Free Republic

A story is making the rounds on Facebook that claims Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is calling for "ID badges" for American Muslims. The image on the story is of Jewish children wearing yellow starts during the Holocaust. Very frightening--and a lie. Step 1: Seed. The lie begins with a Yahoo! profile in which Trump is asked, supposedly (the reporter does not provide his exact question), "require registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form of special identification that noted their religion." Trump does not say yes or no. Instead, he dodges the question, and comes back to the...

I'm sure members of the Circle of Jerks will look on this and give it a complete pass. They will not see the media bias. But even Democrats in Kentucky are expressing outrage at the Lexington Herald-Leader's decision to run an editorial cartoon comparing Matt Bevin's children to terrorists. The cartoonist, Joel Pett, was reacting to Matt Bevin's call to curtail the influx of Syrian refugees. Bevin has multiple children adopted from overseas and regularly conducts Christian mission trips to Africa. You'd think a man like that might be someone to listen to when even he expresses concerns about Syrian...

RedState's own Leon Wolf did a great job exposing the Politico story about Ben Carson and West Point as a lie. Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel is also churning out great information on Twitter regarding the story. I want to focus on what Donald Trump is doing with the story, however. Yesterday, November 5, Donald Trump had this to say about Politico: Look, Politico is so dishonest in so many different things. This Politico website or whatever the hell they call it, I mean, they write about me. We don't deal with them anymore because the level of dishonesty is...

[SNIP] THE FACTS As we have explained before, the only thing close to a 200,000 figure is an announcement in September by Secretary of State John Kerry that the United States was prepared to boost the number of total refugees accepted from around the world in fiscal 2016, from 70,000 to 85,000. Then, in 2017, Kerry said that 100,000 would be accepted. That adds up to 185,000 over two years. But this would be the total number of refugees, not the number of refugees from Syria. By law, the president every fiscal year sets the maximum number of refugees the...

Suggestion for John Kerry: if traveling makes you so tired that you say things undermining the war against radical Islamic terrorism, stay home on Nantucket and conduct your diplomacy by Skype . . . On today's Morning Joe, here's how Mark Halperin explained Kerry's despicable statement about the "legitimacy" and "rationale" of the Charlie Hebdo attacks: "Secretary Kerry has a history when he's tired in particular after he hurtles around the world of speaking imprecisely." Was Kerry speaking "imprecisely"—or did he let the truth slip of precisely how he and President Obama really feel? View the video here.

By now, there’s a reasonable chance you’ve seen Fox Business anchor Neil Cavuto’s interview with Million Student March organizer Keely Mullen. It was all over the Internet in recent days -- and particularly the right-leaning portion of said Internet, which delighted in a liberal college student struggling to explain how giving everyone free college would be paid for. The exchange was, in a word, uncomfortable. Cavuto began by giving Mullen the floor to lay out the demands of her group, which orchestrated student walkouts at 110 college campuses last Thursday. They were: free tuition at public universities, the cancellation of...

There's been a lot of arrant nonsense spoken since the Paris attacks, but Margaret Carlson's might just take the cake . . . On today's Morning Joe, Bloomberg columnist Carlson suggested that because the US is better than Europe at assimilation, potential terrorists sneaking into our country might not carry out their plots. Said Carlson: "maybe they become Americanized, maybe the anger goes away. Maybe what they snuck in to do they're not going to do because we do have an acceptance of these people." Great point, Margaret. If only we'd had a little longer to hug it out with...

As of early this morning, Matt Drudge was carrying a link to a story headlining how President Obama is "under fire for saying ISIS 'contained' just hours before Paris attack." Well, Obama is under some fire, but Drudge's link is to coverage at the UK Daily Mail. That's unfortunately unsurprising, because there is little to no mention of Obama's naive, foolish and callous statement in the U.S. establishment press. So Obama may be "under fire" from people who are paying attention, but low-information news consumers (and voters) who didn't happen to see the original Thursday interview will likely remain unaware...

PALM BEACH, Fla. — The patriarchs of this quiet island of millionaires threw up roadblocks when Donald Trump swooped in and turned its historic oceanfront Mar-a-Lago mansion into a private club. The town council, seeing Trump as an ostentatious outsider, handed him a list of restrictions as he sought to transform the property in the 1990s. Membership, traffic, party attendance, even photography — all would be strictly limited. But Trump undercut his adversaries with a searing attack, claiming that local officials seemed to accept the established private clubs in town that had excluded Jews and blacks while imposing tough rules...

A lot of conservative voters — especially those old enough to have lived through the high inflation of the 1970s — are convinced that America is currently suffering from an inflation problem. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) pandered to those voters in a recent Republican presidential debate, blaming the "loose money" policies of the Federal Reserve for raising the prices of various consumer products. But new data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that overall, prices aren't going up. At all. Between September and October, prices actually fell slightly. And over the past year, the inflation rate was...

A lot of conservative voters — especially those old enough to have lived through the high inflation of the 1970s — are convinced that America is currently suffering from an inflation problem. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) pandered to those voters in a recent Republican presidential debate, blaming the "loose money" policies of the Federal Reserve for raising the prices of various consumer products. But new data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that overall, prices aren't going up. At all. Between September and October, prices actually fell slightly. And over the past year, the inflation rate was...

What We Know So Far Hastert, the former Speaker of the House, was indicted Thursday on federal charges of evading reporting requirements and lying to the FBI The Illinois Republican allegedly agreed to pay an unnamed individual $3.5 million for previous misconduct Source: Investigators considered including a second alleged victim in the Hastert indictment, but ultimately chose not to do so. A source familiar with the investigation told BuzzFeed News that U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon considered but did not pursue additional charges against former Speaker Dennis Hastert, which would have included a reference to an Individual B, one of potentially...

Another nice catch by Andrew Kaczynski and BuzzFeed to go with the old clipping of Carson’s mother telling a newspaper in 1997 that the stabbing incident most certainly happened. Nothing’s going to prove that definitively, but knowing for a fact that Carson was telling this story before he had any reason to (when he had every professional reason not to) is the next best thing. And every time one of Carson’s biographical anecdotes is tested and checks out upon close scrutiny, the impulse to believe him among those who are already well disposed to him and see him as...

Mitt Romney has been mocked for suggesting he could have got an “E” letter grade. But according to a copy of his freshman year report card he could in fact have gotten an “E” letter grade.

(AUDIO-AT-LINK) Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York says Republican opposition to Loretta Lynch’s nomination as attorney general to replace Eric Holder is racially motivated. Rangel added that current Republicans have a “big a tradition out of hating slaves and black folks” because southern Dixiecrats changed parties and became Republicans. “Well first of all we only have one black over there, a Republican, so I don’t have to tell him what the country is all about,” Rangel said of the Senate, referring to Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey is also black....

Speaking in Iowa Wednesday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that all her grandparents had immigrated to the United States, a story that conflicts with public census and other records related to her maternal and paternal grandparents. The story of her grandmother specifically immigrating is one Clinton has told before. Clinton’s sole foreign-born grandparent, Hugh Rodham Sr., immigrated as a child. “Her grandparents always spoke about the immigrant experience and, as a result she has always thought of them as immigrants,” a Clinton spokesman told BuzzFeed News. “As has been correctly pointed out, while her grandfather was an immigrant,...

Supporters of Al Gore have begun a round of conversations among themselves and with the former vice president about his running for president in 2016, the latest sign that top Democrats have serious doubts that Hillary Clinton is a sure thing. Gore, 67, won the popular vote in the 2000 election, and has been mentioned as a possible candidate in every contested Democratic primary since then. He instead spent much of the 2000s focused on environmental campaigning and business ventures. He has largely slipped out of public view more recent years. But in recent days, “they’re getting the old gang...

Donald Trump is a racist, sexist hypocrite who doesn't understand the economy (or basic math) and probably doesn't have anything resembling an inner life—but the man sure can put on a good show! Good enough that thousands of people who get off on the xenophobic, hate-filled subtext of his blathering will pack half a stadium to watch his combover blow in the wind. Which leaves one question for the sane among us: why is a television punchline appealing to people now? Andrew Kaczynski ✔ ‎@BuzzFeedAndrew Pro-Trump Twitter is such a weird place 11:30 AM - 23 Aug 2015 · Big...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is standing by his past support for universal health care. “I want people taken care of in the country, okay? You can call it anything you want, but I want — including people that don’t have anything,” The Donald told radio host John Fredericks in an interview Wednesday. “We gotta do that.” Trump said in 1999 — when he was flirting with a presidential rub on the Reform Party ticket — that the U.S. should make health care an entitlement and that coverage should be universal. “I would put forward a comprehensive health care program...

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was called out on French television for a tweet he sent about the deadly terrorist attack in Paris on Friday. The former speaker and presidential candidate had speculated in a tweet that citizens with concealed carry permits for guns would have stopped the deadly shooting at a Paris concert hall. Gingrich's tweet prompted France 24's Mark Owen to say he found capitalizing on crises to advance a political agenda to be shameful. "Newt Gingrich, shame on you," Owen said. "So he's using this atrocity to make his point that people should be able...