Free Republic

Presidential debates are remembered for the candidates’ pithy one-liners. But in the chaotic political landscape of 2024, a simple statement of fact served as the showstopper on Tuesday’s showdown between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” said ABC News moderator Linsey Davis in the matter-of-fact style familiar to viewers who watch her on the Sunday edition of “ABC World News Tonight” and her nightly streaming newscast “ABC News Live Prime.” Her correction was a response to Trump’s claim that the...

One of the hallmarks of narcissism is that when things go wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault. Being a narcissist means never having to say you’re sorry. Nothing more perfectly illustrates this truism than an essay from yesterday’s Los Angeles Times blaming Republicans for California’s myriad woes. While the author is correct that, when Republicans had the chance, they didn’t make smart decisions, the reality is that it’s the Democrats who have led California to the desperate place it’s in now. Steve Lopez’s essay doesn’t make the mistake of blaming Republicans for all the state’s problems. He concedes that Democrats...

It’s been 15 years since workers earning the federal minimum wage got a raise. The cost of living has gone up more than 45% since then, with rents and home prices rising faster than incomes in most regions of the country. Yet the nation’s wage floor has stayed stuck at $7.25 an hour.That is poverty pay, and an increase to the federal minimum wage is long overdue. It’s mind-boggling that Congress has gone so long without making even modest adjustments to help the lowest-paid workers. This is the longest stretch of time without an increase to the federal minimum wage...

The media have developed a pathological obsession with shielding Vice President Kamala Harris from any criticism or inconvenient fact.. ince a soft coup ousted President Joe Biden as the Democrat nominee in late July, the media have developed a pathological obsession with shielding Vice President Kamala Harris from any criticism or inconvenient fact. To protect their anointed favorite, the media have engaged in a masterclass of revisionism, unleashing every trick in the book to manipulate their audience into buying the new, carefully crafted image of Harris. They’ve tried to claim that a woman whose office was described by her own...

No matter the outcome of the November elections, it is urgent that there be a widespread recognition that American democracy is in danger and that reforms are essential. No form of government lasts forever, and it would be foolhardy to believe that the United States cannot fall prey to the forces that have ended democracies in many other countries.

n the month before Mathew Perry’s death, a doctor the actor contacted to acquire ketamine called him a “moron” in a text message, according to federal prosecutors. A dealer who authorities say supplied the drug to Perry referred to him as “Chandler” — the sarcastic yet sweet-natured character he played on the hit television show “Friends,” court documents say.

WASHINGTON — Vice presidents seeking the top job almost always feel a need to separate themselves from the presidents they’ve served.For Hubert Humphrey, the moment came late in his campaign. In a nationally televised speech on Sept. 30, 1968, he called for a halt to the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, departing from the Johnson administration’s war policy.George H.W. Bush struggled to establish a distinct identity with voters after eight years as second fiddle to the very popular President Reagan. In his speech to the Republican convention in August 1988, he called for a “kinder, gentler nation” — to which...

Hello and happy Thursday. There are 81 days until the election, and today we are talking about stayin’ alive — for the Harris campaign, the Trump whatever-it-is and for us voters who have 11-plus weeks to go.And for democracy. Don’t forget democracy!First, I know you’ve seen the AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” Trump also posted it on his Truth Social, where truth goes to die. This bromance is hard to watch. Musk’s power and privilege seem to be veering him into Howard Hughes-weird territory, where his crazy theories are matched...

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (D) will run for governor of California in 2026 after current Gov. Gavin Newsom reaches his two-term limit. The Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday: Villaraigosa, who has been out of elected office since leaving Los Angeles City Hall in 2013, joins a crowded field of high-level Democratic candidates that includes Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, former state Controller Betty Yee, state Sen. Toni Atkins, and state schools Supt. Tony Thurmond. All are vying to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is serving his second and final term in office.

After the motion was met with resentment, Democratic National Convention chairman Antonio Villaraigosa had to call the vote three times to reinstate language into their party platform that recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel as well as the words "God-given" in a passage about employment

Never has an NCAA Sports Day been so widely and breathlessly covered as it was on Monday.And never has it been clearer that Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, did not just fall out of a coconut tree.With President Biden recovering from COVID-19, the task of honoring top college athletes from across the country fell to Harris, who performed the same duty last year with much less fanfare.This year, of course, the event occurred the day after Biden announced he was ending his reelection campaign and endorsed Harris as the party’s replacement candidate for president....

Now that President Biden has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be the nominee, it will ultimately be up to Democratic National Convention delegates to formally select a new nominee for their party. While many associate the convention system with less-than-impressive nominees, such as the obscure senator Warren G. Harding, the record isn’t that bad. And even Harding managed to win the presidency

The selection of J.D. Vance on Monday as Donald Trump’s running mate is a direct result of the political media’s failure to understand class in America. For his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was venerated by many journalists and book critics as a powerful voice representing long-overlooked Americans. But he’s no working-class hero.Vance portrayed this group — 35% of Americans, by the way — as tragic victims of alcoholism, drug abuse, laziness and their own self-destructive moral failings. Journalists ran with that, bringing their own stereotypes to depict the working class as angry, uneducated white men driven by economic insecurity...

It's been a week since President Biden's disastrous debate performance, and his political fortunes only appear to be growing worse by the day. Now it all boils down to two questions: Will Biden drop out of the race? And who is in the top position to replace him? The answer to that the second question should be a no brainer — the vice president, of course. I honestly don't know if Harris can win in November, or if she truly is the best candidate to steer this country away from what appears to be certain ruin if Trump wins. What...

It’s that stars-and-stripes, American-flag-waving time of year. And throughout the Golden State, the California flag typically takes a place of honor beside it. But how much do you know about the origins of the state flag — the grizzly bear perched on a patch of green, the red star high on the left, the words “California Republic” below?

They're studying Facebook posts. They're using frame-by-frame video screenshots of faces to match with gargantuan databases of named faces. They're seeking and taking tips from "friends" and relatives and ex-boyfriends. For the UCLA Jewish students who got into a scrap with pro-Hamas illegal campout protestors, no doubt after hearing a slew of antisemitic statements and being blocked from attending class, they're doing exactly what they did to identify and hunt down January 6 protestors. According to the Los Angeles Times, which reports this like it was a good thing: It is shaping up to be perhaps the biggest case in...

A deputy press secretary for Barack Obama's reelection campaign married an ABC reporter over the weekend. The ABC reporter, Matthew Jaffe, "covering the 2012 presidential campaign," according to his biography on the website of ABC News. "For the past year he traveled around the country covering the Republican primary, from the Iowa Straw Poll to the various debates to this year's primaries and caucuses." The deputy press secretary Jaffe married is Katie Hogan. Many members of Obama's reelection team and the press celebrated the wedding together Saturday. Mike Allen of Politico reports on the wedding: MARRIED SATURDAY EVENING at Lake...

...It was a stunning turn for Jones, a gun store manager who in his one term in office has emerged as a leading voice in an ultraconservative insurgence that transformed this largely rural Northern California county into a national symbol of hard-right governance and election denialism \

Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur has training in neither psychiatry nor neurology, yet he included an assessment of President Biden's cognitive functioning in his report declining to bring charges for mishandling classified information. Memory assessment is a complex task and cannot be undertaken over five hours in interviews with attorneys.

Joe Biden is old. Like each of us, he comes from a particular place in history, in his case the LBJ years. And that’s one big reason why his first term has been so full of accomplishment: His age, often cited as the greatest obstacle to his reelection, is actually his superpower. The first presidential election in which Joe Biden was eligible to vote featured Lyndon Johnson beating Barry Goldwater. History remembers LBJ’s presidency as chaotic because of his tragic adventuring in Vietnam, but in other respects it was remarkable. His Great Society echoed Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (FDR was...