Free Republic

Axios reporter Alex Thompson said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that former President Joe Biden’s inner circle of family and advisors chose loyalty to him over duty to the country. Co-host Jonathan Lemire said, “So every White House, no matter which party Republican or Democrat administration part of the job is to make the president look good.” He asked, “What makes this administration do what they did to protect their principal? Why is that a cover-up?” Thompson said, “I think a lot of these things start innocently enough, to your point. You know, the speechwriting team early on realized that...

President Donald Trump used a White House meeting to confront South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, accusing his country of failing to address the killing of white farmers. "People are fleeing South Africa for their own safety," said Trump, who at one point dimmed the lights in the Oval Office to play a video of a communist politician playing a controversial anti-apartheid song that includes lyrics about killing a farmer. "Their land is being confiscated and in many cases they're being killed." Ramaphosa, who sat quietly watching these videos, pushed back against Trump's accusation. "I'd like to know where that is...

The early analyses of Trump’s victory have focused almost exclusively on the perceived abandonment of the working class by increasingly corporatist Democrats and the Trump-Vance ticket’s successful embrace of the plight of those who have been left behind by the global economy and the rising inequalities in our society. The culture wars have also been thrown into the mix. While these issues have certainly played a significant role in the decisive loss, Trump was able to claim another attribute traditionally reserved for the Democratic Party, that of being anti-war. We have no doubt that this association contributed to the election...

Now that former President Donald Trump has started to lean into the policy differences between himself and Vice President Kamala Harris — as he did last week in his speech in Asheville, North Carolina, in interviews with Breitbart and X owner Elon Musk and in his news conference on Thursday — the 2024 presidential campaign is starting to look like the 1980 presidential campaign. In that campaign, a fading and clearly outmatched incumbent was opposed by a rival who inspired fervor in some and anxiety in others. The mainstream media still placed considerable weight behind the incumbent, and the campaign’s...

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s inner circle has gotten smaller following his disastrous debate last week — with his wife’s top aide Anthony Bernal emerging as one of the 81-year-old’s key advisers alongside longtime confidante Mike Donilon, four sources close to or inside the White House tell The Post. Bernal, 51, is a divisive figure for allegedly bullying and sexually harassing colleagues — and his influence was likened by three sources to that held by the mystic Grigori Rasputin over the family and court of Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia. First lady Jill Biden considers Bernal her “work husband”...

Anheuser-Busch’s former chief creative officer — whose iconic ads included the “I Love You, Man” commercials and the talking frogs — blasted the company’s Belgian parent InBev over Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney fiasco. “It took us 20 years to take Bud Light beer to the No. 1 beer in the country, and it took them one week to dismantle it,” Robert Lachky told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch this week. Anheuser-Busch has suffered from “a complete lack of corporate oversight, and it’s been that way since (InBev) took the company over,” he added in the Monday interview.

The faster growth under Indonesia's Banda Sea hasn't left the core lopsided. Gravity evenly distributes the new growth—iron crystals that form as the molten iron cools—to maintain a spherical inner core that grows in radius by an average of 1 millimeter per year. But the enhanced growth on one side suggests that something in Earth's outer core or mantle under Indonesia is removing heat from the inner core at a faster rate than on the opposite side, under Brazil. Quicker cooling on one side would accelerate iron crystallization and inner core growth on that side. This has implications for Earth's...

Caked in mud and covered with bug bites, a shivering group of six friends from the Quad-Cities huddled together in the dark this past Sunday, stranded in the woods of northeast Iowa.

Video of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s consultation with his most trusted aides immediately after President Barack Obama’s speech to AIPAC Sunday shows that kippah-wearers comprise half of the inner circle. Netanyahu was in Washington Sunday but did not attend the speech. Channel 2 television quoted a source in his bureau as saying that no meaning should be read into this fact, and that Netanyahu’s schedule had originally called for him to be in New York during the speech. Netanyahu’s bureau released soundless video of his consultation, immediately after Obama’s speech, with top aides including former Ambassador to the U.S. Dore...

When Sen. Barack Obama laced up his basketball shoes Friday evening for a three-on-three game with some players half his age, he was doing something that could prove important should he become the Democratic nominee: looking young and healthy. In a rare move by his presidential campaign, network news cameras were allowed to record Obama, 46, moving up and down the court, playing a game that is almost a religion in this state. Though his relative lack of Washington experience has been repeatedly used against him, Obama's youth and athleticism could offer a dramatic general election contrast with Sen. John...

Six- and 10-month-old babies are much more capable judges of character than previously thought. Not only can infants pick out a good Samaritan, they tend to identify with them, according to a Yale University study published in the journal Nature.

Given the polarized tenor of politics these days, you would think that being a Democrat, or even an independent, in the inner sanctum of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Republican administration would feel like sneaking behind enemy lines in war or, worse, working for the other side. But a funny thing keeps happening as California moves closer to the Nov. 8 special election and Democrats seek to characterize Schwarzenegger as a right-wing partisan trying to impose the Bush agenda on the Golden State. The more Democrats accuse the governor of veering to the right, the more he keeps hiring, and promoting, Democrats...

In a confidential report, Young Muslims and Extremism, prepared jointly by the Home and Foreign offices in mid-2004 and presented to Prime Minister Tony Blair, we learn something about the inner thinking of the British government. Leaked to the Sunday Times of London, the report is now available in four parts in .pdf format at the newspaper's site.Its goal is "to encourage moderate Muslim opinion to the detriment of extremism" and to that end proposes an "Operation Contest." Along the way, it contains much of interest in it, including these points: "A number of extremist groups are actively recruiting young...

Never one to mess up a good story by sticking with the facts, the liberal media in Washington refuse to tell us much about the inner-workings of the Senate. Oh sure, they are quick to carp about anything they think may be a misstep by a Republican member. But that is about as deep as their news reports usually go. No one ever reports that few senators fully understand, or even read, any of the bills before voting. Nor are we often informed that an inordinate amount of each senator's time is spent seeing lobbyists and other campaign contributors, rather...

Inner Mongolia Yields New Discoveries More than 80 leading archeological experts are participating in an international conference in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, to exchange the latest information on Hongshan, a prehistoric relics site. Relics excavated at the Hongshan ("Red Mountain") site originated around 5000 BC to 6500 BC. Now a part of Chifeng City, the site was discovered in 1935. Some of the relics found at Hongshan have led archeologists to conclude that the heads of Chinese dragons may have been inspired by boars in addition to horses and cattle. Primitive people who struggled to survive by fishing and...

Exotic relics found in ancient nomads' tombs in Inner Mongolia www.chinaview.cn 2003-10-28 17:13:28 ¡¡¡¡HOHHOT, Oct. 28 (Xinhuanet) -- Judging from bronze articles unearthed from ancient tombs in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, archaeologists estimate that nomadic tribes in north China had contacts with Western civilizations approximately 2,500 years ago.¡¡¡¡Local archaeologists found a bronze mirror and a bronze plate at the two ancient tomb sites in Liangcheng county which can be traced back to the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 B.C.) and the Warring States Period (475-221 B.C.), which they believed could not be the work of ancient northern peoples in...