Free Republic

Joe Biden's presidency should have begun as a success story. Biden inherited a good economic situation, benefited from Operation Warp Speed's quick development of a vaccine, and got to see his predecessor make a disgrace of himself with his election-rigging conspiracy theories. Yet instead of heading into the Roaring Twenties, liberating locked-up denizens to endless dinner parties and dances, we're seemingly regressing into 1978. With Jerome Powell promising to keep interest rates around that historically safe level of near-zero, Biden is pumping trillions of dollars into the economy to bail out blue states already benefiting from Donald Trump's own fast...

The New York Times, The Washington Post and NBC News walked back their reporting about FBI's communication with President Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani regarding Russia. The Washington Post was the first to report on Thursday that Giuliani was warned that he was the target of a Russian influence campaign last year. The newspaper, citing people familiar with the matter, also reported that One America News (OANN) was given similar warning. But the Post issued a correction on Saturday saying that it removed assertions that Giuliani and OANN had received such warnings. "An earlier version of this story, published Thursday,...

Reporters aren’t in the practice, obviously, of being particularly tough on President Biden. But at his first press conference as president this afternoon, Cecilia Vega of ABC News politely nailed him to the wall on a key failure of his border policy. -snip- In evading this reality throughout the press conference, Biden resorted to a haze of misrepresentations, and inadvertently exposed the senselessness of his own policy. He said that the reason even more family units aren’t being returned is that Mexico can’t take more of them. Again, if it’s okay to send migrants back into Mexico, it makes no...

Shortly before Christmas last year, Susan Rice and Jake Sullivan, two top advisers to President-elect Joe Biden, sat for an interview with EFE, a Spanish wire service, to issue a stark warning to migrants considering journeying north to the nation’s southern border: Don’t come now — but help is on the way. The next day, Biden was similarly pointed, saying his administration — while eager to roll back Donald Trump’s immigration policies — first needed to implement “guardrails” to avoid winding up with “2 million people on our border.” Less than a month later, the new president began tearing down...

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — Nevada's governor on Friday unveiled a proposal that would allow technology companies to establish jurisdictions with powers similar to those of county governments, arguing the state needed to be bold to diversify its economy and pushing back against those who have likened the idea to company towns. “This proposal is an exciting, unprecedented concept that has a potential to position Nevada as a global center of advanced technology and innovation, while helping to create immediate positive economic impact and shape the economy of the future,” Gov. Steve Sisolak said of his Innovation Zones idea. “As...

(CNN)How much longer President Donald Trump continues waging battle over an election he lost remained in question Thursday as more of his advisers voiced doubt his gambit to contest the results would succeed. One person who spoke to him called him "dejected" over the ordeal. Trump himself was waffling by the hour and day between a pugilistic desire to keep fighting and a more resigned attitude that his efforts will ultimately fail, people who spoke to him said. None said they believed a full-blown concession was imminent, or likely to ever materialize. Some people close to the situation pointed to...

November 6, 2020 Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) released the following statement about his request to the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections and its chair, Representative Ron Tusler (R-Harrison). “I am directing the committee to use its investigatory powers under Wisconsin SS 13.31 to immediately review how the election was administered. With concerns surfacing about mail-In ballot dumps and voter fraud, Wisconsin citizens deserve to know their vote counted. There should be no question as to whether the vote was fair and legitimate, and there must be absolute certainty that the impending recount finds any and all irregularities. “I...

Airspace now restricted over Biden’s home From CNN's Pete Muntean New restricted "national defense airspace" has been put in place over Democratic nominee Joe Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware. The Federal Aviation Administration posted the Temporary Flight Restriction on Wednesday, the day after the general election. An FAA notice to pilots available online shows the one mile radius no-fly zone is now active until next Wednesday morning. The FAA says airspace has also been temporarily restricted over the nearby Chase Center, where the stage is set for a possible Biden victory speech – should he ultimately win the presidential election....

Washington (CNN)Sen. Mitch McConnell is allowing Republican Senate candidates to do whatever it takes to salvage their campaigns ahead of what Republicans increasingly fear could be a devastating election for their party. In recent weeks, the Senate majority leader has become so concerned over Republicans losing control of the Senate that he has signaled to vulnerable GOP senators in tough races that they could distance themselves from the President if they feel it is necessary, according to multiple senior Republicans including a source close to McConnell. That could mean breaking with Trump on the administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic...

WASHINGTON (CNN) The official portraits of former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were removed from the Grand Foyer of the White House within the last week, aides told CNN, and replaced by those of two Republican presidents who served more than a century ago. White House tradition calls for portraits of the most recent American presidents to be given the most prominent placement, in the entrance of the executive mansion, visible to guests during official events. That was the case through at least July 8, when President Donald Trump welcomed Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The two...

(CNN)New York City is painting a Black Lives Matter mural on the street directly outside of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan. City employees began painting a stretch of Fifth Avenue, just in front of the Trump Organization's headquarters, on Thursday morning. Mayor Bill de Blasio authorized the stark yellow mural earlier this month. The New York mayor rolled up his sleeves and painted a bit of the mural, too, clad in a mask and flanked by civil rights leader, the Rev. Al Sharpton. "President Trump said we would be denigrating the luxury of Fifth Avenue. Let me tell you: we're...

(CNN)A Tulsa, Oklahoma, police officer has died and another is in critical condition after they were shot during a traffic stop early Monday, police said. A suspect has been arrested. Sgt. Craig Johnson died Tuesday, Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin said at a news conference. David Ware, 32, was arrested Monday in the shooting and faces a first-degree murder charge and two other felony charges, shooting with intent to kill and possession of a firearm after former conviction of a felony, according to an online court record from the Oklahoma State Courts Network. A man accused of being an accomplice...

(CNN)A half dozen new swing-state polls released Thursday morning suggest that not only would President Donald Trump lose if the election were held today, he would lose in a landslide. The surveys, conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, show Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden by double digits in Michigan (Biden +11), Wisconsin (Biden +11) and Pennsylvania (Biden+ 10) and by mid-single digits in North Carolina (Biden +9), Arizona (Biden +7) and Florida (Biden +6). Trump won every one of those states in the 2016 election. Switch them from red to blue and you can quickly...

WASHINGTON — A retired judge on Wednesday urged a federal court not to allow the Justice Department to dismiss its criminal case against President Donald Trump's former adviser Michael Flynn, citing evidence of a "gross abuse of prosecutorial power." The U.S. district judge hearing the case, Emmet Sullivan, last month tapped John Gleeson to serve as a "friend of the court," after the Justice Department abruptly asked the court to dismiss the criminal charge against Flynn, a former national security adviser. The stunning move by the Justice Department followed a pressure campaign by Trump and his conservative allies and came...

New York (CNN Business)The economy has gone from President Donald Trump's greatest political asset to perhaps his biggest weakness. Unemployment is spiking at an unprecedented rate. Consumer spending is vanishing. And GDP is collapsing. History shows that dreadful economic trends like these spell doom for sitting presidents seeking reelection. The coronavirus recession will cause Trump to suffer a "historic defeat" in November, a national election model released Wednesday by Oxford Economics predicted. The model, which uses unemployment, disposable income and inflation to forecast election results, predicts that Trump will lose in a landslide, capturing just 35% of the popular vote....

Washington (CNN)Dramatic new disclosures on Day 1 of the House impeachment hearings painted an incriminating picture of Donald Trump as a President instinctively willing to sacrifice America's interests for his own. In the most critical step so far in the investigation into Trump's alleged scheme to coerce Ukraine's help for his reelection campaign, Democrats posed a question to every US citizen at the core of this dark national chapter. "If this is not impeachable conduct, what is?" House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, asked, arguing that the republic's values and the concept of an accountable presidency were at...

EL PASO, Texas (AP) — A young gunman opened fire in an El Paso, Texas, shopping area packed with as many as 3,000 people during the busy back-to-school season Saturday, leaving 20 dead and more than two dozen injured. ~snip~ Adriana Quezada, 39, said she was in the women’s clothing section of Walmart with her two children when she heard gunfire. “But I thought they were hits, like roof construction,” she said of the shots. Her 19-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son threw themselves to the ground, then ran out of the store through an emergency exit. They were not hurt,...

Washington (CNN)House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler on Sunday said Robert Mueller's report presents "very substantial evidence" that President Donald Trump is "guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors" -- an impeachable offense. "We have to ... let Mueller present those facts to the American people, and then see where we go from there, because the administration must be held accountable," Nadler, whose committee would lead impeachment proceedings, said on "Fox News Sunday." Mueller, the former special counsel for the Department of Justice and former director of the FBI, will testify before Congress on July 24 after House Democrats issued a subpoena...

Rep. ­Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has been getting a lot of attention since being sworn in to Congress earlier this year, but her constituents aren’t all that thrilled with their 29-year-old congresswoman, according to a story published in the New York Post over the weekend. “I thought AOC would be our savior, but that’s not the case,” Roxanne Delgado, a local activist told the Post. Delgado has reportedly been trying “for months” to get in touch with Ocasio-Cortez about saving an animal shelter and cleaning up parks in the district. According to the Post, Delgado “has made numerous calls to Ocasio-Cortez’s...

(CNN)Lori Lightfoot has been elected the next mayor of Chicago, according to the Associated Press, becoming the first African-American woman picked to lead the country's third-most populous city. Lightfoot faced a historic runoff Tuesday against Toni Preckwinkle, who is also an African-American woman. "This may not be the outcome we wanted but while I may be disappointed, I'm not disheartened," Preckwinkle told supporters after she called Lightfoot to congratulate her. Mayor Rahm Emanuel was not in the race, as he was not seeking a third term. Lightfoot, 56, a former assistant US attorney, describes herself as "an out and proud...