Free Republic

The Archer Daniels Midland wet mill on the outskirts of Decatur, Ill., rises like an industrial behemoth from the frozen, harvested cornfields of Central Illinois. Steam billowed in the 20-degree cold last week, as workers turned raw corn into sweet, ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Three miles away, a Primient mill, which sprawls across 400 acres divided by North 22nd Street, was doing the same. To Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, this bedraggled city — set deep in Trump country — is the belly of the agribusiness beast, churning out...

Unions and their affiliates think they can still break through with the Democrats’ worst demographic, white working-class voters, by hustling on the ground. But it has been a slog.Vice President Kamala Harris’s allies in organized labor have begun a late drive to help her with white working-class voters, her weakest demographic, in the face of great skepticism over inflation, old grudges about free trade, new ones about student-loan forgiveness, and a profound blue-collar affinity for Donald J. Trump. Working America, a political affiliate of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. built to reach nonunion workers, has around 1,600 paid canvassers knocking on doors in...

In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are staking their chances on two radically different theories of how to win: one tried-and-true, the other untested in modern presidential campaigns. Ms. Harris’s team is running an expansive version of the type of field operation that has dominated politics for decades, deploying flotillas of paid staff members to organize and turn out every vote they can find. Mr. Trump’s campaign is going after a smaller universe of less frequent voters while relying on well-funded but inexperienced outside groups to reach a...

Former President Donald J. Trump escalated the nativist, anti-immigration rhetoric that has animated his political career with a speech Friday in Aurora, Colo., where he repeated false and grossly exaggerated claims about undocumented immigrants that local Republican officials have refuted.For weeks, Aurora has been fending off false rumors about the city. And its conservative Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, said in a statement on Friday that he hoped to show Mr. Trump that Aurora was “a considerably safe city.”But Mr. Trump has made debunked claims about Aurora, a Denver suburb, such a central part of his stump speech that he took...

The former president is holding a rally in a Colorado city he falsely claims was overtaken by violent immigrants from Venezuela. The city’s leaders, Republicans and Democrats alike, tried to pre-emptively fact-check him. Mike Coffman, the conservative Republican mayor of Aurora, Colo., had a message for former President Donald J. Trump before the Republican nominee for the White House came on Friday to a city he has repeatedly painted as having been taken over by vicious migrant street thugs.The visit, Mr. Coffman said in a statement to The Times, “is an opportunity to show him and the nation that Aurora...

In Eastern Nebraska, far from the presidential battleground states, a drama is playing out that could, in a perfectly plausible November scenario, have history-altering repercussions for the nation’s future and the next president — and it may all come down to one man. A single Republican state senator from Omaha, Mike McDonnell, has so far stood firm against a push by former President Donald J. Trump, national Republicans and the Nebraska G.O.P. to change Nebraska from a state that divides its electoral votes by congressional district to one that awards all of them to the statewide winner. Maine is the...

Mike Coffman, the conservative Republican mayor of Aurora, Colo., said he was at home on Tuesday night watching the presidential debate and bracing for the worst. And then there it was again, before tens of millions of viewers: former President Donald J. Trump, describing Mr. Coffman’s Aurora, a sprawling suburb just east of Denver, as a city under siege, terrorized by migrants. “They’re taking over buildings,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re going in violently.” Mr. Coffman was contrite on Thursday as he told that story. After all, he had helped create the tall tale now sullying his city’s reputation. Before Springfield,...

Senator JD Vance, the running mate of former President Donald J. Trump, has declined to denounce the right-wing talk-show host Tucker Carlson for praising and airing the views of a Holocaust revisionist who falsely claimed that the Nazis’ destruction of European Jewry was not an intentional act of premeditated genocide. Mr. Vance is scheduled to appear onstage Sept. 21 with Mr. Carlson in Hershey, Pa. Mr. Carlson no stranger to controversy, but his recent interview with Darryl Cooper, whom he described as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” has faced particularly fierce blowback. The Nazis’...

Republicans running for the seat of Ohio’s retiring senator, Rob Portman, appear determined to bury the soft-spoken country-club bonhomie that was once a hallmark of the party in this state, and replace it with the pugilistic brand of conservatism owned by Donald J. Trump and now amplified by the new band of Buckeye bomb throwers. The race descended into a brutal slugfest as the leading candidates, the author-turned-venture capitalist J.D. Vance, the former state treasurer Josh Mandel and a self-funded businessman, Mike Gibbons, entered the final weekend before Tuesday’s primaries accusing one another of being insufficiently right-wing or disloyal to...

Last week the corrupt media’s penchant for spinning all things conservative caused a near-fatal case of whiplash. The left began by chastising conservatives for supposedly building “its own echo chamber,” but by the next day, when news broke that Devin Nunes was resigning from Congress to serve as the CEO of Donald Trump’s new media company, the complained-of conservative ecosystem merely represented grift. Both narratives are false, however, which is precisely why leftists peddled them so hard. Axios launched the “echo chamber” accusation with its article titled, “Right wing builds its own echo chamber.” “Conservatives are aggressively building their own...

A high-ranking editor at The New York Times was demoted following recent incidents that resulted in a heavy backlash on social media. The Times confirmed to Fox News on Tuesday that the editor, Jonathan Weisman, has been demoted for his "serious lapses in judgment." "Jonathan Weisman met with [New York Times Executive Editor] Dean Baquet today and apologized for his recent serious lapses in judgment. As a consequence of his actions, he has been demoted and will no longer be overseeing the team that covers Congress or be active on social media. We don't typically discuss personnel matters, but we're...

<p>WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans conceded defeat on Wednesday in their bitter budget fight with President Obama over the new health care law as the House and Senate approved last-minute legislation ending a disruptive 16-day government shutdown and extending federal borrowing power to avert a financial default with potentially worldwide economic repercussions.</p>

In his Saturday Playbook email, Politico’s Mike Allen defended GOP establishment Senators like Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Lamar Alexander and others facing Tea Party challengers as up against nothing more than an “expensive headache” they will defeat. Allen, a denizen of D.C. political establishment, highlighted two news stories to make his point: One from the New York Times, and the other from the Associated Press. The New York Times’ Jennifer Steinhauser reported with Jonathan Weisman on the front page of the Gray Lady on Saturday that “[d]espite their careful efforts, some of the best-known and most influential Republicans...

Betraying his impatience with the Republican Party's insistence that President Obama cut spending, New York Times political reporter Jonathan Weisman sounded shocked that the GOP wasn't simply surrendering its principles in the wake of Obama's four–point victory last November, in Monday's "Republicans Determined To Press On With Air, If Not Vote, of Confidence." (Nice flattering photo of Paul Ryan, by the way.) A year ago this month, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin stood on the floor of the House and declared that the ideals of small government, privatized health care and rigorous spending discipline captured in the budget plan...

THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary (Great Falls, Montana) ____________________________________________________________________________________ For Immediate Release February 3, 2005 SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT Participants get 100% of Their Personal Retirement Accounts, Both Principal and Interest Myth: Jonathan Weisman's Washington Post Story today (p A13), includes the headline that "Participants would Forfeit Part of Accounts' Profits," which is flat wrong. The article says workers who opt for personal accounts "would ultimately get to keep only the investment returns that exceed the rate of return that the money would have accrued in the traditional system." This statement, unfortunately, is also flat wrong. Both...