Free Republic

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on Monday said that Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, “deserves to be heard” in an “appropriate” manner. “Anyone who comes forward as Dr. Ford has deserves to be heard, so I will continue working on a way to hear her out in an appropriate, precedented and respectful manner,” Grassley said in a statement. He said his committee is “working diligently to get to the bottom of these claims,” an indication that another round of committee hearings is possible. The most prominent precedent is from...

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley blasted ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein for her handling of high-school-era sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh... ....snip.. The chairman explained that “the standard procedure for updates to any nominee’s background investigation file is to conduct separate follow-up calls with relevant parties. In this case, that would entail phone calls with at least Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford,” adding, “I asked Senator Feinstein’s office yesterday to join me in scheduling these follow-ups. Thus far, they have refused. But as a necessary step in evaluating these claims, I’ll continue working to set...

Partisan plaintiff Christine Blasey Ford is telling us how she remembers a surge of teenage testosterone––if the incident happened at all. I’m not buying what she is selling and I hope the legislators who vote on the matter agree! Judge Brett Kavanaugh has always been in the crosshairs of the left, ever since he played a major role in urging the impeachment of their icon of moral rectitude, President Bill Clinton, and also led the investigation into the alleged suicide (or fishy murder) of Vince Foster, Clinton’s Deputy White House Counsel and close friend of Ms. Hillary.

The White House on Monday labeled Bob Woodward "reckless" and "careless" after some administration officials refuted claims attributed to them in his new book "Fear: Trump in the White House," ratcheting up its war of words with the Watergate reporter. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders also didn't rule out a lawsuit against Woodward. "A number of people have come out and said Woodward never even reached out to corroborate statements attributed to them, which seems incredibly reckless for a book to make such outrageous claims to not even take the time to get a $10 fact-checker to call...

Officials from the Trump administration reportedly contacted a Yale University psychiatrist last year because President Trump was "scaring" them. Dr. Bandy Lee told Salon and the New York Daily News on Thursday that two White House officials flagged Trump's behavior last October. "[They] said that Trump was 'scaring' them, that he was 'unraveling,'" Lee, who wrote the book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” told Salon. ADVERTISEMENT "Not wishing to confuse the role I chose, as an educator of the public, and a potential treatment role, I referred them to the...

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was in the hot seat Wednesday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee over his company’s practices on content moderation. Both Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Michael Burgess (R-TX) asked about the excessive amount of time it took the company to take down a tweet threatening Meghan McCain despite many people reporting it.An image of McCain crying by her father’s casket was doctored to show a gun trained at her with the caption: “America, this one’s for you.”Many Twitter users, including Meghan McCain’s husband Ben Domenech, complained as the image was left up for five...

Democratic billionaire donor Tom Steyer said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is wrong for saying his push to impeach President Trump is helping Republicans. Steyer pushed back against Pelosi’s claim during an interview with BuzzFeed News that aired Sunday night, calling Trump “reckless and dangerous and lawless.” “This is a historic time,” Steyer said. “If you step back for one second and think about this president, the most corrupt president in American history, somebody who is breaking the law on a daily basis.” Pelosi warned Democrats earlier this year against pursuing impeachment efforts against Trump, saying it could hurt...

Barbra Streisand partly blamed President Trump for the high school mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, saying the president’s actions and rhetoric “brings out the violence in people.” Speaking to Variety magazine in an interview published Tuesday, the 10-time Grammy-winning singer suggested that 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, who fatally shot 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, was “affected” by Mr. Trump’s election.

Katie Couric is upset that an eight-second pause inserted into an interview she did with gun rights activists in the documentary “Under the Gun” has drawn criticism, calling the edit an “unnecessary mistake,” according to an individual with knowledge of her thinking. The individual spoke to TheWrap and said that director Stephanie Soechtig inserted the pause, which critics are calling an example of “deceptive” and “appalling journalism.” “This was an unnecessary mistake,” the individual told TheWrap. “It did not represent editing someone’s sentences, there was no factual error, this is not a mistake that is a substantive mistake. It could...

As the sixth-richest man on the planet, with a net worth of $50.7 billion, Zuckerberg bought the four houses surrounding his Palo Alto neighborhood home at 1462 Edgewood Drive to stop real estate developer Mircea Voskerician from building an imposing house next door. It seems that Voskerician acquired an adjacent house to Zuckerberg in 2013 in the Crescent Park neighborhood, located just north of downtown Palo Alto and near the Bayshore Freeway. The developer had been moving forward with the city Planning Commission to build a house tall enough to look directly down at Zuckerberg’s master bedroom. It is unknown...

Four houses surrounding Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's home in Palo Alto will be demolished and replaced by smaller ones, according to an application filed with city planners Tuesday. Zuckerberg bought the homes on Hamilton Avenue and Edgewood Drive in 2013 after he learned of a developer's plan to build a house next door tall enough to have a view of Zuckerberg's master bedroom. Concerned about privacy, Zuckerberg paid more than $30 million total for the properties at 1462 Edgewood Drive and 1451, 1457 and 1459 Hamilton in the Crescent Park neighborhood.

While Mark Zuckerberg’s much-publicized meeting with conservative leaders last week has drawn varied responses, from Glenn Beck’s overly fawning account to others who were positive but circumspect, what seems clear is that Zuckerberg genuinely wants Facebook to be viewed as a neutral and fair platform for the entire world.But does Zuckerberg have a massive blind spot in his thinking and worldview? And is he totally unaware of the many times conservatives (especially biblically-based conservatives) have been censored on Facebook while their opponents have not?I have documented this several times in my own experience (see here and here and here), although...

OP-ED COLUMNIST And so we went the multilateral route. Confronted with the murder of 50,000 in Sudan, we eschewed all that nasty old unilateralism, all that hegemonic, imperialist, go-it-alone, neocon, empire, coalition-of-the-coerced stuff. Our response to this crisis would be so exquisitely multilateral, meticulously consultative, collegially cooperative and ally-friendly that it would make John Kerry swoon and a million editorialists nod in sage approval. And so we Americans mustered our outrage at the massacres in Darfur and went to the United Nations. And calls were issued and exhortations were made and platitudes spread like béarnaise. The great hum of diplomacy...