Free Republic

Senator Rand Paul is tired of being the only Republican senator willing to stand up to President Trump. The libertarian spoke with Politico’s Dasha Burns just days after being deliberately left out of Trump’s gathering of GOP senators in the Rose Garden. “We have everybody but one person here,” Trump said Wednesday. “We’re just missing one person. You’ll never guess who that is. Let me give you—he automatically votes no on everything. He thinks it’s good politics. It’s really not good politics.”

The Trump administration is using an imagined enemy—“antifa”—to justify turning ICE into an ultra-violent, unaccountable army invading US cities. Portlanders deploying inflatable animal costumes, a brass band, mass ukulele renditions of “This Land Is Your Land,” naked bike rides, and other tactics in their ICE protests are undermining the Trump administration’s lurid claims that Portland, Oregon, is a “war-torn” city under siege by a violent left. It’s hard to portray someone dancing in an inflatable frog or chicken costume as a terrorist. This, of course, hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from officially designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization. Secretary of...

Unicorns are supposed to be rare and mythical. But at Saturday’s No Kings protests I saw the largest outbreak in America outside a Lisa Frank store. They were everywhere, but I was surprised to see almost a dozen of them down in New Braunfels, Texas. As at many of the No Kings protests across the country, attendees embraced the example set by the taunting frog outside Portland’s ICE facility and came in outfits that you could find threatening in only the most silly and specific of contexts: Cookie Monster was there.But you don’t pass up a chance to meet a...

By the time the Pilsen Food Pantry opened on a recent morning, Ulysses Moreno had been there for two hours — with a line of people behind him that snaked around the corner. “This is a lifeline for me,” said Mr. Moreno, 39. He had lost his construction job a few days earlier, and with three teenagers at home, he wanted to make sure he could stock up. “Our food budget doesn’t stretch as far as it used to.” A few miles away, on Chicago’s glitzy Magnificent Mile, luxury hotels are bustling. Jewelry stores and designer boutiques do brisk business....

Virginia Republicans scored a monumental victory in 2021. After 12 years of sustained statewide losses, the party emerged from the wilderness and swept the three statewide races that year, led by outsider Glenn Youngkin, who became the commonwealth’s first Republican governor since Bob McDonnell left office in 2014.Virginia’s gubernatorial elections are unique in American politics in that no other state makes its governor a lame duck the moment he is sworn in, as term limits prohibit consecutive terms. No Virginia governor has ever run for reelection as an incumbent, although two governors have succeeded in winning nonconsecutive terms.The commonwealth’s proximity...

Summary BLS loses senior leaders as Trump targets agency's integrity About 12 of 35 senior leaders have left amid Trump's criticism Modernizing data collection suggested to improve response rates WASHINGTON, Oct 8 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's unwarranted attacks on the integrity of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics were undermining trust in economic data and had accelerated retirements of key personnel at the agency, former BLS commissioners said on Wednesday. During a discussion at the libertarian Cato Institute, Erica Groshen and William Beach, who headed the agency under presidents of both parties, said the BLS had lost 12...

Republican senators are increasingly uneasy about President Trump’s standoff with Democratic governors over deploying National Guard troops from other states to Portland, Ore., and Chicago. The conflict between federal and state authorities escalated dramatically over the weekend when Trump moved to send National Guard soldiers to Oregon and Illinois despite opposition from their respective governors, Tina Kotek and JB Pritzker. Trump’s use of military forces was all the more controversial because a Trump-appointed federal judge for the District of Oregon ruled Saturday that the administration could not federalize Oregon’s National Guard to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in...

Hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal workers may not automatically receive back pay once the government reopens, the White House indicated in a draft memo, prompting broad fears that the Trump administration might try to circumvent federal law to maximize the pain of the shutdown. The memo, which was shared by a White House official, could presage a radical break from a policy adopted during President Trump’s first term. It appeared to contradict some of the administration’s own guidance, which by Tuesday still indicated that furloughed employees would receive retroactive pay shortly after Congress strikes a funding deal. Following the...

Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett claimed on Sunday that it caused her anguish to see that only two white lawmakers voted against the resolution honoring Charlie Kirk on Friday. Every Republican voted in favor of the resolution, but 58 Democrats voted against it, including Crockett and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who both cited their disagreement with his political views. Crockett asserted on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Kirk “specifically targeted people of color” with his “rhetoric.” “One of the things I do want to point out that’s not been laid out, that honestly hurts my heart, is when...

“That is, unfortunately, the cancer known as white supremacy,” said the Texas congresswoman after learning about Kirk’s comments about her and the Democratic Party. A month before his shooting death, conservative activist Charlie Kirk attacked U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, blaming her and Democrats for being part of a “sinister” plan to replace white people in America. While discussing the issue of redistricting congressional maps, which played out dramatically in Texas last month, Kirk said on his Aug. 4 podcast show, “The great replacement of white people is far more sinister than any redistricting project.” “That is at the core...

George Soros has been the go-to bogeyman for the American right — and right-wing leaders around the world — for years. The 95-year-old billionaire has funneled money into causes around the globe, supporting democratic endeavors, immigration efforts and criminal justice reform through his Open Society Foundations, which he founded in 1979. In the intervening decades, Soros, with his large network of progressive causes and opposition to strong-arm governments, has become the target of conspiracy theories in areas that range from Malaysia to his birth country of Hungary, where a so-called “Stop Soros” law made it illegal to aid undocumented immigrants...

https://x.com/JohnMcCloy/status/1967990814794977687

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump, once a casino owner and always a man in search of his next deal, is fond of a poker analogy when sizing up partners and adversaries. … Seven months into his second term, he has accumulated presidential power that he has used against universities, media companies, law firms, and individuals he dislikes. A man who ran for president as an angry victim of a weaponized “deep state” is, in some ways, supercharging government power and training it on his opponents. And the supporters who responded to his complaints about overzealous Democrats aren’t recoiling. They’re...

When Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, dispatched his National Guard troops to Washington to support President Trump’s crackdown on crime, Democrats and other critics wondered why he didn’t keep them within state lines. Memphis, after all, has long been one of the most dangerous cities in the country, with a murder rate about twice as high as the nation’s capital, according to F.B.I. statistics. Nashville has a higher rate of violent crime than Washington as well. The same questions could be asked of other Republican governors like Greg Abbott in Texas, Mike DeWine in Ohio and Mike Kehoe in Missouri,...

Less than 1 percent of Democrats say they are satisfied with the direction of the country, according to a new Gallup poll. Why It Matters This is the lowest level of satisfaction among Democrats in at least 25 years, according to Gallup's polling, and it comes at a time when Republican satisfaction is near record high levels. The polling shows that Democrats' satisfaction with the direction of the country quickly dropped after President Donald Trump, a Republican, returned to office in January, while GOP supporters' satisfaction spiked. According to Gallup, 31 percent of Americans currently say they are satisfied with...

JD Vance, the vice president, sat down with Nigel Farage, a longtime supporter of President Trump whose party, Reform U.K., is leading in British polls.Vice President JD Vance began his family vacation in England last Friday with a lightning round of carp fishing. He hasn’t slowed down since, taking part in conference calls about Ukraine, huddling with Britain’s foreign minister, David Lammy, and meeting fellow right-wing political figures.On Wednesday morning, it was the turn of Nigel Farage, the leader of the insurgent, anti-immigrant party Reform U.K. He sat down with Mr. Vance, according to an official familiar with the vice...

Former President Obama on Tuesday blasted the Texas GOP’s attempts to redraw the Lone Star State’s congressional lines as “a power grab” that threatens democracy. “We can’t lose focus on what matters – right now, Republicans in Texas are trying to gerrymander district lines to unfairly win five seats in next year’s midterm elections. This is a power grab that undermines our democracy,” Obama said in a post on the social platform X. The former president shared a post from All On The Line, a campaign affiliated with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), promoting a virtual event on redistricting.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Eric Hildenbrand has noticed prices continue to rise this year, even with President Donald Trump in the White House. He doesn’t blame Trump, his choice for president in 2024, but says Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democrats who control his home state, California, are at fault.“You can’t compare California with the rest of the country,” said Hildenbrand, who is 76 and lives in San Diego. “I don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the country. It seems like prices are dropping. Things are getting better, but I don’t necessarily see it here.”Voters like Hildenbrand, whose...

The Trump administration has abruptly shifted the focus of its mass deportation campaign, telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to largely pause raids and arrests in the agricultural industry, hotels and restaurants, according to an internal email and three U.S. officials with knowledge of the guidance. The decision suggested that the scale of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign — an issue that is at the heart of his presidency — is hurting industries and constituencies that he does not want to lose. The new guidance comes after protests in Los Angeles against the Trump administration’s immigration raids, including at farms...

As images of protests in Southern California have flooded television and social media in recent days, a key question has emerged: Why are so many protesters carrying Mexican flags at an American political protest? The sea of red, white and green Mexican flags at anti-deportation protests this week in Los Angeles has been seized upon by conservatives who argue that the demonstrations are inherently un-American, causing some protesters to consider leaving them at home. Photos of masked provocateurs waving Mexican flags atop burning Waymo taxis spread instantly across conservative social media this weekend. Republicans pointed to them as a prime...