Free Republic

This reality, and the resulting assignment of an avalanche of 'Pinocchios,' comes as no surprise to our readers -- who've been kept abreast of Democrats' never-ending onslaught of falsehoods, misinformation, fear-mongering and distortions about the GOP's tax reform bill. Fact-checkers have been working overtime to correct the record in an exhausting game of anti-lie whack-a-mole, with the Washington Post's team dishing out 11 Pinocchios to three top Democrats on the ridiculous ""private jet tax break" fairly tale alone. This nonsense is still floating around, promoted by the DNC chairman: Tom Perez @TomPerez #GOPTaxScam philosophy: Let's end tax benefits for colleges...

Democrats win the House of Representatives in 2018 and have the necessary votes for impeachment. But even in that best-case scenario, in which Democrats win every toss-up race for the Senate, they would still be well short of the votes they need in the Senate. Which means that kicking Trump out of the White House by necessity has to be a bipartisan effort with significant Republican buy-in. The most promising route for stopping Trump, then, is through the ballot box. Democrats need a convincing platform and effective organization to win elections at every level. If the party can win back...

Maxine Waters loves to talk about millennials, and she’s apparently adopted some of their traits, too. The California congresswoman made an appearance on Bloomberg TV on Thursday and her definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” — the standard for impeaching a president of the United States — appears to be lowering. When asked what she hopes to achieve with her frequent “Impeach 45” chants around the country, Waters responded, “I have learned over the years that I’ve been in this business that there a few people who are willing to speak truth to power and to talk about what really...

Egypt’s foreign minister paid a rare visit to Israel on Sunday, saying that his country remains a “steadfast and unwavering” supporter of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians but warning that conditions for achieving that are deteriorating. Sameh Shoukry’s trip was the first official visit to Israel since 2007 and reflected the strong but low-profile ties that have developed between the two countries in recent years. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said Shoukry’s visit was aimed at reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. …

With his phone calls to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley last week, Barack Obama seems to have defused the furor over his comment that Crowley had acted "stupidly" in handcuffing Gates on his own front porch. (I agree with Obama' final verdict, which is that Crowley did overreact, even if it appears that Gates got hysterical.) It may be that Obama was admirably taking advantage of what he calls "a teachable moment," and showing America that racial disputes can lead to dialogue and not just name-calling. But Obama was also mindful of what has...

If race were the only issue, there would be much less hyperventilation about Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates' unpleasant run-in with the criminal justice system. After all, it would hardly be the first time a black man had unjustly been hauled to jail by a white police officer. The debate — really more of a shouting match — is also about power and entitlement. This is a new twist. Since the triumph of the civil rights movement, minorities have been moving up the ladder in politics, business, academia, just about every field. Only in the past decade, however, has a...

There is no owner’s manual for the Oval Office, no school to learn how to be a president. Perhaps most challenging for any new president is learning how powerful that megaphone really is. Every offhand word, every spontaneous remark, every comment informed more by emotion than calculation risks profound consequences.

As NewsBuster Geoffrey Dickens has noted, Ben Affleck appeared on yesterday evening's edition of Hardball. And while it's true that the actor/director/Dem activist offered a generally innocuous analysis, he did manage to engage in a bit of religious bigotry. Affleck's foul foray arose in the course of his discussion of the way the various Republican candidates have dealt with the issue of evolution and creationism. Talk turned to the former governor of Arkansas. BEN AFFLECK: I think Huckabee actually framed his position in a much less dramatic way than had been made out. Which was he said it could...

General Colin Powell, one of the nation's most prominent African-American leaders, put some of the blame on Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. for the confrontation that has become a raging controversy. Asked in an interview airing on CNN's "Larry King Live" tonight whether Gates was wrong to confront Cambridge police Sergeant James Crowley before being arrested in his own home, Powell replied, "I'm saying that Skip, perhaps in this instance, might have waited a while, come outside, talked to the officer, and that might have been the end of it. "I think he should have reflected on whether or...

The ethically-challenged "ethicist" of the New York Times Magazine, Randy Cohen, who writes The Ethicist column has inserted himself into the Henry Louis Gates situation by urging the Harvard professor to sue in order to "pursue social justice." To see where Mr. Ethicist is coming from, let us start off with his laughable money quote in his current column on the subject of lawsuits: Gates should enjoy a cool one and then file suit, assuming he has legal grounds to do so. We Americans are often mocked for being overly litigious, but we are not nearly litigious enough. In the...

The now-infamous Gates story has gone through the familiar media spin-cycle: incident, reaction, response, so on and so forth. Drowned out of this echo chamber has been an all-too-important (and legally controlling) aspect: the imbroglio between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley has more to do with the limits (or breadth) of the First Amendment than with race and social class. The issue is not how nasty the discourse between the two might have been, but whether what Professor Gates said--assuming, for argument's sake, the officer's version of events as fact--could by any stretch...

After dropping her young daughter with a baby sitter, Taquana Harris rushed to her hostess job at the fashionable Bowery Bar one night last February, her leopard-print evening gown sweeping elegantly through the dark, icy streets of the East Village. Then a strange woman crudely grabbed her by the arm and demanded to know what she had done with the drugs. Within seconds, Ms. Harris recalled, she found herself pinned to the steel grating of a bodega by two plainclothes officers engaged in a neighborhood drug sweep.

In the aftermath of the mass shooting of a dozen police officers in Dallas this week, some conservatives rushed to lay blame for the incident at the feet of the Obama administration. Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh said on Twitter that "Obama's words & [Black Lives Matter]'s deeds have gotten cops killed." Rep. Roger Williams (R-Tex.) said, "the spread of misinformation and constant instigation by prominent leaders, including our president" contributed to the killings. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said the shooting had "roots" in the "anti-white/cop events illuminated by Obama." These statements are part of a broader narrative of a...

In case you missed it last night, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke made an appearance on CNN with cop killer advocate and CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill to discuss the recent execution of Harris County Sheriff Deputy Daron Goforth at a Houston area gas station.Sheriff Clarke is holding the #BlackLivesMatter responsible for fueling a war on cops with their rhetoric. Over the weekend, #BlackLivesMatter activists in Minnesota chanted, "Pigs in a blanket, fry em' like bacon.""This is part of a pattern now. You would have to stick your head in the sand to think that this thing here wasn't fueled...

Do Shooting Lies Matter? The investigation into the Falcon Heights, MN officer-involved shooting of Philando Castile has taken a sharp turn from the story we first heard in the video his girlfriend shot immediately following the incident.

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that in the discussions after the shooting of police officers in Dallas, and the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, “it doesn’t help that we have an American political debate with basically one all-white party.” Brooks began by saying, “The question, to me, is, are we going to speak out in a way that is actual dialogue and conversation, or are we going to drift into tribal thinking? There’s been a lot of rancid overgeneralizations in our society, that all African men behind the wheel are dangerous, that...

"So who is Alton Sterling? For starters, liberals should know he possessed an illegal firearm. As a felon with a lengthy rap sheet, Sterling is legally prohibited from possessing a firearm. Police records show Sterling had been a member of the Bloods gang, and had a list of offenses including battery, assault, drugs and weapons charges, and owed $25,000 in child support. He was also a registered pedophile, having impregnated a 14-year-old girl when he was 20. The media, by contrast, has portrayed him as a loving father of five."

She’s a walking parody of an unhinged leftist ‘reporter.’...But even among leftist hacks, Amanpour is a special case: It’s almost as if she’s trying to mock herself — a Trump-is-a-Clinton-plant conspiracy theory, if you will, but in the mainstream media. She referred to devout Christianity as “totalitarian” in her August 23, 2007, CNN profile “Christian Warriors.” But in 2008, she fawned over the “progress” achieved by Fidel Castro, and in 2013 she wished Zimbawean dictator Robert Mugabe a happy birthday. If a higher-profile (read: important) person had such a rich historical cache of commentary, they would have already been driven...

Donald Trump steered clear of his characteristic bombast in responding to the massacre of five police officers patrolling a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas on Thursday night, ditching the self-congratulations he put forth after last month's attack on Orlando's Pulse nightclub in favor of a somber statement lamenting national division and racial tension. But while the presumptive Republican presidential nominee sought to avoid the appearance of nakedly capitalizing on the latest tragedy to boost his White House hopes, an upsurge in law-and-order sentiment may yet deliver him the presidency. An eerie echo: To some observers, the potential fallout from...

These Americans feel hopeless when they see FBI Director James Comey excusing Hillary Clinton from indictment. The same transformative power that has recently recorded and exposed violence can also cleanse our government and lead to the replacement of our leadership. It can be used both to expose horrific incidents and police bad apples. It can, and should, be used to clean up Washington. People are upset that the Department of Justice may be unconstitutionally working with the Executive Branch to disrupt justice. What if we had live streaming video inside our federal agencies which have betrayed our trust? What if...