Free Republic

SACRAMENTO — The Republican Party will hold a presidential candidate debate at the Ronald Reagan library Wednesday. It’s a bad fit. The GOP’s modern idol is exactly the opposite of Reagan in personality and character. For upbeat Reagan, America was a “shining city on the hill.” For whining Donald Trump, it’s a waste bin for venom and lies. Reagan’s soaring rhetoric made people feel good about themselves. There was “always a bright dawn ahead” — “Morning in America.” Yes, maybe that was a tad naive and corny, but it brought a collective smile — and won over many Democrats.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has accused Donald Trump of siccing supporters “known to be violent” on the judge in his case and “publicly intimidating’’ the jurist himself. The lefty New York Democrat made the assertions in a tweet late Tuesday that included a clip of Trump’s remarks at Mar-a-Lago after his arraignment earlier in the day, in which the ex-prez called Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan “a Trump-hating judge with the Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris.” AOC fired back on Twitter, “[Trump] is publicly intimidating a judge and pointing a spotlight on their family to...

A new poll found that a majority of Black voters approve of President Biden’s job performance and think he should run for reelection in 2024. HIT Strategies’ first BlackTrack survey since the 2022 midterms found that 59 percent of Black voters say Biden should run for President in 2024 while 74 percent approve of his job performance. These numbers come before Biden has announced his plans for 2024 and ahead of his second State of the Union address on Tuesday. Biden’s approval spans across generational lines, with 66 percent of Black voters 50 years and older approving of the president...

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland honored the five Capitol Police officers on Thursday who, he said, died after defending the legislature from the January 6 riot in 2021 — though none were killed during the violence. In a statement on the second anniversary of the Capitol riot, Garland appeared to link the riot to the deaths: “Two years ago, the United States Capitol was attacked as lawmakers met to affirm the results of a presidential election. Perpetrators attacked police officers, targeted and assaulted members of the media, and interfered with a fundamental element of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of...

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is certainly having a moment. In the wake of the failed “red wave” the media kept warning us about, DeSantis has been declared “the biggest winner of an otherwise dark election cycle for Republicans.” This week, Time magazine — responsible, you may recall, for the 2014 “transgender tipping point” — short-listed DeSantis for its 2022 person of the year award. This award isn’t necessarily granted to the best person in a given year: For example, past recipients include DeSantis’s current nemesis and then president-elect Donald Trump in 2016, and Adolf Hitler in 1938. But it’s another...

Mary Trump speculated Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” that her uncle, former President Donald Trump, took “top secret classified documents” related to the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Host Joy Reid said, “Do you have some speculation as to what he wanted with this documents? Trump said, “I think that there are a couple of different reasons that can all be true at the same time. Clearly, he likes to hang on to things. He thinks they belong to him. It is sort of a way of establishing his street cred if you will, but Donald doesn’t do anything without...

The Biden administration introduced a new regulation Tuesday that would make it harder for employers to misclassify workers as “independent contractors” to avoid minimum wage and overtime laws. The proposal from the White House would replace an earlier, more business-friendly rule created by the Trump administration that set looser guidelines around who could be considered a contractor in the workplace. Labor Department officials said the previous administration’s rule increased the likelihood of workers being exploited. Employers often mislabel their workers as contractors in order to evade workplace laws or shift certain costs of employment onto workers. Gig companies like Uber...

Asenior member of the state Duma, Russia's parliament, said that any U.S. states that want to break away from the country and instead join the Russian Federation will be considered. The comments come only a week after Russia declared that four regions of Ukraine had become Russian territory, following referendums that were widely criticized by Ukrainian and Western officials as being sham. These were Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south. The votes supported the regions changing from Ukrainian to Russian territory. State Duma deputy Alexander Tolmachev was responding to an online poll that...

The Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday tweeted — and then hours later deleted — a message that called on Democrats to “end the gift-giving to Ukraine” while featuring a fluttering Russian flag. The tweet also referred to “Ukraine-occupied territories,” appearing to legitimize Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claims to annex provinces based on a referendum that the U.S. and allies view as illegal. CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp on Saturday said the tweet did not clear the normal approval process because he was traveling for a conference in Australia. “Due to my travel into a distant time zone it was never...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday on “CBS Evening News” that President Donald Trump led a “seditious conspiracy against the government of the United States” to hold on to power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Referencing the hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 riot, anchor Norah O’Donnell asked, “What is your takeaway about the January 6 committee and Donald Trump’s actions?”

Former President Donald Trump insisted that President Biden “must be insane, or suffering from late-stage dementia” for his attack accusing him and his MAGA supporters of being “a threat” to the country. “Someone should explain to Joe Biden, slowly but passionately, that MAGA means, as powerfully as mere words can get, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump, 76, wrote soon after Biden’s Thursday night attack. “If he doesn’t want to Make America Great Again, which through words, action, and thought, he doesn’t, then he certainly should not be representing the United States of America!” The 45th commander-in-chief also warned of a...

But department officials are not expected to file charges imminently, if they ever do. And the specific contents of the materials the government recovered in the search remain unclear — as does what risk to national security Mr. Trump’s decision to retain the materials posed.

The largest children’s hospital in Chicago has created partnerships with local school districts to promote radical gender theory, “kink,” “BDSM,” and “trans-friendly” sex toys for children. I have obtained insider documents that reveal this troubling collaboration between gender activists at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and school administrators throughout the Chicago area. According to these documents, and a review of school district websites, Lurie Children’s Hospital has provided materials to school leaders promoting radical gender theory, trans activism, and sexually explicit materials in at least four Chicago-area public school systems: District 75, District 120, District 181, and District 204. According...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department said Tuesday it had uncovered efforts to obstruct its investigation into the discovery of classified documents at Donald Trump’s Florida estate, saying “government records were likely concealed and removed” from a storage room even after the former president’s representatives had assured officials that they’d thoroughly searched the property. The FBI also seized 33 boxes containing more than 100 classified records during its Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago and found three classified documents stashed in office drawers, according to a filing that lays out the most detailed chronology to date of stained interactions between Justice...

The media can’t stop talking about Donald Trump, which makes two groups happy: Democrats, and Donald Trump. You can argue that this is the administration’s strategy, that the Mar-a-Lago raid was as much a political ploy as a legal proceeding. But Trump, as he always done, has used his legal troubles to raise even more money, call for the ouster of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and relitigate the 2020 election. President Biden’s team couldn’t be more thrilled. For every moment that the conversation is about Trump, or Trump demanding fealty from fellow Republicans, is a moment not spent talking...

Now that Rep. Liz Cheney has lost her primary to a Trumpist Republican in Wyoming, it’s time for President Biden to consider appointing her to his cabinet. Political tensions have risen to new levels since the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago. Bringing a Republican into the administration would cool partisan temperatures and unite the country in support of the rule of law. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used this strategy when the U.S. divided sharply over how to respond to Hitler’s aggression. In June 1940, he appointed Henry Stimson and Frank Knox as secretaries of war and...

... Immediately after her loss, she launched a leadership political action committee titled The Great Task which will allow her to keep her political aspirations alive while taking on the former president. Trump, whose home and private club Mar-a-Lago in Florida was raided by the FBI just days before the primary, has not ruled out running for president again in two years. Cheney is using some of Trump’s own consultants and allies, including those from the powerful Koch network, to try to keep the former president from winning a second term in the White House. Some of them appear to...

When liberals lose in the Supreme Court — as they increasingly have over the past half-century — they usually say that the justices got the Constitution wrong. But struggling over the Constitution has proved a dead end. The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism.

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) declared Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was the “most impressive, incredible and productive speaker in our history.” Anchor Jake Tapper said, “The midterm elections are now just 79 days away. Speaker Pelosi has previously vowed to step down from leadership after this term. There’s already been some jockeying behind the scenes to replace her as either Speaker or House Minority Leader. Would you want to be leader of the House Democratic caucus?”

Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming called "large portions" of the Republican Party "very sick" in an interview recapping her failed bid to stay in office. Cheney, asked by ABC News what she thought her loss said about the Republican Party, said it signified former President Donald Trump's stranglehold on the party. "It says that clearly [Trump's] hold is very strong among some portions of the Republican Party. My state of Wyoming is not necessarily a representative sample of the party," Cheney said. Wyoming is one of the reddest states in the union. Cheney continued, "I think it says a couple...