Free Republic

New York City’s mayor Bill de Blasio has come under fire after he was accused of giving an unadvertised job to his aide’s girlfriend with a reported salary of $150,000 a year. Appointed as ‘campaign director’ for de Blasio’s Office of Immigrant Affairs in May, Stephanie Yazgi’s salary will initially be paid for by the taxpayers until it is covered by a delayed private grant. The 38-year-old is the partner of one of the mayor’s most trusted aides, Emma Wolfe. The startling findings were revealed by the New York Post, who were told by one Democrat insider that it was...

Forget the Twitter blog for emoji responses to how millennials feel about student debt. As the New York Daily News’ Alejandro Alba notes, the condescending approach didn’t generate much respect from Hillary Clinton’s target audience. The beleagured Democrat tried to shift attention to policy from the e-mail scandal, focusing on her $350 billion proposal to overhaul higher-education finances, which is in a shambles largely due to federal government intervention in the first place.Mission not accomplished: While some users thought the question was “relatable,” others believed the question was offensive and condescending.Many users began to reply to the tweet with...

In the liberal universe, there's no correlation between hard work or ingenuity and financial success. As President Obama recently put it, the rich are simply "society's lottery winners." Sounding a similar theme, Al Sharpton today declared it "astounding" that Rand Paul believes that income inequality is due to "some people working harder." Astounding, indeed! What's wrong with Rand? How could he possibly believe that someone someone who works, say, 60 hours per week might earn more than someone else who works 20? View the video here.

At age 60 and weighing 130, the once-rotund Sharpton is almost underweight, and he says he's never hungry. His 'secret': Less food, more exercise. He hasn’t had any sweets in years. He hasn’t had dinner in years, either. Call it “the Al Sharpton Diet,” but this once-rotund reverend has dropped from 305 pounds to exactly 129.6 pounds. The precise weight was recorded this week on Sharpton’s bedroom scale at 5 a.m., when the man of the (much less) cloth begins his day. Sharpton has shed 60% of his much-mocked weight — and he did it without surgery, diet pills or...

Mayor de Blasio was booed at Sunday’s Dominican Day Parade by people angry he slammed the country’s government for wanting to expel ethnic Haitians. “He talks too much,” said heckler Francisco Bens, 53, of Brooklyn, who greeted de Blasio with scattered boos along the Sixth Ave. parade route. “He doesn’t like the Dominican Republic. ... He says Dominicans don’t like black people. That’s not true.” De Blasio hosted a press conference in June to condemn the looming deportations of thousands of people of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic. “It is clearly an illegal act. It is an immoral act....

RUSH: A new Fox poll out yesterday, last night shows Donald Trump is just soaring. Trump is gaining ground on everybody in the GOP field and over Hillary. It's a Fox News poll, NBC poll, and in both of these polls, Hillary, the bottom is starting to fall out identically, exactly as it started to happen in 2008. And that's why the Democrats are starting to push out these stories about what a great guy Biden is and those gaffes that he makes, why, they just make him more lovable. That's old Joe. Telling the guy in a wheelchair to...

"... advice that Sharpton thinks Donald Trump could use now." James Brown said to me, “Reverend, let me tell you something…. There’s a difference between the lounge act and the acts that play the main room.” We’re at Caesar’s Palace. I’m about 19 - 20 years old. And I said, “What do you mean?” You’ve got to be ready. You gotta have choreography. You gotta be rehearsed. You gotta have polish, Sharpton said Brown told him. “[But] when you get on the main stage, Reverend, whatever you did to get out [of] the lounge, don’t do that on the main...

Former SC Democratic party chair Dick Harpootlian told MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki Sunday Vice President Joe Biden’s consideration of a presidential run actually gives Democrats the best chance of retaining the White House in 2016. Harpootlian said Hillary Clinton’s track record will cause her and the Democrats to “die a death of a thousand cuts,” yet Biden is “an inspirational figure” that voters can rally around. HARPOOTLIAN: I think Hillary comes into the race, as she did in ’08 with all kinds of baggage… There’s going to be distractions, we saw just this week with the Wall Street Journal about payments...

Pinstriped sage Yogi Berra has been credited with the observation that “you can learn a lot by watching.” Alas, such wisdom is wasted on Mayor Putz. Asked why he wasn’t at the unveiling of the glitzy plan for LaGuardia Airport with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Vice President Joe Biden and other officials, the mayor offered a revealing response: He only goes to events where he’s invited to speak. OK, we get it. De Blasio’s war with Cuomo continues, and because the gov wouldn’t let him near the microphone, the mayor boycotted the event rather than fume in silence. I think we...

RUSH: Craig in Scarsdale, New York. Great to have you on the program. Hello, sir. CALLER: Thank you very much, Rush. I can't believe all these reporters out there who are just dumping on Trump. It's unbelievable. They gotta go back 30 years to find something that can actually stick to this guy. RUSH: No, no. They have to go back 30 years to make up something. CALLER: I'm sorry? RUSH: They had to go back 30 years to make up something. CALLER: To make up something. And not just that. Why don't we go back 30 years and look...

Out of Twitter’s 2,910 U.S. employees, only 49 (1.7 percent) are black, and that fact has black activists led by Rev. Jesse Jackson racing to condemn the company. Jackson, who has been pressuring tech companies for years to hire more blacks, told The Guardian black Americans are “becoming intolerant” of Twitter’s slow growth in diversity.

Attendees of the Convening's opening ceremony raise their fists as a symbol of power during an organizer's speech.Activists from across the nation converged in Cleveland this weekend for a conference meant to draw national attention to police brutality and race relations in the wake of a number of incidents involving police and black Americans. The National Convening of the Movement for Black Lives began Friday at Cleveland State University where activists will attend sessions that range from viewing films to open discussions on topics that highlight issues that affect all aspects of black culture. The conference is happening amid an...

Mayor de Blasio is a big fan of presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders — because the Vermont senator is a proud “Democratic socialist.” [Snip] De Blasio was quick to correct CNN’s Carol Costello after she called Sanders a “socialist,” telling her the senator is a “Democratic socialist.” “I think there’s a lot to like in that title,” he gushed.

Governor’s races in South and Midwest could be lost if party brand becomes too liberal. Centrist Democrats were wiped out in the 2014 elections and in their absence emerged a resurgent liberal movement, embodied most recently by the surprisingly competitive presidential campaign of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. But the suddenly ascendant left — its populist overtones becoming part of the mainstream Democratic pitch — is worrying Democrats who want to compete on Republican-leaning turf. The party lost every competitive gubernatorial and Senate race in the South last year. And Democrats didn’t fare much better in the heartland. Now, as Bernie...

The principal of an innovative West Harlem public school killed herself the day after her students took the state Common Core exams — which were later tossed out because she cheated ... Jeanene Worrell-Breeden, 49, of Teachers College Community School, jumped in front of a B train in the 135th Street station ... She was pulled out from under the train and taken to Harlem Hospital, where she died eight days later. The city Medical Examiner’s Office ruled it a suicide. The leap came at 9:20 a.m., less than 24 hours after her 47 third-graders wrapped up three days sweating...

While Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are bringing in a sizeable number of donations of under $100, Republicans have been going for the big money, like the huge score Ted Cruz just made from a pair of Texas frackers. Even so, on July 16, Newsmax made a big deal of Hillary receiving donations from wealthy individuals, with the headline, “Hillary Clinton’s Donations From Hedge Fund Titans Exceed Republicans.” Those Democrats are such elitists! You don’t want to be drinking milk when you read these things, at least not without a bib. And here the Texas Messiah, Ted Cruz, just hauled...

Shades of 1968 and the Days of Rage? Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors has announced that "any opportunity we have to shut down a Republican convention, we will." Appearing on today's Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC, Cullors also blithely spoke of "the murder of Mike Brown" in Ferguson, MO. Neither of the co-guest hosts sitting in for Harris-Perry, Richard Liu and Janet Mock, challenged Cullors' characterization. This despite the fact that even Eric Holder's Justice Department found no wrongdoing on the part of the police officer who shot Brown. View the video here.

On Wednesday Governor Cuomo’s New York Wage Board set a new minimum wage for New York City’s 200,000 fast food workers. City establishments will now be required to offer employees at least $15 per hour by the end of 2018. The move also makes it cost effective for companies to fire humans and hire robots. Momentum Machines has developed a robot that can put out one burger every 10 seconds.

Hillary Clinton gave a speech warning that the new "sharing economy" of businesses such as the rideshare company Uber is "raising hard questions about workplace protections." Democrats hate what labor unions hate, and a taxi drivers' union hates Uber, too. Its NYC website proclaims, "Uber has the money. But we are the PEOPLE!" The taxi cartels, which provide inferior service and are micromanaged by government, don't like getting competition from efficient companies like Uber. Clinton didn't mention Uber by name, but we don't have to wonder which company she meant. The New York Times reports that Clinton contacted Uber and...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, late as usual, arrived in Rome Tuesday morning to pontificate at the Vatican about the dangers of climate change. Delayed by fog that forced his plane to land in Milan, de Blasio arrived 80 minutes after his allotted time to speak at the gathering of mayors invited by the Vatican. Once he was given time to speak, though, he waxed eloquent about “powerful corporate interests,” adding, “Is it not the definition of insanity to propagate corporate policies and consumer habits that hasten the destruction of the earth?”