Free Republic

Paul: Instead, government authorities, self-interested in continuing gain-of-function research, say there's nothing to see here. There may be some truth to the assertion of self-interest. The international community of virologists is relatively small, and they tend to know one another. Peter Daszak, head of EcoHealth Alliance, which has been the main conduit for NIH research funds on coronaviruses to the Wuhan lab in China, and has worked closely with scientists in China, has been criticized for having a conflict of interest in his role as a member of the World Health Organization team that investigated the origins of SARS-CoV-2. More...

President Joe Biden’s first official act on his first day in office was signing an executive order mandating that masks be worn on all federal properties and by federal employees and contractors. “The first order I’m going to be signing here relates to Covid,” Biden said. “It’s requiring, as I said all along, where I have authority, mandating that masks be worn, social distancing be kept on federal property.” The original story below was published on November 9, 2020. When President-elect Joe Biden accepted the Democratic nomination on August 20, he said part of his Covid-19 plan would be a...

This piece by Jack Shafer at Politico today was always inevitable. The only real surprise here is that CNN’s Brian Stelter didn’t write it first. But no matter, you can be sure that this vague and pathetic defense of the media’s credibility will be widely admired and imitated by other “media reporters” and a whole phalanx of column writers who want to defend the honor of journalism even if it makes no sense to do so. About a month ago, Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer for Joe Biden in the early 1990s, appeared on Katie Halper’s podcast and...

Health experts are warning the national count of Covid-19 deaths in the United States could be underestimated as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread. This could be especially true because the reporting data can lag by an average of one to two weeks, according to the latest guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's. Also, deaths due to Covid-19 "may be misclassified as pneumonia deaths in the absence of positive test results, and pneumonia may appear on death certificates as a comorbid condition," the CDC noted, adding that "analyses to better understand and quantify reporting delays" for...

Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Andrew Yang pushed false conspiracy theories on Twitter over the weekend tied to the canceled Des Moines Register poll, effectively commandeering a trending hashtag to convey the idea that their candidates are more successful than the public has been led to believe. The Des Moines Register poll, a closely watched indicator of the Iowa race, was canceled after at least one interviewer apparently omitted Pete Buttigieg’s name from the randomized list of candidates the surveyor read. The political website Axios reported that the reason for the error was that an interviewer increased the...

WASHINGTON — In his first formal response to impeachment charges, President Donald Trump misrepresented the testimony of a key witness who described an exchange of favors in the Ukraine matter. The claim marked a week of frequent exaggeration and distortion by the president heading into the opening statements of his impeachment trial. Just as his tax cuts are far from the biggest in history, the economy isn’t the best ever and his election victory in 2016 was no landslide of historic proportions, Trump’s two trade deals don’t stand atop the field of presidential endeavors. One is a partial settlement of...

PASADENA, Calif. — Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will share host duties for the Golden Globes ceremony in 2021. Poehler herself shared the announcement at a TV critics meeting Saturday, just a week after the ceremony aired with Ricky Gervais as host. “There are no two funnier people anywhere,” said Poehler, who introduced herself with the name of an NBC publicist who was to have opened the network’s daylong presentation about its programming. A tongue-in-cheek Poehler said the network was glad the pair found time in their busy schedules to take on the Globes. They have hosted three times before....

As 2019 wound down, well-known press figures sounded alarms about the “erosion of truth.” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd spoke to our own Peter Wade about the “epidemic” of “disinformation.” Washington Post editor Marty Baron and New York Times editor Dean Baquet joined Todd on Meet The Press to talk about how the Internet and Donald Trump and Russia are all combining to create an era in which “crazy conspiracy theories” and “absolute falsehoods and lies” can proliferate. This isn’t a new idea. Since 2016 especially, a wide array of American politicians and think-tanks have been hammering the idea that the free...

Earlier today, Bleeding Cool reported that DC Comics is making the first two issues of the new Lois Lane comic by Greg Rucka and Mike Perkins returnable, so that retailers could order as many copies as they liked, safe in the knowledge that they could return any left unsold. It is possible that this really won’t be an issue as the series may grab as many headlines as Lois Lane usually generated for the Daily Planet. Bleeding Cool has been informed that the new series pits Lois Lane against the White House administration. And while members of that administration are not names, there seem to...

Christin Ford The FBI found no corroborating evidence for Ford claims. All the people she said were at the party don't recall any party. Near the time shortly after the alleged event occurred Ford never told anyone about what she says had happened. Juanita Broaddrick Has five corroborating witness regarding Bill Clinton's allegedly raping her--This is from Vox.com-- Several friends of Broaddrick's backed up the story. Norma Rogers, who was director of nursing at Broaddrick's nursing home at the time, told reporters that she entered the hotel room shortly after the assault allegedly took place, and "found Mrs. Broaddrick crying...

As Washington continues to play a game of wait and see on whether Christine Blasey Ford, the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, will testify in Washington next week, an old-but-new-again incident involving a prominent Democratic senator -- and potential 2020 challenger to Trump -- has reemerged. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker wrote in the early 1990s -- while a student at Stanford -- about an incident on New Year's Eve 1984 (when he was 15) in which he groped a female friend's breast after the two of them had kissed. "With the 'Top Gun' slogan...

When Donald Trump used the phrase “alt-left” to describe the anti-neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville last week, most people had no idea what he meant. I’m actually not sure he knew what he meant. “What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the ‘alt-right’? Do they have any assemblage of guilt?” Trump said during a rambling press conference. If the alt-left exists, it’s probably best represented by “antifa” (short for “anti-fascist”) — a loose network of left-wing activists who physically resist people they consider fascists. These are often the scruffy, bandana-clad people who show up at alt-right...

First bursting into the headlines when they shut down far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in February at the University of California at Berkeley, antifascists again captivated the public imagination by battling the fascists assembled at the “Unite the Right” white power rally in Charlottesville. But what is antifa? Where did it come from? Militant anti-fascist or “antifa” (pronounced ANtifa) is a radical pan-leftist politics of social revolution applied to fighting the far right. Its adherents are predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists who reject turning to the police or the state to halt the advance of white supremacy. Instead they advocate popular...

When James Alex Fields Jr.’s mug shot was released after he drove his Dodge Challenger through a counterprotest in Charlottesville on Saturday, no one was surprised by what the image revealed: a young, white man with a neo-fascist undercut. “Alt-right” figures like Richard Spencer absorb nearly all the media glare on white nationalism, creating the impression that this is a single-sex movement, and as many have pointed out, the white supremacists who rallied on Saturday were mainly men. When it comes to identifying the perpetrators of racial hatred in this country, it is tempting to comfort ourselves with gender tropes....

I’m a white man, so you should listen to absolutely nothing I say, at least on matters of social justice. I have no standing. No way to relate. My color and gender nullify me, and it gets worse: I grew up in the suburbs. Dad made six figures. We had a backyard pool. From the 10th through 12th grades, I attended private school. So the only proper way for me to check my privilege is to realize that it blinds me to others’ struggles and should gag me during discussions about the right responses to them. But wait. I’m gay....