Free Republic

On Friday, leftwing professor Allan Lichtman, who frequently appears as a guest on CNN and MSNBC to hype his "13 Keys" to the presidency shtick was in an excited joyous mood. He had just heard from from former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain that Joe Biden would remain in the presidential race thus preserving Lichtman's all important "incumbency key."Here is the jubilant Lichtman in an upbeat mood due to the preservation of his sacred incumbency key which he believed helped ensure Biden's victory in November.

Vivian Jenna Wilson, the transgender daughter of Elon Musk, said Thursday in her first interview that he was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine. Wilson, 20, in an exclusive interview with NBC News, responded to comments Musk made Monday about her and her transgender identity. On social media and in an interview posted online, Musk said she was “not a girl” and was figuratively “dead,” and he alleged that he had been “tricked” into authorizing trans-related medical treatment for her when she was 16. Wilson said that Musk hadn’t been...

Anumber of conservative women have criticized Donald Trump's running mate, Senator JD Vance, after his "childless cat ladies" comment reemerged.

Former President Donald Trump missed 12 putts while playing a round of golf alongside Bryson DeChambeau. The 2024 Republican nominee for president appeared on the professional golfer's popular "Break 50" series, where they raised money for charity. Trump, 78, and DeChambeau, 30, played a two-person scramble, a common golf game in which "each player plays from the teeing area on each hole, one of the tee shots is selected and all the players play their second shots from within one club length of that location, no closer to the hole, and in the same height of grass in the general...

The U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 2.8 percent in the second quarter of 2024, according to new Commerce Department data released Thursday. Economists had expected gross domestic product (GDP) to grow by 1.9 percent in the three-month period between April and June, closer to the 1.4 percent growth posted in the first quarter of the year. The strong report comes as the Federal Reserve is set to meet next week to consider changing interest rates, which it has held steady since last July. The central bank has kept rates at a two-decade high, as inflation has remained...

A UW-Madison professor is revisiting "Hillbilly Elegy"-- JD Vance’s memoir-- eight years after the book was picked by the university as the "Go Big Read" book of the year. Hillbilly Elegy describes Vance’s experience in Appalachia, Kentucky and upbringing in Middletown, Ohio– diving into concepts such as poverty, addiction, and "hillbilly culture." This was published in 2016, and in 2017 UW-Madison chose to distribute the book through the “Go Big Read” reading program. This program selects one book per academic year to give to all the incoming freshmen and center discussion around the book’s themes, like a massive book club....

Wall Street grew so frustrated with US President Joe Biden’s antitrust policies over the past three and a half years that many long-standing Democratic dealmakers considered switching their support to Donald Trump in the 2024 elections or even boycotting the ballot altogether. But two events have dramatically changed that stance in the past fortnight: Trump named JD Vance as his running mate and Biden dropped his re-election bid, endorsing his vice-president Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination. Mergers and acquisitions practitioners are now reconsidering their electoral strategies. They consider Harris to be potentially more moderate than Vance, who is seen...

Billionaire Elon Musk is denying reports that said he is donating $45 million a month to a super PAC supporting former President Trump each month leading up to the November election. "What's been reported in the media is simply not true," Musk said in an interview with conservative commentator Jordan Peterson. "I am not donating $45 million a month to Trump."...The Tesla and SpaceX CEO followed up on his comments by saying on Tuesday that he does plan to make donations to America PAC but at a "much lower level."...Musk said he helped create America PAC, which he said would...

Before last week’s Republican convention, Donald Trump seemed to be moving away from the populism that characterized his 2016 campaign. “This time around, the former president isn’t even pretending to stand up to corporate power,” Rogé Karma observed in The Atlantic. “He’s defending big business, cozying up to billionaires, and wooing C.E.O.s.”When Mr. Trump named Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate, though, pundits quickly concluded that he was doubling down on populism. Mr. Vance has been a leading critic of Reagan-Bush policy orthodoxy in the G.O.P., has expressed skepticism of further corporate tax cuts and has even...

In Monday's interview on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) offered his perspective on the sudden shift in the Democratic presidential race, criticizing media pressure on President Joe Biden while holding off on an immediate endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Sanders, who had previously supported Biden's reelection bid, expressed concern about the media's role in pushing the President out of the race. The Vermont senator's hesitation to immediately endorse Harris stands in contrast to the wave of support she has received from within the Democratic Party. "Vice President Harris has now been endorsed by at least 41...

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....

With the end of their convention, the Republican Party and Donald Trump have reached what in military theory is called the “culminating point.” “The culminating point of victory,” according to the Modern War Institute at West Point, “is the threshold when military advantages peak and then rapidly turn into disadvantages.” As an infantryman, I was taught that the culminating point is a paradox; it’s a moment of maximum vulnerability at a time when you believe you are at maximum strength. Let’s say your platoon has just taken a hill. Exhausted and jubilant, you’ve achieved your objective. Your troops have sent...

WASHINGTON — Kamala Harris had one great day in her ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign: her first. Then came a rapid collapse. The freshman senator who announced her candidacy in January 2019 before 20,000 cheering supporters in Oakland, Calif. dropped out in December before a single vote had been cast. Now, Harris may get another shot. As the sitting vice president, she would be a leading candidate to succeed Biden if he succumbs to party pressure and exits the race. Other elected officials might step forward to challenge Harris, dividing Democrats and clouding the general election picture ahead of a November...

Following the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump, unity was expected to be the hallmark of the Republican National Convention for the presidential candidate. "I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America," Trump said. But the message of unity rings hollow for some in the LGBTQ community, who say they have repeatedly been the target of Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee, and others on the national stage. "It can be difficult to stay hopeful when anti-LGBTQ sentiment comes...

[snip] To be fair, some people who watched the speech thought that the first 10 minutes or so, in which Trump recounted being injured, were good, even thoughtful. I thought they were terrible; although Trump and his people have emphasized Trump’s defiance in the moment after he was hurt, his blow-by-blow account of the incident came across to me as creepy and solipsistic rather than brave. Contrast that with Ronald Reagan, the previous president injured in an attempt on his life. Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post reminded us today that Reagan appeared before Congress a month after he was...

…But as the 2024 Republican National Convention in the garrison state of downtown Milwaukee winds down, a more definitive transformation of the Trumpist creed is under way, chiefly in the selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate. Trump’s own listless, meandering, and astoundingly long acceptance speech on the convention’s last night only made it all the more clear that the MAGA torch is being passed to a more focused and clear-eyed generation of ideologues, with Vance as their de facto leader. But the party’s fulsome embrace of a blood-and-soil brand of economic nationalism, as epitomized by Vance’s...

Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party shows itself in the platform priorities approved here at the convention and the people who are now influencing the Illinois Republican Party. With all the hoopla from inside the convention hall at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, it’s easy to miss the people left outside of the arena and the party. Among them: Adam Kinzinger, who was once viewed as the future of the GOP. He was a fresh-faced military vet who, as a congressman, voted with Trump more than 90 percent of the time. But then he committed the Cardinal Sin of today’s GOP:...

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...

HOLY MOLY! Donald Trump Jr. just told the MSNBC reporter to get lost after he started lying about Trump as usual "GET OUT OF HERE" 55 seconds https://x.com/BehizyTweets/status/1812932339108094236