Free Republic

Joanne Rogers, the 92-year-old wife of the late Fred Rogers, blasted the president on Thursday, calling him a ‘horrible person’ who ‘seldom tells the truth.' ‘This man is pathologically ill. Mentally ill,’ Rogers told The Daily Beast. When asked what she would do if Trump won re-election, she replied: ‘I will probably go into mourning.’ ‘I can’t even imagine. I would feel so badly.’

Beowulf: A New TranslationThe first thing I need to tell you is that you have to read it now. No, I don't care if you've read Beowulf (the original) before. No, I don't care if you loved it/hated it, if it traumatized you, if it ruined and/or energized the English language for you, or ruined you for translations or whatever. I don't care what you think of when you think of Beowulf in any of its hundreds of other translations because this — this — version, Headley's version, is an entirely different thing. It is its own thing. A remarkable...

The former head of the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama and President Trump says he wishes the United States had taken more action against Russian meddling prior to the 2016 election and claimed the country is better prepared in 2020. Adm. Mike Rogers, who retired in 2018 after four years as NSA chief and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, spoke with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly on All Things Considered this week, saying that “I wish we had taken, broadly, more action prior to the election itself” in 2016. He said the U.S. was aware of Russia’s meddling efforts...

For many loyal corporate media consumers the convention provided the longest slice of counter-programming they'd been treated to in years. Night one of the Republican National Committee’s first-ever remote convention kicked off Monday, rejecting Democrats’ hosted model for a faster-paced, single-location-centered event that beat its competitor in production value and rally atmosphere, although still stunted by the lack of a live audience. Activists and everyday Americans stole the show, telling moving stories of the fights, lessons, victories and tragedies that brought them to that stage, skillfully parlaying those stories into specific policies they support the president on. While some veteran...

Fifty years after the Public Broadcasting Service launched, we're still seeing our taxpayer subsidies transform into Democratic donations during election years. On Aug. 4, "PBS NewsHour" hatched a love-in with Dr. Jill Biden. Anchor Judy Woodruff hit every Joe Biden campaign talking point with partisan perfection. She began by reminding viewers of the Biden family losses, saying: "He had lost his first wife and another child. You were coming out of your own marriage. You describe how daunting it was. How did you do it?" Then she recalled how Joe Biden's son Beau Biden died of brain cancer five years...

Another example of the Left's ongoing perpetuation of racist slanders. NPR ran a lead segment this past Sunday dedicated to a new book that is so defamatory it should never have been published, let alone made it onto taxpayer-funded broadcasts. Fakenews “journalist” Jean Guerrero has written a virulent screed on the thesis that Donald Trump won the 2016 election as a white supremacist, and that speech-writer Stephen Miller was the evil genius who crafted his message, all with the goal of dividing Americans along racial lines. Anyone who ever attended a Trump rally knows this is a lie. Anyone who...

President Trump said hydroxychloroquine "would be the hottest thing" had he not endorsed the anti-malaria drug as a treatment for COVID-19. "If I would have said, 'I don't believe in it. It doesn't work,' it would be the hottest thing going right now," he said Tuesday morning. In an interview on sports radio show Outkick, Trump told host Clay Travis that the drug "causes no problem," citing his own use of hydroxychloroquine as a preventive measure against the virus in May. "As soon as I came out with it, they said 'Oh, it doesn't work.' They went crazy," Trump added,...

Don’t you dare compare the ideologically motivated mobs attacking and destroying shops and other property in Seattle with the ideologically motivated mobs that attacked and destroyed Jewish-owned shops in Nazi Germany during Kristallnacht in 1938! Not if you work for NPR affiliate KNKX in Tacoma, WA. KNKX has permanently booted University of Washington Professor Cliff Mass from his weekly weather segment for daring to make such a comparison on his personal blog. Reaction came swiftly from the left on social media accusing Mass of anti-Semitism and exaggerating what was going on in riots in Seattle. This led to KNKX removing...

Revolutions tend to devour their own, but rarely has this happened as swiftly, publicly, and predictably as it did with Portland’s overpraised “Wall of Moms.” The brainchild of a suburban Mexican-American woman named Beverly Barnum, the group was loosely organized among other moms on Facebook who were incensed that President Trump had dispatched federal officers to Portland to protect the federal courthouse that had become the main target of three-months-long protests in the city. Wearing yellow T-shirts and linking arms, the Moms created a “wall” between federal officers and Black Lives Matter protestors in July, chanting “Feds stay clear. Moms...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had a bitter exchange with "PBS NewsHour" anchor Judy Woodruff Tuesday over the ongoing stalemate on Capitol Hill between lawmakers negotiating a so-called "Phase 4" coronavirus aid bill. At one point in their interview, Woodruff asked Pelosi about the "flexibility" GOP lawmakers are showing in terms of allocating more money for state and local governments, as well as Republican arguments that "much of the money" allocated in the CARES Act "has not even been spent yet."

Brace yourself for wave upon wave of … political polls. The latest show President Trump lagging presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, as usual. But stop. Let us do what no one does – look BEHIND these polls, understand the process and bias in polling. Take two recent polls, by NPR/PBS/Marist (NPR) and ABC/Washington Post (ABC). Both report new anti-Trump findings. Take a moment and unpack them. MSN.com – like may non-technical, left-leaning sites – summarizes both. A stinging line punctuates a leading paragraph. Says MSN, NPR’s poll “has Biden beating Trump 60 percent to 35 percent among suburban voters.”...

NPR, Politico, Time, and Scientific American are unlikely ever to pay an NRA employee to write news articles about gun control. But they have no problem hiring people who work for The Trace, a Michael Bloomberg-funded gun control organization. Even in the very hypothetical case that these publications did use an NRA-influenced article, they would undoubtedly include a disclaimer warning readers of the possible bias.

According to a recent poll, two-thirds of voters trust Dr. Anthony Fauci, not President Trump, when it comes to information on the coronavirus. Well, if you think you can trust Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, you now have every reason to question his judgment. In an interview with PBS NewsHour, Dr. Fauci, the trusted expert, actually lauded New York’s response to the coronavirus. “We know that, when you do it properly, you bring down those cases. We have done it. We have done it in New York,” he told PBS’s Judy Woodruff....

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)and other Democrats have gone on a tirade over apparent federal agents sweeping alleged rioters away in unmarked vehicles. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has joined the bandwagon of sanctimonious anger over the criminal suspects being apprehended in an unconventional way, highlighting the suspicion by patriotic Americans nationwide the left is not interested in quelling any civil unrest unless it happens to directly affect them. Earlier we reported that Nancy Pelosi was calling the agents “Stormtroopers” for President Trump. Now Chuck Schumer has this to say about the situation, using the word abomination for the...

Broadcast ratings for nearly all of NPR's radio shows took a steep dive in major markets this spring, as the coronavirus pandemic kept many Americans from commuting to work and school. The network's shows lost roughly a quarter of their audience between the second quarter of 2019 and the same months in 2020. People who listened to NPR shows on the radio at home before the pandemic by and large still do. But many of those who listened on their commute have not rejoined from home. And that threatens to alter the terrain for NPR for years to come, said...

Democratic challengers in many of the key Senate races that will determine which party controls the chamber next year have over the past three months outraised the Republican incumbents they’re hoping to unseat in November’s general election. “The green wave of fundraising that helped Democrats take back the House in 2018 is now a tsunami of cash in Senate races for Democrats that could clear the way for them to flip the Senate in November,” said Jessica Taylor, who closely tracks the Senate races for the Cook Report, a leading non-partisan political handicapper. Republicans enjoy a 53-47 majority in the...

A federal judge in Washington has blocked federal executions scheduled for this week, citing concerns that the lethal injection protocol involved is "very likely to cause extreme pain and needless suffering." Judge Tanya Chutkan said the last-minute ruling only hours before executions were set to resume for the first time in 17 years was "unfortunate," but she blamed the Justice Department for racing ahead before legal challenges had been fully aired. The judge said the prison's plan to use a single drug, pentobarbital, could cause pulmonary edema, producing a sense that the condemned men were drowning. That would violate the...

The curfew in Serbia appears to have ended before it could even begin. Serbian President Aleksandar Vu�ić suggested Wednesday that the country would "probably" not reinstate a curfew this weekend, less than a day after its announcement led to bloodshed in the capital. The country's health ministry clarified that officials have yet to make a final decision, even as new cases have surged. Demonstrators gathered overnight in Belgrade to protest the coronavirus-prevention measure, some clashing with police outside parliament and even trying to storm the building. Dozens of people were injured in the violence, which Vu�ić blamed primarily on "right-wing...

A joint effort by former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to unify Democrats around Biden's candidacy has produced a 110-page policy wish list to recommend to the party's presumptive presidential nominee. Throughout the Democratic primary, Biden stuck to a more moderate platform, while Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and much of the rest of the crowded field courted progressives and advocated for broader structural changes. But as the United States faces a growing pandemic and unemployment rates at the highest levels in generations, Biden has been talking more and more about a presidency that approaches Franklin...

Journalism is just one of the industries hard-hit by the economic fallout from the pandemic. While we reimagine journalism’s structures and funding models, what role might the government play in intervening to support the role of a functioning press—not just someday, but now? In a new report published by the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina, Penny Abernathy—a collaborator on our Cutback Tracker project—underlines the stakes. Since 2005, more than a quarter of the country’s newspapers have disappeared. In the same fifteen-year span, the number of local journalists working in newsrooms has dropped by...