Free Republic

It is bizarre, however, to spend two years insisting collusion is not a crime and then turn around and call the absence of crimes proof that there was no collusion. Of course Trump colluded with Russia. He literally went on camera and asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, promising that Russia would be rewarded by the American media, and Russia responded to this request by attempting a hack to steal Clinton’s emails that very day. Trump’s campaign aides repeatedly welcomed and sought out Russian assistance. His campaign manager passed on 75 pages of intricate polling data to a Russian...

Democratic primary voters are looking for a wide range of disparate things in their party’s 2020 standard-bearer. For some, the top priority is to nominate a progressive who boasts a long record of supporting single-payer health care, standing up to the financial industry, and championing organized labor. And many just want a nominee who will definitely beat Trump. Unfortunately, there is no Democratic 2020 hopeful who checks all of these boxes at once. But there could be. What if there were a Democratic politician who had been championing single-payer health care for two decades, and calling for a ban on...

RUSH: Oh, folks! I just remembered this. I was watching CNN this morning. To think how bad this all is and now add this to it. There’s this infobabe at New York Magazine. Her name is Olivia Nuzzi. (interruption) You know, my watch… I’m gesticulating in here wildly and my watch thinks that I’m falling. So it alerts me, “If you’ve fallen and you don’t respond in 30 seconds, we are calling EMS.” So I have to tap on “I didn’t fall. Leave me alone.” (I have not lost my place.) Olivia Nuzzi, you know what she said? The magic...

With Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford hours away from testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a bombshell dropped Wednesday afternoon. The committee released the transcript of a call between GOP staffers and the Supreme Court nominee that included two new allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh. The dam, it appeared, had broken. But the claims quickly drew skepticism, largely because they’re anonymous, unlike the first three allegations made against Kavanaugh, in which Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and Julie Swetnick went on the record to tell their stories of Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual misconduct. One of the new claims came in the...

n June 14, 2016, the Washington Post reported that Russian hackers had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s files and gained access to its research on Donald Trump. A political world already numbed by Trump’s astonishing rise barely took notice. News reports quoted experts who suggested the Russians merely wanted more information about Trump to inform their foreign-policy dealings. By that point, Russia was already broadcasting its strong preference for Trump through the media. Yet when news of the hacking broke, nobody raised the faintest suspicions that Russia wished to alter the outcome of the election, let alone that Trump...

One of the symptoms of extreme Trump Derangement Syndrome is making comparisons to Watergate in the desperate hope that President Donald Trump can be removed from office. Former New York Times columnist and drama critic Frank Rich too such fantasies to an extreme in his August 23 New York magazine article, building up an entire imaginary world in which his obsession with the removal of Trump from office is revealed down to the smallest of Watergate-related details. One of the symptoms of extreme Trump Derangement Syndrome is making comparisons to Watergate in the desperate hope that President Donald Trump can...

Rachel Dolezal's 15 minutes of fame have (thankfully) come and gone. But because many comedians — including Dave Chappelle — didn't quite know what to make of her story, most refrained from poking fun at her expense. Maya Rudolph isn't one of them. Since Rudolph can no longer use Saturday Night Live to scratch her impersonation itch, Seth Meyers provided both a forum and and a wig to get her into full #AskRachel character on Monday's Late Night. It doesn't disappoint.

Iran has recently faced the largest wave of popular protest since the Green Movement of 2009, mainly focused on economic stagnation but also bleeding into more political issues of foreign policy, personal freedoms, and human rights. The rising wave of discontent is pushing the government to make some concessions. Just yesterday, the regime's security council approved the release of opposition figures Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, leaders of the 2009 protest movement, from house arrest after seven years. This move illustrates the regime's unease with the rising pressure from the streets, but also shows that it has some tools...

An “off-the-record” private discussion group for left-wing journalists, similar to the controversial “JournoList” cabal, has been discovered. The group, which is hosted on Google Groups, was discovered after messages from New York Magazine journalist Jesse Singal were leaked. “The listserv, per its ‘About’ page, aims to provide an ‘off-the-record discussion forum for left-of-center journalists, authors, academics, and wonks.’ It has been around for at least eight years (I found discussion posts dating back as far as 2010), and has just over 400 members (403 at the time of this writing),” reported Jezebel. “These members include New York Times best-selling authors,...

... Democrats really need a great 2018 midterm, both to avoid an almost irreversible disadvantage in the Senate, and to give it a fighting chance to do well during the momentous redistricting cycle just on the horizon. For reasons that have almost nothing to do with her leadership abilities and other sterling qualities, a President Clinton would have made a great 2018 midterm for her party extremely unlikely, and a debilitating defeat quite possible. (The same would have been true, to be clear, with a President Sanders or a President Biden). A President Trump could make an inevitably bad midterm...

The Democratic Party has never been more reliant on the support of upper-middle-class voters than it is today. And the economic fortunes of affluent Americans - and those of the typical working-class household - have rarely been more disparate. These twin developments have inspired much commentary about the class tensions beneath Team Blue’s “big tent”. There is little doubt that it would be easier to advance radical economic reform in an America where politics was sharply polarized along class lines, and working people of all races were concentrated in a single partisan coalition. It is absolutely true that a liberal...

Of all the desperate and futile attempts at revisionist history, few are as careless as the attempt to destroy the reputation of one of the finest Supreme Court justices this country has ever produced. Now comes another volley. New York magazine has assembled "The Case for Impeaching Clarence Thomas." The author is longtime anti-Thomas journalist Jill Abramson. For more than 4,000 words, Abramson labors to relitigate Thomas accuser Anita Hill's dramatic loss in the court of public opinion. According to one poll at the time, 58 percent believed Thomas; only 24 percent believed Hill. Again the argument falls on its...

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, host of “Hardball,” was conspicuously absent from a scheduled “Meet The Press” appearance on Sunday morning. Matthews announced the scheduled appearance on a pre-taped episode of “Hardball” on Friday, and it was noted in the Friday edition of POLITICO’s Playbook. Matthews may have chosen to sit out the appearance because of a 2016 video uncovered by New York Magazine’s The Cut late Friday, which showed him joking about drugging and raping then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “This was a terrible comment I made in poor taste during the height of the Bill Cosby headlines,” Matthews told The Cut....

In the wake of the immense political conflagration that Michael Wolff’s upcoming book Fire and Fury has caused, Thursday’s Morning Joe was almost entirely consumed by discussion of all its salacious claims and their implications for the Trump White House. Even though multiple guest panelists on the show admitted to the shaky factual foundation for Wolff’s book and the unproven nature of many of his assertions, they nevertheless largely treated his testament as gospel. Much of Morning Joe’s coverage focused on dissecting the purported comments of Breitbart News Executive Chairman and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. However, co-host...

The funniest episode in the protective yet revealing new Hillary Clinton profile arrives when we learn that this sad, unemployed, 69-year-old lady is so desperate to keep her self-image alive that she still employs flunkies and retainers to treat her as though she actually were the president, or the secretary of state, or a president in waiting, or at very least the leader of the opposition. Her longtime loyalists are so happy to bustle around her in the service of maintaining the illusion that, after she takes an hour away from it all to exercise, her communications director, Nick Merrill,...

The Associated Press, PolitiFact, CNN, Snopes and all of the other "fact-checkers" should be busy this weekend and well into next week vetting the howlers contained in Rebecca Traister's New York Magazine Friday afternoon interview of a politician who has been in the public eye for decades. But it's a virtual lock that they won't bother, because the person Traister interviewed was Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton's montage of mendacity is virtually guaranteed to escape the scrutiny of "fact-checkers" because, as I noted at NewsBusters in mid-April, they "overwhelmingly select facts presented by Republican and conservative politicians and pundits, while ignoring similar howlers generated by...

The former secretary of state and Democratic frontrunner says she still encounters sexism on the campaign trail — even on the rope line. Hillary Clinton says while sexism on the campaign trail is not as severe as it was in 2008 when she first ran for president, it still lingers - even in her encounters with would-be supporters. [Snip] She also said that men fear ambitious women like her. "I think it's the competition," Clinton said. "Like, if you do this, there won't be room for some of us, and that’s not fair."

Gabriel Sherman writes a column for the New York Magazine about the fallout to the terrible ratings from Megyn Kelly’s broadcast special premier, and how she has damaged her contract negotiating position with a poor result.Sherman is a good read for some facts surrounding Fox News Insider stuff, but his analysis generally misses the mark because he’s inside the liberal NYC bubble; this article is no exception. Example: Sherman asserts that Rupert Murdoch is now supportive of Donald Trump… um, NO – that’s laughable.Rupert “Open Borders” Murdoch who has spent millions supporting immigration reform, who has used his network...

Well, so much for suspense. The networks called Indiana for Donald Trump about five seconds after the polls closed, and within two hours Ted Cruz announced he was suspending his campaign. Trump is winning a majority of the vote and will likely win all 57 delegates. Even if a few delegates stray back across the line, this win clinched the nomination for Trump. He will now have well over 1,000 bound delegates, which is less than 200 from what he needs to make it a lock. And that's without the unbound delegates he definitely has in Pennsylvania and is sure...

Monday on MSNBC’s “Hardball” while discussing his New York Magazine article about Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump entitled “America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny,” the former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan said Trump was a “reality television asshole,” to which host Chis Matthews apologized to his audience for at the end of the segment.