Free Republic

In my Sunday Smiles essay, I riffed on this Washington Post retrospective on Joe Biden's presidency and how it soft-pedaled Biden's disastrous policies and all the important questions about who was really in charge over the past few years. I reserved for today the most important "revelation" in the story: Biden considers one of his biggest mistakes the choice of Merrick Garland for Attorney General. Garland, in his view, was not political enough. It may seem odd to normal people that anybody could think that Garland was anything but a political hack over the past four years, but seen through...

President Joe Biden does not appear to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for the landslide election loss to President-elect Donald Trump, Biden’s aides told the Washington Post on Saturday. The president reportedly argues he could have still defeated Trump if he would have stayed in the race and ignored calls for him to step aside. Biden’s belief appears to be at odds with reality, based on his poor debate performance, a lack of fundraising, and dropping poll numbers. About two-thirds of Democrats wanted Biden to withdraw, an AP-NORC poll found in July before Biden stepped aside. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA),...

As RedState previously reported, President Joe Biden decided to drop an unwelcome Christmas surprise on the families of murder victims whose killers were on federal death row by commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 inmates to life in prison without the possibility of parole."... guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level," Biden's said in a statement posted to the White House website Monday.In...

Ahead of President Trump taking office on Jan. 20, Bidenomics is still with us. Joe crowed about all the 16 million jobs he'd 'created' in his speech five days ago, patting himself on the back. Here's the White House public relations video: [video at link] It was stolen valor. Turns out his jobs numbers look like this: Post Stephen Moore @StephenMoore 🚨 Another half-million jobs reported under Biden turn out to be phantom! 🚨 The Philly Fed's recent findings reveal that Q2 job growth was actually negative, with all reported gains set for revision in 2025. This follows an alarming...

Democrats are eager to turn the page on a poor year in which they lost again to President-elect Trump, who has swallowed up much of the spotlight well before he’s taken office for a second time. Biden for his part has embarked on several major foreign trips since the election. He also pardoned his son, is working on reaching a ceasefire deal in Gaza, upping assistance to Ukraine and working the holiday circuit while delivering speeches in and around Washington. He also made waves just before Christmas by announcing he was commuting the sentences of 37 people serving on federal...

The Biden-Harris administration has let five University of California campuses off the hook in a settlement with the Department of Education over antisemitism that erupted after the Hamas terror attack in Israel on October 7, 2023. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday on the settlement, which does little beyond requiring self-reporting: The Department of Education found that UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz “appear not to have responded promptly or effectively to notice of alleged national origin discrimination, including harassment” against its students and employees. … As part of the settlement, the universities...

Two notorious San Fernando Valley men sentenced to death in federal court in 2007 for a kidnappings-for-ransom scheme and the cold-blooded murder of five people have had their sentences commuted to life in prison by President Biden. Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas, Soviet immigrants, operated an aquarium store on Ventura Boulevard where they hatched their gruesome plot, the Los Angeles Times reported. The duo targeted the immigrant community, luring victims in with the promise of profitable business deals before ruthlessly beating them, kidnapping them, demanding ransoms from their families and, ultimately, strangling them to death. Between 2001 and 2002, Mikhel...

Today's episode of CNN This Morning began its segment on Biden's commutation of the death sentences of 37 federal death row convicts with a clip of then-Senator Biden, in 1994, proclaiming "I'm a death penalty supporter," and bragging "I'm the guy who wrote this bill with my own little hands," a bill that added 50 federal death penalty-eligible crimes. I encourage people to watch Biden's display. Even death penalty supporters could cringe at his unseemly hubris. Fast-forward 30 years, and now Biden defenders are explaining his decision yesterday to commute the death sentences of 37 convicts on federal death row...

As if his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and refusal ever to acknowledge responsibility weren’t bad enough, now we learn that Joe Biden forced grieving military families to wait for hours on the tarmac of Dover Air Force Base while he took a nap on Air Force One. We already knew that he had continually checked his watch and talked about himself when he met the relatives of 13 military members killed by a suicide bomber during the chaotic evacuation from Kabul in August 2021. But this new report adds an extra layer of callousness to the story. Biden has long...

Almost all leading large language models, or “chatbots,” show signs of mild cognitive impairment when tested using assessments commonly used to detect early dementia, according to a study published in the Christmas issue of The BMJ. The study also found that older versions of these chatbots, much like aging human patients, performed worse on the tests. The authors suggest that these findings “challenge the assumption that artificial intelligence will soon replace human doctors.” The instructions given to the LLMs for each task were the same as those given to human patients. Scoring followed official guidelines and was evaluated by a...

President Biden on Thursday said he would be attending President-elect Trump’s inauguration next month. When asked by MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas if he would attend the event, Biden said, “Of course I am. The only president I avoided the inauguration of is the guy about to be inaugurated.” The White House said last month that Biden and first lady Jill Biden would be attending Trump’s inauguration. In August, the president suggested he would attend a January 2025 inauguration for Trump if he were reelected. “The president promised that he would attend the inauguration of whomever won the election. He and...

It seems like every writer and their dog has already published their take on the Wall Street Journal's bombshell report on Presidentish Joe Biden's decline, but seemingly lost in the hubbub over the White House coverup is one big question. Why the hell didn't they ditch Biden two or three years ago? The obvious answer is that his replacement would have been Kamala Harris, who my friend Stephen Kruiser and I have joked on many occasions got the veep nod from Biden as an insurance policy against getting 25th'd out of office. But given what we know they knew about...

The knives have come out — and so has the truth. Having been lied to for years by the Democratic Party machine and most of the mainstream media — who insisted Joe Biden was not diminished by his age but energized by it — well, it turns out we skeptics were right all along. And what we're learning is terrifying. Infuriating. An unacceptable abuse of power, a usurpation of the presidency itself by a nameless, faceless cohort. Will we ever know who these conspirators are? Two bombshell reports out this week, in the New York Times and the Wall Street...

Researchers have found that incorporating specific nutrients into a regular diet may reduce iron buildup in the brain—a factor associated with cognitive decline in normal aging. In this project, researchers specifically looked at non-heme iron, which is critical for brain health. This type of iron does not bind with storage proteins and, with age and in excess, can contribute to oxidative stress, potentially affecting neuronal integrity and cognition. Excessive brain iron has been linked to poor cognitive performance, even in normal aging. "Despite mounting evidence connecting iron overload to negative cognitive outcomes, there are currently no established methods for reducing...

The pardon of Hunter Biden, dismissed by some as presidential overreach, is far more than it seems. It is not an act of absolution, but a calculated move orchestrated by the White Hats to force Biden, Inc.’s activities into the public spotlight. These activities, spanning election interference, bioweapons labs, human trafficking, and the COVID-19 pandemic, are part of a vast network of corruption tied to the Deep State. This is not a story of redemption or voluntary cooperation. It is a story of overwhelming evidence and forced compliance, where the sheer weight of proof has cornered key actors, compelling them...

The New York Times chief White House Correspondent has admitted to using “translation headsets” to help understand what Joe Biden is saying during public speeches, even when he is 20 feet away from the president, according to the Times. This raises other questions. How does the sign language interpreter interpret what Biden says when he gives official speeches? According to The New York Times, Biden recently told Democrat governors that his ‘health is fine,’ “it’s just my brain.” The Democrats are in disarray over Biden’s mental fitness, with many top officials calling on him to drop out of the race...

A study from Tufts University found that daily consumption of pistachios can enhance eye health by increasing macular pigment optical density (MPOD), which helps protect against blue light and age-related eye damage. This benefit is attributed to pistachios’ unique content of lutein, a plant pigment essential for eye health and potentially useful in preventing age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Daily pistachios boost eye health by raising lutein, protecting against age-related damage, and supporting brain function. A recent study by researchers at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy suggests that eating pistachios daily may greatly benefit eye health. This...

Of course she wouldn’t have done anything different than President Biden. She’s the empty replacement figurehead. In her appearance on “The View” this week, Vice President Kamala Harris was asked if she would have done anything differently than President Joe Biden over the past four years. She answered, incredibly, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” Commentators were quick to note how disastrous an answer it was given Harris’ previous efforts to distinguish herself from Biden, whose tenure in office is widely seen as a failure. The problem for Harris of course is that she’s the current vice...

An already registered antidepressant, duloxetine, may also have positive effects on memory and cognitive functions in the elderly. A new study shows that duloxetine, in addition to treating depression, also inhibits an enzyme involved in the regulation of the nervous system that affects memory and cognition. This could potentially prevent the development of dementia diseases, especially Alzheimer's disease. "Both depression and cognitive impairment often occur simultaneously in elderly individuals, particularly those in the early stages of a dementia disease," says Taher Darreh-Shori. "The discovery that duloxetine can have a dual effect is very promising." "This has been an unexpected discovery...

President Biden has signed off on a highly classified plan that shifts America’s nuclear strategy to focus on China as a nuclear threat — and prepare for the possibility that the communist nation could team up with North Korea and Russia against the US, according to a new report. Biden made the shift in March because the Pentagon believes China’s nuclear arsenal will rival the US and Russia, the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing sources. The new strategy is called the “Nuclear Employment Guidance” and also readies the US for a possible coordinated threat between China, Russia and North...