Free Republic

The media is growing increasingly unnerved at the fact that their endless attacks on Trump appear not to be having an affect on his poll numbers and at the fact that Trump pwned them twice in 2 days. They decided the only thing to do is ramp up the number of hit pieces. Check the Washington Post and New York Times for reference. The media is always looking for an opportunity to attack Trump. It only takes a sentence or a fragment of one. The media decided there was an opportunity to portray Trump as as too reactionary and therefore...

CHELSEA, Manhattan — Multiple people were injured during an outdoor explosion in Chelsea Saturday night. The explosion happened at 135 23rd St. between Sixth and Seventh avenues. It was not immediately clear how many people were injured or the severity of their injuries. The FDNY is on the scene with the NYPD. The explosion comes after a pipe bomb exploded in Seaside Park, New Jersey near the Semper Five 5K Charity Run Route. The device was placed in a garbage can.

De Blasio, Clinton cronies are carving up the city. Right, developer Bruce RatnerBy Micah Morrison In New York City, the controversy plagued Atlantic Yards development appears to be heading for trouble again. That could create problems for Mayor Bill de Blasio and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. Allies of both Democrats have profited mightily from the project. For over a decade, Atlantic Yards has been at the center of heated disputes over power, profit and privilege in New York. Does the site serve the needs of the taxpayers who financed its development? Or is it primarily a giant boondoggle generating...

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.

When whites say that slavery reparations is a dead issue, that’s not news. When conservative blacks say it, it isn’t news. But when Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says it, you can put a fork in it. There are a few black Americans whose ancestors were never held as slaves in this country. (One of them has a rather important job now — something involving government housing and ’round the clock protection.) Does President Obama deserve a reparations check?...

In yesterday’s Times, the estimable scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. had an odd op-ed article entitled “Ending the Slavery Blame Game. ” What made it odd was its construction. At the heart of the piece was Gates’ very interesting summary of recent scholarship about the complicity of African tribes in capturing African people and selling them to European and American slave traders. Sandwiching this summary, however, was Gates’ bid for op-ed relevance, which was his assertion that this fuller understanding of a broader criminal enterprise would give President Obama “a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the...

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage. There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture...

In a book just released, The Story: A Reporter's Journey, Judith Miller, a key witness in the Libby prosecution, states that Patrick Fitzgerald had offered repeatedly to drop all charges against Lewis Libby if he would "deliver" Vice President Cheney to him. In addition, she charges that Fitzgerald manipulated her into incorrectly testifying about a critical conversation she had with Libby and withheld exculpatory evidence from both her and the defense in order to induce her mistaken testimony – testimony the prosecution knew was made because she was acting under a false belief....[must read snip]....Rizzo, of course, is focused only...

Actor Ben Affleck has made it very clear where his sympathies lie in the Leakgate affair -- and it isn't with the White House. Appearing on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," Affleck charged that President Bush "probably also leaked” CIA agent Valerie Plame's name and so "if he did, you can be hung for that! That's treason!” He continued: "You could be killed. That's not a joking around Tom DeLay 'I'll do a year, I bribed the state officials with corporate money.' That's like they shoot you in the battlefield for doing that.” Affleck also called DeLay a "criminal."

Ben Affleck: Bush Can Be Hung for 'Leaks' in Plamegate By Josh Hart Apr 9, 2006 Actor Ben Affleck suggested this weekend on 'Real Time with Bill Maher' that President Bush “probably leaked” Valerie Plame's name and so “if he did, you can be hung for that! That's treason!” The would be politician and Democrat went through this exchange according to News Busters that gives a brief and rough transcript on how Mr. Affleck came to this conclusion. *** The panel guests were Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) who was quite humorous as he let loose with some funny four-quotes. Bill...

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...

WASHINGTON — They came, they met, they drank. They did not apologize. The much-anticipated “beer summit” of President Obama, the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department in Massachusetts took place Thursday night, accompanied by minute-by-minute reporting from the White House press corps, countdown clocks from the cable news networks, and a last-minute addition by the White House in the form of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. After 10 days of near nonstop news coverage of a case that prompted a thousand news stories about race, the men sat down for...

In “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey,” which hit book store shelves Tuesday, April 7, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller revealed in the final chapter that she now believes that she was induced by then-Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald to give false testimony in the 2007 trial of I. “Lewis” Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Given that Fitzgerald’s three-and-a-half year-long investigation and prosecution of Libby riveted the nation’s capital and generated vast news coverage implying, when not outright declaring, that the Bush administration lied the nation into war, one might think that recantation...

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.

t's the film fans have been waiting decades for. And today, the first trailer for the hotly-anticipated Ghostbusters re-boot was finally released. But while many praised the hilarious clip, showing Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones battling New York's supernatural nasties, some have complained that the film is falling back on racial stereotypes. That's because, while the white leads, McCarthy, Wiig and McKinnon, play brilliant engineers, professors and scientists, Jones' character is a simple NYC subway worker.

What I watched for the next two hours was mostly a tragic underutilizing of four of this country's funniest women — Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon as the evil-ectoplasm battlers of the title, fighting to save a New York that is played primarily by Boston — combined with what felt like the world's longest laser-tag game. the main performers rarely get to display their individual idiosyncratic strengths. It's particularly dispiriting to hear McCarthy, one of the most floridly gifted verbal riffers in comedy, have to utter frat-brah catchphrases like "Let's do this." That kind of lifeless,...

Three Dallas police officers were killed and seven others were wounded Thursday night during a demonstration protesting the police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana this week, according to Chief David O. Brown of the Dallas police.

Hillary Clinton, courting young voters and the broader Democratic base, has promised to one-up President Obama on climate change, vowing to produce a third of the nation's electricity from renewable sources by 2027, three years faster than Mr. Obama, while spending billions of dollars to transform the energy economy. A half-billion solar panels will be installed by 2020, she has promised, seven times the number today, and $60 billion will go to states and cities to develop more climate-friendly infrastructure, such as public transportation and energy-efficient buildings. She would put the United States on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions...

Let’s be clear. The global economy is not working for the majority of people in our country and the world. This is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite. We need real change... We need a president who will vigorously support international cooperation that brings the people of the world closer together, reduces hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war. We also need a president who respects the democratic rights of the people, and who will fight for an economy that protects the interests of working people, not just Wall Street, the drug companies...

Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump? I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe...