Free Republic

Even before Tuesday’s elections, many progressives insisted the question of whether protecting abortion rights wins elections was already asked and answered. Democrats made abortion rights the centerpiece of their campaign advertising during the 2022 midterms, a cycle where Democrats outperformed expectations, kept control of the US Senate, and staved off a red wave. Polls last year also found abortion rights to be a significantly motivating issue for both independent and Democratic voters. Abortion rights ballot measures won in all six states where they appeared in 2022, including states like Montana, Kentucky, and Kansas that otherwise elected Republican candidates.

He is preparing for an investiture vote which is expected to see him form a new government and avoid a repeat election. That can only happen if he can secure the parliamentary support of Catalan separatists. The Socialists were runners-up in July's general election, behind the conservative People's Party (PP). However, PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo failed to form a government in an investiture vote in September, receiving only the support of the far-right Vox out of the main parties. It is now Mr Sánchez's turn and he is close to securing enough parliamentary support to form a new administration...

Liberal journos like Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias continue to treat struggling Americans as stupid for not giving President Joe Biden kudos on his so-called “great” economy. Yglesias published a ludicrous Oct. 22 op-ed for Bloomberg Opinion with a headline that was nothing short of comical: “Biden’s Economy Is Great Everywhere Except in the Polls.” In Yglesias’s condescending, escapist worldview, those darn average Americans just don’t know what’s good for them: “Like a lot of world leaders, the US president must contend with voters who remain unhappy even as economic conditions improve.” Yglesias even outrageously attempted to make Biden out to...

Carlos Campos came to Miami from Venezuela in 1979, before dictator Hugo Chávez’s socialist revolution brought about the unraveling of the oil-rich country. But it wasn’t until 2016 that Campos became actively engaged in US politics. Donald Trump’s “America First” message stirred something in him. Sitting down at a Cuban restaurant just minutes from the Trump National Doral golf resort — one of the former president’s major Miami-area properties aside from his Mar-a-Lago estate — Campos described how he came to the realization that his values aligned more closely with Republicans than Democrats. He attends Alpha & Omega, a Spanish-language...

The right-wing Popular Party (PP) is projected to be ahead after a general election in Spain - but it is likely to need the support of the far-right to govern.

Spain’s conservative opposition Popular Party (PP) made significant gains in local and regional elections, offering a perilous assessment of public feeling towards the country’s ruling left-wing coalition ahead of general elections in December. MADRID -- Spain's conservative opposition Popular Party made significant gains in Sunday's local and regional elections, offering a dire assessment of public feeling towards the ruling left-wing coalition ahead of general elections in December. In the local vote, the Popular Party, or PP, won 31.5% of votes compared with 28.2% for the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, or PSOE, which leads the central government, with more than 97%...

Jewish News Syndicate editor-in-chief and National Review contributing writer Jonathan Tobin claimed that journalists who pushed the narrative that Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman was completely healthy to run for office "lied" in order to ensure that Democrats "maintain control of the Senate." In his column for The Jewish News Syndicate, Tobin declared that these "team blue journalists" "were prepared to cover up or falsify the facts about his health in order to advance his candidacy." [cut] Tobin’s piece, titled, "The painful truth about media bias: Some journalists lie," began with the observation that the debate between Fetterman and...

Three judges appointed by former President Donald Trump handed down an astonishing decision on Wednesday, effectively holding that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency charged with protecting consumers from a wide range of predatory activity by lenders and other financial services, is unconstitutional and must be stripped of its authority. The decision by the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit relies on a novel reading of an obscure provision of the Constitution, and is entirely at odds with a Supreme Court decision that rejects the Fifth Circuit’s reading of that provision. This is not...

Liberal media outlets are rallying around Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman after an NBC News reporter said he had difficulty understanding their conversation during a sit-down interview. On Monday, The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey wrote that despite his "relatively privileged upbringing," Fetterman has long been recognized as a "consummate everyman" and a straight talker. Speaking with Fetterman supporters during the campaign trail, Godfrey reported that supporters of the stroke survivor appeared unfazed by the candidate’s recent health challenges, and that he has now become "more relatable than ever." "Which is to say that Fetterman’s just-like-us appeal before his stroke may...

I’ve lived in Houston for most of my life, and there’s never been a time when I’ve reasonably been able to walk anywhere. Houston is practically the poster child for American urban sprawl — the landscape is dominated by spread-out neighborhoods with single-family homes and massive “stroads” (street-road hybrids with the worst aspects of both) lined with strip malls and expansive parking lots, connected by miles and miles of highways. It’s an environment designed to be solely traversed by car, not by foot. That had a dramatic effect on the friends I could make, especially when I was younger and...

CNN's Wolf Blitzer presses Saudi diplomat Adel al-Jubeir, who was in the room during President Joe Biden's meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, about the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Video at source.

Lina al-Hathloul is an activist from Saudi Arabia whose sister, Loujain, was imprisoned and tortured from 2018 to 2021. She traveled to Washington this week to explain to policymakers just how devastating it is that President Joe Biden has traveled to the Middle East to meet Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, known as MBS. “The thing is, Saudi Arabia is now a police state. So whatever reforms they brag about having, concretely, it really depends on the will of MBS,” Lina al-Hathloul told me. “It’s a dictatorship and a dark era for Saudi that we’ve never experienced...

Vox senior politics correspondent Andrew Prokop is rather upset. Why? Because as he wrote, "Donald Trump may be about to escape legal peril yet again."Prokop explains in more detail the reasons for being bummed out about Trump possibly escaping "legal peril again" on Wednesday in "New York investigation into Trump’s business looks imperiled after prosecutors quit."

An opinion poll released on Wednesday, February 23rd by the firm Electomania has populist party VOX in second place with 23 per cent, just four percentage points behind the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), and well ahead of the People’s Party (PP) which scored just 17 per cent in the poll. The poll shows that if an election were called, VOX would likely win as many as 92 seats in the Spanish parliament, nearly doubling its current number of seats, which stands at 52. Earlier this month, VOX polled ahead of the PP to become the second-largest political force...

Showing once again why he didn’t fit in with the progressive orthodoxy at Vox, Matt Yglesias has a piece up on his Substack today arguing that diversity training might be doing more harm than good. The whole piece covers a lot of territory but he starts by arguing that there’s not a lot of certainty about what works in terms of anti-racist training, but there is some evidence about what doesn’t work. …as best I can tell, none of the literature seems to support the idea that in-your-face calling-out tactics are effective. What seems to work best are fairly gentle...

One afternoon a few Octobers ago, I sat with a friend from Spain at a picnic table in an idyllic orchard 50 miles northwest of New York City. As our significant others scoured the farm’s various other goods (jams, butters, donuts), the two of us admired the vast green-and-red foliage blanketing the hills in the distance. Beside us were net bags filled with the dozens of apples we had collected by hand from the property’s dozens of rows of trees — a ritual and scene familiar to many Americans. My friend looked at the bags and gestured toward the sprawl...

The Supreme Court handed down an order Tuesday evening that makes no sense. It is not at all clear what the Biden administration is supposed to do in order to comply with the Court’s decision in Biden v. Texas. That decision suggests that the Department of Homeland Security committed some legal violation when it rescinded a Trump-era immigration policy, but it does not identify what that violation is. And it forces the administration to engage in sensitive negotiations with at least one foreign government without specifying what it needs to secure in those negotiations. One of the most foundational principles...

Texas v. Biden, a case with profound implications for American foreign policy, reached the Supreme Court with lightning speed. On August 13, a judge in Texas appointed by then-President Donald Trump effectively ordered the Biden administration to permanently reinstate Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. That policy, which is officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), requires many immigrants who seek asylum in the United States to stay in Mexico while they await a hearing. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s opinion in Texas was wrong for many reasons, including that he completely misread federal immigration law. Kacsmaryk wrote that a 1996 federal...

Vox Day's website has been taken down by Google. For those who don't know who he is, he is a conservative/alt-right author who has started several businesses to create alternatives to liberal products, including: • Arkhaven Comics: a comic book publisher • Castalia House: physical book publishing house • Infogalactic: a Wikipedia alternative • news.infogalactic.com: alternative news aggregator He is also the author of "SJW's Always Lie", "SJW's Always Double Down", "The Irrational Atheist", "Cuckservative: How Conservatives Betrayed America", "Corporate Cancer" (a book about how liberals damage companies from within), and multiple fiction novels. Lately, he has been speaking out...

Herein lies a glimpse into just what kind of knuckle-draggers the left thinks we are. They think patriotism means we’ll do whatever they say whenever they say it.“Rooting against Olympians, scoffing at Capitol police, broaching civil war — meet today’s conservative movement.”That’s the opening of an article last week at Vox.com. You’ve probably heard of Vox. Their self-proclaimed, self-aggrandizing purpose is to “explain the news.” But when Vox’s condescending reporters start talking about conservatives, Christians, guns, or really anyone outside of a few coastal cities, they have a habit of sounding like Jane Goodall observing apes.So, what’s their qualm now?...