Free Republic

'Tis the season for Senator Rand Paul to air his Festivus grievances about government waste! It's out, and it's spectacular! We're proud that--for the 7th year straight--the report features wasteful animal tests exposed by WCW, including: 🐶 $5.2M to inject beagles with cocaine and meth (NIH) 🐕 $13.8M for Dr. Fauci’s ongoing maximum pain tick bite experiments on beagles (NIH) 🦆☣️ $1M for a dangerous USDA-CCP bird flu gain-of-function collaboration (USDA) 🦭🐬 $77M for the Navy’s outdated Marine Mammal Program (DOD) 🐁🤰$2.8M to implant bone, liver, and thymus tissue from aborted human fetuses into lab animals to create “BLT mice”...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Sunday that partisan gerrymandering will “lead to more civil tension and possibly more violence in our country,” urging restraint in the ongoing redistricting wars playing out in more than a dozen states. “I think there is the potential that when people have no representation, that they feel disenfranchised, that it can lead, it might lead to violence in our country,” Paul said in an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Paul’s warning comes as state lawmakers across the country consider redrawing congressional lines at the insistence of President Donald Trump, with Democratic-led...

Several Democratic senators and one Republican, Rand Paul of Kentucky, filed a war powers resolution to prevent the United States from using its armed forces to engage in hostilities with Venezuela without congressional approval. The resolution was filed by Paul and Democratic senators Tim Kaine, Va., Adam Schiff, Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, N.Y. It directs President Donald Trump to stop using the military “unless specifically authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force,” according to The Hill.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing bipartisan scrutiny over his reported order to strike a boat in the Caribbean a second time, killing two survivors who were clinging to the ship’s wreckage on Sept. 2. The Washington Post reported Friday that Hegseth issued an order to “kill everybody” after the initial strike, the first of what is now more than 20 such attacks, did not immediately kill all 11 of the people on board the vessel, leading the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack to order a second strike. Some Democrats and a senior Republican said Sunday the strike was...

An explosive Washington Post report, the subject of so much discussion the past two days, says that, in the first missile strike the Trump Defense Department carried out against operatives of a boat suspected of transporting narcotics on the high seas off Venezuela, two survivors were rendered shipwrecked. As they clung to the wreckage, the U.S. commander ordered a second strike, which killed them. If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law. I say “at best” because, as regular readers know, I believe the attacks on these suspected drug...

As the US Navy remains primed for action in the Southern Caribbean, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro prepares for what could be an American attempt to remove him. And as President Trump alternates between calling Maduro on the phone and authorizing air strikes, a bevy of misinformation is being peddled by public figures with an agenda. There are so many claims and counter-claims on the air waves right now that it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction. A sizable chunk of this disinformation is of course being sold by Maduro himself, a man who has learned from his predecessor and mentor,...