Free Republic

A raid on Abby’s Bakery in Los Fresnos heralded the crackdown to come. Ahead of the owners’ trial for “harboring” undocumented workers, the community is seeing the impact of the president’s policies.Most mornings, Leonardo Baez, a father of seven, wakes up hours before sunrise to mix bread dough in the border city of Los Fresnos, Texas. Punishing and laborious work, yes, but owning a beloved bakery has been a lifelong dream of his, he said.It is now in jeopardy.In February, federal agents swooped down on his shop, Abby’s Bakery, detained workers they said were in the country illegally and pressed...

At home, President Trump is ordering up investigations into his political opponents and finding creative ways to use his executive power to ruin the lives of even some of his milder critics.Abroad, Mr. Trump has sent a different message: Let bygones be bygones. Even if those bygones involved trying to assassinate him or working with Al Qaeda.In a series of speeches and off-the-cuff remarks during the first major foreign trip of his second term, Mr. Trump has told audiences in the Middle East that he is willing to set the past aside in the interests of peace and profit.“I have...

President Trump has long railed against drug traffickers. He has said they should be given the death penalty “for their heinous acts.” On the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order listing cartels as “terrorist organizations.”But many public health and addiction experts fear that his budget proposals and other actions effectively punish people who use drugs and struggle with addiction.The Trump administration has vowed to reduce overdose deaths, one of the country’s deadliest public health crises, by emphasizing law enforcement, border patrols and tariffs against China and Mexico to keep out fentanyl and other dangerous drugs....

Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday called on Ukraine to accept an American peace proposal that closely aligns with longstanding Russian goals, including a “freeze” of territorial lines in the three-year war, acceptance of the annexation of Crimea by Russia and a prohibition on Ukraine becoming part of the NATO alliance.It was the first time a U.S. official had publicly laid out a plan to end the war that favors Russia in such stark terms.A peace plan that leaves Russian forces deep inside eastern Ukraine would be welcome news in Moscow. President Vladimir V. Putin has said for almost year...

No, the headline does not deceive you. The New York Times got its pants in a bunch over President Donald Trump daring to refer to violent Mexican drug cartels as “terrorists” because it could supposedly harm the economy. “How Labeling Cartels ‘Terrorists’ Could Hurt the U.S. Economy,” read the asinine January 22 news item from Times correspondents Maria Abi-Habib and Simon Romero. The authors railed against Trump’s executive order designating the cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” and claimed that it “could force some American companies to forgo doing business in Mexico rather than risk U.S. sanctions.” Yeah, how dare Trump...

The president’s Day 1 actions included directives that fly in the face of legal limits on involving the military in domestic operations and the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.President Trump’s flurry of executive actions on immigration in the hours after taking office was the leading edge of an effort to roll back four years of policies put in place by the Biden administration and reimpose an agenda that would fundamentally upend the United States’ global role as a sanctuary for refugees and immigrants. In a series of orders he signed on Monday evening, Mr. Trump moved to seal the nation’s...

False rumors of Haitian residents eating dogs and cats have thrown the Ohio city into turmoil.Daily life, says one resident, has been “turned upside down by such vitriol and ignorance.”Some Haitians have already decided to leave Springfield and Ohio altogether. A disturbing scenario has played out at public schools across Springfield, Ohio, in recent days, with children turned away as they arrive or, worse, rushed out of classrooms, all because of bomb threats.Parents have struggled to explain to 6- and 7-year-olds what is happening. Some aren’t quite sure about sending their kids back.“You don’t want to give in to the...

In an article published Friday, The New York Times outed the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) top spy overseeing the organization’s efforts in Iran. The paper justified its outing of the undercover CIA spy and his role within the agency by saying it was necessary since the agent is “leading an important new administration initiative against Iran.” Yes. That really happened. {..snip..}

Bolton’s Ways Foil Goals, U.N. Envoys Say By WARREN HOGE UNITED NATIONS, July 22 — In recent months, as one international crisis followed another, John R. Bolton has fulfilled the role of the United Nations’ most influential ambassador at full strength, firmly articulating the position of the United States government regarding Iran, North Korea and the Middle East. His performance won over at least one crucial critic, Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio. Mr. Voinovich’s opposition a year ago forced Mr. Bolton to take the job as a presidential recess appointment, an arrangement that expires at the end of...

WASHINGTON, DC, MONDAY, JULY 3, 2006--The D.C. Chapter of FreeRepublic.com and the online watchdog Accuracy in Media (www.AIM.org) held a press conference and demonstration Monday at the Washington, D.C., bureau of the New York Times to protest the newspaper's publishing of stories exposing national security intelligence programs. The two conservative groups called for the prosecution of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Executive Editor Bill Keller and reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau for "giving aid and comfort to al-Qaida." The initial group of 14 FReepers, led by FreeRepublic's National Spokesman Kristinn Taylor, soon swelled to 29 protesters. They...

WASHINGTON, June 28 — Ever since President Bush vowed days after the Sept. 11 attacks to "follow the money as a trail to the terrorists," the government has made no secret of its efforts to hunt down the bank accounts of Al Qaeda and its allies. But that fact has not muted the fury of Mr. Bush, his top aides and many members of Congress at the decision last week by The New York Times and other newspapers to disclose a centerpiece of that hunt: the Treasury Department's search for clues in a vast database of financial transactions maintained by...

THE TREASURY Department's just-disclosed program of searching records of overseas bank transfers may provoke outraged comparisons to the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance and data-mining of telephone call records... So far, however, it seems like exactly the sort of aggressive tactic the government should be taking in the war on terrorism. For one thing, it appears to be legal. The government is receiving large volumes of data detailing financial transfers from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a Belgium-based consortium that acts as a kind of messenger service for banks around the world, electronically notifying banks of transactions...

NYT MONDAY: BUSH HATE /// Disdain of core Dems toward W. Bush runs very deep -- far deeper, some analysts say, than existed toward his father or Ronald Reagan... Developing...