Free Republic

President Joe Biden’s farewell speech to the State Department on Monday will reportedly omit his most serious policy blunders. The octogenarian is scheduled to give multiple speeches this week during his last seven days in office to frame his presidency as a success. The planned speaking tour comes after Americans told Gallup they will remember Biden as the second worse president in the history of the republic. The two policy failures Biden will ignore during Monday’s State Department speech include his deadly Afghan withdrawal, which took the lives of 13 U.S. troops, and the Americans who died at the hands...

What we are witnessing is the panicked flailing of a campaign that is desperately attempting to recoup its lost initiative. The result is partly embarrassing, partly hilarious. If I may start with an understatement: It has not been a good week for team Kamala Harris. First, there was the scandal of her interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes. Asked about US influence on Israel, Harris delivered one of her signature, zero-calorie word salads. We know this because the network released a preview of the interview on social media, where it was promptly pounced upon and mocked. But when the...

Vice President Kamala Harris tried to separate herself from the Biden-Harris administration’s record during a Wednesday interview on Fox News Channel’s Special Report with Bret Baier. Under the Biden-Harris administration, costs increased by about 20 percent across the board, Russia invaded Ukraine, Hamas and Iran attacked Israel, illegal migrants invaded the southern border, and the nation suffered the deadly Afghan withdrawal.

Former President Donald Trump is gaining in swing-state polls — and you can bet one group is secretly pleased: New York’s elected officials. The city’s Democrats use big, bad Trump as a cartoon foil to district the public from their own failures. Last week, Trump announced a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, two weekends before Election Day. State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, whose Manhattan district includes MSG, immediately lodged a complaint via Trump supporter Elon Musk’s X. “Allowing Trump to hold an event at MSG is equivalent to the infamous Nazis rally at Madison Square Garden on...

The family of a 76-year-old Kentucky man was awarded over $2 million for his death from second- and third-degree burns suffered in a scalding hot motel shower where water temperatures reached at least 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Court documents from the lawsuit alleged that Alex Chronis checked into the Econo Lodge in Erlanger, Kentucky, on Nov. 18, 2021. The next morning, he turned on the shower and was immediately struck by extremely hot water that knocked him to the floor while the water continued to burn him. The two people who were in the motel with Chronis heard his screams and...

The Trump rally gunman was laid out on his belly, took aim and fired shots into the crowd before he got met with incoming bullets that killed him ... and TMZ has it all on video.We've obtained an incredible clip that shows the moment the gunman opened fire at the Butler, PA rally Saturday -- and you can see the guy looking through either a scope or iron sights on a roof ... with people watching down below and freaking out, their panic palpable.The guy has longer brown hair, and he seems to be wearing a grey shirt/khaki pants --...

The Republican National Committee (RNC) appears to have little to no on-the-ground operations in key battleground states despite former President Donald Trump narrowly leading President Joe Biden, local GOP and conservative group leaders tell The Federalist. They expressed optimism, however, that the RNC will step up its efforts and suggested it’s “typical” for the RNC not to have its ground game going until about now. Grassroots organizations are targeting key states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Texas to improve “election processes at the administrative level well before Election Day,” director Josh Findlay of the Texas Public Policy...

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Thursday he expects to see some banks fail due to their exposure to the commercial real estate sector, which has declined significantly in value following the shift to remote work. Powell said the banks that are in trouble with falling office space and retail assets are not the big banks, which were designated as “systemically important” in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. That episode, which resulted in a taxpayer bailout of the financial sector, was also triggered by unsound real estate assets. Rather, the banks at risk of failure now Powell identified...

Doctors have released a damning new report on America’s “failures” during the COVID pandemic, revealing that keeping schools closed for longer than necessary and forcing people to mask outside led the country to experience “eye-wateringly high” death rates compared to other first-world nations. Duke University professor Gavin Yamey and Drexel University professor Ana Roux said the pandemic “failures began at the top” with poor communication from the federal government, which demonstrated a “surprising inability to generate reliable information, communicate it in a timely and consistent manner and translate it into sound policy.”

How many people marry the first person they ever kiss or date or even have sex with? Not that many. The average age an American loses their virginity is 17 while the average age they get married is 27. Nonetheless, despite a decade in the dating pool, experiencing everything from one night stands to years of living with someone, when people finally take the plunge, half of all US marriages end up in divorce. There are lots of things that one might take from that observation, but the thing that is most compelling is that despite their best efforts, people...

Note: This is the fourth in a 10-part series at PJ Media examining what our nation’s top 10 law schools – according to U.S. News and World Report – are teaching. J. Christian Adams and I are undertaking a deep dive into what is being taught in these law schools. We have already covered Yale, Stanford, and Chicago. If you thought based on our coverage of the curriculums at Yale, Stanford, and Chicago that you had seen the worst of the political indoctrination that passes for a law school education these days, wait until you see the curriculum at the...

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that Democrats have to answer for failures in the education system and that spending more money won’t solve the education issue. Maher said, “I also read this week in the paper, one in three children in America cannot read at a basic level of comprehension. 85% of black students lack proficiency in reading skills. We already spend a lot of money on schools, so you’re going to keep telling me more money will fix this? … And it seems like a lot of times the solutions that come from...

As the global community prepares to celebrate Earth Day, NASCAR today announced its commitment to achieve net zero operating emissions by the year 2035. The announcement coincides with the launch of NASCAR IMPACT, a new umbrella platform designed to align and advance the sport’s collective efforts around sustainability, community engagement and other impact-driven social initiatives. NASCAR plans to reduce its carbon footprint to zero across all scope 1 and 2 emissions over the next 12 years through strategic investment, collaborative partnerships, and operational changes. “As a sport, NASCAR has a responsibility to serve and impact the communities where we live...

Kids in New York schools could be doing even worse on state exams than we thought – because educrats are cloaking failure with misleading stats. An analysis by The Post of the 2022 statewide test results in English and math found that the state fudged its overall results by ignoring the nearly 20% of kids who went untested — most because they refused to take the exams altogether. So while the state Education Department claimed in October that New York state students in grades 3-8 achieved a 47% proficiency rate in English Language Arts in 2022, only 38% of kids...

EXCERPTS: Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, a Marine sniper who served in Afghanistan during the American withdrawal, recounted the ordeal in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Wednesday, telling members about the moment he and a friend were hit with a "flash and massive wave of pressure" after a suicide bomb detonated at Kabul airport on Aug. 26, 2021. "The troops on the ground had to tirelessly work to control the crowds, day and night. The Department of State staff at HKIA (Hamid Karzai International Airport) would completely shut down processing Afghans every evening and into the morning, leaving ground forces...

The brutal, unrelenting cold that lasted for several days over the Christmas holiday froze off a sizable portion of Appalachia’s ample gas production, cutting off supply to power plants when they needed it most. Gas transmission pipelines said the gas they were promised simply didn’t show up. On the electric grid that connects Pennsylvania to 12 other states, at one point almost 25% of the capacity on the system either didn’t start up or broke while operating, leaving coal and petroleum-fired units to pick up the slack. PJM, a Valley Forge-based grid operator, is still analyzing what happened during the...

Hey capitalists! You still think your system is perfect? Well, think again! Capitalism is one of the worst things to happen to humanity and we'll show you why. Here are 10 miserable failures of capitalism: The hotel breakfast was out of waffle mix this morning: Say what you will about the gulags, they NEVER had this problem. Your Che Guevara t-shirt was delayed during shipment: Virtue signal delayed! Lame! Google Maps on your iPhone 13 Pro Max sent you to the wrong end of the park for the abortion protest: It was inconvenient. That time you stubbed your toe on...

We were swindled, fooled, bamboozled and lied to during the pandemic. The public-health establishment misled the American people about the value of masking, closures and social distancing. No one has accepted blame. Understanding how badly we failed is not only an inevitable part of the “told you so” process but, more important, a lesson for next time. Just ask the Swedes. Sweden had zero excess deaths associated with COVID-19. The United States had the most excess deaths of all nations. New York had more than Florida. That’s the whole story right there in a handful of words.

The Democrat National Committee (DNC) on Monday blamed Republicans for President Biden’s chaotic presidency. Fraught with massive inflation, soaring crime, and an invasion on the southern border, the DNC has displaced blame from the president onto the GOP, accusing them of standing in the way of progress.

Democrats, who have continuously had messaging problems through the current election cycle, have now blamed messaging itself for their failures months before the general election. Democrats across the country are claiming they have “done a lousy job at highlighting their accomplishments in a year plus of unified power in Washington” and are using that as the source of their problems leading up to the November midterm elections, according to the Hill.