Free Republic

Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady -- a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation -- is a congenital liar. Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit. 1. Remember the story she told about studying The Wall Street Journal to explain her 10,000 percent profit in 1979 commodity trading? We now know that was a lie told to turn aside accusations that...

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Donald J. Trump would not be Silicon Valley’s first choice as president. Or its second. Or maybe even its third. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee wants to restrict immigration while bringing back manufacturing. He compulsively uses tech products like Twitter but is not in awe of the people who built them. He made his fortune the old-fashioned way, by going into the family business, in the old-fashioned industry of real estate. He’s not the valley’s kind of entrepreneur. Worst of all, Mr. Trump is revealing Silicon Valley’s vulnerability. In recent years, technology companies have extended their...

With the California primary fast approaching, the media are rolling out their favorite fairy tale about how Republican Pete Wilson’s support for Proposition 187 in 1994 was a historic, game-changing error for the GOP, driving Hispanics from the party for good! Both CNN and MSNBC retold this completely bogus narrative this week. NPR rolls it out once every two weeks. I — along with other people capable of reading election returns — have written about this forever. I did most recently in “Adios, America,” in a chapter titled, “I Wrote This Chapter After Noticing How Stupid Rich People Are,” inspired...

At a news conference in Trump Tower on Tuesday morning, the presumptive Republican nominee Donald J. Trump shared his thoughts about the political press and Harambe, the gorilla that Cincinnati Zoo officials shot and killed after a small child wandered into his enclosure. Mr. Trump had nicer things to say about the gorilla.

SACRAMENTO — When Bernie Sanders held a rally at an outdoor stadium here the other night, more than 15,000 people turned out in a display of cheering, chanting, singing and cartwheels. Gov. Jerry Brown, the state’s most prominent Democrat, was not there, but he might as well have been. Mr. Sanders’s speech was replete with the kind of to-the-barricades flourishes that have long been part of Mr. Brown’s campaign language. “The political establishment is getting nervous,” Mr. Sanders said. “The corporate establishment is getting nervous. And they should be nervous. Because real change is coming.” As the Democratic presidential primary...

The senior senator who once told New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand not to lose "too much weight" because he liked his girls "chubby" was the late Hawaii Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, the New York Times reports. In a memoir published earlier this month, Gillibrand revealed that some of her male colleagues in Congress felt free to comment about her weight. “Don’t lose too much weight now," one "of my favorite older members of the Senate" told her, squeezing her waist. "I like my girls chubby!”

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Well, that's what you've all wanted. That's what everybody's been asking for I don't know how long. That was a press conference. That was a press conference. That was the kind of press conference Republicans voters have been dying to see for who knows how many years. Greetings, my friends. Great to have you here, and great to be back. A short busy broadcast week. Rush Limbaugh back at it. It is 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program; the email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com. Say what you will about Donald Trump -- how many years have...

Hamburg, Germany — WE Germans can never escape the trauma of our recent history. That has rarely been clearer than today, as we look around our Continent and across the Atlantic. There are almost too many differences to mention between what happened in the 1930s over here and what is going on today. And it goes without saying that Donald J. Trump and Austria’s Norbert Hofer are not Adolf Hitler. Still, Germany’s slide into a popular embrace of authoritarianism in the 1930s offers a frame for understanding how liberal democracies can suddenly turn toward anti-liberalism. Setting aside debate about whether...

he NYT says “Donald Trump’s Campaign Stumbles As it Tries to Go Big.” Evidence of the stumbling? 1) Trump met with “dozens of female chief executives and entrepreneurs” last week but “never publicized” it! Instead of putting out this staged campaign news, Trump put out real news (that he’d fired political director RIck Wiley, the man who crash-landed Scott Walker’s campaign.) 2) Trump only has one communications aide. One! Why, Hillary has “a press team of more than a dozen, including people devoted solely to the news media for black and Hispanic audiences”! 3) Trump hasn’t yet violated the spirit...

It was 6:30 a.m. at the United States Military Academy, the sun was rising over the Hudson River, and Paula Broadwell was in athletic gear. With a half-dozen women, she rotated between sprints and burpees. Sweating onto the pavement, the group was perched atop an overlook called Trophy Point, in the shadow of a 46-foot battle monument memorializing those killed in the Civil War. There is a female statue in bronze at the top, arms outstretched regally, who is said to represent “fame.” Ms. Broadwell was here in April for a 40th anniversary celebration for the academy’s first class of...

The holiday weekend is often seen here as the start of heightened violence ... That has been particularly worrying this year to community leaders and city officials, as they grapple with a rise in gun violence that has traumatized some neighborhoods and left city officials searching for new ways to subdue street crime. "If something doesn't change, if we don’t get jobs for these kids, if we don’t change the economic situation, I'm worried that we could be looking at a blood bath," said the Rev. Corey Brooks, a pastor on the city’s South Side, a mostly African-American area where...

Democrats could hardly believe their good fortune last month when it became clear that Hillary Clinton was headed to a general election showdown with Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump carried so much baggage and had insulted so many voting blocs that some Clinton supporters began to imagine a landslide. But early optimism that this would be an easy race is evaporating. In the corridors of Congress, on airplane shuttles between New York and Washington, at donor gatherings and on conference calls, anxiety is spreading through the Democratic Party that Mrs. Clinton is struggling to find her footing.

BISMARCK, N.D. — A constant stream of changes and scuffles are unsettling Donald J. Trump’s campaign team, including the abrupt dismissal this week of his national political director. A sense of paranoia is growing among his campaign staff members, including some who have told associates they believe that their Trump Tower offices in New York may be bugged, according to three people briefed on the conversations. And there is confusion among his donors, who want to give money to a “super PAC” supporting Mr. Trump, but have received conflicting signals from top aides about which one to support. On Thursday,...

Ever since talk radio, cable news and the Internet emerged in the 1990s as potent political forces on the right, Republicans have used those media to attack their opponents through a now-familiar two-step. Political operatives would secretly place damaging information with friendly outlets like The Drudge Report and Fox News and with radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh — and then they would work to get the same information absorbed into the mainstream media. Candidates themselves would avoid being seen slinging mud, if possible, so as to avoid coming across as undignified or desperate.

Whistling past the graveyard. I really don’t even know why the Democratic Party spends a dime on communication staff. Why not just hand out copies of the New York Times to everyone? It would accomplish the same purpose, and most of the time they’re all on social media posting links to the Times anyway. No matter what happens, the Times is there and ready to spin it to put the story in the best - or least bad - light for the Democrats. Those polls you’ve heard about in recent weeks that show Trump either pulling into the lead or...

Officially, the top world leaders who gather Thursday at the Group of 7 summit meeting will talk about shared concerns, like global trade or the Islamic State. But their private discussions are likely to cover a topic that is not on the agenda: Donald J. Trump. President Obama now hears questions in his meetings with world leaders about whether Mr. Trump has a realistic shot at becoming president. For months, Mr. Obama has answered those questions with an emphatic “no.” But this week’s summit meeting in Japan is the first among major allies since Mr. Trump moved decisively toward securing...

Unlike the butchery that bookended it, it merited no presidential statements, no saturation television coverage. But what took place at 6101 Prentice Street on Aug. 21 may say more about the nature of gun violence in the United States than any of those far more famous rampages. It is a snapshot of a different sort of mass violence — one that erupts with such anesthetic regularity that it is rendered almost invisible, except to the mostly black victims, survivors and attackers (...) “Clearly, if it’s black-on-black, we don’t get the same attention because most people don’t identify with that. Most...

Continuing to treat a victory over Senator Bernie Sanders as a fait accompli, Hillary Clinton on Sunday questioned Donald J. Trump’s business record and assailed his ideas, warning that the coming weeks represented a critical period in which, if left unchallenged, Mr. Trump could “normalize himself” as he seeks to broaden his support.

CAIRO — In an eerie coincidence, the EgyptAir jetliner that plunged into the Mediterranean on Thursday was once the target of political vandals who wrote in Arabic on its underside, “We will bring this plane down.” Three EgyptAir security officials said the threatening graffiti, which appeared about two years ago, had been the work of aviation workers at Cairo Airport. Playing on the phonetic similarity between the last two letters in the plane’s registration, SU-GCC, and the surname of Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, some workers also wrote “traitor” and “murderer.”

Same tactics the liberal MSM used against me It was the most predictable thing, and for me, a very familiar thing as well. The New York Times, which might as well be the official newsletter of the Democrat Party and the Hillary campaign, goes around and interviews every woman it can find who’s ever had contact with Donald Trump – then writes a story that drips with implication he treats them boorishly and in a sexist manner. But there’s one problem: Their star witness immediately came forward and said the Times completely misrepresented what she told them. Case in point:...