Free Republic

For all the delays and the drama, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's signature on his state's GOP-backed voting reforms came with relatively little fanfare on Tuesday. While much of the action has been quiet, it's striking to see how much of the political landscape continues to be shaped by the "big lie" told by former President Donald Trump and his supporters, a full 10 months after Trump lost. Including Texas, 17 Republican-controlled states have new voting restrictions in place in time for 2022 -- via bills at least partly inspired by the mistruths told by the former president. The so-called "audit"...

If you tried to keep abreast of the news this weekend by reading the New York Times, watching ABC News, or following well-regarded veteran reporters on Twitter, you would have been led astray as badly as if you had followed a couple of guys working out of a coffee shop in Moldova. Relying on the supposedly respectable news media would have left you believing that the FBI found President Trump urging national security adviser Michael Flynn to contact Russia during the campaign (it didn’t), that Trump national security aide K.T. McFarland wrote that Russia threw the election to Trump (she...

As a Marine, Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran, and Honorably Discharged Sergeant, I know a thing or two about mission accomplishment versus troop welfare. As a matter of fact, any Marine can tell you the clearly stated objective of the Marine Corps is mission accomplishment. Troop welfare comes secondary. Commanders and military leaders learned long ago that success on any battlefront depends chiefly upon mission accomplishment. Troop welfare, while important, does not trump mission accomplishment. For the enlisted Marine on the ground, this is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. But we understand. And actually, this is one of the reasons...

The New York Times had another in a string of embarrassing moments this weekend, part of a steep descent for the "paper of record," much like that of President Obama's approval numbers. And neither seems to have bottomed yet. In reality, the Times' latest disaster is quite closely related to the Obama approval ratings free fall. A significant majority of Americans (54%-35%) ) now favor doing nothing as far as health care reform, if the alternative is one of the bills working its way through Congress,( each of which is a thousand page or more monstrosity, with untold consequences for...

Based on her interview with Sen. Joe Biden, we may assume that WFTV, Orlando Anchor Barbara West: 1. Did not graduate from a school of communications, 2. Will never receive an award from the Society of Professional Journalists, 3. Is unlikely to be employed by The New York Times in the foreseeable future, and 4. Will soon be working with Joe the Plumber, installing bathroom fixtures. Silly rabbit -- Didn’t West know that tough questions are reserved for Republicans? Yet, there she was asking old leaden-tongued Joe how his running mate’s spread-the-wealth platform differed from standard Marxist redistributionism (from each...

Q Is the President concerned that his veto of the stem cell bill is going to hurt Republicans running in fall elections? MR. SNOW: Not a bit. Q He doesn't feel as though it will hurt? MR. SNOW: No. Q Why not? MR. SNOW: And I'll tell you what, it's worth pointing out one thing — actually several things on stem cells. Number one, the President is the first ever to have financed research using embryonic stem cell lines. Number two, there is a bit of demagoguery in the House of Representatives. Representative Castle was circulating talking points about a...