Free Republic

Iran lost its own mines. Swalwell lost control of an exploding narrative. The WSJ lost the real cause of our health crisis. A terrific judicial appointment should delight MAHA. And more. Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your weekend edition roundup includes: how Iran’s mines are the most convenient excuse since the dog ate the homework — and why Trump is quietly delighted about it; the spectacular self-destruction of Eric Swalwell, who ran his entire campaign on protecting women and now faces four accusers, a surfaced NDA he said never existed, and a Democratic Party that just handed him his hat;...

The Wall Street Journal, quoting Middle Eastern officials, reports that Iran has only cut off its "direct" communications with the US not its talks with ceasefire mediators.While the move has temporarily complicated efforts to make a deal by Trump’s 8 p.m. deadline, it hasn't ended the talks, the report said."Iran intended to send a signal of disapproval and defiance by severing communications," one official was quoted as saying.Iran's state-run Tehran Times later reported that "diplomatic and indirect channels of talks with the US are not closed."The Tehran-based paper had earlier reported that Iran had cut "all diplomatic and backchannel talks"...

Could the Iran war do what even Vladimir Putin couldn’t and blow up the North Atlantic Treaty alliance? That’s no longer an idle question as most of Europe refuses to help the U.S., and President Trump responds by threatening to leave NATO. This would be the dumbest alliance breakup in modern history. The immediate fault here lies with Europe. Spain and Italy are blocking U.S. military flights for Iran from their bases, and Mr. Trump says the Macron government has blocked flights over France. Add its reluctance to help clear the Strait of Hormuz, and Europe is playing into every...

Not satisfied with being commander-in-chief, Donald Trump has become the White House’s very own shoe salesman. The US president has been buying his favourite shoes for his staff so frequently that they have become the unofficial White House uniform. One female White House official told the Wall Street Journal: “All the boys have them. It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them.” Mr Trump has fallen in love with Florsheim, a brand that sells some pairs for as little as $49.90 (£37.27) – a far cry from his expensive Brioni suits. The president has been buying the shoes for...

A 6-3 Supreme Court majority on Friday struck down President Trump’s sweeping emergency tariffs (Learning Resources v. Trump) in a monumental vindication of the Constitution’s separation of powers. You might call it the real tariff Liberation Day. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Court’s decision for the law and the economy. Had Mr. Trump prevailed, future Presidents could have used emergency powers to bypass Congress and impose border taxes with little constraint. As Chief Justice John Roberts explains in the majority opinion, “Recognizing the taxing power’s unique importance, and having just fought a revolution motivated in large part...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a bigger budget than any other U.S. law enforcement agency at $85 billion. That’s far greater than the budget for the U.S. Marines, yet it’s hard to see any of the same competence and professionalism in ICE operations. Donald Trump returned to the White House with a promise to slash government waste and inefficiency through a Department of Government Efficiency. Congress should now create a DOGE to rein in wasted taxpayer money, poor management, incompetent behavior and mission creep at ICE....

A funny thing happened this week that you wouldn’t think possible from reading the common narrative of President Trump as a Frankenstein’s monster unchained to do whatever he wants: He backed down from his demands to own Greenland. And he did so after financial markets, European allies and the U.S. Congress raised objections. The “authoritarian” Trump narrative was wrong again. This isn’t to dismiss Mr. Trump’s often wild demands and threats. They have consequences in lost trust among allies and doubts about American reliability. These costs are hard to quantify, but they are real and may show up in a...

If imitation is the sincerest form of politics, President Trump is paying Elizabeth Warren great homage by copying the Senator’s ideas. In November he asked the Justice Department to investigate meat-packers for price-fixing. On Wednesday he endorsed a ban on large institutional investors buying homes. Mr. Trump is searching for ways to lower housing costs and now he’s seizing on a favorite of the anti-business left. “People live in homes, not corporations,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to...

... Mr. Romney’s lead idea is to eliminate the income limit on the Social Security payroll tax. He imagines that a huge 12.4% hike to the marginal rate on an essential cohort of the striving will have a “relatively small impact on economic growth.” Moreover, this whopping increase in social-insurance premiums wouldn’t come with better coverage. Mr. Romney would largely sever the link between Social Security contributions and benefits. We think these changes are poor policy—and we also note that they aren’t taxes on the rich but on salarymen. Mr. Romney dismisses the doomed-from-the-get-go DOGE effort to end the deficit...

Claudio Neves Valente, the suspect in the Brown and MIT shootings, had flashes of temper; former classmates describe him as confrontational and socially awkward Twenty-five years ago, two promising physicists graduated from a prestigious science university in Lisbon. On Monday, one gunned the other down at his home outside Boston after firing on a classroom of Brown University undergrads, authorities say. Claudio Neves Valente, the suspected shooter, once had a bright future. He graduated at the top of his college class, ahead of classmate Nuno Loureiro. But by the time Neves Valente confronted Loureiro at his Brookline, Mass., apartment building...

The New North Carolina plant is aimed at selling more hybrid cars and trucks to AmericansLIBERTY, N.C.—Toyota, a longtime hybrid car and truck promoter, is making one of the industry’s biggest bets on green transportation and opening a $14 billion battery plant here. For years, Toyota held out against electric vehicles while rivals retrofitted factories and launched models in preparation for an all-electric future. Now that the EV market in the U.S. is vanishing as tax credits expire and sales disappoint, Toyota is doubling down on its hybrid strategy. The Japanese automaker’s gamble: that American consumers—many of whom won’t touch...

An indecipherable email about my mother-in-law’s checkup has me reaching for the pitchfork.‘How do you come up with things to write about?” a young George Will once asked William F. Buckley Jr. That’s easy, said the National Review founder, “the world irritates me three times a week.” Most people seek to avoid the feeling of irritation. But for newspaper guys, irritation equals inspiration. Let me tell you an irritating little story that I think you will find relatable. It’s about my mother-in-law. She’s 86 and has been ill for a while. For the past few years she’s lived in a...

If only the peasants would just surrender! When I saw this headline in the opinion pages of the WSJ, I had high hopes that some scientist pointed out that politicians and bureaucrats can’t control the climate: We Can’t Stop Climate Change, So We Need to Prepare for ItSadly, I was wrong. The article was a pure piece of garbage, essentially claiming that despite the work of green pushers to scare everyone into capitulation to the radical green agenda, people just won’t cooperate. The writers complain that, “Around the world, people are giving priority to higher living standards, economics, and access...

President Trump said his proposed 100% additional tariffs on goods from China were "not sustainable."

Russian President Vladimir Putin presented the Trump administration this week with a sweeping proposal for a cease-fire in Ukraine, demanding major territorial concessions by Kyiv—and a push for global recognition of its claims—in exchange for a halt to the fighting, according to European and Ukrainian officials. European officials expressed serious reservations about the proposal, which would require Ukraine hand over Eastern Ukraine, a region known as the Donbas, without Russia committing to much other than to stop fighting. The offer, which Putin conveyed Wednesday to U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow, set off a diplomatic scramble to get further...

https://babylonbee.com/news/scandal-wsj-reports-trumps-name-appears-in-their-article-about-the-epstein-filesNEW YORK, NY — In what many were calling the greatest political scandal in American history, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that Donald Trump's name does, in fact, appear in the article about the Epstein File that was recently written by the Wall Street Journal. "This is damning, earth-shattering stuff," said WSJ journalist Cliff Buttly, who wrote the article. "As I scanned the article I recently wrote about Epstein, I found Trump's name appeared in there 23 times. I'm not sure how Trump can manage to walk away from this bombshell unscathed." At this time, sources were unclear on the...

Another day, another leak. CNN and The Washington Post on Wednesday reported that sources say the Pentagon Inspector General has ‘evidence’ that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Signal chat included classified information from Central Command. The Pentagon Inspector General expanded his investigation into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the double-encrypted app Signal in May. Steven Stebbins took over as Acting Inspector General after President Trump fired the previous IG and 17 other inspectors general. Stebbins was first appointed to his position in 2015. Pete Hegseth has been under heavy attack since before his confirmation hearing and the leaks keep coming....

The ‘reporter’ behind the disgusting smear piece produced by one of America’s leading newspapers has a connection to one of the greatest scandals in American political history. As The Gateway Pundit reported, The Wall Street Journal published a hit piece on President Trump on Thursday night involving Jeffrey Epstein. The paper alleged Trump wrote Epstein a “bawdy” letter for his 50th birthday depicting a naked woman. Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly prepared a ‘special gift’ and collected letters from Trump and others. “The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several...

The Wall Street Journal embarrassed itself Thursday by hyping a so-called Trump-Epstein “bombshell” that amounted to nothing more than a disputed birthday card from 2003 that they won’t show, and that Trump denies writing and is now suing over. The rest of the story was recycled material long in the public domain. Desperate to revive the left’s failed narrative tying Trump to Epstein, the Journal grasped at straws while ignoring Epstein’s far more substantial connections to powerful Democrats like Bill Clinton, who flew on Epstein’s jet multiple times and visited his island — facts the media still downplays to this...

Zohran Mamdani said he would discourage the use of the slogan “globalize the intifada” in a roughly hourlong meeting with some of New York City’s most powerful executives on Tuesday, seeking to defuse an issue that has prompted a backlash from the business community and beyond. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, was grilled by a room of 100-plus executives at an event hosted by the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group. The audience included finance and real-estate executives, high-powered lawyers and a handful of billionaires.