Free Republic

"Where have all the flowers gone?" asks the famous 1960s antiwar song. In Moscow today, The New York Times reports, the question is: Where have all the men gone? The answer to both questions is, in part, the same: To the graveyards of soldiers. But a lot of the missing men of Moscow have also fled Russian President Vladimir Putin's draft for his war in Ukraine. In fact, demographers say Russia may not recover for generations, if ever. "Putin spent years racing against Russia's demographic clock, only to order an invasion of Ukraine that's consigning his country's population to a...

The Florida firm hired by Arizona Senate Republicans to review the 2020 election results in Maricopa County was supposed to submit its final report on Monday, but Arizona Senate President Karen Fann (R) said she now only expects "a portion of the draft report," due to unforeseen circumstances. "The team expected to have the full draft ready for the Senate today, but unfortunately Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and two other members of the five-person audit team have tested positive for COVID-19 and are quite sick," she said in a statement. Fann suggested on Twitter that some of the Cyber...

"They'll never say it publicly," Politico reports in Thursday morning's Playbook. "But Republicans in Washington are dreading Donald Trump's return to the stump, predicting his rallies will cause a major headache for the party as it mounts a bid to take back Congress in 2022." Congressional Republicans are privately relieved Twitter and Facebook banned Trump, Politico says, but the resumption of his rallies in June likely means he just gets a new platform to "spout conspiracy theories about the election and air his grievances," denying the party a chance to move on and attack President Biden's agenda. "If we win...

In yet another shocking twist, it's over between The Bachelor's Peter Weber and Madison Prewett. The couple, who had a dramatic reunion on the live finale of the ABC series earlier this week (after Weber's abrupt split from Hannah Ann Sluss) has broken up, both confirmed on Instagram Thursday. 'Madi and I have mutually decided to not pursue our relationship any further,' the star of season 24 of the ABC show said on the site. 'Believe me this was not easy for either of us to be ok with, but after a lot of honest conversations, we have agreed that...

A new excerpt from former White House communications staffer Cliff Sims' new memoir emerged in Vanity Fair, and this one focused on a very special member of President Trump's Team of Vipers: Kellyanne Conway. Sims doesn't appear to be a fan: As I watched Kellyanne in operation over our time in the White House, my view of her sharpened. It became hard to look long at her without getting the sense that she was a cartoon villain brought to life. Her agenda — which was her survival over all others, including the president — became more and more transparent. [Cliff...

McSweeney's had a wry, Onion-like tongue-in-cheek response to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) entering the 2020 presidential arena: "I Don't Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary And Coincidentally I'm Starting To Hate Elizabeth Warren." But it was anchored in reality. "The 2020 presidential campaign is expected to include the largest field ever of female candidates, all of them campaigning in the wake of the defeat of the first female nominee of a major party," say Annie Linskey and David Weigel at The Washington Post. And like Warren, they'll probably all "feel compelled to come up with an answer" to...

In the early days of the Trump administration, a memo of uncertain origin circulated at the highest levels of the White House laying out a conspiracy theory about "coordinated attacks" on President Trump's foreign policy agenda from a group of former Obama administration officials, according to a memo obtained by The New Yorker's Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow. The memo, which "reads like a U.S. military-intelligence officer's analysis of a foreign-insurgent network," they wrote, posited that "the communications infrastructure ... used to sell ObamaCare and the Iran Deal to the public ('Echo Chamber') has been shifted from the White House...

Washington State holds its Republican primary on Tuesday, and with one candidate left in the race, there's not too much drama about the outcome. But in a twist — and what would the 2016 race be without a twist? — 40 of Washington's 41 delegates selected Saturday to attend the Republican National Convention in July are Ted Cruz partisans. Cruz supporters outnumbered Donald Trump supporters at the state GOP convention in Pasco, and they were better organized, pushing through the Cruz slate of delegates over occasional protests from Trump backers, who noted repeatedly that Cruz is no longer in the...

A key victory for the UAW is on the line. Friday is the last day of a union-organizing vote at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. At stake is whether the German automaker's sole plant in the U.S. will be represented by the United Auto Workers. But it's also much more than that: The battle being waged in Chattanooga is being billed as a seminal moment that will either pave the way for more labor unions in the South, or affirm the continuation of a "right to work" region that is UAW-free. Going into the three-day election, the vote was...

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) caused a small kerfuffle on Monday by requesting of President Obama, on her Facebook page: "Mr. President, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all who commit to ending any racial divide, no more playing the race card." Nobody seems quite sure what prompted the request, though USA Today and Talking Points Memo, among others, suggest it was a new Obama profile in The New Yorker, in which the president famously says that marijuana is no worse for people than cigarettes and alcohol. In the germane passage regarding race, Obama tells interviewer David...