Free Republic

Like much of Washington, the Biden White House was caught off guard Saturday morning when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy abruptly reversed course and announced that he would bring a clean bill to fund the government for the next 45 days. But aides weren’t terribly surprised. After all, they had assumed the government shutdown showdown would end this way at some point — with the main question being whether McCarthy would take his lumps before or after the funding deadline.

In 2020, one hitherto unknown report accurately predicted what was to follow Biden’s election. It also laid out a plan to preserve democracy in an uncertain future. Weeks before the 2020 election, a secret 87-page document outlined in matter-of-fact language the threat posed by Donald Trump’s still-to-come campaign of election denial. The private paper — the existence of which has not been reported before — forecast with chilling confidence the likelihood of violence during the presidential handover and proposed a far-reaching set of political reforms to thwart Trumpism in the future. Americans remember that dark winter well. But the impetus...

'Real Time' host Bill Maher said Republicans would 'secretly love' to see Trump incarcerated over January 6 as much as Arab countries 'love when Israel would bomb Iraq.' Maher, 66, returned to his show Friday night after a month-long break and was joined by Politico's White House Editor Sam Stein and Columbia Associate Professor John McWhorter. The liberal host jumped into the roundtable discussion by calling former President Donald Trump the 'cloud hanging over this country,' but admitted the January 6 committee hearings were 'pretty impressive.'

For the second weekend in a row, Politico’s Sam Stein guest hosted MSNBC’s Velshi. On this Saturday, Stein accused pro-lifers in Kansas of “essentially trick their citizens into voting away their own rights” on an upcoming ballot measure on August 2. Stein went to commercial teasing the future segment with all the hyperbole that one expects from MSNBC, “It’s been just one month since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the legal chaos continues to cause fallout with life or death consequences for people who need reproductive healthcare across the country. Coming up we’ll take you to one...

As liberal media members go, this NewsBuster finds Sam Stein to be among the most affable. And for years, he has good-naturedly rolled with Morning Joe's frequent ribbing about his youthful looks. But Politico needs to give up any pretense of objectivity after recently hiring Stein to head up its coverage of the Biden White House. Stein is an avowed, liberal. He comes to Politico after stints at HuffPost and the Daily Beast, two outfits that make no bones about their left-wing advocacy. Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Debacle. Disaster. Fiasco. There's no shortage of descriptors for the colossal cock-up that were the Democrat Iowa caucuses. Rather than choose just one among the many amusing moments as the liberal media tried to rummage through the ruins this morning, we present our readers with a mashup of lowlights from MSNBC's Morning Joe and CNN's New Day. Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

VIDEO On Friday's Morning Joe, HuffPost political reporter Sam Stein twisted himself into a pretzel trying to explain away why Congressman Schiff LIED to him about not having contact with the whistleblower. This has inspired a new dance craze called The Pretzel Twist.

Let's give Morning Joe some modified credit. On today's show, Democrat House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff was criticized for not telling the truth when Sam Stein asked him on the show's September 17th episode whether his committee had spoken with the whistleblower. Schiff denied it to Stein. In fact, the whistleblower had contacted the committee, and they spoke. Offered Stein today: "I will say, this puts him in some trouble. He clearly wasn't being forthright in that interview with us a couple weeks ago. And he should have been." Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

“If they allow [GOP Reps.] Meadows and Jordan and few of the others there, they’ll eviscerate him more than they did Michael Cohen,” said Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney during and after the Mueller probe. Giuliani said it would be “emotionally satisfying to have” Mueller testify and that “in terms of the politics of it, I would love to have him testify. I think he’s afraid to.” The former New York City mayor and current Trump lawyer said he’d spoken to the president both before and after Mueller’s televised statement to the press. Asked to describe Trump’s views, Giuliani...

House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) has requested ten years of documents related to President Donald Trump’s past financial dealings, his committee spokesman confirmed.

On Sunday evening, just as The New Yorker revealed the identity of a second woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, attorney Michael Avenatti announced that he, too, had “credible information” about Kavanaugh and his high school friend, Mark Judge. The media-savvy lawyer told The Daily Beast on Monday that his client would be coming forward “in the next 48 hours” with details and accusations that mirrored those already leveled and could, in his estimation, torpedo Kavanaugh’s confirmation—all of which would seem helpful for Democrats as they make the case that Kavanaugh is morally unfit to sit...

There were few who defended Romney’s comments. Even snake-bit Republicans, chastened by the swift backlash in the media, hedged when asked to back up Romney’s assessment of the challenges posed by Moscow. But MSNBC’s wagons circled particularly quickly in defense of the president. Volley after volley of snark was lobbed in the GOP nominee’s direction. ... “This is Mitt Romney’s severely conservative problem,” University of Georgia professor Cynthia Tucker opined on-the-air. “It made Romney look dumb. He’s not a dumb man, but he said something that was clearly dumb.” Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein agreed that Romney’s statement was evidence...

Even The Huffington Post cannot let the down-ballot gutting of the Democrats go unnoticed. Senior politics editor Sam Stein was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Wednesday, where he said that while Obama was re-elected twice proving himself to be an excellent candidate—his party has suffered catastrophic losses during his presidency. In all, the Democrats have lost 1,030 seats at the state and federal level, a wipeout of at least a generation of Democratic talent. Stein added that with such a political butcher’s bill, you have to ask whether this man was good for Democrats (via The Hill):

Huffington Post is the site that embarrassed itself by refusing for months to take the Trump candidacy seriously, relegating Trump coverage to its Entertainment section while explaining to readers that the Trump campaign was simply a "sideshow." So it's notable that it was HuffPo's Sam Stein, of all people, who testified to the decency of Trump supporters on today's Morning Joe, saying he found them "kind, very nice" and that there was no "blood in the streets." Stein and Joe Scarborough contrasted the decency ofTrump supporters with the scare story on the front page of today's New York Times, headlined...

As liberal pundits go, I find Sam Stein among the least objectionable—a low bar to be sure. The HuffPo editor has a streak of fairness to him. But on today’s Morning Joe, Stein served up some absurd spin on Hillary’s “basket of deplorables.” “Deplorables,” according to Stein, in a way “does work to her advantage.” Why? Because some moderate Republicans will “look at this division between the deplorables and the non-deplorables . . . and do say to themselves: do I want to be part of that?” A kind of snob appeal, Sam? Don’t think so, and even Joe Scarborough,...

“Allegations that Ellison and Carson are secret Muslim agents with extremist leanings are usually found among fringe groups online, often discussed in dire tones on poorly designed websites. Rarely, if ever, do such sentiments get read into congressional testimony, with the imprimatur that offers.” The media elites’ scorn for the unwashed masses is brimming over in this article: “fringe groups” who speak in “dire tones” on “poorly designed websites” couldn’t possibly be saying anything true or accurate, right? If your website design is poor, what you’re saying must ipso facto be false — not to mention “bigoted” and “Islamophobic”! And...

Arianna Huffington is no pachyderm, politically speaking, but like the elephant, she apparently never forgets--or forgives. Three years ago, Donald Trump called Huffington "unattractive both inside and out." Arianna has now returned the favor, relegating HuffPo's coverage of Trump to its entertainment section. On today's Morning Joe, HuffPo's Sam Stein was put in the unenviable position of defending his boss's decision, arguing that Trump is a mere "lounge act" whose position in the polls is simply "sustained by the media." Joe Scarborough blasted the decision as "absolutely absurd," and Mika Brzezinski, in the unkindest-but-truest cut of all, said that many...

Projection is a powerful phenomenon, and the American people have been subject to a perfectly cynical display of psychological projection from Democrats this week as the increasing likelihood that the party in power is going to endure a stinging censure from the voters on November 4. Democrats have spent the better part of the week insisting that Republicans who have urged the president to take stronger measures to contain Ebola in the United States, which he did on Friday with the creation of a federal Ebola response coordinator, are stoking unwarranted fears among the public. At the same time, liberals...

The last time we looked, Barack Obama was President of the United States, not of some other country. So if a ban on travel into the United States by people from Ebola-ravaged countries in West Africa would help America, isn't it President Obama's obligation to impose it, even if it might hurt those African countries? On today's Morning Joe, HuffPo's Sam Stein twice acknowledged that the ban might "help America." Yet he argued against the ban on the grounds that it would hurt West Africa and make it harder to track people fleeing those countries. You sensed Sam's heart wasn't...

Red Alert at the White House? When the VA scandal leads even such as Sam Stein to question liberalism . . . The VA scandal is getting so grievous for the Obama admin and for the liberal project at large that it has led even liberals to question their most cherished ideological beliefs. On today's Morning Joe, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post wondered "is liberalism, is progressivism, in this instance the right thing" given that the additional money the Obama admin spent on the VA has not yielded results? View the video here.