Free Republic

A news website funded by hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer says it contracted the firm to research 'multiple candidates' Matthew Continetti, the editor of the neoconservative website Washington Free Beacon, wrote in a letter posted online just after 7 p.m. on Friday that the Free Beacon hired Fusion GPS during the Republican primary to do research on Republican candidates. That research kicked off what became known as the “dossier” used to smear Donald Trump. The Washington Free Beacon is funded by New York hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who backed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in the Republican primary, and was vigorously...

The White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon’s departure was widely applauded, and not only by the Washington establishment Mr. Bannon has spent a career excoriating. After the news broke, traders at the New York Stock Exchange “literally cheered,” according to a CNBC report. Yet the reaction was not uniformly positive. Supporters of Mr. Trump’s America First nationalism worried that Mr. Bannon’s exit might sever the ties between the president and his electoral base. “Any move to fire Bannon,” wrote the editor of the pro-Trump website American Greatness in recent days, “is more dangerous to the future of the Trump...

Twitter helped make Donald Trump president. It may also lead to his impeachment. The president values Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as ways to bypass a hostile media and express his thoughts directly and authentically. But there is a difference between tweeting as a candidate for president and tweeting as the president. And there have been plenty of times since January when his Twitter habit has diverted President Trump from his message and agenda.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell famously wrote, “needs a constant struggle.” In front of my nose as I write this is a copy of last Sunday’s New York Times. I have opened it to the business section. Below the fold is one of many Times articles on Thomas Piketty, the French economist and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which argues that America has entered a second Gilded Age of vast inequality, inherited fortunes, and oligarchic politics, where the shape of public discourse and public policy is determined by a wealthy few. Capital...

There aren’t many occasions on which I will pick up a copy of The Weekly Standard and read one of their articles. My wife, however, left a copy of it sitting at my desk, having subscribed to the magazine earlier in the year. The magazine was open to an essay, entitled, “The Two Faces of the Tea Party” by Matthew Continetti. So, I became another unfortunate victim of The Weekly Standard, reading an essay that was written for RINOs, and those individuals who make the cocktail party circuit in Washington, D.C. I’m sure there will be a plethora of buzz...

Matthew Continetti, an associate editor at The Weekly Standard, has written a book about Governor Palin. The title of the book is The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star. Continetti has always been very fair to Governor Palin and wrote a long and thoughtful article about her for the July 20, 2009 edition of The Weekly Standard. Amazon provides the following description of Continetti's book: The real story of the Republican vice presidential nominee and her collision with the elite liberal media As the second woman ever nominated as a candidate...

In early July, while most Americans were preparing for a long weekend of cheesy parades, charred meats, and noisy fireworks, Sarah Palin made some plans of her own. The Alaska governor had been the object of endless media attention and assorted calumnies since she became John McCain's vice presidential nominee last August. Now she wanted to try something new. So, on July 3, in a speech delivered from her home on Lake Lucille in Wasilla, Palin told her constituents that not only would she not seek a second term, but she would also be transferring authority to Lieutenant Governor Sean...

It's time to face facts. In-your-face liberalism is about to make a comeback. And this time it will be on steroids. Next year the Democrats will control both houses of Congress, most likely with comfortable, perhaps filibuster-proof majorities. If there is a Democratic president, too, Washington will host one of the most liberal governments in American history. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid are more than ready to make staggeringly liberal changes in the country's economic, social, and foreign policy. Obama says Washington needs to "invest" tax dollars in alternative energy, infrastructure, health insurance subsidies, and education...

Denver - THE country is at war. The economy is in shambles. The Republican Party is weaker than it has been in decades. So whom does John McCain choose as his vice presidential nominee? A former beauty queen turned governor from Alaska. Think the 47-year-old Barack Obama is too inexperienced to be president? Mr. McCain says the 44-year-old Sarah Palin, who has two years fewer of experience as governor than Mr. Obama has as a senator from Illinois, is up to the job. Concerned that Americans do not know enough about Mr. Obama, who spent part of his childhood overseas...

She's back.THE INCOMING REPRESENTATIVE FROM GEORGIA'S 4th congressional district is the outspoken Cynthia McKinney. She is a Democrat, she is 49 years old, and she has held the job before. She held it for a decade, in fact, from 1992, when she became the first black woman elected to Congress from Georgia, to 2002--when, she says, the "hostile corporate media," allied with Republicans, "repeated falsehoods" about her, "distorted" her positions, and drove her from "my seat."That is McKinney's explanation for her 2002 primary defeat, and she is sticking to it. But there are other explanations. Her father, Georgia state legislator...

Two centuries after their famous forebears met on the banks of the Hudson, the Hamiltons and the Burrs are still at it."LOOK AT THIS," said Antonio Burr. "Look at what they're selling." Standing in the gift shop of the New-York Historical Society on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Burr held a magnet to the light. On it were portraits of his ancestor Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States, and Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, whom Vice President Burr killed in a duel 200 years ago. Each man's portrait stared coldly at the other's.It was...

SOME REPORTERS spend the final week of the presidential race inside the Bush and Kerry campaign bubbles, following the candidates to swing states, eating fast food, obsessively checking their Blackberries, and writing up the candidates' stump speeches again and again and again. Not me. Today I'm in a well-appointed dining room in the St. Regis hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., where Bush-Cheney '04 campaign manager Ken Mehlman has come to talk to print reporters over lunch. And what a lunch: Caesar salad to start, then grilled chicken breast over rice and mixed steamed vegetables, then a strawberry mousse cake with...

The Kerry high command comes to New York City to tell reporters that they're just where they want to be.New YorkIS THE KERRY CAMPAIGN IN DISARRAY? Over the last week, as Republicans gathered in New York City, another, perhaps more interesting, political story developed in Boston, Nantucket, and Washington, D.C. Upset about the way in which they think the Kerry communications team mishandled the controversy over the anti-Kerry veterans group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, many Democrats said it was past time Kerry shook up his communications team. And while "shake up" probably isn't the best way to describe what's...

Where was John Kerry December 24, 1968? Not in Cambodia.JOHN KERRY, fresh from a three-day vacation at his retreat in Ketchum, Idaho, addressed the annual convention of the International Association of Fire Fighters in Boston last week, and it was quite a speech--combative, fiery, personal. The firefighters' union was one of the first to endorse Kerry during the Democratic primaries last year, as the candidate barnstormed among the snowy drifts of New Hampshire and Iowa, and on Thursday Kerry spoke to them plainly but forcefully, as one would to old friends. "Over the last week or so," Kerry began, "a...

What John Kerry's speechwriters say to expect from his address tonight. (Not that they wrote it, of course.)BostonTONIGHT JOHN KERRY will deliver the most important speech of his 30-year-long political career. And Terry Edmonds wants you to know the senator wrote the speech himself. Edmonds, 54, is the Kerry campaign's chief speechwriter and a veteran of the Clinton White House. He spoke with reporters on Thursday morning, along with Bob Shrum, Kerry's chief political consigliere. "A number of people wrote drafts," Shrum said. "But Senator Kerry wrote his speech." Edmonds and Shrum, perhaps the only two Kerry staffers able to...

Only on a panel sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future.Boston"ARE YOU ALL READY TO TAKE BACK AMERICA?" Robert Borosage, the co-director of Campaign for America's Future, asked on Wednesday, standing in front of an enthusiastic crowd at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge. And the crowd sure was ready. They hooted and hollared. They roared and screamed. They nodded their heads vigorously. The day before, Michael Moore had stopped by. On Wednesday, Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee, former senator Gary Hart, and Ambassador Joe Wilson took the stage.The occasion was a debate on the Iraq war, which may...

Not everyone gathered at the Democratic convention in Boston is a Democrat. And not all the Democrats are wild about John Kerry.BostonYEARS AGO, back when he first worked for Florida Rep. Andy Ireland--back, in other words, when he was a Democrat--Ed Gillespie would have fit right in here.But things change. When Ireland switched parties in 1984, Gillespie switched too. "I liked President Reagan's approach to governing and it just made sense to me," Gillespie told the New York Times recently. It was a wise decision. Or at least a profitable one. These days, of course, Gillespie heads the Republican National...

Joe Wilson wasn't a truth-teller.ONE DAY LAST OCTOBER, Ambassador Joe Wilson, his wife Valerie in tow, traveled to the National Press Club in downtown Washington, D.C., for lunch. It was a big day for Wilson. He was the guest of honor at a banquet thrown by the Nation Institute, which publishes the Nation, the venerable lefty weekly. Daniel Ellsberg was there. So was New Jersey senator Jon Corzine. Towards the end of lunch, plates of cold salad shunted aside, Wilson was invited onstage. Looking the part of a globetrotting former diplomat in his Zegna suit and trademark Hermès tie, he...

Would President Reagan have wanted Alexander Hamilton taken off the $10 bill?"WE THINK it's premature at this point to discuss any changes to currency," Anne Womack Kolton told the New York Times on Tuesday. Like most Americans, she was reacting to the death of Ronald Reagan, albeit in her own particular way. Kolton is a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department. The currency changes to which she refers are several outstanding proposals that would memorialize Reagan's visage by grafting it to cash money. For Reagan to inhabit the dime, which currently houses Franklin Delano Roosevelt's profile, is one possibility; the $20...

John Kerry and Teresa Heinz-Kerry own a lot of real estate. But is any of it on foreign soil? HERE'S A QUESTION: Do either Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry or his wife, Teresa Heinz, own any foreign property? Certainly the couple have plenty of American residences. There's the $10 million Beacon Hill townhouse in Boston, for example. And the vacation ski lodge in Ketchum, Idaho. And the other vacation house in Nantucket. And then there's the estate outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And finally, the mansion in Georgetown . The total value of Kerry and Heinz's properties is estimated at around $33...