Free Republic

Not quite six years ago, wildfire expert Jack Cohen, who lives in Missoula, Mont., visited Pacific Palisades to instruct firefighters and property owners on how to protect homes against wildfires. Three days of training, including a tour of the community, left Cohen hopeful, but the feeling faded when it became clear that his lessons were not going to be fully implemented. This week’s tragedy has left him with a deep sadness. Respected by fire agencies across the country, Cohen and Pyne have found their straight-talk admonitions often disregarded or dismissed. Sensitive to losses and suffering, both said they are motivated...

The wildfires engulfing Los Angeles have put an uncomfortable spotlight on two of its richest residents — Stewart and Lynda Resnick — agriculture tycoons whose farms guzzle a vital and scarce resource: water. So far, the Resnicks' Beverly Hills mansion, and the Picasso artworks that adorn its walls, have been spared the nearby Palisades and Eaton fires, even as their celebrity neighbors' homes go up in smoke. But they cannot so easily escape criticism for their agriculture empire, which sucks up more water than whole cities, even as LA firefighters cannot get a drop of the stuff out of the...

In a sharp rebuke of comedian Tony Hinchcliffe's characterization of Puerto Rico as a "floating island of garbage" during a rally for Republican former U.S. President Donald Trump, Democratic President Joe Biden made a remark that appeared to characterize Trump supporters as "garbage." Controversy arose not only because Trump's supporters took offense at what they heard, but because the White House released a transcript offering a different take on what Biden said or meant to say. Specifically, the controversy hinged on whether Biden said "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters," plural, meaning all of Trump's...

The establishment media immediately tried to reframe and explain away President Joe Biden’s labeling of Trump supporters “garbage.” “There’s no way to spin it: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don’t just hate President Trump, they despise the tens of millions of Americans who support him. Kamala does not deserve four more years,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national spokesperson, said Tuesday. Biden was speaking on an evening call on Tuesday to rally Latino voters when he brought up a Trump rally speaker’s racist insult of Puerto Rico over the weekend. The media, however, tried to spin it. “Trump and His Allies...

One day after The Washington Post announced it would not endorse a presidential candidate in this year’s election or in the future, its billionaire owner remains silent as the newspaper’s staff are in turmoil. Jeff Bezos has so far declined to comment on the situation, even as his own paper’s journalists reported that it was Bezos who ultimately spiked the planned endorsement. A source with knowledge told CNN on Friday that an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris had been drafted before it was squashed. In the last 24 hours, at least one editor has resigned, and high-profile Post staffers...

So much outrage (including from Vice President and Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris) about the claim in Bob Woodward’s upcoming book that Donald Trump during his presidency sent some test kits to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin at the height of the Covid pandemic when they were scarce in the United States. And about the famed journalist’s report that the former president called Putin seven times since the former left the Oval Office in January, 2021. (See, e.g., here.)And so little about by far the biggest outrage described in War (if true, of course – as with the above revelations): that...

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...

…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...

On Sunday, “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil reported from the site of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and said that 2024 Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump’s slogan that people aren’t after him, but are after his supporters and he’s in the way is “the kind of rhetoric we’re all going to be analyzing in the days ahead about how we got here and how those words now hit differently this morning.” CBS News Chief Political Analyst and Senior National Correspondent John Dickerson asked, “Did anybody say, we’ve got to reach out a hand, or was there a...

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s inner circle has gotten smaller following his disastrous debate last week — with his wife’s top aide Anthony Bernal emerging as one of the 81-year-old’s key advisers alongside longtime confidante Mike Donilon, four sources close to or inside the White House tell The Post. Bernal, 51, is a divisive figure for allegedly bullying and sexually harassing colleagues — and his influence was likened by three sources to that held by the mystic Grigori Rasputin over the family and court of Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia. First lady Jill Biden considers Bernal her “work husband”...

Howard University has canceled their nursing graduation ceremony after family members began smashing windows and pounding on doors after being locked out due to the venue reaching full capacity. Parents and family members of College of Nursing and Allied Health Sciences students crammed into the Cramton Auditorium in Washington, DC, on Thursday; however, some did not enter the building before the keynote speech abruptly ended the ceremony.

I'm old enough to remember the hubbub over JournoList, a listserv of leftist reporters from different news outlets who convened regularly in a chatroom to strategize how to spin stories and set narratives, such as how to torpedo Gov.Sarah Palin to get Barack Obama elected president. From 2007 to 2010, JournoList was its own echo chamber, as Politico put it at the time. Now the same thing's happening again, with TV lawyers acting as rhetorical wetwork teams covering the trials of their political nemesis, Donald Trump. JournoList was started by Ezra Klein, who now works for the New York Times,...

You think I'm kidding?You think I'm shining you on?Think again, friend-o: There is nothing shiny about me. I am sandpaper covered in coal-dust.I'm sure you already know that the New York Times' first instinct was to Pivot to Republicans Pounce:Luke Thompson is posting amusing tweets, in which he quotes a member of the partisan traitor media or a member of the traitorous Democrat Party, and then pronounces: "We have entered the Soviet grain report phase of the Biden presidency." Referencing, of course, this sort of headline that would run in Pravda every harvest season:THIS YEAR'S GRAIN HARVEST EXCEEDS ALL RECORDS...

The ongoing “fraud” trial led by Letitia James in New York City continues to unfold, and to anyone watching, it’s apparent that the highly biased TDS judge is already chomping at the bit to hand down a “guilty” verdict. This has always been the predetermined outcome for the first tragic act against Trump, and the rest will follow the same way. But President Trump understands this game and isn’t just rolling over. He actually floored Judge Engoron by whipping out a bombshell document right there on the witness stand—a total game-changer for this sham trial. And the judge’s reaction? It...

ABC News anchor Martha Raddatz said Sunday on “This Week” that a new ABC/Washington News poll showing President Joe Biden trailing former President Donald Trump by 10 points was a “tough one to spin.” Raddatz said, “Whatever caveats, whether that is an outlier, that’s a tough one to spin.” Former DNC chair Donna Brazile said, “It’s a tough one to spin, Martha. But I don’t believe Democrats should be sitting in a panic room.”

If you understand the war inside the machine {GO DEEP} then this move by President Trump will make a lot more sense.Going all the way back to 2016, the #1 value to the RNC from the candidacy of Donald Trump President Trump has always been the supporter data, the donor files and data of the people who support Donald Trump. This data was what literally floored Reince Priebus in 2016, because the RNC had never before seen such a scale of grassroots donor support in the history of the organization.The RNC administrative leadership were floored when the data-sharing requirement forced...

One of former President Donald Trump’s attorneys has withdrawn from his ongoing defamation suit against CNN just days after removing himself from the embattled pol’s federal defense team. Jim Trusty cited “irreconcilable differences” between himself and his client as the reason for his request to be withdrawn as the 77-year-old’s attorney in his suit against the cable news channel, according to federal court papers filed Friday. Those differences, Trusty wrote in the three-page filing, mean he “can no longer effectively and properly represent” the former president. On June 9, Trusty and fellow Trump attorney John Rowley resigned from the former...

The interceptions are an embarrassment for the Russian military. Back in 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin billed the Dagger, or Kinzhal in Russian, as a “next-generation” Russian weapon. Russian officials claimed that the missile can go 10 times faster than the speed of sound, reach any point in Ukraine, and is able to evade all but the most sophisticated air defense systems. Experts questioned those claims, arguing that the missile is just a modification of an existing missile that Putin was trying to rebrand. Russian officials must be reeling in utter disbelief after seven of their most sophisticated missiles were...

The news was jarring to those who had come to regard Volodymyr Zelensky as a warrior for freedom, standing unflinchingly against a sinister, unscrupulous and powerful foe: in December, he signed a decree banning the Church to which millions of Ukrainians belong, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Last Sunday, thousands of those Ukrainians gathered outside the Church’s headquarters, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, to pray and show their support for the monks whom Zelensky has ordered to vacate the premises. This is the new Churchill? A man who evicts monks from their monastery and closes churches? But...

As the establishment continues to pump out more finely tuned propaganda to support throwing eye-watering stacks of money at Ukraine, it’s glaringly apparent the conflict isn’t ending anytime soon, at least if the western elites get their way. Unless you are blindfolded by media narratives, the money thrown at Ukraine is painful to watch, especially coinciding with soaring inflation, gas prices, and energy costs. Meanwhile, vast swathes of Europe – specifically Germany, face a complete grid collapse and possibly famine, made worse by the recent Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. Those daring to question why the Ukraine war is dragging on...