Free Republic

Ukrainian accounts on social media are chattering excitedly this morning about activity in Kherson, the southern province that Russia has occupied since the start of the war. Ukraine’s government spent the last month warning that a counteroffensive to liberate the province was coming. Very soon. Any time now. Could be tomorrow! Could be the next hour! Tick tock.Time is not on Russia’s side in this war, as they’re running out of men and munitions and are unwilling to risk the political backlash that would come if they instituted a national draft. But time isn’t on Ukraine’s side either. Winter is...

Watch Dan Crenshaw do his level best a few days ago to defend Trump’s decision to withhold documents from the feds.Dan Crenshaw’s appearance on CNN is off to a shaky start pic.twitter.com/xzbqiuyGFd— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 21, 2022Trump has been cooperative, Crenshaw insists, so why didn’t the FBI just politely ask him to return the remaining documents he had?But as we’re finding out, he actually hasn’t been cooperative. And he was asked to return the material in his possession — many times, including via a grand jury subpoena. Why didn’t he?The latest scoop comes from WaPo, which obtained an email...

“Who killed her?” is the first question. The next question is “Did they intend to?”Dugina was a minor Russian fascist propagandist, sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury earlier this year for insisting that Ukraine must “perish” if it joins NATO. More recently she was heard claiming that Russia’s many war crimes in Bucha must have been Ukrainian false-flags aimed at capitalizing on the similarity between the town’s name and the English word “butcher.”Nice lady.Daughter of the prominent #Russia|n Nazi ideologist Alexander Dugin, Darya Platonova (Dugina) publicly described Ukrainians as “subhumans” and called for the Russian occupation of #Ukraine and extermination of...

You really covered yourself in glory this week, Wyoming.The right column is comprised entirely of blue states while the left column is comprised entirely of red ones — except for Georgia, which I suppose technically qualifies as blue for the moment given that it went for Biden and two Democrats in last year’s Senate runoffs. But let’s revisit that this fall, after Brian Kemp takes care of business against Stacey Abrams. Georgia may be the truest purple state in the union in 2022.The vaccine data comes from this fascinating survey by Morning Consult, which has been tracking public opinion on...

We should reserve judgment on this one as I’m unfamiliar with the pollster, Blueprint Polling, apart from the fact that (a) it’s the “sister company” to a Democratic polling firm and (b) it’s the same one that recently found DeSantis leading Trump 51/39 in Florida.But the results here are grim enough to be noteworthy, particularly when we’re starving for data from Pennsylvania. There hasn’t been a public poll of the state since mid-June, when one survey found John Fetterman ahead of Oz, 50/44. A Democrat being up six in a swing state in a national environment as red as this...

Short answer: Probably not.Longer answer: Probably not, and even if it has, it might not be dangerous enough to do real damage given how much immunity the population now has.I wrote about the new Omicron subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5, a few weeks ago. Early indications are that they’re more contagious than the current dominant subvariant in the U.S., BA.2.12.1, which is more contagious than the original Omicron, which was itself insanely contagious. Worse, because natural immunity from Omicron appears to last only a few months, a prior infection is no real defense to BA.4 and BA.5. In fact, the two...

A Twitter pal compared this to FDR visiting American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge. Jonathan Last calls it literally Churchillian, since Churchill also made a point of visiting the front repeatedly to remind his men that their leaders hadn’t forgotten them or their sacrifice.That’s important at this stage of the war, now that Kiev and Kharkiv have been liberated while Ukrainian troops in the Donbas are going through hell. Eighty percent of the country, including the capital, is facing nothing more than occasional airstrikes. Businesses are open, embassies are operating, life has regained a semblance of normalcy. The...