Free Republic

There is no way to evaluate the trustworthiness of anonymous sources and unpublished documents, so why try?At this point, it’s safe to say the publicly available reports muddle the Mueller investigation so much that the only thing we “know” is all sides have more than enough circumstantial evidence to justify their pre-existing hopes and dreams. Left-wing partisans would have you believe that Mueller has the goods on Trump, and that conservative critiques of Mueller’s team or the Clinton campaign’s role in creating the so-called Steele dossier are nothing more than bad-faith attempts to discredit the investigation and undermine faith in...

In collusion news today, the New York Times has devoted six reporters to producing the “news” that the previously obscure Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos lies at the heart of the putative case. Their story is “How the Russia inquiry began: A campaign aide, drinks and talk of political dirt.” Paul wrote about it last night here. I think the story is ludicrous on its face. The Times has served as a prime purveyor of the Trump/Russia hysteria. Yet reality has deflated it. Now the Times returns to pump it up. The names have changed, but the song remains the...

After the New York Times on Saturday printed a story headlined “Republican Attacks on Mueller and F.B.I. Open New Rift in G.O.P.,” WikiLeaks couldn’t stand it anymore. In a late-night post on Twitter, WikiLeaks revealed that a Times reporter used to feed State Department email updates of the stories the paper would be publishing DAYS before the stories appeared.

CAIRO — The Egyptian authorities hanged 15 men on Tuesday for an attack in the Sinai Peninsula in 2013, the start of an Islamic insurgency that the military-dominated government has been battling ever since. The hangings, reported by state media, were the biggest mass execution in Egypt since six convicted jihadists were hanged in 2015. A military court found the men guilty on terrorism charges last month for an attack on a military checkpoint in which one army officer and eight soldiers were killed. That assault came amid a surge of violence that swept across Egypt after Egyptian security forces...

A week after authorities arrested a would-be suicide bomber for detonating an explosive in a crowded New York City transit station, the New York Times ran a piece highlighting his charity work in Bangladesh. In a Tuesday A1 story with a print headline of "Subway Bomb Suspect's Mysterious Act of Mercy," the Times reported that a few weeks before the attack, Akayed Ullah participated in charity work in his native country to help Rohingya refugees who fled neighboring Myanmar. "After visiting relatives here in the capital city, Dhaka, he traveled across the country, slept in a mosque and under a...

The New York Times put a condescending, left-wing populist screed disguised as “news analysis” on Monday’s front-page. Reporters Michael Tackett and Jim Tankersley misleadingly assume the tax-cut bill moving through Congress is a sop to the wealthy, then use that false fact to portray Trump as a hypocrite for pushing it, in the would-be expose “Ally of the ‘Little Guy’ In Words, Not Actions”: President Trump rarely misses a chance to offer himself up as the champion of “forgotten” Americans, men and women who feel ignored or derided by elites and believe, as he frequently says, that the “system is...

Kenyerber Aquino Merchán was 17 months old when he starved to death. His father left before dawn to bring him home from the hospital morgue. He carried Kenyerber’s skeletal frame into the kitchen and handed it to a mortuary worker who makes house calls for Venezuelan families with no money for funerals. Kenyerber’s spine and rib cage protruded as the embalming chemicals were injected. Aunts shooed away curious young cousins, mourners arrived with wildflowers from the hills, and relatives cut out a pair of cardboard wings from one of the empty white ration boxes that families increasingly depend on amid...

The publisher of The New York Times Co. is stepping down after 25 years and will be succeeded by his 37-year-old son, the Times announced Thursday. Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. will retire as of Dec. 31 but will remain as chairman of the board of directors, the Times said. His son and current deputy publisher, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, will take over as publisher. “It is the greatest honor to serve The Times — and the people who make it what it is — as the next publisher,” the younger Sulzberger, known as A.G., said in a staffwide email. Sulzberger praised...

The Times set out to compare the trustworthiness of Obama compared to President Donald Trump. "In his first 10 months in office, [Trump] has told 103 separate untruths, many of them repeatedly. Obama told 18 over his entire eight-year tenure," the piece reads.

Sub-Headline: With Twitter as his Excalibur, the president takes on his doubters, powered by long spells of cable news and a dozen Diet Cokes. But if Mr. Trump has yet to bend the presidency to his will, he is at least wrestling it to a draw.

You need the First Amendment precisely when your ideas offend others or flout the majority’s orthodoxies. And then it protects more than your freedom to speak your mind; it guards your freedom not to speak the mind of another. Thus, in classic “compelled speech” rulings, the Supreme Court has protected the right not to be forced to say, do or create anything expressing a message one rejects. Most famously, in West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), it barred a state from denying Jehovah’s Witnesses the right to attend public schools if they refused to salute the flag. In Wooley v. Maynard...

White House chief of staff John Kelly called the State Department on Thursday to dispel media reports that a plan had been developed to remove Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, agency spokeswoman Heather Nauert said.

There is no forgiveness from some on the left. It doesn’t matter how many decades or tens of thousands of articles a publication contributes to liberal causes and the overall progressive agenda. If they have a single moment of clarity and fairness, they’re evil and no longer deserve support from the leftist elites. That’s the scenario surrounding Hollywood snowflake Debra Messing. The Will and Grace star, who is known for being to the left of most leftists in Hollywood, took great offense to the posting of a single article: The frailty of liberalism isn’t universal, despite claims by many right-wing...

The Boston Globe recent ran an article where it acknowledged the obvious: the long term goal of the gun control movement (recently relabeled as  “gun safety”), is to confiscate a large number of Americans' firearms. The Globe has almost everything else wrong in its article, but they are honest about the desire for gun confiscation.From the bostonglobe.com:In other words, the proposals aren’t just difficult to enact in the current political climate; their practical effects would also be quite limited. On occasion, though, leading Democrats will make oblique reference to a more sweeping policy change: seizing a huge number of...

After weeks of continuously unfolding abuse scandals, men have become, quite literally, unbelievable. What any given man might say about gender politics and how he treats women are separate and unrelated phenomena. Liberal or conservative, feminist or chauvinist, woke or benighted, young or old, found on Fox News or in The New Republic, a man’s stated opinions have next to no relationship to behavior. Through sheer bulk, the string of revelations about men from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and, this week, to Charlie Rose and John Lasseter, have forced men...

A profile in The Times of Tony Hovater, a white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer in Ohio, elicited a huge amount of feedback this weekend, most of it sharply critical. Here’s how the piece came about, why we wrote it and why we think it was important to do so. The genesis of the story was the aftermath of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August, the terrifying Ku Klux Klan-like images of young white men carrying tiki torches and shouting “Jews will not replace us,” and the subsequent violence that included the killing of a woman, Heather D....

New York Times columnist Charles Blow took to Twitter Friday afternoon with a message of unity, no doubt inspired by Divine Providence after rejoicing in the Thanksgiving holiday. Just kidding. The author of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” told his followers point blank that Trump fans need not apply for friendship. If u support Trump, we don't have anything to talk abt & we can't be friends. This isn't abt parties or ideology; This is abt right & wrong— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) November 24, 2017 He followed up his Tweet saying that Trump’s lying was the cornerstone of his...

As we watch Roy Moore thumping his Bible to defend himself from accusations of child molestation, let me toss out a verbal hand grenade: To some degree, liberals practice the values that conservatives preach. This is complicated terrain with lots of exceptions, and the recent scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Al Franken underscore that liberals can be skunks as much as anyone else. Yet if one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it’s striking that conservatives champion “family values” even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast,...

New York Times reports: One idea now being discussed under this scenario, brought up by two different White House officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, would be for Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama to immediately appoint Attorney General Jeff Sessions to what had been his seat when it becomes vacant again. Mr. Sessions remains highly popular among Alabama Republicans, but his relationship with President Trump has waned since he recused himself from the investigation of the role that Russia played in last year’s campaign.

<p>WASHINGTON — One is a rail-thin liberal idealist who spent his career in government, on campaigns and at think tanks. The other is an overweight pragmatist who made a fortune lobbying for all manner of liberal boogeymen.</p> <p>And now, in a twist with Shakespearean undertones, the two influential Washington brothers have found themselves on opposite sides of the scandals over Russian interference in the 2016 election.</p>