Free Republic

Would you consider yourself a reporter at this point or is that more of a former job description?' one critic asked White House correspondent April Ryan raised eyebrows on Friday after she appeared to endorse the idea that journalists shouldn't reveal contradictions between President-elect Joe Biden's public and private statements. On Thursday, Ryan appeared to express disapproval that a recording of Biden claiming "defund the police" rhetoric hurt down-ballot Democrats in last month's elections was leaked to The Intercept, which duly reported on it. "I asked an incoming White House source was the meeting contentious with civil rights leader and...

This week a Los Angeles County judge ruled that a local ban on outdoor dining at restaurants, ostensibly aimed at reducing transmission of the COVID-19 virus, was "not grounded in science, evidence, or logic." Around the same time, California Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly admitted that the same thing is true of a state ban on outdoor dining that currently applies to all of Southern California, including Los Angeles County. Ghaly said that ban, which is one of many restrictions that are triggered when a region's available ICU capacity drops below 15 percent, is "not a comment on...

Hunter Biden acknowledged today that he has been notified of an active criminal investigation into his tax affairs by the U.S. Attorney for Delaware. Among the numerous prongs of the inquiry, CNN reports, investigators are examining “whether Hunter Biden and his associates violated tax and money laundering laws in business dealings in foreign countries, principally China.” Documents relating to Hunter Biden’s exploitation of his father’s name to enrich himself and other relatives through deals with China were among the cache published in the week before the election by The New York Post — revelations censored by Twitter and Facebook and...

The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with churches against California's coronavirus gathering restrictions. In an unsigned opinion, the court granted the churches injunctive relief and sent the case back to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court asked the lower court to consider the churches' plea in light of a decision in which New York houses of worship sued to undo Gov. Andrew Cuomo's restrictions. In that case, the court granted an injunction to Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues, saying they were treated unequally in lockdown orders. Attorneys for the California churches, run by Harvest Rock Church and...

In early November, as health officials warned of a impending COVID-19 spike, Austin Mayor Steve Adler hosted an outdoor wedding and reception with 20 guests for his daughter at a trendy hotel near downtown. The next morning, Adler and seven other wedding attendees boarded a private jet bound for Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where they vacationed for a week at a family timeshare. One night into the trip, Adler addressed Austin residents in a Facebook video: “We need to stay home if you can. This is not the time to relax. We are going to be looking really closely. …...

I nearly burst out loud laughing when I read the headline of Chris Cillizza’s latest on CNN.com: “Why Joe Biden’s broken foot reveals how different his White House will be from Donald Trump’s.” Naturally, despite my better judgment, I just had to read the article. ... After noting that former Vice President Joe Biden had slipped and injured his foot while playing with his dog Major, Cillizza lauds the fact that “We were quickly told — via the traveling press pool — that Biden was going to see his orthopedist out of an abundance of caution.” ... I’m not gonna...

LeBron James would be proud. The New York Times reports that Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola are among the many global companies and business groups lobbying Congress to weaken a bipartisan bill that cracks down on human rights abuses and forced labor in China. “The bill also targets so-called poverty alleviation and pairing programs that ship Muslims from impoverished areas to work in factories elsewhere, which human rights groups say are often coercive.” For human rights supporters, the bill is great news. For companies that care about their bottom line first, it’s terrible. The legislation, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act,...

This concludes my report on an interview with Rep. Elise Stefanik yesterday afternoon. I posted the first installment here, including my daughter Eliana’s 2014 NR profile of her just before she became the youngest woman elected to Congress at the time. I mentioned to Rep. Stefanik how much I admired women standing up to run for office on our side because of the abuse to which they subject themselves. Unlike their Democratic counterparts, the abuse won’t be offset by features glamorizing them in the fashion magazines. We’re not holding our breath for Stefanik’s 2020 class to be featured by Glamour...

While most jurisdictions have just about finished tabulating 2020 Election results, many observers are highly unimpressed that it’s taking New York City so long to count every ballot. The New York Times released their latest look at the election data from the state and found that only 84 percent of the estimated vote total has been processed, and there is a large fraction of outstanding votes in multiple counties. By the Times’ estimation, only 56 percent of the votes have been reported from Westchester county, 60 percent from Manhattan, 64 percent in Queens, and 74 percent in the Bronx. The...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) said he doesn't know any candidate who supports defunding the police—even though numerous left-wingers have called for slashing police budgets or abolishing police departments altogether. "Nobody I know who's running for office is talking about ‘defunding the police,'" Sanders said in a Sunday CNN interview, referring to candidates who ran in this month's election. "What we're talking about is making police officers accountable." The far-left House Democrats known as "the Squad" and other newly elected progressives, however, have said otherwise. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) argued that slashing $1 billion from the NYPD's budget didn't...

He’s done it again! This time, with a video that very effectively raises the chilling reality that local TV news across the country has been coopted into dutifully mouthing the same scripts, written to indoctrinate the public with leftist propaganda. In this case, beware of “disinformation” (from you know who), cloaked in self-righteousness. By combining the voices of multiple TV broadcasters on their respective stations into a chorus, with a collage of their images, this tweet exposes a genuine scandal in an impactful way. The “news” pic.twitter.com/rfCoXbzskp— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) November 14, 2020

José Javier loss is a stunning blow to Senate Democrats, who went into the election cycle hoping to flip three seats to reach parity in the chamber and ended up losing one seat After three long days of a painstaking recount, early results on Thursday showed Latinas for Trump co-founder Ileana Garcia leading Democratic incumbent José Javier Rodríguez in the race for Senate District 37 by a mere 34 votes. In a video posted shortly after the recount was done, Rodríguez conceded and called for an investigation into the race, raising concerns about the influence of a third-party candidate backed...

The coronavirus pandemic has devastated the service sector, made millions unemployed, and forced many of us who still do have jobs to work remotely. Fortunately, we now have a perfect solution to all this economic dislocation and disruption: a new tax on working from home! This week, the German financial giant Deutsche Bank released a new report full of proposals for how governments and corporations should respond to the pandemic. Included in the report is a call for a 5 percent tax on the incomes of people who work from home in places where the government is not advising or...

For the first time in the city’s history, Mayor de Blasio announced Tuesday that the new mental health professionals and crisis workers will be the dispatched through 911, instead of the NYPD, to respond to mental health emergencies in two high-need communities -- calling the pilot program a "major innovation." According to the mayor, the ongoing pandemic "pointed out such horrible disparities that we have to address but it also brought issues to the fore in a new way and nowhere is that more true than on the topic of mental health." “One in five New Yorkers struggle with a...

A CLINTON, BUSH, AND OBAMA-ERA AMBASSADOR REJECTED THE RESULTS OF 2004’S UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OVER THE SAME PLETHORA OF FRAUD WITNESSED IN THE U.S. ELECTIONS OF 2020. AMBASSADOR JOHN TEFFT EVEN WENT SO FAR AS TO ADMIT SUCH FRAUD IS “EXTREMELY DIFFICULT TO DETECT” WHEN THE POLITICAL PARTY ORGANIZING THE FRAUDS CONTROLS THE LOCAL PARTY APPARATUS. Ambassador John Tefft, then-Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, said on December 7, 2004: The OSCE/ODIHR’s report said that the election did not meet “a considerable number” of international standards, and that, as in the first round, state executive authorities and the...

BERLIN (AP) — The United States on Wednesday formally left the Paris Agreement, a global pact forged five years ago to avert the threat of catastrophic climate change. The move, long declared by U.S. President Donald Trump and triggered by his administration a year ago, isolates the United States in the world but has no immediate impact on international efforts to curb global warming. ....

Over the past two months, The New York Times and Siena College have conducted polls in almost every battleground state, creating a large database of likely voters and their preferences. This database allowed us to take an unusual look at the American electorate — one based on first names. We’ve put together a short quiz to see how well you can guess the patterns that emerged. If you want to take it, click here. We hope you’ll learn as much about politics and culture as we learned in putting it together. Otherwise, here are the 10 most common female and...

Arizona Democratic Senate candidate Mark Kelly made an odd request years after his 2004 divorce: The famed astronaut petitioned a Texas court in 2010 to sentence his ex-wife to 6 months in jail and 10 years of supervised release after she moved to a new town a few miles outside of their children’s school district. The court records from Galveston County, Texas—which include recriminations from both sides and detail a lengthy custody dispute—show that Kelly claimed his ex-wife Amy’s move was a violation of their custody agreement. The documents, which include a temporary restraining order issued against Kelly in 2004,...

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans voted overwhelmingly Sunday to advance Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett toward final confirmation despite Democratic objections, just over a week before the presidential election. The vote was 51-48. Barrett's confirmation on Monday was hardly in doubt, with majority Republicans mostly united in support behind President Donald Trump's pick. But Democrats were poised to keep the Senate in session into the night in attempts to stall, arguing that the Nov. 3 election winner should choose the nominee to fill the vacancy left by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Republicans are excited by the chance to...

China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for ­Facebook to recruit social media censors? There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’ ” The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices...