Free Republic

FRANKFURT/BERLIN (Reuters) - Hundreds of people protested in European cities on Saturday against U.S. President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk, following a bruising week for financial markets after Trump unveiled sweeping global tariffs.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mary Glantz was in her room at a Hampton Inn in Columbia, South Carolina, last Friday night during a trip visiting friends when her phone began pinging furiously with messages at 9:30 p.m. They were from panicked colleagues at the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent, congressionally funded organization in Washington that had found itself in the crosshairs of billionaire Elon Musk's cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency. At 10:09 p.m., Glantz's own termination notice arrived in an email telling her she was being fired, effective immediately. Most of USIP's 300 staff were laid off that night. Glantz...

Republican poll-watcher planning raises prospects of noncitizen votingNorth Carolina election officials air concerns about potential voter and poll worker intimidationVoting rights advocates say effort is aimed at creating doubt in the event of a Kamala Harris victorySANFORD, North Carolina, Oct 24 (Reuters) - "Be aggressive," Jim Womack, a local Republican Party chair in North Carolina, told the grid of faces who joined the Zoom training session for volunteers to monitor voting on Nov. 5. "The more assertive and aggressive you are in watching and reporting, the better the quality of the election."During the two-hour session, conducted from a Republican Party...

MILWAUKEE - For four nights at Donald Trump's nominating convention in Milwaukee, a roster of speakers attempted to give one of the most divisive politicians in recent U.S. history a makeover, describing him as a loving and caring family man whose near-assassination at a rally on Saturday had changed him. That new version of Trump lasted barely half an hour. Then the Trump more familiar to Americans - the bombastic thrower of insults who revels in demonizing his opponents - re-emerged, trampling over the message of unity so painstakingly choreographed by the Republican National Committee this week. In a rambling...

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Problems with dozens of electronic vote counting machines in the battleground state of Arizona on Tuesday were seized upon by former Republican President Donald Trump and his followers, who falsely claimed it was evidence of election fraud by Democrats. The state's Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who has echoed Trump's false claims of a stolen 2020 election, also seized on the machine problems, issuing a "voter alert" on her Twitter account. Trump, Lake and other election deniers have been calling for the end of electronic voting machines, Election Day-only voting, and the use of just paper ballots...

(Reuters) - Ricardo Aguirre sits near his two taco trucks and laments the soaring cost of tomatoes, onions, meat and cilantro, which have doubled in price in recent months, hammering his Phoenix-based catering business. Aguirre, 43, usually votes for the Democratic Party. But with inflation hitting a 40-year high in February he has a stark warning for Democrats as they seek to keep control of the U.S. Congress in November's elections. "If the Republican Party has something better to offer us, I will vote Republican," said Aguirre. Republicans, he believes, are generally better economic stewards who could have more success...

Hundreds of officials who worked for former Republican President George W. Bush are set to endorse Democratic White House hopeful Joe Biden, people involved in the effort said, the latest Republican-led group coming out to oppose the re-election of Donald Trump. The officials, who include Cabinet secretaries and other senior people in the Bush administration, have formed a political action committee - 43 Alumni for Biden - to support the former vice president in his Nov. 3 race, three organizers of the group told Reuters. Bush was the country's 43rd president.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Dozens of Republican former U.S. national security officials are forming a group that will back Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, people familiar with the effort said, in a further sign that President Donald Trump has alienated some members of his own party. The group will publicly endorse Biden in the coming weeks and its members plan to campaign for the former vice president who is challenging Trump in the Nov. 3 election, the sources said. It includes at least two dozen officials who served under Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, with...

Donald Trump has dramatically escalated his attacks on his nearest rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Ben Carson. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll may explain why: the billionaire real estate magnate is bleeding support among avid church-goers and women to the retired neurosurgeon. While the unconstrained Trump has a comfortable double-digit lead over the soft-spoken Carson, the data points to a possible emerging threat to Trump's hopes of capturing the party's nomination for the November 2016 election. The poll of likely Republican primary voters also shows that Carson is drawing strong support from the rural Midwest, including Iowa, which holds the...

I received an email from a reader of ElectionLawCenter.com noting that Tim Reid, the actor who has played Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnati may be a New Black Panther. I don't know the answer. One thing is for sure . . .