Free Republic

Thomas L. Friedman, famous New York Times editorialist, does not much like Trump’s plan for Gaza. A skilled wordsmith, he dismisses it, writing, “How short a distance it is between out-of-the-box thinking and out-of-your-mind thinking.” However, the former is correct. This plan is creative, unique, and incisive, and kills several “boids” (as we say in Brooklyn) with one rock. For one thing, it will safeguard Israel. Under an American Riviera on the Mediterranean, there will be no more rockets launched in an eastward direction; no more leaping out of tunnels (a new tourist attraction!) to unleash suicide bombers. For another,...

Sarah Palin on Tuesday lost in the retrial of her defamation case against the New York Times – a second defeat in the efforts by the former Republican vice-presidential candidate. A federal jury in New York deliberated for two hours then found the newspaper not liable for allegedly defaming Palin in a 2017 editorial about gun control. Palin appeared dejected as she left the courthouse in Manhattan. The case garnered much attention not just because Palin and the Times are household names across the US but because it raised broader issues about free speech in the era of the return...

The Trump administration has considered sharply curtailing vouchers as part of its budget for the 2026 fiscal year... Administration officials recently discussed cutting or canceling out the vouchers and other rental assistance programs and potentially replacing them with a more limited system of housing grants, perhaps sent to states... The cuts to housing programs come in addition to an exodus of the agency’s work force. As of last week, about 2,300 employees opted to accept an offer for “deferred resignation” and leave their jobs...

Ten years ago, when President Barack Obama and other leaders reached a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program, Saudi Arabia was dismayed.Saudi officials called it a "weak deal" that had only emboldened the kingdom's regional rival, Iran. They cheered when President Trump withdrew from the agreement a few years later.Now, as a second Trump administration negotiates with Iran on a deal that might have very similar contours to the previous one, the view from Saudi Arabia looks quite different.The kingdom's Foreign Ministry issued a statement recently saying that it hoped the talks, mediated by neighboring Oman, would enhance...

The acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was replaced Friday, only three days after assuming the role, as his appointment triggered a power struggle between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Elon Musk of the Department of Government Efficiency, the New York Times reported. Gary Shapley was replaced after Bessent complained to President Donald Trump that Musk circumvented Bessent’s office to secure the position for Shapley, the NYT reported. The outlet cited people who said they were familiar with the situation. Shapley was a longstanding IRS agent who accused the Biden administration’s Department of Justice of dragging out its...

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat. Some of those people said that the information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

Their big news “hook” is that after a solid few rounds of grappling, I injured my shoulder. Because it’s Adam Goldman, you can generally assume he’s wrong, and he is, again. The instructor I was grappling with got the best of me, because he’s incredibly talented. That’s why he’s there. And it was my not an “injury” but a bit of swelling in my right elbow, not shoulder, because I’m 50 years old and I can’t recover like I used to. But I felt it was important to get on the mats any way, because that’s what men do. But...

A former opinion page editor of the New York Times broke down in tears and apologized to Sarah Palin while testifying in court over a 2017 editorial that she says was defamatory. James Bennet testified on Thursday that he “blew it” when he falsely claimed in the editorial that the former Alaska governor’s political action committee had contributed to an atmosphere of violence in the weeks and months leading up to the 2011 assassination attempt on then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.). The Times has acknowledged the editorial was inaccurate but said it quickly corrected the “honest mistake.” Bennet got choked up...

President Trump has replaced the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service after his appointment just days earlier set off a power struggle between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the billionaire Elon Musk, five people with knowledge of the change said Friday. Mr. Bessent’s deputy, Michael Faulkender, will be the new acting leader, replacing Gary Shapley, the Treasury Department confirmed on Friday. Mr. Faulkender will be the third acting leader of the agency this week. Mr. Bessent had complained to Mr. Trump this week that Mr. Musk had done an end run around him to get Mr. Shapley installed as...

Cenk Uygur @cenkuygur If @nytimes is right and Trump refused Israel's request to attack Iran, he deserves a ton of credit for that. Times reporting @TulsiGabbard made the argument against the strike - huge credit for that. @JDVance also spoke against. Not a lot of good news lately, but this is great. 4:24 PM · Apr 17, 2025

The search for life beyond Earth has led scientists to explore many suggestive mysteries, from plumes of methane on Mars to clouds of phosphine gas on Venus. But as far as we can tell, Earth’s inhabitants remain alone in the cosmos. Now a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth. A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known...

So much crazy happens with the Trump administration every day that some downright weird but incredibly telling stuff gets lost in the noise. A recent example was the scene on April 8 at the White House where, in the middle of his raging trade war, our president decided it was the perfect time to sign an executive order to bolster coal mining. “We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” said President Trump, surrounded by coal miners in hard hats, members of a work force that has declined to about 40,000 from 70,000 over the last decade, according to Reuters....

It’s the latest setback to the president’s efforts to wield government power to punish the legal industry. A federal judge called it “a shocking abuse of power.”A federal judge on Tuesday blocked President Trump from punishing the law firm Susman Godfrey, calling the retribution campaign he has waged from the White House against the nation’s top firms “a shocking abuse of power.”Ruling from the bench, Judge Loren L. AliKhan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia said that the executive order Mr. Trump signed last week targeting the firm stemmed from a “personal vendetta.” Susman Godfrey represented...

Harvard University said on Monday that it had rejected policy changes requested by the Trump administration, becoming the first university to directly refuse to comply with its demands and setting up a showdown between the federal government and the nation’s wealthiest university. Other universities have pushed back against the administration’s interference in higher education. But Harvard’s response, which called the Trump administration’s demands illegal, marked a major shift in tone for the nation’s most influential school, which has been criticized in recent weeks for capitulating to Trump administration pressure. A letter the Trump administration sent to Harvard on Friday demanded...

Daniel Wakin, the New York Times Deputy International Editor of Opinion, had an "Opinion Today" item in the paper's April 14th edition promoting a guest essay on the Op-Ed page entitled, "The U.S. Must Now Reckon With a Hegemon in the Mideast: Israel." The beginning of Wakin's item [emphasis added] reads: "Ancient Rome in the Mediterranean. The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. The United States in the Western Hemisphere, for that matter. History is rife with nations and empires seeking to become dominant in a region or larger swath of the world. It is called hegemony. Aaron David Miller and...

The waitress was pouring tap water. But Natalie Winters was quick to ask for bottled.“No fluoride for our dear dinner guest!” she said, gesturing to me. “Only filtered water and pesticide-free limes.”We were sitting in the back corner of Butterworth’s, a Capitol Hill bistro that has become a destination for friends and supporters of President Trump. Stephen K. Bannon, Ms. Winters’s current boss, has hosted private events there. Her former boss, Raheem Kassam, the editor in chief of The National Pulse, is an investor. The menu that night featured lamb tartare, oysters brûlée and pork cheeks.Ms. Winters and I had...

Britain has watched President Trump’s tariffs with a mix of shock, fascination and queasy recognition. The country, after all, embarked on a similar experiment in economic isolationism when it voted to leave the European Union in 2016. Nearly nine years after the Brexit referendum, it is still reckoning with the costs.The lessons of that experience are suddenly relevant again as Mr. Trump uses a similar playbook to erect walls around the United States. Critics once described Brexit as the greatest act of economic self-harm by a Western country in the post-World War II era. It may now be getting a...

Tesla’s sales in the United States fell almost 9 percent in the first three months of the year even as the overall market for electric vehicles grew, according to data compiled by a research firm. Car buyers are moving away from Teslas and toward models like General Motors’ Chevrolet Equinox electric vehicle, which starts at around $35,000 and can travel more than 300 miles on a charge, Cox Automotive, the research firm, said in a report. Sales of all-electric vehicles in the United States rose 11 percent during the first quarter to about 300,000 cars and light trucks, Cox said,...

This weekend, the US and Iran will hold their first semi-direct talks in years, despite the previous insistence of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in barring such talks. What changed? First, the Iranian security situation has degraded rapidly over the last few months, thanks to their stupidity in attacking Israel directly as well as indirectly through their proxies. That has left the mullahs more exposed than ever before in their 46-year run as theocratic tyrants in Iran. That's not the only reason, the New York Times reports today. The Iranians may have finally realized that Donald Trump returned to office with the...

Each is a wannabe autocrat, each is working to undermine the rule of law and so-called elites in his respective country, each is seeking to crush what he calls a “deep state” of government professionals. Each is steering his nation away from its once universal aspiration to be a “light unto the nations” toward a narrow, brutish might-equals-right ethnonationalism that is ready to mainstream ethnic cleansing. Each treats his political opposition not as legitimate but as enemies within, and each has filled his cabinet with incompetent hacks, deliberately chosen for loyalty to him instead of the laws of their lands....