Free Republic

There’s a brewing trade dispute between the U.S. and Mexico on energy policy, and it’s getting ugly fast. “Ooooh, I’m so scared,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) said at a Wednesday press conference, referencing a popular Mexican song and taunting the Biden administration by ordering his staff to play it. When reporters asked him how he proposes to solve the policy spat, AMLO was defiant: “Nothing will happen.” What is going on here? It started early on Wednesday, when U.S. officials argued that AMLO’s energy policies favor Mexico’s state-run electrical utility and oil companies and undermine American business....

Reporting from Washington — For decades, Republican doctrine has viewed Russia as a power to mistrust. But in Donald Trump’s GOP, Moscow’s sins seem to matter less. The platform written at the GOP convention in Cleveland this week eliminated references to arming Ukraine in its fight with Russia, which seized the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and has supported separatists in eastern Ukraine.Those represent sharp departures from U.S. policy and recent GOP positions and sparked immediate concerns that Trump would abandon treaty commitments to allies. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is not attending the convention in his home state, was among...

To President Biden, public health researchers, and the media, violent crime is all about guns. But a new survey finds that people are badly misinformed about how much violent crime involves guns. The average likely American voter is way off, thinking that over 46% of violent crimes involve guns. In fact, the true figure is less than 8%. Not surprisingly, those who believe that most violent crime involves guns are more likely to view gun control as the solution.

United Airlines on Monday said it would no longer enforce COVID mask mandates for employees and travelers after a federal judge’s move to void the Biden administration’s mask mandate for travelers. "Effective immediately, masks are no longer required at United on domestic flights, select international flights (dependent upon the arrival country’s mask requirements) or at U.S. airports," the company told FOX Business in a statement." "While this means that our employees are no longer required to wear a mask – and no longer have to enforce a mask requirement for most of the flying public – they will be able...

How many people have died, or will die, as a result of the Left’s “green” fantasies? To begin with, who has taken responsibility for the hundreds of thousands–maybe millions–of Africans who have died because of the Left’s insane banning of DDT? No one, of course. Will there ever be an accounting? Currently, the war between Russia and Ukraine dominates the headlines. We all know that global petroleum supplies have been disrupted by the war, but perhaps more significant is the war’s impact on agriculture. Ukraine and Russia are two of the top grain-exporting countries in the world. Ukraine has been...

Dear Government, Seriously and respectfully, what do you want us to do so you will change your fiscal policies and quit destroying our lives? Seriously, what do you want? We need you to quit spending so much money, re-open pipelines, allowing drilling for oil so we can have reasonably-priced fuel and change regulations to allow us to produce/acquire food at a reasonable price. Very seriously, what do you want from us? You are beginning to make it impossible to live. What do you expect us to do when that time comes when we begin to go bankrupt? I am totally...

A White House correspondent was mocked online for flattering President Joe Biden on Monday by telling him that he had “more foreign policy experience than any President who has ever held this office” before asking him a question.

Joe Biden’s call for regime change in Russia, which likely was a manifestation of his worsening dementia, has caused consternation around the world. Joe Biden is facing an international backlash from his own allies after calling for regime change in Russia. Emmanuel Macron led a chorus of disapproval following the US president’s comments, in which he called Vladimir Putin a “butcher” and insisted the Russian premier “cannot remain in power”. Downing Street said it was for the Russian people to choose their leader, while Mr Biden’s own secretary of state contradicted the president in an attempt to limit the diplomatic...

... After the attacks by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001, America’s hubris manifested itself in an effort to spread democracy to the world, but in the first instances to Afghanistan and Iraq. ... The George W. Bush administration rightly responded to attacks on our country by hunting down the terrorists responsible and retaliating against some of the regimes that supported the terrorists. But then it got carried away and launched a Wilsonian crusade for democracy. ... As President Reagan's U.N. Ambassador and trusted adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick was one of the intellectual architects of our victory in the Cold War....

In response to Purdue University moving to an optional face mask policy, an English professor complained the move would give people “more freedom.” Purdue announced on February 16 that beginning last Friday, face masks in indoor settings would be optional “except for instructional, research and health care settings, as well as where contractually required.” The campus currently has a five percent COVID positivity rate, according to the statement. Professor Robert Marzec, whose specialization is contemporary British and postcolonial literature, didn’t think much of the announcement. “I’m curious what folks think about today’s announcement concerning masks on our campus,” Marzec wrote...

A little earlier today, my colleague Nick Arama posted on a Washington Post editorial about the futility of mask mandates (see WaPo Finally Says It: ‘Mask Mandates Didn’t Make Much of a Difference Anyway’). If this sounds a little strange given the fights raging across the nation, and the so-called Western world, about mask mandates, it should. In fact, it should seem strange even by the standards of the Washington Post editorial section that published the story.pic.twitter.com/WPfjhNRvqL— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs)February 12, 2022How does the Washington Post story fit in here?The hallmark of the so-called public health information associated with COVID,...

Diversity, equity and inclusion in the military are necessities for the United States, Bishop Garrison, the senior advisor to the secretary of defense for human capital and diversity, equity and inclusion said. Garrison spoke to the Center for a New American Security today about the progress being made by the department and what still needs to happen. Some 41 percent of the military identify as members of minority groups, and that number will grow larger, Garrison said. The military must be able to attract, train and retain them for the services to retain competitive edges, he said. ...

"It means buckle your seatbelt Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye."The linchpin that allows the world’s nefarious central banking model to be so effective is that the commonfolk - the plumber, the electrician, the teacher, the bartender, bus driver or barber - don’t understand it. Countless times, I have reminded my readers and listeners that the inflationary “machinery of night” blankets the most regressive tax possible upon the people who can least afford it, and does so in an extraordinarily convenient way for elites, politicians, central bankers and central planners whose titles and “jobs” hinge upon nobody questioning them and/or...

Though expected to distance and quarantine at the whim of local dictators, a few things gave us a clue that our pandemic response was not about health. Vices were deemed essential, as liquor stores and non-medical marijuana dispensaries remained open, while playgrounds were barricaded, beaches, and gyms, and houses of worship suddenly inaccessible. There was no guidance on health-seeking behavior to bolster the first line of defense against the onset of ailments, just a band-aid for a bullet wound grade of national mitigation strategy that left many dying alone, surrounded by strangers. We willfully sacrificed our most fundamental duty of...

If you are not Greta Thunberg, but the president of the United States, what's the first thing you do when returning from a global climate conference — especially one where you pledged to reduce emissions by over 50% in eight years? How about releasing an additional 50 million barrels of oil from your strategic reserves while begging domestic and foreign oil producers to ramp up production? Sorry, that was trick question. The move by the Biden administration a few weeks ago to fight soaring gasoline prices by tapping U.S. strategic reserves is not only bad policy, but also destined to...

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, widely viewed as a potential 2024 presidential contender, said former President Donald Trump's administration didn't deliver on its most important policy priorities. Christie said Trump failed to build a wall on the southern US border, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and pass an infrastructure bill, despite making these promises central to his 2016 campaign. "We didn't get a lot of stuff done," Christie told Josh Holmes, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's former chief of staff, during a podcast interview that aired on Tuesday. "Let's just go through the list of things. The wall isn't...

DOT Secretary Buttguy is correct. I have been using racist highways since my early childhood. We lived in an area with an unpaved dusty gravel road which they tried to control with oil spray occasionally. One day a miracle happened. Big dump trucks filled with "blacktop" appeared and commenced to creating a brand new racist "blacktop" road for all of us white racists adults and children. Although created for our white use, black people and other assorted minorities were allowed to use it without cost or limitation. For years, from bicycles to cars, we loved that undusty racist blacktop highway....

If things aren’t working, it’s because those who work within the federal government don’t want them to work. I am amazed how many words have been wasted trying to explain this or that government policy that is hurting the American people. Don’t we know by now that, if a government program seems not to be useful, it was designed to be that way? Instead of taking each program and dissecting it, the trick here is to bundle them together to better understand their motivation: importing cheap foreign labor, increasing energy costs, the irresponsible tolerance of cancel culture, vaccine mandates, anti-ableism,...

Democrats haven’t grasped this yet, but it’s too late for them. The die is cast. An electoral bloodbath awaits next year, akin to or surpassing what happened to their party in 2010. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s and the Squad’s anti-American leftist politics drive their party, and that’s beginning to register at a gut-level with voters. What voters – critically, that big, pivotal segment known as independents – now feel is revulsion for Democrats in not just one way but many. The intensity of that revulsion is bound to grow in the coming months. How do we know that? In the first 10...

Human beings aren't great at assessing risk. In 1979, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky posited a new branch of behavioral economics, which they titled prospect theory. One of their key findings was that human beings are naturally loss-averse -- we generally are willing to forego the probability of gains in order to minimize the chance of losses. Because of our loss aversion, human beings are also subject to what Kahneman and Tversky label the "planning fallacy": our self-serving bias toward believing that we are capable of planning for contingency more successfully than we are. As Kahneman writes, "Exaggerated optimism...