Free Republic

AG Garland has told the FBI and US Attorneys’ Offices to meet and “strategize” on ways to deal with parents who have the nerve to protest critical race theory. The DOJ said: “Citing an increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation’s public schools, today Attorney General Merrick B. Garland directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to meet in the next 30 days with federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend. These sessions will open dedicated lines of communication...

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg announced on Twitter on Tuesday that he and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, are going to become parents. "The process isn’t done yet and we’re thankful for the love, support, and respect for our privacy that has been offered to us," he wrote. "We can’t wait to share more soon."

Across the state, candidates for public office are repeating Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged and the contest was stolen from him. Many are running for local office and state legislative seats, while some are seeking the most powerful posts in the state. The conspiracy theories are already complicating GOP primaries in Georgia, as Republicans try to fend off ascendant Democrats fresh off a string of victories in November’s presidential election and January’s U.S. Senate runoffs. The leading candidates competing to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock have raised questions about the election results and echoed the...

The grassroots effort to punish Gov. Brian Kemp largely fizzled at key Republican meetings across the state this weekend even as record crowds of activists continued a relentless focus on former President Donald Trump’s lies about Georgia’s election results. Fury over Trump’s narrow defeat combined with anger at President Joe Biden’s administration helped bring a surge of new faces to the weekend meetings, held in 13 of Georgia’s 14 congressional districts. Many speakers repeated Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud in Georgia, which have been repeatedly debunked. ***At least a half-dozen districts passed resolutions condemning Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan...

It’s a lie. Donald Trump is flat-out lying to manipulate the political process. I get sick and tired of people on the Left who refuse to believe things that contradict what they prefer to believe, but it is no better when people on the Right do it. It is as plain as day what happens when a people accept as true statements they have every reason to know are lies, and accept them because it suits their political preferences. The corruption of the truth is far worse than ordinary corruption, like stealing money. It makes it impossible to know what...

It’s payback time. The Republican rift in the state Senate came to a head Tuesday when Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan demoted three Republican senators who have backed attempts to overturn the presidential vote in Georgia over baseless allegations of irregularities. When the bloodletting was over, state Sens. Brandon Beach of Alpharetta, Matt Brass of Newnan and Burt Jones of Jackson were sapped of their political influence on the second day of the winter session. ***The three aggressively promoted President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud, and pushed efforts to overturn the outcome that ran afoul of Duncan, who...

The Monmouth University poll released Wednesday shows Democrats making recent gains in Georgia, with Joe Biden eking out a slim lead over President Donald Trump and Jon Ossoff knotted up against U.S. Sen. David Perdue. It’s also the latest poll that has Democrat Raphael Warnock as the clear front-runner in the chaotic special election for U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s seat – and it gives him a head-to-head lead over both Loeffler and U.S. Rep. Doug Collins in a likely Jan. 5 runoff.

Twitter is experiencing an outage that began in the early evening on Thursday, with some users reporting problems sending tweets and refreshing their timelines starting shortly after 5:30PM ET. We have seen no new tweets cross our timelines since then, though we were able to find a tweet sent as late as 5:40PM ET using Twitter’s search tool. User-generated reports on Downdetector.com are skyrocketing as well, but there’s no communication from the company itself as to the nature of the outrage. Twitter’s last major outage, occurring in February of this year, still allowed users to circumvent that outage by scheduling...

Moderna’s chief executive, Stéphane Bancel, told the Financial Times that the company’s experimental covid-19 vaccine is not expected to be available for widespread use until the spring. Moderna’s is one of four vaccine candidates undergoing final tests in the United States. President Trump has repeatedly suggested that at least one vaccine will be approved and made available this year, though experts are skeptical and polls show Americans are worried about the process being rushed.

The federal government’s top infectious disease official attempted to reassure the public Thursday that he’ll support safety standards set by federal officials for any COVID-19 vaccines and their work won’t be swayed by politics. “If (U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials) come and say this is the way we should do it, I’ve got your back on that,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said in an online discussion organized by Emory University. The remarks came in response to a question from Dr. Sanjay Gupta, an associate Emory University professor and CNN medical correspondent who moderated the discussion, if Fauci will resist efforts...

President Trump has said the health of the American people is his primary concern when considering new FDA guidelines on a vaccine. On Wednesday, the President announced the White House may not approve tougher guidelines on the emergency use authorization of a coronavirus vaccine. According to reports, the FDA was gearing up to announce the stricter standards ahead of the election. As part of the new guidelines, manufacturers seeking authorization would have to follow trial participants for at least two months after a second vaccine shot. The new standards would also reportedly ask developers to identify a specific number of...

The presidential horse race remains unchanged by recent protests — Joe Biden still leads President Trump by the same margins nationally and in the battleground state of Wisconsin. Here's why: though neither candidate gets rave reviews for what they've said about the demonstrations, Biden is seen by more as trying to calm the situation, while the president is perceived by slightly more as encouraging fighting, rather than calming things down. And the larger notion that violence could come to "the suburbs" finds little concern among those who actually reside in the suburbs. Moreover, it's also about the approach to those...

A federal judge on Monday extended the deadline for absentee ballots to be returned in Georgia, ruling that they must be counted if postmarked by Election Day and delivered up to three days afterward. The decision will likely result in tens of thousands of ballots being counted after Nov. 3 that would have otherwise been rejected, enough to swing close elections. The ruling invalidates Georgia’s requirement that ballots had to be received at county election offices by 7 p.m. on Election Day. U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross wrote that voters must be protected during the coronavirus pandemic, when record numbers...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump will travel to Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, amid fury over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in the back, which left the 29-year-old Black man paralyzed. White House spokesman Judd Deere told reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday that Trump will be meeting with law enforcement officers and “surveying” some of the damage from recent protests that turned destructive. The visit is certain to exacerbate tensions in the city, where a crowd of about 1,000 demonstrators gathered outside a courthouse Saturday to denounce police violence. Trump has been running his reelection campaign on...

The dominos started to fall. Atlanta Public Schools was among the first: schools will open with no face-to-face classes. This news was shortly followed by updates from DeKalb, Fulton, Cobb, Clayton, Henry, and most recently, Gwinnett, as well as others. I suspect we’ll see many more. For some, this is a frustrating, bewildering turn of events. What’s wrong with these educators? *** Georgia put its school districts in a position of not having a real choice. We chose distance learning in how we chose to handle the COVID-19 pandemic in our state. In April, as you may recall, the governor...

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said Atlanta’s mask mandate would stand despite Gov. Brian Kemp’s executive order voiding local face covering requirements. “My belief is that the city still has appropriate standing to mandate masks,” Bottoms said during a streamed press conference on July 16 to give an update on the city’s COVID-19 response. Bottoms said she found it “quite interesting” that Kemp decided to void city and county mask mandates after Atlanta implemented one, since other cities have had them in place for weeks. The mayor also linked Kemp’s decision to President Donald Trump’s visit to the UPS hub at...

What is new about the nationwide riots of the last week that have followed the death of George Floyd is the convergence of these two previously separate streams—traditional urban riots in poor neighborhoods triggered by police-related incidents, and the ideologically motivated vandalism by young white members of the overclass in downtown districts. This convergence is the result of hub city gentrification. The deindustrialization of the cities and rising real estate prices have forced most of the working class of all races out of hub cities into low-income suburbs and exurbs. The children of the white urban elite—some of them downwardly...

(CNN)Competitive banter on the field during baseball games is a norm between teams and typically stretches into the bleachers among fans, but one school district in Iowa is saying comments made during a high school game crossed the line. A Black player for Charles City High School heard "several bigoted comments yelled from the crowd" during a game played at Waverly-Shell Rock High on June 27, according to an online statement from the Charles City Community School district and information from the school district communications director. The school district didn't name the player. Jeremiah Chapman, who says he's the only...

Before Donald Trump’s election I made a lot of dire predictions about how his mix of demagogy and incompetence would interact with real world threats: I envisioned economic turmoil, foreign policy crises, sustained domestic unrest. . . . In 2017, 2018, 2019, those predictions didn’t come to pass. Trump was bad in many ways, but the consequences weren’t what I anticipated. The economy surged; the world was relatively stable; the country was mad online but otherwise relatively calm. And as the Democrats shifted leftward and Trump delivered on his promised judicial appointments, many conservatives who had shared my apprehensions would...

Three men with ties to the U.S. military and alleged to be members of an extreme white supremacist group face multiple terrorism conspiracy charges of planning to wreak havoc at protests in Las Vegas over George Floyd’s death. Federal prosecutors say the men belong to the far-right “Boogaloo” movement and not the American militant anti-fascist movement Antifa, which President Donald Trump continues to blame most for stoking violence around the country. *** Activists monitoring social media activity of extremist groups online amid the protests have identified the loosely organized right-wing movement called “Boogaloo,” which is a code word calling for...