Free Republic

Parent groups are crying "hypocrisy" after a video surfaced showing the president of the Berkeley teachers union dropping off his two-year-old daughter at an in-person preschool. Matt Meyer, president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, has fought for what he called the "gold standard" for the teachers he represents — saying Berkeley schools should only reopen to in-person learning when educators are vaccinated, among other criteria. A tentative plan between the Berkeley Unified School District and Berkeley Federation of Teachers in mid-February would see preschoolers through second grade returning to class at the end of March and other grades staggering...

Clifford Wagner, an 80-year-old Republican in Tucson, Ariz., never cared for President Trump. He supported Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential primary race and cast a protest vote in the general election for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee. An Air Force veteran, Mr. Wagner described the Trump presidency as a mortifying experience: His friends in Europe and Japan tell him the United States has become “the laughingstock of the world.” This year, Mr. Wagner said he would register his opposition to Mr. Trump more emphatically than he did in 2016. He plans to vote for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the...

I often wonder who didn’t love Donald Trump. I often wonder who left an affection void that he has tried to fill by winning attention, which is not the same thing. He’s turned his life into a marketing strategy. As Michael Cohen said in his testimony on Wednesday, even the presidential campaign was a marketing campaign to build the Trump brand. In turning himself into a brand he’s turned himself into a human shell, so brittle and gilded that there is no place for people close to him to attach. His desperate attempts to be loved have made him unable...

The hostility she’s felt from the public recently wasn’t necessarily the last straw in television news photographer Lori Bentley-Law’s decision to quit the business after 24 years, but it was one of them. Bentley-Law’s recent blog post explaining why she was leaving Los Angeles’ KNBC-TV hit home for many colleagues. While President Donald Trump’s attacks on the media are usually centered on national outlets like CNN and The New York Times, the attitudes unleashed have filtered down to journalists on the street covering news in local communities across the country. When a president describes the press as enemies of the...

A Twitter official said Tuesday that President Trump does not have a "blanket exception" from a possible ban by the social media platform. The company’s legal and policy chief Vijaya Gadde told Politico that while the company has often given Trump an exception for possible policy violations because of the newsworthiness of his tweets, there is “not a blanket exception for the president or anyone else.”0 The company has come under fire from Trump critics for not punishing the president for specific use of the platform. Trump often uses his account to launch personal attacks on political opponents, criticize the...

At election time, every Republican apparently becomes a racist.

"How to Lower Your Child's IQ," "Why Spanking Does Not Work," and other videos.

There was a spate of headlines last week claiming that new scientific discoveries disproved the historical narrative of the Bible. Headlines included, "DNA vs the Bible: Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites" and "Study disproves the Bible's suggestion that the ancient Canaanites were wiped out." The problem is that the reverse is actually true: The discoveries confirm what the Scriptures explicitly state.Not surprisingly, these headlines didn't come from obscure, Bible-bashing websites. Instead, they came from Cosmos Magazine, Yahoo.com, New Scientist (claiming that the discovery helped unravel the "true fate" of the Canaanites), and others. As stated in the New York...

During the 2016 presidential campaign, many observers wondered exactly what motivated voters most: Was it income? Authoritarianism? Racial attitudes? Let the analyses begin. Last week, the widely respected 2016 American National Election Study was released, sending political scientists into a flurry of data modeling and chart making. The ANES has been conducted since 1948, at first through in-person surveys, and now also online, with about 1,200 nationally representative respondents answering some questions for about 80 minutes. This incredibly rich, publicly funded data source allows us to put elections into historical perspective, examining how much each factor affected the vote in...

IMEE PICCHI. December 2, 2016. As Breitbart Wages "War" On Kellogg’s, Advertisers Flee Breitbart News, an ultraconservative website that has served as a platform for the white nationalist “alt-right” movement, is touting its growing readership and “main street American values” as a reason advertisers should stick with it. Some marketers, however, are heading for the exits, directing their advertising dollars away from Breitbart amid the publication’s call for a boycott against Kellogg’s (K), which has pulled its ads from the site. That prompted Breitbart to declare “war” on Kellogg’s: Editor-in-Chief Alexander Marlow said on the site that “to blacklist Breitbart...

A newly-released video shows a professor at the University of California, Merced (UC-Merced) teaching his students that 90 percent of terrorist attacks in America are conducted by white men who are "religiously motivated and politically conservative." WATCHThe video, recorded in October, was released by The College Fix. It shows professor Ross Avila lecturing his "Introduction to Psychology" class on the topic of heuristics, mental shortcuts people use when trying to assess information or solve problems. To illustrate his point, Avila said that most Americans assume Muslims are the country's largest terror threat because they haven't thought about the matter systematically....

The senator claims on the campaign trail that he was the reason the Fort Hood soldiers shot in a 2009 attack were awarded Purple Hearts. Why that’s stretching the truth just a tad. Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential stump speech electrifies conservative crowds with a cocktail of growls, whispers, warnings of impending doom, and at least one claim of personal accomplishment so powerful, it often brings many in the audience to their feet.

The issue for me regarding the Brian Williams controversy is whether he made a mistake or intentionally misled people by making a claim he knew was false, i.e., lied. To conclude that a mistake is actually a lie requires a lot of proof. Otherwise, if there is a possible explanation of an honest memory mistake, I give the person the benefit of the doubt. Williams said that in 2003, he was in a helicopter forced down by enemy fire — a mistaken recollection, as he told Stars and Stripes on Feb. 4. He said that the mistake was a result...

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber “was paid almost $400,000 by this administration.”– Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), on Fox News’s “On the Record,” Nov. 12, 2014Republicans are demanding hearings into videos that have emerged in recent days of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber making impolitic remarks about the Affordable Care Act. Why should Gruber’s comments matter? Because Gruber is well-known in health-care circles as one of the intellectual godfathers of Obamacare and the very similar law in Massachusetts (sometimes called Romneycare), though people involved in ACA deny he was “an architect” of the ACA. (House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) even claimed she...

"...The most recent person to distance herself from the embattled MIT economist is Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress, who wrote an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal Thursday claiming that “Mr. Gruber was not, as many claim, the architect of the health-care law.”......... [snip of her denial] [picking up with the facts].....According to Tanden, Gruber provided essential budgetary information that the Congressional Budget Office needed to score the bill. “The most important arbiter of everything was the C.B.O.,” Tanden told The New York Times for a profile of Gruber. “We knew the numbers he...

Democrat Mike Dickinson recently promised to wage “war” on the NRA, Tea Party and Fox News. On Thursday, he was confronted by Greta Van Susteren in a tense exchange that ended with an embarrassing admission. “Why do you hate me?” Van Susteren asked, immediately getting to business. Dickinson, who apparently is not actually running for Congress, said he has a problem with her network as a whole. “Well, but no, what about me? I’m Fox News, I’m ‘trash,’ apparently, so what’s wrong with me?” the TV host responded. Dickinson conceded that he didn’t have a problem with Van Susteren personally,...

By now, the Republican Party’s view of the Affordable Care Act should be pretty familiar, as in this ad from David Jolly:“I’m fighting to repeal Obamacare, right away. It’s bad for our families, and our economy.”But not all Republicans agree; one is Irene Jacusis of New Port Richey, who was uninsured until now. “I did not vote for Obama," she said. “But I am so in love with this plan, with this health care plan, what can I do?” […] Another Republican who wants to keep the Affordable Care Act is Mary Fallon of St. Petersburg. She was a teacher...

White House spokesman Jay Carney today abruptly walked out of the briefing room after struggling to answer questions related to Obamacare. As he walks out, frustrated reporters can be seen asking questions, including: “Have White House officials watched anyone without insurance go through the website, trying to help the situation?” “Couldn’t we have a [HHS] rep just come to the press briefing?” Since the Oct. 1 launch of HealthCare.Gov, Carney has repeatedly ducked uncomfortable questions by referring reporters to HHS, where they are met with silence. Click on the image below to view Carney’s walk-out:

Quick: how much were Social Security, Medicaid and food stamps cut by the sequester? Zero, you say? Those programs were exempted from sequester cuts, and Medicare was reduced by only 2%? Correctomundo! So what was Andrea Mitchell thinking when she claimed on her MSNBC show that the sequester "gutted" social programs? You tell me. View the video here.

He’s there in every corner of Congress where a microphone fronts a politician, there in Russia and the British Parliament and the Vatican. Blame Bush? Of course, President Obama has to lead; it’s his superpower now, his armies to move, his stage. But the prior president gave every world leader, every member of Congress a reason to keep the dogs of war on a leash. The voice that stands out most by his silence, the one that grates with its public coyness, is Bush himself. He has refused to take a side in the Syrian conflict. The president, he said,...