Free Republic

Robbin Bain, who covered fashion and beauty as a “Today Girl” on the NBC morning show, died Oct. 21 in Southampton, NY. She was 87. Bain’s daughter, Lara McLanahan, told Deadline that breast cancer was the cause of her death. Born on Aug. 10, 1936, Barbara Jane Bain’s career got underway in 1959 when the Queens native was crowned Miss Rheingold, which was the region’s most popular beer at the time. Earning the $50,000 prize, Bain made several appearances across the US and Europe and was even tapped for Revlon and Helena Rubinstein ads.

…many private-equity experts have long explained that the goal of Bain and similar companies was never to create jobs per se — but to generate profit for itself and its investors. If this … tape again causes Romney problems, though, it is likely to be because of its tone. His 47 percent language was seen as labeling nearly half the country as moochers who would never take responsibility for their own lives. This time, it's that word "harvesting," which brings to mind, for instance, organ harvesting from the recently deceased.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel downplayed former President Donald Trump's threat of skipping the GOP debates. McDaniel talked about the RNC's correspondence with the 2024 campaigns about the debate structure and defended her push to have candidates pledge to back the eventual nominee on Sunday. "That's his choice. And every candidate is going to make that calculation," McDaniel told Fox News Sunday. "What I think the American people want to see is these candidates; they want to see what they're articulating, and especially what is your plan to take us out of the misery of Joe Biden." The chairwoman...

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said Tuesday in a CNN interview that if former President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the NATO alliance would be significantly damaged. Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, said NATO members would wonder whether they could continue to count on the United States. “If he were to come back as the U.S. president, I think it would represent a pretty dramatic departure for the world, and they would rethink whether they can count on the United States to lead NATO to lead other nations as they push back against China and against Russia,” Romney said

A British operative was inserted into President Trump’s White House in an effort to tarnish President Trump’s image and then derail the 2020 Election audit efforts. We’ve previously reported that an individual named Don Berlin inserted a document into President Trump’s inner circle days before Jan 6 in an effort to set President Trump up for perceived insurrection. A summary of this document was then scooped up by the Jan 6 committee and shared with multiple media outlets in an attempt to claim he attempted an insurrection after the 2020 Election steal. We now know that Berlin wasn’t alone. Another...

NOTE DATE PUBLISHED: August 29, 2012 -- Take a typical Bain transaction involving an Indiana-based company called American Pad and Paper. Bain bought Ampad in 1992 for just $5 million, financing the rest of the deal with borrowed cash. Within three years, Ampad was paying $60 million in annual debt payments, plus an additional $7 million in management fees. A year later, Bain led Ampad to go public, cashed out about $50 million in stock for itself and its investors, charged the firm $2 million for arranging the IPO and pocketed another $5 million in “management” fees. Ampad wound up...

@RudyGiuliani : A meeting is coming out in 1-2 days in State Dept. in which Hunter snuck in the back door ... That meeting took place with Tony Blinken."

“Baby Lives Matter” was painted in large letters overnight outside of a Salt Lake City Planned Parenthood. The art was no doubt inspired by the “Black Lives Matter” painted outside the White House last month. The artist, Tayler Hansen, dedicated his artistry to those abandoned without a voice. “My name is Tayler Hansen. I’m making this video to raise awareness of one of the most egregious human rights violations that has not been properly addressed. In 2019, abortion was the leading cause of death worldwide. “Almost 43 million children were denied the most basic right of all…life. Which is why...

Not only did the controversial Ukrainian energy firm get a deal with USAID while Hunter Biden was on the board, but Joe Biden's energy advisor, Amos Hochstein, promoted the very program which worked to legitimize Burisma amid the allegations. As an Obama official, Hochstein testified repeatedly to Congress, urging lawmakers to help "reform" Ukraine's energy sector to mitigate Putin's advances

While the 2016 presidential race was raging in America, Ukrainian prosecutors ran into some unexpectedly strong headwinds as they pursued an investigation into the activities of a nonprofit in their homeland known as the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC). The focus on AntAC(Anti-Corruption Action Center) — was part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption inside the former Soviet republic had been improperly diverted. The prosecutors soon would learn the resistance they faced was blowing directly from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, where the Obama administration took the rare...

Roberto Micheletti Baín played a significant role in the political crisis that struck Honduras in 2009. He assumed the presidency of the country when the Supreme Court of Justice ordered the arrest of then-President Manuel Zelaya, who was subsequently expelled from the country by the armed forces. Six years on, Micheletti has retired from political life, and lives surrounded by nature and his family. Yet the specter of political turmoil has returned once more to the Central American nation. Late in April, a chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice revoked two key constitutional provisions that prohibited presidential reelection: paving...

He's said over and over that he won't run for the White House a third time, but a new poll indicates that if Mitt Romney changed his mind and made another bid for president, he'd be the frontrunner among Republicans in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire. According to the Suffolk University/Boston Herald survey, which was released Thursday, 24% of Granite State Republicans and independents who lean towards the GOP say that Romney would be their first choice for their party's presidential nomination. Among the potential 2016 GOP contenders, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was a distant second, at...

Could Mitt Romney save Hostess? Like him or not, if you have ever shopped at a Staples and/or Sports Authority, you have Mitt Romney and his Bain Capital buddies to thank. And now that Mr. Romney is not running — well anything, maybe he can shift his energy towards an endeavor greater than saving the nation from the “looming fiscal cliff” … and rescue my favorite cakes from extinction. Sure President Obama may have saved the auto-industry, but bring back Ho Ho’s, Sno-Balls and Wonder Bread and Virginia, Minnesota & Michigan become easy wins in the next presidential election. Wanna...

The Bain attack is back. This time it’s being used against Hostess Brands, the Twinkies and Wonder Bread maker that announced Friday it was closing. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka drew the comparison in a public statement Friday. “What’s happening with Hostess Brands is a microcosm of what’s wrong with America, as Bain-style Wall Street vultures make themselves rich by making America poor,” Trumka said in a public statement. “Crony capitalism and consistently poor management drove Hostess into the ground, but its workers are paying the price.” Earlier Friday, Hostess Brands announced that it would be closing, which the company said...

For the final days of the 2012 campaign, the Democratic groups pummeling Mitt Romney on television have returned to the weapon they started with last spring: Bain Capital. The Obama campaign and its super PAC allies have spent months trashing Romney’s policies and personal values across the airwaves, branding him as a job-killing, abortion rights-opposing, Medicare-privatizing tycoon who disdains working-class and poor Americans. But with a little over a week left in the race, several of the Democrats’ top independent spenders are leaning hard into the Bain message, eschewing a pure policy message for a gut-punch reminder that the former...

Oh, my! Perhaps that explains this indecipherable frantic tweet that Mr. Fineman posted earlier.#Obama in dm register tre— Howard Fineman (@howardfineman) October 28, 2012 Heh. Cat got your tweet, toots? Twitter users can’t resist some jabs over that one.@howardfineman your tweets are really hard to decode.— Dave Devitt (@sydcon) October 28, 2012 @howardfineman Is that you Senator Grassley?— Gus (@Gus_802) October 28, 2012 Looking at @howardfineman's recent TL, I'm convinced he's drunk or dictates his columns at HP.— Slim Pickens (@Mattie96) October 28, 2012 HuffPo editor and MSNBC analyst Fineman continues. Basically, that Des Moines Register endorsement of Romney?...

Maureen Sullivan Stemberg, ex-wife of Staples founder, sits in her $5,200 a month, 14th-floor, concierge-at-the-door, elegantly furnished Back Bay apartment and tells you she’s broke. She can’t work. She can’t afford a car, her medications, her rent, even the family springer spaniel, J.J., who she just gave away. She produces doctors notes detailing medical woes: possible lupus, bouts of pneumonia requiring hospitalizations, a history of cancer, petit mal seizures, plus recommendations for thrice weekly psychotherapy and psychiatry. She says her insurance won’t cover mental health care. “I’m going to be out on the street,” says Sullivan Stemberg, a tiny, 50-ish...

Romney as a Manager: Unhurried and Socratic By MICHAEL BARBARO, SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MICHAEL WINES. BOSTON — As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney could not resist burrowing into the bureaucratic weeds: He once took the statewide math and reading test for 10th graders, then startled his education commissioner by calling to say, “I like No. 14” and rattling off the answer. As head of the private equity firm Bain Capital, he was so uncomfortable cutting loose struggling employees that a legend grew: executives sent in to his office to be fired emerged thinking they had been promoted. And as...

The pro-President Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action is out with a memo this morning detailing its plans for the final days, including the return of one of its toughest spots about Mitt Romney's time at Bain.

Is it true that Mitt Romney closed down his firm, Bain Capital, and flew 30 workers to New York to look for the missing daughter of one of his colleagues? The fact-finding groups PolitiFact.com, Snopes.com and Truthorfiction.com all rate this as true, and media reports of the day confirm much of the details of the viral email.