Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Vice presidents seeking the top job almost always feel a need to separate themselves from the presidents they’ve served.For Hubert Humphrey, the moment came late in his campaign. In a nationally televised speech on Sept. 30, 1968, he called for a halt to the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, departing from the Johnson administration’s war policy.George H.W. Bush struggled to establish a distinct identity with voters after eight years as second fiddle to the very popular President Reagan. In his speech to the Republican convention in August 1988, he called for a “kinder, gentler nation” — to which...

Hello and happy Thursday. There are 81 days until the election, and today we are talking about stayin’ alive — for the Harris campaign, the Trump whatever-it-is and for us voters who have 11-plus weeks to go.And for democracy. Don’t forget democracy!First, I know you’ve seen the AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” Trump also posted it on his Truth Social, where truth goes to die. This bromance is hard to watch. Musk’s power and privilege seem to be veering him into Howard Hughes-weird territory, where his crazy theories are matched...

Kamala Harris had no sooner replaced Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee than Donald Trump began bashing her over the number of immigrants coming into the United States, declaring that they had driven countless American workers from their jobs.But the data on U.S. employment and the economy overwhelmingly suggest a reality far more beneficial when it comes to immigration than the nightmarish vision the former president has put forth.The surge of international migrants since 2021 — including refugees, asylum seekers and others entering legally and illegally — has lifted the U.S. and California economies by filling otherwise vacant...

Last week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz went viral with his observation that former president and current GOP nominee Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance are “just weird.” After Trump wildly attacked Vice President and leading Democratic candidate Kamala Harris on “Fox and Friends,” the Harris campaign responded with a scathing press release titled “Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance” that included in its bullet-point takeaways: “Trump is old and quite weird?” Since then the word has become a byword among Harris supporters, used to describe everything from Trump’s continued, and quite baffling, non sequiturs about “the...

Never has an NCAA Sports Day been so widely and breathlessly covered as it was on Monday.And never has it been clearer that Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, did not just fall out of a coconut tree.With President Biden recovering from COVID-19, the task of honoring top college athletes from across the country fell to Harris, who performed the same duty last year with much less fanfare.This year, of course, the event occurred the day after Biden announced he was ending his reelection campaign and endorsed Harris as the party’s replacement candidate for president....

Donald Trump isn’t normally thought of as a consensus-builder, but in one sense that’s exactly what he is. Many of Trump’s most ardent fans and foes alike believe he is the leader of a political movement with a clear and defined set of principles and goals. They disagree only on whether that agenda is good or bad.The tendency to cast Trump as a tool of the ideological right serves the purposes of both sides. The right needs to believe Trump is a warrior for its causes to justify its support for him, and the left wants to believe the same...

The selection of J.D. Vance on Monday as Donald Trump’s running mate is a direct result of the political media’s failure to understand class in America. For his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was venerated by many journalists and book critics as a powerful voice representing long-overlooked Americans. But he’s no working-class hero.Vance portrayed this group — 35% of Americans, by the way — as tragic victims of alcoholism, drug abuse, laziness and their own self-destructive moral failings. Journalists ran with that, bringing their own stereotypes to depict the working class as angry, uneducated white men driven by economic insecurity...

Joe Biden is old. Like each of us, he comes from a particular place in history, in his case the LBJ years. And that’s one big reason why his first term has been so full of accomplishment: His age, often cited as the greatest obstacle to his reelection, is actually his superpower. The first presidential election in which Joe Biden was eligible to vote featured Lyndon Johnson beating Barry Goldwater. History remembers LBJ’s presidency as chaotic because of his tragic adventuring in Vietnam, but in other respects it was remarkable. His Great Society echoed Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (FDR was...

Was I the only journalist in America who thought President Biden’s State of the Union speech Tuesday was hard to watch? At least until he departed from his script and began sparring with the nation’s rudest Republicans?Sometimes when Biden starts to speak, I involuntarily hold my breath, waiting for him to stumble over his words, or slur them or otherwise mangle his text in a way that will show up in clips on Fox News or MAGA Twitter. See, he’s incompetent! Worrying about this detracts from the pleasure of having a solid Democratic president after four years of Trumpian chaos...

President Biden will welcome Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House on Friday, a meeting intended to signal a more confrontational approach to China as Tokyo's defense turns south toward the Taiwan Strait.Kishida is pushing for a larger defense role for Japan in the Indo-Pacific region as his country and the U.S. face down threats on multiple fronts: a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a nuclear-armed North Korea and Russia's continued assault on Ukraine.Before Kishida's visit, the U.S. and Japan agreed on Wednesday to upgrade their security cooperation by equipping Tokyo with long-range missiles and refitting a U.S....

Gregory Yee, a hard-charging breaking news reporter for the Los Angeles Times, died unexpectedly Wednesday at the Hollywood bungalow where he lived. His family said the cause appeared to be complications from a respiratory issue. He was 33. ... Hired during the pandemic, he worked from home and did not have a chance to meet many of his co-workers in person. Colleagues said he enjoyed the adrenaline rush and constant novelty of breaking news, and studied the paper’s online analytics to gauge how much time readers were lingering on his stories.

There is a new cable news ratings champion. Nielsen data for 2022 rank the Fox News round table program “The Five” as the most watched show in cable news with an average of 3.5 million viewers. The figure tops “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” which averaged 3.3 million viewers for the year. The figure for the Fox News prime-time show is up 3% over 2021 when it was the most watched program for the year. But “The Five” grew more, up 17% over 2021. The program, which airs live at 5 p.m. Eastern and 2 p.m. Pacific, is also the first cable...

This industrial city an hour north of Indianapolis isn't as famous as Detroit, but it has become an unlikely battleground in the war over electric cars. Almost everyone you meet here either works in a factory, is retired from one or has a relative in a plant that makes parts for gasoline-powered cars — which have ruled Kokomo for nearly 130 years. Yet change is coming. Bulldozers are clearing Kokomo’s cornfields to build a $2.5-billion government-subsidized electric vehicle battery factory, with the aim of retaining jobs tied to auto production at a time California is leading the nation in phasing...

Senate Republicans on Friday blocked an independent, bipartisan commission to study the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.Eager to put the events of that day and former President Trump’s role in it behind them, Republicans blasted the commission proposal as a partisan attempt by Democrats to keep both in the news during next year’s pivotal midterm elections.The bill fell in the first legislative filibuster of the year as it failed to get the 60 votes needed to advance. The vote was 54 to 35 to move the bill forward, with a handful of Republicans breaking ranks — Sens. Mitt...

The myth of Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, Master of Pandemics, Destroyer of Trump, Boyfriend of America didn't create itself: It was the creation of U.S. media.The week isn’t even over and already New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has threatened a Democrat colleague, attacked nurses and nursing home staff, lashed out at the federal government, and attacked his “critics” for spreading “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories” about that time he literally conspired to hide easily avoidable deaths he caused. Things aren’t looking good for him.This, we’re told by his new enemies in corporate media, is what Democratic accountability looks like....

The first night of the Republican National Convention averaged 15.9 million viewers on Monday, a sharp drop of 28% from 2016. The audience figure from Nielsen was also below the opening night of last week’s Democratic National Convention which averaged 18.7 million viewers over the three major English language broadcast networks and three leading cable news channels. The audience for the Democrats on the first night of their convention was also down about 28% from 2016. With additional channels added, the final total was 19.7 million for the Democrats on Aug. 17. A total for coverage of the Republicans’ proceedings...

Are rich people fleeing California to escape astronomical state income taxes? That’s the word. But it’s fake news. In fact, more wealthy people are moving to California than leaving, research indicates. It’s the poor and middle class who are departing. It makes sense. If you’re getting rich in California and can afford to live comfortably here in this balmy climate, there’s little incentive to leave — except to stick it to the tax collector in Sacramento. “If you’ve got your business here and you’re making money, it’s hard to leave,” says Allan Zaremberg, president of the California Chamber of Commerce....

RUSH: In the LA Times today, how predictable is this? How often have we seen this? The LA Times has a story which purports to be written from the opinion-free middle. It’s a piece of consternation and hand-wringing over the wide gap between the mainstream media and conservative media and their audiences. They’re practically crying in frustration over this division. And the focus of the story is the Susan Rice story. The LA Times says on CNN and CBS and ABC what you have is the entire premise being ridiculed and CNN proudly refusing to even cover it and telling...

Donald Trump’s flair for connecting with veterans won him an overwhelming share of their votes, but the durability of the alliance is already being tested as Trump’s search for a Veterans Affairs secretary veers in a direction that has alarmed some of America’s most influential retired soldiers. Under pressure from conservative activists, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and organizations funded by the Koch Brothers, Trump is contemplating choosing an agency chief who would upend the entire veterans healthcare system. That would come over the protest of the country’s major veterans groups. An appointment like that could prove an early...

The Los Angeles Times paid a visit to Donald Trump’s Southern California headquarters in Long Beach on Monday and was stunned by the diversity of volunteers who are committed to seeing him win the Golden State and the presidency. “It was as if the whole thing had been staged, in Cambodia Town, no less, to belie the notion that Trump’s appeal is largely limited to older white males,” the Times‘s Steve Lopez wrote. In Long Beach, one of America’s most diverse cities, that same diversity was reflected in Trump’s supporters at his Southern California headquarters. Lopez spoke with a woman...