Free Republic

Now that President Biden has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be the nominee, it will ultimately be up to Democratic National Convention delegates to formally select a new nominee for their party. While many associate the convention system with less-than-impressive nominees, such as the obscure senator Warren G. Harding, the record isn’t that bad. And even Harding managed to win the presidency

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...

It's been a week since President Biden's disastrous debate performance, and his political fortunes only appear to be growing worse by the day. Now it all boils down to two questions: Will Biden drop out of the race? And who is in the top position to replace him? The answer to that the second question should be a no brainer — the vice president, of course. I honestly don't know if Harris can win in November, or if she truly is the best candidate to steer this country away from what appears to be certain ruin if Trump wins. What...

It’s that stars-and-stripes, American-flag-waving time of year. And throughout the Golden State, the California flag typically takes a place of honor beside it. But how much do you know about the origins of the state flag — the grizzly bear perched on a patch of green, the red star high on the left, the words “California Republic” below?

They're studying Facebook posts. They're using frame-by-frame video screenshots of faces to match with gargantuan databases of named faces. They're seeking and taking tips from "friends" and relatives and ex-boyfriends. For the UCLA Jewish students who got into a scrap with pro-Hamas illegal campout protestors, no doubt after hearing a slew of antisemitic statements and being blocked from attending class, they're doing exactly what they did to identify and hunt down January 6 protestors. According to the Los Angeles Times, which reports this like it was a good thing: It is shaping up to be perhaps the biggest case in...

A deputy press secretary for Barack Obama's reelection campaign married an ABC reporter over the weekend. The ABC reporter, Matthew Jaffe, "covering the 2012 presidential campaign," according to his biography on the website of ABC News. "For the past year he traveled around the country covering the Republican primary, from the Iowa Straw Poll to the various debates to this year's primaries and caucuses." The deputy press secretary Jaffe married is Katie Hogan. Many members of Obama's reelection team and the press celebrated the wedding together Saturday. Mike Allen of Politico reports on the wedding: MARRIED SATURDAY EVENING at Lake...

...It was a stunning turn for Jones, a gun store manager who in his one term in office has emerged as a leading voice in an ultraconservative insurgence that transformed this largely rural Northern California county into a national symbol of hard-right governance and election denialism \

Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur has training in neither psychiatry nor neurology, yet he included an assessment of President Biden's cognitive functioning in his report declining to bring charges for mishandling classified information. Memory assessment is a complex task and cannot be undertaken over five hours in interviews with attorneys.

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...

The Los Angeles Times, the largest newspaper in California and one of the biggest by circulation in the entire United States, was hit with a heavy round of layoffs Tuesday. The move to terminate more than 110 positions within the company has been widely rumored for several weeks — even prompting a one-day walkout protest from the newsroom last week — but the scale of the layoffs, and when those layoffs would happen, was not widely known until Tuesday morning.

For the first time since record keeping began, Earth has surpassed a critical temperature threshold that scientists have long warned could unleash the worst effects of climate change. On Friday the planet soared 2.07 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, or the 1850 to 1900 average, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Not all hope is lost, however. The Fifth National Climate Change Assessment, released last week by the White House, underscored that every fraction of a degree of warming added or averted will make a difference.

“I can’t believe I have to say this,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said during the debate over the motion to censure her in Congress this week, “but Palestinian people are not disposable. We are human beings just like anyone else.”

Democratic congressman lashed out at New York Times and Los Angeles Times for pushing false narratives on Palestinian hospital strikeRep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., accused The New York Times of doing something far "worse" than making a mistake, after the outlet quoted Palestinian claims blaming Israel for the explosion that rocked the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City earlier this week. President Biden said that U.S. intelligence confirmed Israel was not to blame for the attack and backed up Israel's military investigation, which found the strike was caused by Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad. Users on X roasted the paper for...

SACRAMENTO — The Republican Party will hold a presidential candidate debate at the Ronald Reagan library Wednesday. It’s a bad fit. The GOP’s modern idol is exactly the opposite of Reagan in personality and character. For upbeat Reagan, America was a “shining city on the hill.” For whining Donald Trump, it’s a waste bin for venom and lies. Reagan’s soaring rhetoric made people feel good about themselves. There was “always a bright dawn ahead” — “Morning in America.” Yes, maybe that was a tad naive and corny, but it brought a collective smile — and won over many Democrats.

Show more sharing options Tucked into a state Senate bill revising aspects of the Medical Board of California is a brief but unambiguous clause undoing a controversial law that was intended to curb “dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19.”If the bill passes as expected this week, it will put an end to the saga of Assembly Bill 2098, a well-intentioned, poorly worded and ultimately doomed effort to curb the most flagrant cases of COVID-related falsehoods by people wielding medical licenses. “We are happy that the Legislature is attempting to address the defects in last year’s legislation,” said Chessie...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is eyeing a change to the United States Constitution. The state's legislature on Thursday approved a resolution in support of Newsom's call for a 28th Constitutional amendment, according to the Los Angeles Times. The amendment would enshrine a list of Democratic gun-control policy priorities into federal law. California is requesting a Constitutional convention to enshrine the amendment. For the amendment to be considered, two-thirds of state legislatures would have to vote in favor of a convention, according to the Times. The proposed "Right to Safety Amendment" would limit legal gun ownership to adults 21 and older,...

The vandalism last weekend of a sculpture of Republican Party icon Ronald Reagan that’s long greeted passersby of artist Miriam Baker’s home on Balboa Island’s South Bayfront has generated outcry from her neighbors and friends. Baker first learned of the incident from her nephew, who at about 9 a.m. Sunday discovered the artwork, which stands next to some potted geraniums on her front patio, had been defaced by someone using what appeared to have been foam insulation. “It’s incomprehensible that there is a person that nasty around that would do it out of meanness and small mindedness,” said Baker, who...

It wasn't until 2008 that the Supreme Court for the first time struck down a gun control law, ruling the 2nd Amendment protected the "right of law-abiding, responsible citizens" to keep a handgun at home for self-defense. Last year, the court went a step further and said an "ordinary law-abiding citizen" also has a right to a state permit to carry a concealed weapon in public for self-defense. Now the justices face a new frontier: Do gun rights extend to dangerous people and dangerous weapons? In just the last year, accused criminals and felons including drug dealers and domestic abusers...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has the Leftist political and media elites deeply rattled, and that’s utterly delightful. Imagine this scenario: a wildly unpopular and manifestly incapable president is running, however haltingly, for reelection. Initially he seemed like a lock, but then he encountered an unexpected challenge from a scion of an old American political family, a man who defies all the conventional categorization of political candidates and has set the establishment on its ear by challenging not only the superannuated corruptocrat in the White House but many of that establishment’s most cherished assumptions. It would make a great novel, but...

Russian lawmakers gave initial approval Wednesday to a bill that would outlaw gender transitioning procedures in yet another blow to the country's beleaguered LGBTQ+ community.Senior lawmaker Pyotr Tolstoy, who is among the bill’s sponsors, has said it is intended to “protect Russia with its cultural and family values and traditions and to stop the infiltration of the Western anti-family ideology.”