Free Republic

Last month, on 22 February, the House of Commons debated premature deaths due to heart and circulatory diseases at the request of Dean Russell, Member of Parliament (“MP”) for Watford. In August 2023, Mr. Russell had a heart attack at the age of 47. After he opened the debate, Andrew Bridgen, MP for North West Leicestershire, gave a speech. Mr. Bridgen raised that cardiovascular deaths per 100,000 population have risen by 10% since 2019, after falling steadily for decades. What novel intervention in public health has occurred since 2019? “We are witnesses to the greatest medical scandal in decades –...

A little after 8 a.m. on July 20, 2001, a couple arriving for an appointment opened an unlocked front door at an office in the Florida panhandle town of Fort Walton Beach and discovered a woman lying on the floor, dead. Her name was Lori Kaye Klausutis and she was just 28. The police said they found no signs of foul play. The medical examiner concluded her lonely death was an accident. She had fainted, the result of a heart condition, and hit her head on a desk, he said. Now, nearly 20 years later, Klausutis's death has captured...

Trump supporters share more fake news on social media than any other political group, according to a new study from Oxford University. Researchers studied more than 13,000 Twitter users and 47,000 Facebook pages in the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address to determine which social media users spread the most “junk” news. They discovered that Trump supporters on Twitter shared more unreliable news than all other groups combined. On Facebook, extreme conservatives share more junk news than all other audiences put together. The researchers defined “junk news” as “misleading, deceptive or incorrect information purporting...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Long before he tweeted about wiretaps, Donald Trump worried about who was listening in on his calls.As a real estate mogul and reality TV star — well before he alleged on Twitter that former President Barack Obama wiretapped his phones during the campaign — Trump expressed regular concern that his phone lines were not secure, according to three former Trump Organization executives.At times he talked about possible listening devices and worried that he was being monitored, two executives said.

In the view of the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence wing, anger over the election of Donald Trump, reflected in protests across the country, is a driving force in “domestic terrorist violence,” according to an unclassified report obtained by The Intercept. The conclusions, laid out in a February 21 report prepared by the North Carolina Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAAC) and DHS’s Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A), come amid a series of controversial post-election efforts by Republican lawmakers to criminalize protest. Focused on North Carolina, the six-page document “was written in response to a spike in violence and...

Tom Godat, a union electrician who has always voted for Democrats, cast his ballot for Donald Trump last year as “the lesser of two evils” compared to Hillary Clinton. He’s already a little embarrassed about it. There’s a lot that Godat likes about President Trump, especially his pledge to make the country great again by ignoring lobbyists, challenging both political parties and increasing the number of good-paying jobs.

George Lakoff vividly recalls where he was and what he was doing the night Donald Trump was elected president. “We were having some tacos,” said Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley. “I felt pretty bad afterward. And it wasn’t just the tacos.” A lot of people had heartburn that night, unable to understand how such a uniquely unqualified candidate could be elected to the highest office in the free world. Lakoff understood exactly what had occurred. “Why was it that all the polls were wrong?” asked Lakoff, speaking to a packed auditorium Thursday night at San Francisco’s Commonwealth...

"...veterans of past administrations and members of Congress from both parties criticized the decision to put Mr. Bannon on the principals committee, saying that it risked injecting politics into national security. President George W. Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove, was generally kept out of sensitive national security meetings. Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, attended some national security meetings but was not given formal status." "As for Bannon, who may be cut from the NSC, Trump's decision will be carefully watched as such a move would be potentially perceived as a relaxation of Bannon's influence over Trump, a topic which...

<p>A hammer pounds away in the living room of a middle class home. A sanding machine smoothes the grain of the wood floor in the dining room.</p> <p>But this home Pastor Ada Valiente is showing off in Los Angeles is no ordinary home.</p>

The left-leaning Washington Post has introduced a new slogan in the age of President Donald Trump: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” In an interview with CNN’s Brian Stelter, the paper’s spokesperson, Kris Coratti, said that the slogan was a “good, concise value statement that conveys who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year.” The newspaper, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, was vehemently opposed to Donald Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 presidential election. As part of the effort to prevent Trump from winning, Bezos reportedly...

Columnists and editorial boards of national news outlets hope President Donald Trump will institute taxation of carbon dioxide, citing “prominent” Republican support for such “climate action.” In February, The New York Times editorial board, a Washington Post columnist, Time magazine and a CNN.com opinion columnist all ran pieces endorsing a carbon tax. Post columnist Robert Samuelson cried “two cheers for a carbon tax” in his headline. In order to sell the idea, the media used descriptions like “blue-collar climate plan” and labeled it a tax that “could win over” Trump. The general premise of a carbon tax is that energy...

It was 1967. The local music store had an ink-blue Mosrite Ventures solid body electric guitar, and I wanted it badly. Cost: $500. My family was not poor, but neither could they drop five bills on one of four children. My first guitar was a $29.99 Stella acoustic from Sears. There was only one way to get the guitar of my dreams: a summer job. Complication: I had long hair, and even in the psychedelic sixties, few legitimate employers wanted that at their front counters or even their back rooms. All the head shop jobs were taken. We lived in...

President Donald Trump was more right than wrong about Sweden. Fox News was slightly misleading. As you’ve heard, Trump referred to “[what happened] last night in Sweden.” On Twitter, smug critics circulated lists of anodyne events like concerts and road accidents and accused the president of inventing a terror attack. He didn’t cite a terror attack, though his words were characteristically imprecise. Two days later, as if to underscore that Trump had a point, riots erupted in a suburb of Stockholm. As Andrew Brown of the Guardian put it, Sweden looms large in the “fantasies of the outside world.” It...

Noteworthy because it contradicts Fox News’s data from last week. When Fox asked registered voters whom they trusted more to tell them the truth, the Trump administration or reporters who cover the White House, they split 45/42. Less than a week later, when Quinnipiac asked voters whether they trust Trump more or the news media more to tell them the truth, the split was … 37/52. Did Trump’s credibility nosedive in the span of a week or is he right that “any negative polls are fake news”? (Spoiler: He is not right.)Note the sharply different numbers among independents in...

Last week, when White House communications director Anita Dunn charged the Fox News Channel with right-wing bias, Fox responded the way it always does. It denied the accusation with a straight face while proceeding to confirm it with its coverage. Take a look at Fox's own Web story on the episode. It begins by quoting a Fox News senior vice president named Michael Clemente, who says: "It's astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming. It seems self-serving on their part." Then it quotes David Gergen, the gravelly voice of Washington's conventional wisdom, who says the attack...

Levi Johnston says his relations are improving with Bristol Palin, daughter of former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The 19-year-old Johnston tells GQ magazine that the Palins aren't "lying when they say that things are better." Johnston fathered a child with Bristol, the 18-year-old daughter of Alaska governor. But since the couple broke off their engagement, he has complained in national interviews that the Palins were limiting his access to his son Tripp, born Dec. 27. Johnston also claims in the GQ article that Sarah Palin's husband, Todd Palin, offered to buy Bristol a new car if she broke...

The US military is looking into whether an American marine in Falluja shot dead a severely wounded Iraqi insurgent at point-blank range. Television footage shows US soldiers entering a building as injured prisoners lie on the floor. The soldier, from the 3rd battalion of the US marines, has been removed from the field and faces possible charges. The images were taken by an NBC reporter embedded with the US troops in the Sunni city under assault. The BBC's James Robbins says the incident could prove highly damaging and that the US military will need to answer key questions about whether...