Free Republic

The thing about Democrats is they are like the Borg – a hive mind with absolute conformity. In spite of what some of the bumper stickers on their Priuses proclaim, they are not fans of questioning authority, at least their own. This is why they have now turned their resources on Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman. The message is clear: conform or we will destroy you. Ronald Reagan famously said that his 80 percent friend is not his 20 percent enemy. To Democrats, their 99.9 percent friend is their 100 percent enemy. Stray from the acceptable thought plantation they place...

A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Tuesday became the first to say President Trump can invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport Tren de Aragua gang members. US District Judge Stephanie Haines, a Trump appointee, said President Trump’s description of the Venezuelan gang’s “incursion” into the US meets the threshold to invoke the Alien Enemies Act. “Having done its job, the Court now leaves it to the Political Branches of the government, and ultimately to the people who elect those individuals, to decide whether the laws and those executing them continue to reflect their will,” the judge wrote. The judge...

---SNIP--- Ethan Parker, 12, was found unresponsive with a gunshot wound to his chest on the 1500 block of East Pastorius Street in the middle of the day on Saturday. He was rushed to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead just before 1 p.m. Parker and two teens were making a music video with guns, when one went off and killed the 12-year-old boy. Police recovered the gun and said other weapons were found in the home.

You and I have to pay more taxes so elite universities that willfully break the law discriminating against Jews, whites and Asians can get tax exemptions. It's a slap in the face. Yet Harvard alum Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is trying to turn the tables, accusing the Trump administration of "weaponizing" the IRS to strip Harvard of its 501c3 tax exempt status. Truth is, Harvard should lose its tax-exempt status because it's guilty of illegally allowing the civil rights of Jewish students to be trashed. The case against Harvard is a slam dunk. Numerous other universities where Jewish students are...

In the run-up to the vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., knew her party had a problem — and its name was John Fetterman. Fetterman, the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, was open to confirming President Donald Trump’s embattled pick, according to two people familiar with his thinking. Murray wanted to speak with her colleague one-on-one. So she reached out to set up a time. But Fetterman refused, as the two people familiar with the episode told NBC News. “He figured that she wanted to yell at him about it,” one person familiar with the...

The media’s pile-on of Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., reached the point where both Republicans and Democrats were lamenting the rhetorical blows landing on the hulking Pittsburgh-area lawmaker by Friday. "This is so blatantly coordinated," remarked media observer and Fox News contributor Joe Concha, who shared a link in his X post to a Politico report claiming an internal Democratic poll found Fetterman’s popularity faltering in his part of the Keystone State. The report claimed Fetterman had now fallen below 50% in Democratic voter support in the Steel City, just a few miles west of Braddock, where he was previously...

Air Traffic Control lost radar for 90 seconds at Newark Airport on Friday. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), there was a telecommunications outage at Newark Liberty International Airport. “There was a telecommunications outage that impacted communications and radar display at Philadelphia TRACON Area C, which guides aircraft in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport airspace. The outage occurred around 3:55 a.m. on Friday, May 9, and lasted approximately 90 seconds,” the FAA said on Friday morning. ... United Airlines pulled 35 round-trip flights a day following a radar outage at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey...

A new pope has been named, and for Villanova University and Philadelphia, the pope might be a familiar face and name. Pope Leo XIV, formerly known as Cardinal Robert F. Prevost, is a class of 1977 Villanova University graduate, earning his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics. The new pope, a 69-year-old Augustinian friar, was one of the 21 new cardinals selected by Pope Francis. According to Villanova University, Pope Leo XIV was born in Chicago, Illinois, and joined the Order of St. Augustine in 1977. Following his undergraduate studies at Villanova, Pope Leo XIV earned a Master of Divinity degree...

A Pittsburgh man was sentenced to life in prison without parole for executing an Uber driver who was seen begging for her life in a disturbing dashcam video. Calvin Crew, 25, fatally shot 38-year-old Christina Spicuzza in 2022 after she picked him up while driving for Uber.

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., appears to no longer have the support he once had, with many liberals turning on him following a scathing report focusing on his health. New York Magazine’s Intelligencer published a lengthy piece Friday titled “All By Himself” which says how Fetterman “insists he is in good health” in the wake of a massive stroke he suffered in May 2022, “but staffers past and present say they no longer recognize the man they once knew.” Fetterman, once seen as a progressive darling, has earned fanfare from many moderates and conservatives over his pragmatism on various issues. However,...

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., appears to no longer have the support he once had, with many liberals turning on him following a scathing report focusing on his health. New York Magazine's Intelligencer published a lengthy piece Friday titled "All By Himself" which says how Fetterman "insists he is in good health" in the wake of a massive stroke he suffered in May 2022, "but staffers past and present say they no longer recognize the man they once knew." Fetterman, once seen as a progressive darling, has earned fanfare from many moderates and conservatives over his pragmatism on various issues. However,...

Air traffic controllers who lost communication with aircraft at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, leading to hundreds of delays for more than a week, are taking special government leave for traumatic situations to recover from the stress. The controllers in Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control, which coordinates planes arriving at Newark, “temporarily lost radar and communications with the aircraft under their control, unable to see, hear, or talk to them,” on Monday April 28, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association said in a statement shared with CNN. The connectivity between Federal Aviation Administration radar and the frequencies that...

Portnoy is fed up after he says an antisemitic sign was shown at his Barstool bar in Philadelphia. What they're saying: Dave Portnoy took to social media Sunday to address an antisemitic incident that occurred at Barstool Sansom Street Saturday night. According to Portnoy, when patrons order bottle service at the bar, signs are typically shown and displayed.

John Fetterman’s camera-thirsty wife has done him dirty. New York Magazine published a hit piece on the Pennsylvania senator Friday, airing grievances from his staffers who are concerned about his mental health, his views on the Israel-Gaza War. The piece also shed light on Fetterman’s relationship with his left-wing wife, Gisele, who secretly communicated with his staff and made a political disagreement into a full-blown argument. ... Gisele visited her husband’s senate office in November 2023, weeks after Hamas attacked Israel, and got into a heated debate about the burgeoning war and her husband’s support for the Israeli state. Gisele...

House Republicans are planning to include several of President Trump’s campaign promises in the first draft of the bill, which they hope to release soon.It was easy to miss, but last weekend President Trump floated a fundamental rewrite of the American tax code. In a social media post, and again in remarks to reporters, Mr. Trump suggested the United States could stop taxing income under $200,000 and instead rely on revenue from his extensive tariffs. “It’ll take a little while before we do that, but we’re going to be cutting taxes, and it’s possible we’ll do a complete tax cut,”...

Current and former staffers to Democratic Senator Jon Fetterman's raised concerns about his health in an article published by New York Magazine's Intelligencer on Friday, with his former chief-of-staff Adam Jentleson telling a Walter Reed medical director in 2024 that he worried the senator "is on a bad trajectory." In the article, Fetterman called the various concerns and allegations raised by staffers "past and present" as "disgruntled employees saying things that are either untrue or, so, that's kind of the business that we are in." Newsweek reached out to Fetterman and Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's office by email...

A massive crowd gathered at City Hall in Philadelphia Thursday for a May Day rally and to see Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders speak. The "For Workers, Not Billionaires" rally on the north side of City Hall drew a large crowd and shut down streets in the area. Sanders laid into the Trump administration's policies on taxes, immigration, federal cuts and more. He also pointed out the billionaires President Trump has put into cabinet positions and surrounded himself with — including the world's wealthiest man, Elon Musk. Sanders says he came to the event with a call to workers and Pennsylvania...

New York Magazine’s Ben Terris saved the most important part of his extensive profile of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman for last: “I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired,” he wrote in its concluding paragraphs. That is not the impression that a reader would have gathered from the worried former Fetterman staffers, jilted progressive activists, and anecdotes detailing the senator’s declining mental health that preceded this observation. The piece paints a portrait of a broken man, a shadow of his former self, plagued by depression and demented episodes. None of that was especially apparent to...

(WHTM) — A Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty to defrauding the United States Government of over $1 million in SNAP and Medicare benefits. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, James Sessoms, 60, of Philadelphia, pled guilty today to one count of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) fraud, seven counts of false statements in connection with health care benefits, and seven counts of Social Security fraud. The U.S. Attorney’s Office says that in October of 2024, Sessoms was charged by indictment with those offenses after he used stolen identities and Social Security numbers (SSNs) to file for SNAP and Medicaid benefits. The...

A fan at PNC Park fell over the outfield wall and onto the track on Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Pirates’ matchup with the Chicago Cubs. In the seventh inning of the contest, a man in the right field section at PNC Park suddenly was seen falling headfirst over the outfield wall and crashing down onto the dirt during the middle of a play. The person appeared to jump up before flipping multiple times on his way down about 21 feet to the warning track.