Free Republic

Hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers may not automatically receive back pay once the government reopens, the White House indicated in a draft memo, prompting broad fears that the Trump administration might try to circumvent federal law to maximize the pain of the shutdown. The memo, which was shared by a White House official, could presage a radical break from a policy adopted during President Trump’s first term. It appeared to contradict some of the administration’s own guidance, which by Tuesday still indicated that furloughed employees would receive retroactive pay shortly after Congress strikes a funding deal. Following the...

Once the darling of the alcohol industry, small-batch beer makers are shutting down because of increased competition and flagging interest.For more than two decades, pints of lagers and ales flowed from the taps at 21st Amendment Brewery. An early mover in craft brewing, the bar and restaurant flourished in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood, near the financial district and the Giants’ Oracle Park, serving its own specialties like Hell or High Watermelon beer. But after 25 years, 21st Amendment, named after the constitutional amendment that made alcohol legal after Prohibition, will say “last call” for the final time later this...

The White House has cut or paused billions in funding to Democratic-run cities and states since the federal government came to a halt.President Trump has embarked on a legally dubious campaign to weaponize the federal budget during a contentious government shutdown, halting more than $27 billion in approved funding in a bid to punish Democratic-led cities and states. Rather than broker a legislative truce or seek to ameliorate the fallout of a costly fiscal stalemate, the president has leveraged the crisis to exact revenge on rivals, slash federal spending and pressure Democrats into accepting his political demands. Since the shutdown...

Ms. Jong-Fast is the host of the “Fast Politics” podcast and the author of “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.”Nobody thinks the N.F.L. is run by a bunch of woke libs. Or for that matter, that most N.F.L. fans fit that description. In fact, the team owners, many of whom trend MAGA oligarch, donated $23 million to Republicans in the 2024 election, versus $2.5 million to Democrats. And of course there’s a reason Colin Kaepernick’s career was so resolutely benched. Many woke libs won’t even let their kids play football, not wanting to risk that their meritocratic brains...

Paramount Skydance is poised to name Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News in the coming days — giving the hard-charging journalist unusual clout to revamp the struggling network as it also acquires her scrappy news site the Free Press, The Post has learned. Weiss — a 41-year-old former New York Times opinion writer who has built the Free Press into a buzzworthy site with a contrarian bent — is expected to be named to the top post in a Monday announcement, although the talks are in flux and the timing could change, a source close to the...

A notice calls the people the U.S. military recently killed on suspicion of drug smuggling in the Caribbean Sea “unlawful combatants.”President Trump has decided that the United States is engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels his team has labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers for such groups are “unlawful combatants,” the administration said in a confidential notice to Congress this week. The notice was sent to several congressional committees and obtained by The New York Times. It adds new detail to the administration’s thinly articulated legal rationale for why three U.S. military strikes the president ordered...

Tomorrow, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth brings hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals to Quantico for what amounts to a mass leadership formation. The agenda is opaque, the logistics unusual, and the stakes high. With President Trump now planning to attend, the gathering risks becoming as much a signal about civil-military relations as it is about readiness. What should Americans take from it — and what should our flag officers hear? First, let’s dispense with the novelty. Large, in-person convocations of nearly the entire general/flag officer corps are rare. Reporting indicates Hegseth intends to hammer “warrior ethos,” grooming and standards...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday said that Medals of Honor for soldiers who took part in an 1890 massacre of Native Americans would not be revoked. More than 300 Lakota Sioux men, women and children were killed by U.S. Army soldiers on Dec. 29, 1890, in one of the deadliest attacks on Native Americans by the United States military. The Lakota people had gathered to resist government control in an area of South Dakota that is now part of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation..... In 2019, Democratic lawmakers, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, introduced legislation to revoke...

If Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey, Drew Barrymore and Gwyneth Paltrow are peddling a memoir from their billionaire investor pal, who has a mind-blowing tale of self-actualization — maybe just maybe, there’s a little more to the story. We learned just how much more this week, in a blockbuster New York Times piece that dug into the narrative behind Amy Griffin’s bestselling memoir, “The Tell.” And the article is far more compelling than the book itself. SNIP However, her memories were recovered during therapy sessions while under the influence of the drug MDMA — a practice that is illegal and was...

Would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh was declared guilty on Tuesday on all charges, but The New York Times accidentally published the wrong article. In journalism, outlets often pre-write obituaries, election outcomes and potential court verdicts of major cases before they occur, using the basic facts of the story and adding whatever key details are essential on the day of. However, a screenshot indicated that the New York Times accidentally published a headline, “Man Found Not Guilty of Trying to Assassinate Trump in Florida.” The lede of the now-scrubbed article added, “In a surprise verdict, a federal jury acquitted Ryan Routh...

Britain, Canada and Australia confirmed on Sunday that they now formally recognize Palestinian statehood, piling pressure on Israel to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and putting three major U.S. allies at odds with the Trump administration. The seemingly coordinated announcements came on the eve of the annual gathering of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, at which France and Portugal are also expected to vote for recognition of Palestinian statehood. ...

President Donald Trump's $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times has been tossed, for now. Calling the president's 85-page lawsuit "decidedly improper and impermissible," a federal judge in Tampa threw it out on Friday and gave him 28 days to file a new complaint that had to be under 40 pages. U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday blasted the Trump suit for alleging only two acts of defamation, yet "Count I appears on page eighty, and Count II appears on page eighty-three." He also criticized the suit's flowery descriptions about Trump and overly political language, writing a complaint is...

Donald Trump has sued the New York Times and others for defamation, alleging damages of $15 billion. While the Times has smeared Trump in many ways over the years, this case focuses on a book written by two Times reporters, and related coverage in the newspaper. The book is Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. Defendants include the Times, Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, who wrote Lucky Loser, Peter Baker and Michael Schmidt, who authored anti-Trump columns in the Times, and Penguin Random House, which published Lucky Loser.Lucky Loser...

As Democrats search for their way out of the political wilderness, a new think tank, introduced on Wednesday, has some ideas about where the party went wrong. Among them: too much emphasis on issues like climate change and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and far too much deference to the powerful liberal organizations championing those causes at the expense, some argue, of appealing to voters in battleground states. The think tank, the Searchlight Institute, was started by Adam Jentleson, a veteran Democratic operative. He knows that his effort, intended to minimize the sway that left-leaning groups have over candidates before what is expected...

President-elect Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Friday, vowing to bring justice to his name after years of attacks from the mainstream media. The incoming 47th president announced he is suing several media outlets, including the New York Times, CBS News, Penguin Random House, and the Daily Beast, alleging widespread bias and defamation. Trump’s lawyer, Edward Andrew Paltzik, demands $10 billion in damages for publishing defamatory material. In the lawsuit, Trump accused the mainstream media of “defaming and disparaging” him during coverage of the election and making “false and defamatory statements.” The NYT was at the center of the lawsuit....

The New York Times issued a correction Thursday, admitting it had wrongly attributed an antisemitic remark to Charlie Kirk when the late Turning Point USA founder was actually critiquing the comment. As part of its story on where Kirk stood on key political issues in the wake of his assassination, The Times reported Kirk was "repeatedly accused of antisemitism." Kirk was a staunch supporter of Israel and has been praised by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made on an episode of his podcast. He was...

https://t.co/AMeXCf4rA8 NEW YORK, NY — Responding to public outcry to set the record straight after a terrible act of political violence launched the debate about dangerous rhetoric to the forefront of American consciousness, the New York Times issued a minor clarification that conservative activist Charlie Kirk had said "Hitler is bad" and not "Hitler is good." The correction came several days after Kirk was gunned down at a public event, with the New York Times seeking to clarify that it had gotten one minor detail wrong by telling its readers that Kirk had praised infamous Nazi leader Adolf Hitler when...

The New York Times is engaged in whitewashing Zohran Mamdani's record as a radical socialist. Presumably, this is because President Trump has been attacking him as a communist, and if there is anything that smells like catnip to a liberal journalist, it is the opportunity to contradict what President Trump says. This is an actual sentence in a news report from The New York Times.Truly insane. pic.twitter.com/agtBmEprVm— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) August 31, 2025Mamdani has been calling himself a socialist for as long as he has been a public figure. And not just a "Democratic Socialist," the current buzzword used to...

President Trump has begun a major escalation in his long-running efforts to stifle political opposition in the United States, using the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to make the baseless argument that Democratic organizations and protesters are part of a violent conspiracy against conservative values and the American way of life.

President Donald Trump is suing The New York Times for $15 billion for defamation and libel. In a late night post on Monday, the president described the publication as 'one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country.' He described the lawsuit as a 'great honor' and accused the prestigious paper of becoming a 'virtual mouthpiece for the Radical Left Democrat Party.' Trump's announcement comes days after the newspaper released articles on his ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. He had threatened last week to sue The New York Times for its reporting related to...