Free Republic

<p>Tuesday was a slow news day, and slow news days always mean fewer Internet clicks for the nation’s desperate-to-survive fake news services. Thus, when the story came out that a magnolia tree on the White House grounds that was planted during the presidency of Andrew Jackson almost 200 years ago was going to need to be removed because it was in imminent danger of falling over, some fake news services couldn’t resist trying to turn this seemingly non-controversial story into click-bait.</p>

Barnicle on Biden 2020 bandwagon? After Morning Joe played a clip today of Joe Biden, on The View, giving encouragement to Meghan McCain regarding her father’s illness, Mike Barnicle, choked with emotion, said: “The country is in real need of someone with empathy, and compassion, and clarity. Someone who knows what it’s like to suffer a loss. To be wounded. To reach out to others. To be human. That’s the source of Joe Biden’s strength. That’s what you saw just now.” Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Bunch of Bible-thumpin’ racists . . . That’s in essence how a Joy Reid guest has described Roy Moore’s supporters. On Reid’s MSNBC show this morning, Eric Guster, an Alabama lawyer, said: “Roy Moore’s coalition, they [are] in the rural counties. The Bible Belt. The people who love to go to church on Sunday. The ones who want to build a wall and keep brown people out of the United States.” Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Hang in there, Al baby! That’s Chris Matthews’ message to embattled Senator Al Franken. Despite many of his fellow Dem senators and the head of the DNC calling for Al’s head over allegations of sexual misconduct, Matthews, on this evening’s Hardball, encouraged Franken not to cave—at least not right away. Excerpts: “Now here’s the question. What does he got to gain in quitting? Why isn’t in his interest to say, you know what? I’m going home this holiday season and I’ll think about it . . . The reason I say this is, won’t he regret any impulsive decision? ....

Which kind of intelligence failure is better — the kind that badly understates a threat, such as the one in London, or the kind that overstates a threat, such as the insistent warnings before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction? Even in the best intelligence services, failures are sometimes inevitable. Foresight will never be as sharp as hindsight. Only after the fact — after the Underground blows up, after 9/11, after the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons are nowhere to be found — is it clear what the picture looks like...