Free Republic

A report Wednesday from the New York Times about a top vaccine expert at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who claims he was fired for opposing hydroxychloroquine has quickly fallen apart. Rick Bright, former director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority [BARDA], said he was dismissed from his position because he opposed hydroxychloroquine. This is the anti-malarial drug that has been touted by President Donald Trump as a possible coronavirus treatment. NYT reporters Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman pushed Bright’s “scorching statement” following his dismissal, but heavily downplayed...

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Sunday shrugged off the brutal dismembering of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, just days after a United Nations report described how a team of Saudi assassins called Mr. Khashoggi a “sacrificial animal” before his murder. The U.N. report urged an F.B.I. investigation into the slaying. But in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Trump said the episode had already been thoroughly investigated. He said the Middle East is “a vicious, hostile place” and noted that Saudi Arabia is an important trading partner with the United States. “I only say they spend $400...

Along with Jim AcostaÂ’s near-daily antics, Wednesday and Thursday served as another example of how far too many at CNN need to be told to get a life. ThursdayÂ’s Inside Politics led off with more kvetching about every aspect of President Donald TrumpÂ’s surprise visit to U.S. troops in Germany and Iraq, including how he didnÂ’t meet with the Iraqi Prime Minister. Conveniently, the panel downplayed the broader and positive symbolism of having a President visit troops and footnoted the similarities between Trump and predecessor Barack Obama in not meeting face-to-face with Iraqi leaders. CNN Still Bashing Trump for Iraq...

With elections fast approaching, Friday’s New York Times was packed with accusations of President Trump as a racist and hostile to immigrants, most intensely in the lead story by Michael Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis. The headline deck: “Trump Invoking ‘Crisis’ at Border As Voting Nears – Message For Midterms – A Presidential Theme Is Built Around a Fear of Immigrants.” Illegal immigrants, actually, but don’t count on the Times to ever clarify. President Trump’s closing argument is now clear: Build tent cities for migrants. End birthright citizenship. Fear the caravan. Send active-duty troops to the border. Refuse asylum. Immigration...

WASHINGTON — Late to his own meeting and waving a sheet of numbers, President Trump stormed into the Oval Office one day in June, plainly enraged.Five months before, Mr. Trump had dispatched federal officers to the nation’s airports to stop travelers from several Muslim countries from entering the United States in a dramatic demonstration of how he would deliver on his campaign promise to fortify the nation’s borders.But so many foreigners had flooded into the country since January, he vented to his national security team, that it was making a mockery of his pledge. Friends were calling to say he...

Mr. Obama calls himself a "night guy," and as president, he has come to consider the long, solitary hours after dark as essential as his time in the Oval Office. Almost every night that he is in the White House, Mr. Obama has dinner at 6:30 with his wife and daughters and then withdraws to the Treaty Room, his private office down the hall from his bedroom on the second floor of the White House residence. There, his closest aides say, he spends four or five hours largely by himself. He works on speeches. He reads the stack of briefing...

The New York Times did its best to begin the Supreme Court debate by mainstreaming Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee, as a “brilliant” “centrist” and moderate voice of reason. Reporters Michael Shear and Gardiner Harris treated the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit with kid gloves in the paper’s initial reporting Wednesday, with the same kind of pro-Democratic labeling slant the paper has always shown toward Supreme Court nominees. A 2010 Media Research Center report, Supremely Slanted, exposed the Times stark disparity in labeling “conservative” justices nominated by Republicans compared to “liberal” ones...

New York Times chief political blogger Michael Shear is a bit annoyed that Sarah Palin is successfully attracting media attention while ignoring reporter’s inquiries and playing hide-and-seek with the press on her "One Nation" bus tour. (Photo by the Times' David Winter.) Shear, who has filed multiple blog posts on the Palin family's historical trail through the Northeast, made Tuesday’s print edition with his gripes: (Palin Family Hits Road, if Not 2012 Trail)Ms. Palin announced her bus tour with great fanfare last week and is using it on her Web site to raise money for her political action committee. Despite...