Free Republic

New York Times reporter Nick Confessore jabbed at Trump critics Tuesday over their claims that White House officials bucking subpoenas might herald the end of democracy. In just two tweets, Confessore pointed out that there is precedent for a showdown between a White House and an oppositional Congress over who does and who doesn’t comply with the inevitable subpoenas. “Another crazy NYT story here about the White House ignoring a congressional subpoena, like it’s a choice or something,” Confessore tweeted, along with a NYT story about an Obama official refusing to comply with a subpoena. He followed that with a...

If reason ruled in politics, the Democratic party would urge its presidential candidates to eliminate the vitriolic posturing from their campaign, and would then begin to concentrate on the only question that matters: Who can beat Reagan? That is different from asking whether Walter Mondale would make a better chief executive than Gary Hart, or whether Hart’s “new ideas” are preferable to Mondale’s old-line liberal values. What troubles me is that, given the rising nastiness, this campaign begins more and more to resemble the terrible script written in 1972, when another new face, George McGovern, was buried by Richard Nixon’s...

On February 15, 2016, the National Review took unprecedented action. In an all-out plea to Republican voters to stop Donald Trump before it was too late, the magazine enlisted 22 of the right’s most prominent voices to band together and throw support elsewhere, to save the party. The “Conservatives Against Trump” issue didn’t move the needle. Despite a lineup of pleas against Trump that included Glenn Beck, Cal Thomas, Mona Charen, Michael Medved and Dana Loesch, Trump surged in the polls that month, expanding his lead over primary opponents at a critical juncture of the race. Trump voters considered these...

Think about what happened here, about what is described in that report. The country’s elections were attacked by a foreign power. Russia is a vote suppressor. Understanding that,what motivation would this President have to move a finger to stop them? Or the Republican Party, for that matter? Theonly hope for accountability, perhaps before a court of law after Trump isno longer President, is theDemocratic Party that has the power to start impeachment proceedings. Should Democrats take impeachment off thetable, they would let Trump get away with it. It is that elementary. There is no guarantee that he will not repeat...

If it were up to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, outgoing Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen wouldn’t ever find work again. The freshman congresswoman tore into Nielsen on Twitter Tuesday night — saying the now-retired DHS secretary doesn’t deserve to get a “lucrative deal” or “prestigious” new post — on account of her role in last year’s family separation crisis. “In stealing 1000s of children, deporting their parents,& refusing to provide info for reunification, Sec. Nielsen oversaw one of the largest-scale human rights violations in recent history,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Awarding her a lucrative deal or prestigious post is to legitimize+celebrate that abuse.”...

White House counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway did not take kindly to Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace’s line of questioning when he turned the discussion to her marriage. Wallace asked about the state of her marriage to George Conway, a vocal critic of President Donald Trump. Wallace began by showing a string of tweets and comments from George blasting Trump. Followed by video of the president responding to the criticism with misogynist immature insults, calling him a “wack job” and “Mr. Kellyanne.” Wallace then flatly asked: “Why is your husband attacking your boss?”

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a “highly profitable scam” that “never lived up to the values it espoused,” according to former SPLC staffer Bob Moser. The New Yorker on Thursday published a scathing essay from Moser, now a Rolling Stone reporter, accusing the left-wing non-profit of “ripping off donors” while turning a blind eye to sexual harassment and racial discrimination within its own ranks. The SPLC fired co-founder Morris Dees on March 13 over unspecified conduct issues. The SPLC announced Dees’ firing after roughly two dozen SPLC employees previously signed a letter to the organization’s leadership expressing their...

We all knew why Democrats support open borders. We all knew their goal was more imported dependent voters. Finally one Democrat pundit comes clean. The goal of the modern day Democrat Party is to replace Americans with foreigners and drive the GOP to extinction. Sadly, several Republicans in the Pretend Party (12 last week) support this plan. Liberal David Atkins posted a thread on the Democrat Party’s plan for domination — replace Americans and capture the vote forever. David is a contributor at the Washington Monthly and far left Rolling Stone.

Establishment media journalists and pundits uncritically accepted and promoted Jussie Smollett’s elaborate “hate crime” story, just one week after the mainstream media fostered the false narrative surrounding the Covington Catholic students, resulting in a laundry list of impending defamation lawsuits. Here’s 12 establishment media commentators and journalists who fueled the Jussie Smollett flames with impassioned and uncritical reactions to the Empire actor’s imaginative account of his supposed run-in with Trump supporters in “MAGA country” Chicago. 1. Eugene Scott – Washington Post‘s The Fix reporter 2. Don Lemon – CNN journalist 3. Yamiche Alcindor – PBS NewsHour White House correspondent 4....

The biggest mystery in Washington—second only to how the Mueller probe will end—is how President Donald Trump manages to maintain his bright fluorescent orange glow regardless of the season. Thankfully, the New York Times dug in on this pressing question, interviewing current and former White House staffers in an attempt to get to the bottom of this important story. Officially, the White House line is that Trump gets his glow from “good genes,” but like many other explanations from this administration, that seems patently false. Other theories have been floated to explain Trump’s skin color, including tanning beds, spray tan,...

One of the founding members of the band Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show died this week after a brief illness. According to Page Six, Ray Sawyer died Monday at age 81. He mostly sang in the background and played various percussion instruments in several of the band's songs, but he was on lead vocals for the 1972 hit "The Cover of Rolling Stone." The song, written by cartoonist and writer Shel Silverstein, sang a tale about the band wanting to appear on the cover of the popular music magazine. Four months after the song was released, the band accomplished...

Supervisors at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, provided fake green cards and Social Security numbers to undocumented employees, according to a report in the Washington Post. Anibal Romero, a lawyer representing five immigrants who were undocumented while working at the Trump property, told the newspaper that he turned the fraudulent documents over to the FBI. “I’m confident that federal and state authorities will conduct a complete and thorough investigation,” Romero told the New York Daily News in an interview. Romero first contacted Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor investigating the president, but Mueller told him it was not within his jurisdiction. A few weeks...

It will come as no surprise that the White House is in chaos, but what is shocking is that this fact is being confirmed by President Donald Trump’s outgoing Chief of Staff John Kelly. In an exit interview with the Los Angeles Times, Kelly admits that the White House is not quite the “well-oiled machine” that Trump loves to brag about. Two specific instances he cited as chaotic were the implementation of the travel ban and the “zero-tolerance” family separation policy at the Mexican border.

Four years ago, Claas Relotius was named CNN's Journalist of the Year. Earlier this month, the 33-year-old Der Spiegel writer was celebrated as Germany's top reporter. On Wednesday, his rising star came crashing down as a lengthy article in his own magazine outlined repeated falsification in his reporting. In fact, the piece said Relotius is "not a reporter," and that "he tells fairy tales whenever he pleases." The article continues: "truth and lies are confused in his texts, because some stories are clean ... others completely invented." ... But his admission of guilt was apparently hard-won. On Dec. 3 —...

Former Arizona lawman Joe Arpaio sued CNN on Monday, arguing the cable outlet inaccurately labeled him a “felon” in a broadcast and has made no efforts to correct its mistake. Mr. Arpaio was found guilty of a misdemeanor contempt of court last year, not a felony — and was quickly pardoned by President Trump. He has asked the courts to expunge his original misdemeanor conviction, in a case that’s still pending. In his lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C., Mr. Arpaio also sued Huffington Post and Rolling Stone, which he says also made inaccurate statements about his...

Swift’s endorsement is not without commercial risk. According to an analysis by the New York Times, she is most popular in rural areas in the West and Midwest that tend to vote conservative, like Utah, Montana and Nevada, and only modestly popular in Tennessee...."OUR GIRL no more," one posted. "They took her from us and turned her into one of their brain dead zombies," another wrote.

The Nebraska Republican gave an emotional speech on the Senate floor before returning to business as usual Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) gave a little performance on the Senate floor last night. As Sasse and his colleagues waited to receive the FBI’s report on its investigation into the sexual assault claims made against Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican from Nebraska took to the podium to talk about how friends of his have been raped, how the #MeToo movement is “a good thing” and how President Trump’s mockery of Christine Blasey Ford earlier this week was unacceptable. “We all know that the president...

You’ll cry laughing at Michael Moore’s new doc Fahrenheit 11/9, an unmissable provocation about the rise and rise of Donald J. Trump that should help get out the vote in November better than any limp recruitment outreach. One of Moore’s best and most incisively funny films — right up there with Roger & Me (1989), Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Sicko (2007) — his latest goes way past taking potshots at the Donald, though it does that with piercing intelligence and wounding wit. Rather, he wants to show us that this celebrity Commander-in-Chief didn’t just fall from the sky. The...

And in Lovelock’s view, the Earth’s self-regulating system is seriously out of whack, thanks largely to our 150-year fossil fuel binge. “You could quite seriously look at climate change as a response of the system intended to get rid of an irritating species: us humans,” Lovelock told me in 2007 when I visited him at his house in Devon, England, for a profile in Rolling Stone. “Or at least cut them back to size.” By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as...

“If there is a sense of cultural irrelevance hovering around me, that’s fine,” says the screenwriter and novelist behind ‘American Psycho,’ ‘Less Than Zero’ Over the past three decades, novelist Bret Easton Ellis has dealt in ultraviolence, casual nihilism and the skewering of America’s superficialities. With his last book, Imperial Bedrooms approaching its 10-year anniversary, it began to seem that Ellis was spinning his wheels. With several savagely reviewed screenwriting ventures in recent years — the 2013 Lindsay Lohan/James Deen erotic thriller The Canyons didn’t exactly set the world on fire — the Bret Easton Ellis brand might not hold...