Free Republic

Side issues -- some of them created by the president himself -- have obscured the accomplishments of the Trump administration during his first year in office. The economy is the most obvious one. From anemic growth in the previous administration, it is now growing at around 3 percent, which economists say is ideal. The stock market continues to set records, fattening retirement portfolios. Unemployment is at its lowest level since 2000. It is also at a 17-year low for African-Americans, and it has dropped for all other major racial and ethnic groups. The black community is unlikely to give the...

A proposed law giving the government formal powers to send the military into the streets to fight crime in Mexico faces unified opposition from human rights groups and the United Nations. The “internal security” law currently before Mexico’s Senate passed the lower house of Congress last month, pushed through by President Enrique Peña Nieto’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) party. In a statement opposing the proposed law, U.N. human rights commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said the Mexican government has been using the military to fight organized crime and drug cartels for the past decade, but without success. “Violence has...

Senator Kristen Gillibrand is a menace; to Congress, to the US military, to the nation she serves. She is an ardent leftist and uber-feminist whose ego is writing checks reality can’t cash. She has apparently coronated herself Number One in a SPECTRE like female led congressional kangaroo court that now decides who can stay in Congress and who cannot, based only on accusations. I do not like Senator Al Franken. I do not like his politics, his personality or his comedy. It would be a cold day in hell before I ever voted for him, or any member of his...

A reluctant LiAngelo Ball said that he wouldn’t have thanked President Trump if his school hadn’t instructed him to do so. The former University of California, Los Angeles, basketball player said that school officials told him to thank the president in his statement to the press after being released from a Chinese prison following an arrest for shoplifting. “My school wanted to hear it,” he told the New York radio show. “If they didn’t tell me to do it, it wouldn’t have been in there, to be honest.” He added: “Before I went up there, it was like, ‘You’ve got...

Republican campaign professionals conceded Wednesday that the party’s loss of a Senate seat in ruby red Alabama was a troubling sign for the party but insisted that winning with Roy Moore would have been worse. Doug Jones’ special election victory in Alabama, which hadn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in decades, foreshadowed a possibly tough midterm campaign for the Republicans. Democratic enthusiasm was high, minority turnout reached Obama-era levels, and suburban support for the GOP was down. But for Republican operatives preparing for the 2018 campaign, it was still a win of sorts, protecting the party's fundraising, candidate recruitment,...

Suspended PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley insisted on Thursday that sexual harassment allegations him are untrue. “I have the utmost respect for women and celebrate the courage of those who have come forth to tell their truth,” he posted on Facebook shortly after midnight. “To be clear, I have never groped, coerced, or exposed myself inappropriately to any workplace colleague in my entire broadcast career.”

With Doug Jones' victory in Alabama, Democrats now have at least a plausible path to winning control of the U.S. Senate in the 2018 elections. It's a difficult path to be sure, but it could happen. The first step will be for Democrats to successfully defend all of their Senate incumbents next November. That's not going to be easy because the list includes 10 running in states that voted for Donald Trump. But, the results from Alabama suggest that it could happen. If it does, all Democrats would need to win the Senate is to pick up a pair of...

For the second time in two months, someone who has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State has plotted to kill innocents in New York City and has executed his plot. According to police, at the height of the Monday morning rush hour this week, in an underground pedestrian walkway that I have used many times, in the middle of Manhattan, a permanent legal resident of the United States named Akayed Ullah detonated a bomb he had strapped to his torso in an effort to kill fellow commuters and massively disrupt life in New York. The bomb was inartfully constructed, and...

About a year into President Donald Trump's first term, the jury for much of the country and for most of the major media has returned its verdict: Trump is a failure. Trump is incompetent. Trump cannot lead. Trump has no legislative victories. Even former President Jimmy Carter said he had never seen a president so maligned in the media. Meanwhile former President Barack Obama all but compared Trump to Hitler. Trump endures a nightly beating from the cast of late-night comedians who take turns calling Trump racist, sexist, dumb, inarticulate, overweight, overwrought and, of course, clueless. His reported consumption of...

In 1995, Drew Dixon was working her dream job as an executive at Def Jam Recordings, helping to oversee a chart-topping album and a ubiquitous single by Method Man and Mary J. Blige. But as her star rose, Ms. Dixon, then 24, was spiraling into depression, she said, because of prolonged and aggressive sexual harassment by her direct supervisor, Russell Simmons, the rap mogul and co-founder of the label. On work calls, he would talk graphically about how she aroused him. At a staff meeting, he asked her to sit on his lap. He regularly exposed his erect penis to...

Now that the Alabama special election is over, it’s time to get real. Long before the creepy allegations against him, I didn’t care for Roy Moore. I’m just not a fan of politicians or judges who ignore the law because they don’t like it, and seek to impose their will. That’s what Moore did as a judge when he refused to remove the Ten Commandments from the courthouse and was ultimately removed from the bench for it. I didn’t like it when Barack Obama did it on countless issues, and I don’t like it when someone who is registered in...

<p>Almost every supposedly informed prediction about President Donald Trump's compulsive Twitter addiction has so far proved wrong.</p> <p>He did not tweet his way out of the Republican nomination. Spontaneous social media messaging did not lose Trump the general election race with Hillary Clinton. Nor has Trump tweeted his presidency into oblivion.</p>

Recently, a young being – I don’t want to presume its gender identity, but it’ll probably throw a hissy fit about my blatant chrono-shaming anyway – scribbled an article titled 10 Things Every Intersectional Feminist Should Ask On a First Date for his/her/xir fellow liberal freaks. It’s an illuminating view into the twisted minds of the SJWs, but the article never answers the first question we all asked ourselves reading the title: “Why the hell would anyone ever date an intersectional feminist?” Masochism? Threats? Lost a bet? Anyway, her/his/xir article is meant to help her/his/xir readers determine whether their prospective...

Republican Roy Moore is still not conceding defeat in Alabama’s special election for a U.S. Senate seat -- 24 hours after Democrat Doug Jones claimed victory. In a video posted to YouTube on Wednesday evening, Moore says his campaign is still waiting for the election results to be certified by the Alabama secretary of state. Moore notes in the video that military and provisional ballots remained to be counted. Election results showed that Jones defeated Moore by 49.9 percent to 48.4 percent. In most of the remainder of the nearly five-minute-long video, Moore thanks supporters and then lists numerous ills...

Clinton told crowd she cheered when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed the country’s first gender-balanced cabinet. Hillary Clinton says she feels ”a tiny bit less” concerned about the United States following the Democratic party’s surprise win in Alabama’s senate race on Monday. The former presidential candidate is calling the electoral upset a turning point for Americans in pushing for accountability from President Donald Trump, who backed the unsuccessful Republican candidate. Clinton made the comments while in Vancouver promoting her new book. Geordon Omand ✔ @gwomand I’m told there are about 5,200 ppl attending @HillaryClinton book tour stop in #Vancouver. Sold-out...

Pilot Yousef Dajah widely praised in Jordan after he told his passengers that their Amman-NY flight path would take them over “Jerusalem, capital of Palestine”; “He knew there were many Americans on the flight, but he did it anyway,” says co-pilot.The pilot of a Royal Jordanian fight enjoyed praise in his country after he announced to passengers on the in-flight PA system that the plane was flying over “Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine” and along the Palestine Mediterranean coast. His announcement on flight RJ216 from Amman to NYC was greeted with enthusiastic applause by the passengers and a recording of...

Congressional Republicans say they reached agreement on a final tax bill that will provide a new 20-percent deduction for pass-through income from farms and small businesses. The agreement, which the House and Senate are expected to take up early next week, also calls for doubling the estate tax exemption and will include key expensing provisions that farm groups sought to preserve and expand, lawmakers said. They said the agreement also would allow deduction of state and local taxes, including income and property taxes, up to $10,000, a concession to lawmakers in high-tax states that could also benefit farmers. Senate Agriculture...

Apple today released iOS 11.2.1 which fixes bugs including an issue that could disable remote access to shared users of the Home app. Apple today also released tvOS 11.2.1 which is likely also related to the above issue.For information on the security content of Apple software updates, please visit this website: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT201222 MacDailyNews Take: Happy updating!SEE ALSO:Zero-day iOS HomeKit flaw allowed remote access to IoT devices including door locks, garage door openers; fix rolling out – December 8, 2017

In a remarkable moment of complete honesty, President Trump tweeted that last night's election in Alabama proves that Republicans "need to put up GREAT Republican candidates to increase the razor thin margins in both the House and Senate." In other words: not candidates like Judge Roy Moore. [TWEET TRUMP] Obviously, Moore wasn't as strong a candidate as the nationalist-populist wing of the Republican Party had hoped. It should never even have been close. We're talking about Alabama, after all, one of the reddest states in America. So, Trump certainly has a point. What's remarkable, though, is that he's criticizing Moore...