicago police, the 26-year-old woman got into a quarrel with a 45-year-old man while on a train at the Clark/Lake subway station around 9:25 p.m. Police said the fight escalated when the man poured a liquid on the woman and set her on fire. Sources said the liquid the man poured was gasoline. Police said the woman ran off the train and collapsed on...

WASHINGTON — Rep. Adam Gray was one of only six House Democrats — and the only one from California — who voted with Republicans in favor of a deal to end the government shutdown, and there was a calculated reason behind that decision.Gray, a first-term Democrat from the Central Valley, is running for reelection in a majority Latino district that national Republicans are expected to heavily target as they defend their narrow House majority in next fall’s midterm elections. Last year, Gray won his seat by 187 votes, and although redistricting has since made the 13th District more favorable to...

The number of Britons emigrating has hit a new high, it was revealed on Tuesday - as the exodus under Labour gathers pace. Last year the number of UK citizens going to live abroad was 257,000 – far more than the 77,000 previously estimated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Before Labour came to power, the highest such figure was 283,000 in 2021 – when international travel reopened following the pandemic. Net emigration has also peaked since last year's general election. In the 12 months to September 2024, a net 116,000 Britons left the country. This is far higher...

The United States government has taken one of the most forceful steps in recent decades against Nicolás Maduro’s regime. The State Department announced the designation of the Cartel of the Suns, a criminal structure directly linked to the Chavista apparatus, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), a measure that will take effect on November 24. With this declaration, Washington formally places the Venezuelan regime in the category of a state enemy. Until now, the Cartel of the Suns was listed only as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT), a classification primarily focused on enforcing financial sanctions. But the FTO designation...

Ten Democratic officials who oversee elections in their states sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanding answers on how private voter data was being used.A coalition of 10 top state election officials sent a letter on Tuesday pressing Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over whether their agencies had been forthcoming about their use of private voter data.“We write to express our immense concern with recent reporting that the Department of Justice (D.O.J.) has shared voter data with the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.), and to seek clarity...

In the school of Tuckerism, I was a prospective PhD. I never missed Tucker’s Fox News monologues. Every night, I imbibed his lively lectures, treating his conservative social critique as a nightly devotional. His cuts into liberalism were scalpel-sharp. I once commented to my wife, after another of Tucker’s surgical vivisections of some liberal propagandist, “I’d hate to be one of his liberal guests.” Though sometimes, looking back, the red flags were there—baseless conspiracy theories punctuated with an emphatic “This is just true, period!”—he still put on a nightly clinic on how to deconstruct the left. But now the scalpel-like...

A historic ocean liner will become the world’s largest artificial reef after it’s sunk off Florida’s Gulf Coast early next year.Okaloosa County officials announced Tuesday that they expect to sink the SS United States in early 2026 about 22 nautical miles (41 kilometers) southwest of Destin and 32 nautical miles (59 kilometers) southeast of Pensacola.The nearly 1,000-foot (305-meter) vessel, which shattered the trans-Atlantic speed record on its maiden voyage in 1952, has spent most of this year at the Port of Mobile in Alabama, being scoured to remove chemicals, wiring, plastic and glass.Regional PartnershipThe ship’s final location was selected as...

The FAA has long needed to hire 3,000 more air traffic controllers to fill vacant positions.The Federal Aviation Administration lifted mandatory flight limits on Monday at 6 a.m. They were put in place to reduce the workload on short-staffed air traffic controllers at 40 large airports during the federal government shutdown.The reductions affected passengers on thousands of flights and exposed a shortage of air traffic controllers that began more than a decade ago.There is a need for 3,000 more controllers to work in towers and regional air traffic centers all over the country.Controllers have been working mandatory overtime and six-day...

Trump is willing to do whatever is necessary to keep drugs from flowing into the US. Mexico and Colombia have been added to Trump’s naughty list. US President Donald J. Trump made statements yesterday (17) to the effect that he supports military strikes on cartels in Mexico and Colombia, setting the tone for an anti-drug operation in Latin America that would be much larger than expected. By supporting kinetic action against narcotics production in Mexico and Colombia, Trump made it clear that the series of strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific is just the start. Reuters reported:...

Summary Leading opposition figures in jail, exile or under charge Lawsuit would ban three opposition parties Ruling party says it is shielding Georgia from figures who would foment war TBILISI, Nov 18 (Reuters) - Just over a year ago, a diverse array of opposition coalitions jockeyed for votes in Georgia’s parliament, with four of them winning seats. Today, of their eight main leaders, all but one are in jail, in exile or facing criminal charges. The ruling party aims to ban the three main opposition groups outright.The slide into one-party rule has shocked many in the tiny South Caucasus country...

Trump is also frustrated because he thinks Democrats outmaneuvered the GOP on the debate. The fast-track movement comes after months of stalling by Republican leaders and immense pressure from the White House to keep a vote from happening.But Trump, over the last week, realized his vice-like grip over the GOP was not enough to forestall the vote and relented to the “inevitable reality,” the official said. The president changed course Sunday after speaking with many Republicans and concluding dozens of House members planned to cross him.“The strategy now is give Republicans a perceived win,” the official said. “So they can...