Free Republic

NBC News reporter Kristen Welker, the debate moderator for the final presidential debate, has strong ties to Democrat activism and has even been caught on camera “tipping off” a member of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign about “at least one question” that she was going to ask during an interview, according to a new report.

All eyes are turning to NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker as she prepares to host the third and final presidential debate Thursday. President Trump and Joe Biden will square off at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., in a 90-minute debate starting at 9 p.m. Welker, 44, has been the White House correspondent at NBC News since 2011, after working as a news reporter in Rhode Island. Welker comes from an established Democratic family — who have poured cash into party coffers, and to Trump opponents, for years. Her mother, Julie Welker, a prominent real estate broker in Philadelphia,...

“Anyone who’s ever dealt with Welker knows she’s an activist, not a reporter. The White House press team views her the same way they would AOC or Pelosi if they walked in the office,” a senior White House official told The Post.

After the chaos of the first two presidential debates—including the absence of an actual second debate—the Biden-Trump face-off series will finally conclude on Thursday, Oct. 22, at Nashville's Belmont University at 9 p.m. ET. The third debate (or, if we're being literal, the second) will see Joe Biden and Donald Trump step up to their lecterns one last time to outline their plans to help the American people and shout nonsense over their opponent, respectively. After the chaos of the first two presidential debates—including the absence of an actual second debate—the Biden-Trump face-off series will finally conclude on Thursday, Oct....

The Senate will vote Monday on confirming President Trump's nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court. "With regard to the Supreme Court justice ... we'll be voting to confirm justice-to-be Barrett next Monday," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said during a weekly press conference, confirming the timing of a final vote on her nomination. ... Top GOP senators and aides had previously indicated to The Hill that they were likely to set up the final vote for Monday, allowing vulnerable GOP senators to spend the final week before the election back on the campaign trail. To set...

Facebook is demonetizing the Christian, political satire page “The Babylon Bee” after they published an article satirizing Sen. Mazie Hirono’s comments during the Amy Coney Barrett hearings in a fictional depiction. The Bee’s CEO Seth Dillon announced the demonetization on Tuesday in a tweet, claiming that the big tech company pulled down the article based on a “regurgitated joke from a Monty Python movie.” “So after a manual review, Facebook says they stand by their decision to pull down this article and demonetize our page. I’m not kidding,” he wrote. “They say this article ‘incites violence.’ It’s literally a regurgitated...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump portrays the hundreds of people arrested nationwide in protests against racial injustice as violent urban left-wing radicals. But an Associated Press review of thousands of pages of court documents tell a different story. Very few of those charged appear to be affiliated with highly organized extremist groups, and many are young suburban adults from the very neighborhoods Trump vows to protect from the violence in his reelection push to win support from the suburbs.

By almost every measure that political operatives, academics and handicappers use to forecast elections, the likely outcome is that Joe Biden will win the White House. Yet two weeks before Election Day, the unfolding reality of 2020 is that it’s harder than ever to be sure. And Democrats are scrambling to account for the hidden variables that could still sink their nominee — or what you might call the known unknowns. Republican registration has ticked up in key states at the same time Democratic field operations were in hibernation. Democratic turnout is surging in the early vote. But it’s unclear...

Isn’t there something incongruous about a human rights organization providing a platform to a journalist who has whitewashed human rights abuses? Next week, an online event organized by the human rights group “3 Generations” will feature New York Times op-ed columnist Roger Cohen, who sparked an international furor in 2009 when he visited Iran and announced that the oppressed Jews there were not really so oppressed, after all. Cohen’s assertion that Iranian Jews were “living, working and worshiping in relative tranquility” was met with scorn across the political spectrum. Jeffrey Goldberg, in The Atlantic, called him “credulous.” The Anti-Defamation League...

One candidate slapped on a helmet, a black leather jacket and rode his Harley Davidson across Michigan. His ads highlight his toughness on China and his support for banning Chinese travelers from entering the United States early in the coronavirus outbreak, a policy of President Trump’s. The other candidate calls himself “nonpartisan.” He denounces the way politics have become “nastier and more divisive.” His wife recently appeared in a campaign ad to talk about their young son who has asthma as a way to demonstrate her husband’s commitment to protecting health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions.... According to recent...

It’s becoming increasingly clear to even mainstream media outlets that things are unlikely to return to “normal” after the 2020 election. No matter who wins, it is likely the losing side will regard the winning side as having obtained its win using dirty tricks, foreign meddling, or through relentless propaganda offered up by a heavily biased and one-sided news media. And if about half the country regards the winning president as illegitimate, where does one go from there?

Last week, the New York Post published a dubious story about Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden. The Post story claims Hunter Biden helped arrange a meeting between Joe Biden and an executive at a Ukrainian energy company Burisma in April 2015. The series of stories contained hacked materials and personal email addresses, so Twitter (TWTR) initially prevented people from posting links to the article, sending it via direct message and retweeting it. As CNN's Chief Media Correspondent Brian Stelter noted on "Reliable Sources" Sunday, "We are not talking about fully reliable...

The New York Post’s own journalists say they are skeptical of the paper’s stories about Hunter Biden, including the man who wrote most of the “smoking gun” story and would not put his name on it, four newsroom sources told Intelligencer. On Wednesday morning, the Post dropped what it clearly hoped would be a bombshell — an exclusive report based on copies of emails and photos that had supposedly belonged to Hunter, the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The Post said the files were recovered from a computer that belonged to Hunter and was dropped off at a...

Guest host Tiffany Cross claimed that, while awaiting the conclusion of negotiations on the new stimulus package, Americans are "starving." Other than people who have fallen off the grid due to addiction or mental illness, perhaps Cross could tell us how many Americans have starved during these negotiations. Even more egregiously, the Rev. William Barber, a poverty advocate and regular MSNBC guest, offered up some statistics that can only be called insane. Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

“Thanks to some stunning new reporting in the Washington Post, we now know that Rudy Giuliani was identified by United States intelligence agencies as a target of an active Russian intelligence operation to harm the candidacy of Joe Biden” - @NicolleDWallace

Steve Scully got a clear vote of confidence last Friday, from a host of popular Republicans the morning after a tweet from his Twitter account sparked an outcry in the political media. Fox News Host Chris Wallace, Fox News analyst Karl Rove, former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer, former chairman of the RNC Frank Fahrenkopf, came to Steve Scully's defense. These comments did not age well, after Steve Scully admitted to lying. See their comments....

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has accused President Donald Trump of giving people license to say racist and sexist things. She also expressed a hope that he would soon be defeated.(snip) "And so when I look at where we are, I think that Trump and his enablers gave a lot of permission to people to say things and act in ways that were deeply racist and misogynistic. "And part of what I hope part of this election will be about is reclaiming any ground that's been lost and continue to push forward because it's unfinished business. If anybody lived...

Before MSNBC’s The ReidOut decided on Wednesday to only mention the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings once, Tuesday’s show was filled with rank sexism against Barrett as panelists ruled that “this woman” and “this lady” was akin to the Proud Boys, guilty of collusion with the Trump administration to get rid of ObamaCare, a real-life SNL skit, and too dumb to understand the law. The Beat host Ari Melber went down the collusion route after Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) finished wrapping her questioning of Barrett, praising her for pressing Barrett about when she had written a law review article disagreeing...

On Thursday, October 15, 2020 at 1:30 pm ET, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) will convene a virtual unclassified hearing entitled, “Misinformation, Conspiracy Theories, and ‘Infodemics’: Stopping the Spread Online.” Conspiracy theories and misinformation narratives that prey on individuals’ fears and uncertainties continue to mar the online landscape. Against the backdrop of a global pandemic, an economy in turmoil, and a tumultuous presidential campaign, there is ample terrain for malicious actors at home or malign foreign operatives and governments abroad to exploit such tensions by stoking chaos and dangerous, even life-threatening, untruths. Recent trends in the spread...