Free Republic

Here’s the deal: Presidential candidates issue plenty of pointed barbs in debates, but they use a lot of filler language, too. Phrases such as “let’s be clear” and “the end of the day,” buy the speaker time to collect themselves, think ahead and formulate an answer. Among the Democratic contenders, the fact is, Vice President Joe Biden utters them most frequently (and “the fact is” has been his most-used phrase). The Wall Street Journal identified 23 commonly used three-, four- and five-word phrases and their variations spoken by candidates during the four Democratic presidential debates and tracked the number of...

The Democratic Party’s internal dispute over Medicare for All has reached this battleground state, and so far, supporters of a single-payer health care system are finding a tough audience. Union members in this labor stronghold state have expressed unease with Medicare for All, fearing they would lose health benefits that were hard-won over years of negotiations. A survey of 600 likely voters commissioned by the Detroit Regional Chamber this summer found that a majority opposed a Medicare for All proposal that would eliminate private health insurance, as proposed by Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Kamala Harris, a...

President Obama argues that the election gave him a mandate to raise taxes on high earners, and the White House indicates that he won't compromise on this issue as the so-called fiscal cliff approaches. But tax rates are already high—much higher than is commonly understood—and increasing them will likely further depress the economy, especially by affecting the number of hours Americans work. Taking into account all taxes on earnings and consumer spending—including federal, state and local income taxes, Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, excise taxes, and state and local sales taxes—Edward Prescott has shown (especially in the Quarterly Review...

It seems the prosecutors feared it would just be too humiliating to admit they had nothing, and hoped they’d somehow stumble on . . . something. Still, Thursday’s final retreat, dropping most charges at the very end, was a shocker. It left the judge dismissing those charges “with prejudice,” so the state can never refile them. And Exxon’s infuriated lawyers say those claims “have cost in many respects the most severe reputation harm to the company and to the executives,” so they want still stronger sanctions. Judge Ostrager has 30 days to issue a decision. The prosecutors are surely praying he’ll find...

Last Thursday, in a move that surprised everyone but perhaps shouldn’t have come as a surprise at all, New York State Attorney General Tish James withdrew two counts of fraud against ExxonMobil during her closing arguments in the flimsy case she and her predecessor, Eric Schneiderman, spent the last half-decade pursuing against the energy giant. Tellingly, AG James dismissed the two of her original fraud counts that were based on laws requiring demonstration of actual harm in order to obtain a positive judgment. Her suit claimed that ExxonMobil’s alleged “fraud” of keeping two separate estimates of the future costs of...

A reporter who now works for the New York Times failed to report on public records, which he obtained in April, that cut against Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D., Mass.) claim that she was fired from a teaching position in 1971 due to pregnancy discrimination. Reid Epstein, who was then working for the Wall Street Journal, filed an open-records request with the Riverdale Board of Education on April 2 seeking “to inspect or obtain” copies of public records relating to Warren’s time teaching at Riverdale during the 1970-1971 school year. In response to his request, Epstein on April 10 received school-board...

Book includes how Steele was commissioned to write dossier Robert Reich: Trump is an international mobster The former journalists Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch are to publish a book on Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia, including an account of how they commissioned the British ex-spy Christopher Steele to write his dossier on the future president. Crime in Progress: The Secret History of the Trump-Russia Investigation will be published in December by Penguin Random House in the US and UK. Simpson and Fritsch founded the Washington intelligence firm Fusion GPS. In summer 2015, it began investigating Trump and Moscow. It hired...

Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” network political analyst Carl Bernstein said if President Donald Trump asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate 2020 presidential hopeful former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, it is echoed of “Watergate.” Bernstein said, “Well, I think the first thing is to find out exactly what has happened here. And if the reporting of Shane Harris and The Wall Street Journal is accurate and it seems to be it clearly moves toward a grievance abuse of power by the president of the United States.”

President Donald Trump overruled the adamant objections of nearly his entire trade team when he ordered the imposition of 10% tariffs on China's remaining $300 billion of exports to the United States, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. Trump, in his decision announced on Twitter Thursday, said China has not made good on a promise to buy American agricultural goods in large quantities, and as a consequence the U.S. would impose new tariffs starting Sept. 1. (please see link, for full story)

First, take a deep breath. Now take a look at the Wall Street Journal. The otherwise fine newspaper editorially on Saturday blasted President Trump. For what? For not killing Iranians and blowing up Iranian targets to show how super our American power is. The president acted humanely and rationally, weighing proportionality in response to Iran’s downing of our spy drone over international waters (we say) or Iranian waters (they say). The WSJ, of course, is an authority on the subject of territoriality and sovereignty and the respect thereof. The newspaper for years insisted that the United States should have no...

It may seem a bit anti-climatic but this is the story that stuck in my craw like a tablespoon of cinnamon - Boomer Bequest Is Millennial Misery –  subtitle: Saddled with student and public debt, today’s young adults will long pay the price for our elders’ folly. A hat tip to the copyeditor, just reading it raised my blood pressure. It also succinctly summarizes the article and lets you know out of the box that it was written by one of the aggrieved generation. Boomers invented the Happy Face which Millennials appropriated and turned into Frowny FaceBuckle up buttercups, this...

The Wall Street Journal ticks me off quite regularly. The balance of never-Trumpers to rational conservatives is deeply skewed towards the abyss. Much of the non-business content tends towards the trendy which I am decidedly not. But I have been reading the WSJ since grad school when I got a complementary subscription for a semester. It was an education in itself – all the stories about capital building, financing, taxes, accounting, bottom lines, products, marketing – oh my! All the mysteries of the business universe revealed. Of course I didn’t learn how business really worked until much later.Yet due to...

Not long after his daughter got into Stanford University with the help of a $6.5 million payment, Chinese pharmaceutical billionaire Zhao Tao met with President Trump to promote a key Beijing foreign-policy initiative. [The MSM never stops, does it? For those who don't know, the WSJ news section has always been center-left, or worse.]

Amidst reports that Venezuelan Soldiers loyal to Socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro gunned down civilian volunteers attempting to deliver humanitarian aid at the southern border with Brazil, killing one and wounding over a dozen, Marxist media outlets in the US have been mostly silent. Those that have commented have chosen some interesting headlines for the massacre. New York Times Deadly Violence Erupts on Brazil Border in Venezuela Aid Showdown Vox President Maduro’s forces clash with Venezuelans in aid showdown NBC News Woman killed, dozen injured after clash with Venezuelan security forces CNN Venezuela's military kills woman in standoff over international aid...

“This is the Holy Grail of gold mining effectively, given the quality and given the scale,” The news is good for both Polyus and the Russian government. Unlike other producers that move their bullion on world markets, Polyus sells its gold exclusively to large Russian state banks, which then resell it to the country’s central bank. Once mining begins, the bank can use the mine’s gold to support its ruble currency or sell it for extra foreign currency in times of crisis. According to Polyus, Sukhoi Log is likely to be producing more than 1.6 million ounces of gold every...

RICHMOND, Va.—A top Republican Virginia lawmaker was forced to defend his role editing a college yearbook with photographs of students in blackface, as the state’s political crisis spread to both parties Thursday. Senate Majority Leader Thomas Norment served as managing editor of the 1968 yearbook at Virginia Military Institute that included the blackface photos and racial slurs. Gov. Ralph Northam, Democrat, faces calls to step down following the emergence last week of a photo from his medical-school yearbook that showed a person in blackface and another in Ku Klux Klan garb. Mr. Northam said he wasn’t in the picture, after...

The Wall Street Journal has been against Trump’s trade tariffs, and any chance they get they will put blame on the tariffs for bad things, even when it is obvious they are not to blame. On Thursday they had a front-page story which attributed a wave of Chapter 12 bankruptcies (50 total in the U.S.) partially to small tariffs put in place by Trump in 2018. Any business reporter with a brain knows that those small tariffs had nothing to do with bankruptcies that occurred in 2018. Those farmers had to be struggling with too much debt for years, and...

Mary Kissel from The Wall Street Journal is one of those nasty and predictable #NeverTrump hacks on TV today. She’s so bitter and angry that your tend to mute your TV when you see her pop up on a discussion panel. But that didn’t stop the U.S. State Department from hiring the anti-Trump hack to be Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s new senior adviser for policy and strategic messaging.

Get ready for Hillary Clinton 4.0. More than 30 years in the making, this new version of Mrs. Clinton, when she runs for president in 2020, will come full circle—back to the universal-health-care-promoting progressive firebrand of 1994. True to her name, Mrs. Clinton will fight this out until the last dog dies. She won’t let a little thing like two stunning defeats stand in the way of her claim to the White House. It’s been quite a journey. In July 1999, Mrs. Clinton began her independent political career on retiring Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s farm in upstate New York. Her...

Even progressives treat the president as a familiar monster. And he hasn’t destroyed the world yet. It’s hard to prove intangibles, harder still when they are in motion, like October clouds, moving rapidly across millions of minds. One obvious but neglected intangible is worth noticing in the weeks before the elections: The country—consciously or unconsciously—has gotten used to Donald Trump. Twenty-one months into his administration, Mr. Trump has been processed, or half-processed—even subtly domesticated—by the large, complicated American mind, which is improvisational and on the whole incoherent except in moments of national crisis. Even progressives to whom he is a...