Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans are processing the nightmare of the slaughter of children in Texas, the racist murders in Buffalo, New York, and the other numbingly repeated scenes of carnage in the United States. They’re contending with what feels like highway robbery at the gas pump, they’re nagged by a virus that the world can’t shake, and they’re split into two hostile camps over politics and culture — the twin pillars of the nation’s foundation. They’ve already been through two set-piece dramas of presidential impeachment — indeed, through the wringer on all things Donald Trump. Now, beginning in prime time...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump falsely declared in a weekend rally that public health authorities are denying the COVID-19 vaccine to white people because of their race. TRUMP: “The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating ... white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics. ... In New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health.” THE FACTS: No, white people are not being excluded from...

WASHINGTON - Allegiance to a lie has become a test of loyalty to Donald Trump and a means of self-preservation for Republicans. Trump’s discredited allegations about a stolen election did nothing to save his presidency when courtrooms high and low, state governments and ultimately Congress - meeting in the chaos of an insurrection powered by his grievances - affirmed the legitimacy of his defeat and the honesty of the process that led to it. Now those “Big Lie” allegations, no closer to true than before, are getting a second, howling wind. Republicans are expected to believe the falsehoods, pretend they...

President Donald Trump isn’t giving up on his false accusations of a rigged election now that his administration is making room for President-elect Joe Biden to proceed with the transition of power. Trump on Tuesday spread distortions about voting in Wisconsin and suggested that his administration’s decision Monday to let the transition begin should not be taken to mean he’s giving up on trying to engineer another term in the face of his defeat. In tweets Tuesday: TRUMP: “Remember, the GSA has been terrific, and Emily Murphy has done a great job, but the GSA does not determine who the...

WASHINGTON - What if the real “invisible enemy” is the enemy from within - America’s very institutions? When the coronavirus pandemic came from distant lands to the United States, it was met with cascading failures and incompetencies by a system that exists to prepare, protect, prevent and cut citizens a check in a national crisis. The molecular menace posed by the new coronavirus has shaken the conceit of “American exceptionalism” like nothing big enough to see with your own eyes. A nation with unmatched power, brazen ambition and aspirations through the arc of history to be humanity’s “shining city upon...

President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a coronavirus task force briefing at the White House, Sunday, April 5, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is pitching a medicine for COVID-19 sufferers that science has not concluded is effective or safe for their use. “Take it,” he said of the drug. For people sick with the coronavirus, he said Sunday, “It can help them but it’s not going to hurt them.” In fact, it may or may not help some people, and it may or may not hurt them. His straight-ahead advocacy of hydroxychloroquine,...

WASHINGTON - For a few moments in the Rose Garden, the coronavirus pandemic is a bucking bronco with President Donald Trump on its back. His arm swings an invisible rope. He seems to be hanging on for dear life. “Ride it like a cowboy,” he growls. “Just ride it. Ride that sucker right through.” This rodeo riff came during the daily White House coronavirus task force briefing, where science meets all things Trump. It’s where the teetotaling president serves a 5 o’clock cocktail of public-health policy, twisted facts, invented achievements, performance art, hectoring, cheerleading, erraticism, improvisation, self-praise, pet theories and...

WASHINGTON -- The “great American comeback” President Donald Trump claimed in his State of the Union speech drew on falsehoods about U.S. energy supremacy, health care and the economy as well as distortions about his predecessor’s record. In arguing, in essence, that he has made America great again, Trump took credit for an energy boom that actually began under Barack Obama in an assertion he recycled from his last State of the Union address. He inflated manufacturing gains, misrepresented policy on migrant detention and glossed over a rate of economic growth that has yet to reach the scale he promised....

The words from one president to another, somewhat casual in tone, were not casual at all in meaning: “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” Those words have now prompted deployment of the ultimate political weapon, an impeachment process enshrined in the Constitution as a means other than the ballot to remove a president from office. When history writes the story, the seemingly innocent request from President Donald Trump to his Ukrainian counterpart will show their infamous July 25 phone call had a lot behind it, at least implicitly. It had the weight of U.S. military power...

WASHINGTON — Like whisperers in a tempest, conservative-minded officials across the breadth of Donald Trump’s government are letting it be known what they think of him, and some of it isn’t pretty. But they are speaking oh so softly, in a kind of code, to a country that may only hear shouting. Jim Mattis is just the latest in a string of leading lights from the conservative establishment to throw shade at Trump. As with others — the chief justice, a special counsel, various Republican lawmakers who hope to have a political future — the ex-Pentagon chief’s words are subtle,...

WASHINGTON -- In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making "immoral" and "obscene" returns while "the bodies pile up."But in pillorying insurers over profits, the critics are on shaky ground. Ledgers tell a different reality.Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That's anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the...