Free Republic

Usually, I get political wisdom from Rahm Emanuel, not his brother Ari. But a quote from Ari, the Hollywood macher, to Puck’s Matthew Belloni about the gender chasm in 2024 caught my eye. “This election is gonna come down to probably 120,000 votes,” Ari said. “You probably have 60 percent of the male vote for Trump, and the female vote is 60-40 for Kamala. It’s a jump ball. We’re gonna find out who wants this more — men or women.” Are we back to the days of Mars versus Venus? Or did we never leave? It is the ultimate battle...

During an interview aired on Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN International’s “Amanpour,” U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel stated that he’s not sure China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran have formed an alliance, but rather “an agreement among players that are isolated in the world.” Host Christiane Amanpour asked, [relevant exchange begins around 6:05] “China is involved, too. China has a certainly friendly relationship with Russia. Does this grouping, this alliance pose a threat to the United States and its Western allies? China, North Korea, Russia, and whoever else, Iran.”

Some audience members came up to me after a speech I gave in downtown Tokyo in late April. They were hopping mad at Rahm Emanuel, the man whom Washington sent a little over a year ago to do its business in Japan. And what does that business entail? If Emanuel’s April tweets are any indication, it entails interfering in internal Japanese political matters. (snip) In my April speech in Tokyo, I referred to the American Embassy down the street as the “sotokufu,” the “governor-general” of Japan. The audience broke into thundering applause. I said that it was time to throw...

Even before he left office in January 2017, President Barack Obama had laid grand plans to build a presidential library on the South Side of Chicago. As early as 2015, the Chicago City Council (and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff from 2009 to 2010) announced that “the City defers to the sound judgment of the President and his Foundation as to the ultimate location of the Presidential Library.” Obama ultimately decided to build on 19.3 choice acres in historic Jackson Park, designed in 1871 by great American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. By that time, Obama’s “library”...

ABC News partner NHK reported that Abe was bleeding when he collapsed. Abe's heart is in a "stopped condition," ABC News has learned, and there are no vital signs.

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm stated that many hoped “we would be focusing solely on clean energy solutions, renewable, making that transition,” but the war in Ukraine has thrown a wrench into that and said that “we have got to use this reason to become energy independent with clean energy.” Host Chris Hayes said that while he would probably take a similar approach to President Joe Biden because people need gas to get around and gas price increases harm people, but “At the same time, it just seems so depressingly insane that we are...

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Saturday the prospect of Russia using nuclear weapons was "increasingly real", welcoming a visit by the U.S. ambassador to Hiroshima, the first city to suffer a nuclear attack. Japan, the only country attacked by atomic weapons, has regularly spoken out against nuclear armaments. Kishida, who represents Hiroshima in parliament, visited the city's peace memorial and museum on Saturday with envoy Rahm Emanuel. “When the possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia is increasingly real, I believe Ambassador Emanuel's visit to Hiroshima and his experience of seeing the nuclear reality will...

(IsraelNN.com) Vice President-elect Joe Biden has appointed former Clinton administration aide Ran Klain as his chief of staff, one week after President-elect Barack Obama tapped Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel to head the White House as chief of staff. Both appointees are Jewish, but while Emanuel is an observant Jew, Klain intermarried more than 20 years ago and his family observes Christmas. Klain, like Emanuel, promoted the Oslo Peace Accords, which eventually exploded into the Oslo War that has been raging since September, 2000. Emanuel choreographed the handshake between Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn...

The guilty verdicts in the Jussie Smollett fake hate crime trial underscore just how radical Chicago State’s Attorney Kim Foxx has proven to be. She campaigned for office in 2015 advocating a radical brand of “criminal justice reform,” including no bail policies for almost every defendant and reduced sentencing, and during the riots last summer, her office adopted a “presumption of dismissal” for certain low-level charges. Then came the Jussie Smollett case and the inexplicable dropping of charges against the actor, despite other prosecutors in her office claiming they had a “slam dunk” of a case. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm...

How woke Chicago DA Kim Foxx went out of her way to help Jussie and complained to her deputy that charges against him were 'excessive' - Embattled actor Jussie Smollett's initial charges for filing a fake police report were dropped in 2019 by the Cook County State Attorney's office - Top prosecutor Kim Foxx recused herself from the original charges against him after liaising with Smollett's family at the behest of MeToo leader Tina Tchen - Foxx previously tried to convince the FBI to take over the probe of the alleged attack at the request of his family, whom she...

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said Wednesday that he will oppose Rahm Emanuel’s nomination to be ambassador to Japan. “Black Lives Matter. Here in the halls of Congress, it is important that we not just speak and believe these words, but put them into action in the decisions we make,” Merkley said in a statement. “I have carefully considered Mayor Emanuel’s record—and the input of civil rights leaders, criminal justice experts, and local elected officials who have reached out to the Senate to weigh in—and I have reached the decision that I cannot support his nomination to serve as a U.S....

A New York Times star columnist has lashed Barack Obama for axing people who helped him to the top from his lavish 60th birthday guest list in favor of A-list stars. Maureen Dowd branded Obama 'Barack Antoinette' - a reference to the out-of-touch renaissance queen - and likened him to Jay Gatsby, the shallow people-pleaser from F Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby in her scathing piece, published Saturday. She highlighted how the former president cut his ex-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and former campaign strategist David Axelrod from the original 600-person guest list, despite both helping him secure his...

Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said on ABC’s “This Week” that the way to get more people vaccinated against coronavirus is to make it a “reward-punishment system.” Panelist Margaret Hoover said, “There’s a lot of things we can do without calling it a mandate. Just make it almost impossible for people to live their lives without being protected and protect us.” Emanuel said, “I agree. I’m the son of a pediatrician…The fact is no child can show up at school without showing their immunizations, smallpox and measles. You have to make this familiar to people. Second is, I would close...

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot reflects on her first two years in office on WTTW's Chicago Tonight. "About 99 percent of it, Lightfoot said. "Look at my predecessors. Did people say that Rich Daley held tea sessions with people that he didn't disagree on? Rahm Emanuel was a polite guy who was a uniter? No. Women and people of color are always held to a different standard."

During America's first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded to them. They picked and chose which businesses could stay open without much rationale. They sent the infected into nursing homes occupied by the weak and vulnerable. Their rules for prosecuting those who violated social distancing, sheltering in place, mask wearing or violent protesting often hinged on political grounds. Their spending measures on "infrastructure" and "health care" were excuses to lard up redistributive entitlements. Conservatives moaned that left-wing agendas were at work beneath the pretenses of saving us...

President Joe Biden is expected to nominate former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Japan, according to a person familiar with the president’s decision. The person, who was not authorized to comment publicly about the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity Tuesday, said the White House plans to announce Emanuel’s nomination later this month. Emanuel is a former three-term congressman who served as Barack Obama’s first White House chief of staff and was a senior adviser in Bill Clinton’s administration.

In June 2018, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., publicly exhorted her supporters to harass cabinet members of the Trump administration. At an outdoor rally in Los Angeles, Waters, with microphone in hand and amplifiers nearby, shouted: "Let's make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere." In response, President Donald Trump tweeted: "Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily...

Barack Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, famously, and cynically, said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” As has become increasingly clear, teachers unions across the nation have used that advice as their playbook during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploiting a crisis, as the teachers unions have done for the past 11 months, carries significant risks, however, and the unions will likely soon understand that their strategy of stalling the reopening of schools has backfired. Exhausted parents and exasperated public officials – even some of the most far-left progressive advocates of teachers unions – are increasingly...

"Never allow a good crisis (to) go to waste. It's an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible." Thus did chief of staff Rahm Emanuel advise Barack Obama on the financial crisis he inherited in 2009. Following the Capitol riot by a mob of pro-Donald Trump protesters, the left took Rahm's counsel, seizing upon and exploiting the episode ever since to paint the right as America's safe harbor for "domestic terrorism." According to leftist columnists and commentators, going back to the '60s, the real threat of domestic terrorism has always come from the right. That is not,...

That wailing you hear involving Rahm Emanuel, President-elect Joe Biden and the left clinging to its ideological purity tests sounds like something out of a horror movie. But as Rahm seeks political resurrection at Biden's hands, here's the thing: Chicago has seen Rahm's movie before. Chicago remembers him as the mayor who sat on that Laquan McDonald police shooting video until after his reelection was safe. And I remember him running for reelection while his administration suppressed that video, as Rahm played his Barack Obama card as the former president's chief of staff. Rahm stood on the South Side with...