Free Republic

A former top staffer in the Biden White House said on Fox News Sunday that former First Lady Jill Biden’s strategy to prop up former President Joe Biden in public is only harming the Biden legacy. Michael LaRosa, who served as a longtime press secretary to Jill Biden, admitted that Biden’s team is mishandling the fallout regarding his cognitive decline and Joe Biden’s initial decision to seek reelection in 2024. Despite his affection for the Bidens, the former aide urged Jill and Joe Biden to reconsider how they are handling media appearances in the post-presidency period because their current strategy...

Cannes (France) (AFP) – Hollywood heavyweights Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Riz Ahmed and Guillermo del Toro have added their names to a letter condemning the film industry's silence on what it called "genocide" in Gaza, the organisers confirmed Friday. The petition, signed by more than 370 actors and filmmakers, also denounced Israel's killing of Fatima Hassouna, the young Gaza photojournalist featured in the documentary "Put Your Soul in Your Hand and Walk", which premiered at the Cannes film festival Thursday. The organisers of the letter said the French actor Juliette Binoche, who is chairing the jury at Cannes, also added...

Everyone is talking about Republicans’ proposed Medicaid cuts, but hardly anyone is calling this what it really is: the strategy by Elon Musk, President Trump, and the Republican Party to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, one piece at a time. The ACA, a historic piece of legislation that extended health coverage to millions of Americans, celebrated its 15th anniversary on March 23. Signed by President Barack Obama in 2010, the ACA expanded Medicaid and provided subsidies so that more working and middle-class Americans could have access to our expensive and complicated health care system. The law also made it illegal...

Some need to win a coin flip to use a desk. Others say they’re killing time when workstations aren’t available.As the Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared for its full workforce to report in person this month, it faced a situation many agencies are confronting as they scramble to comply with President Donald Trump’s return-to-office mandate: There weren’t enough workspaces for everyone.As a result, employees would have to “share workstations on a rotating basis,” the agency announced in guidance shared with employees last week. The guidance, obtained by The Washington Post, stated: “Supervisors will resolve workplace availability conflicts using the following...

When President Joe Biden began his campaign trip in Las Vegas last week, everything seemed to be running as smoothly as it could for an 81-year-old president in physical and cognitive decline. The day before he abruptly left town, Biden delivered the keynote address in front of a packed crowd of almost five thousand people at the NAACP National Convention at the Mandalay Bay hotel. On Wednesday, Biden was scheduled to deliver the keynote at the UnidosUS annual convention at the MGM Grand, with thousands in attendance anticipating his arrival. With the venue located right off the Las Vegas Strip,...

…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...

The gunman who shot Donald Trump last night is a 20-year-old registered Republican who donated to Joe Biden. Thomas Matthew Crooks was shot dead by a US Secret Service sniper after he opened fire on the former President during a rally in Pennsylvania. His father, Matthew Crooks, 53, told CNN he was trying to figure out 'what the hell is going on' but would 'wait until I talk to law enforcement' before speaking. Crooks had fired at least eight bullets from a rooftop just 130 yards from where Trump, 78, was on stage in Butler speaking to thousands of fans...

Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press” that the Republican Party wanted a national abortion ban as part of their “war on women.” Newsom said, “They are not only restricting the rights of self-determination to bear a child for a young woman, and they’re determining their fate as it relates their future in life by saying they can’t even travel and they are modeled after a version that passed in Idaho is now being proposed in Tennessee and Oklahoma and Mississippi. The AG himself of Alabama wants to criminalize travel not just for children but for...

Democratic consultant and political commentator James Carville said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat” that he believed Tuesday’s election results showed voters don’t trust Republicans on the issue of abortion because “they keep lying.” Host Ari Melber asked, “What are the voters saying?” Carville said, “Well, I think voters said that they don’t like being lied to. They did it in Kansas. They did it in Ohio. They tried to confuse people, change the wording.”

(RNS) — The latest chapter in Donald Trump’s ongoing legal drama played out on Monday evening (Aug. 14), as a grand jury in Georgia indicted the former president and 18 others as part of a sweeping probe of alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the state. While most of those indicted are lawyers or people with close connections to Trump, at least one is a faith leader: an Illinois pastor and former police chaplain charged in connection with efforts to intimidate Georgia election workers. The indictment singles out the Rev. Stephen Cliffgard Lee, a pastor within the...

The White House issued a rebuke of Tucker Carlson’s January 6 video footage on Wednesday, suggesting it was a “false depiction” and adding it was roundly condemned by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and the Capitol Police chief. On Monday and Tuesday, Carlson aired video footage revealing Capitol Police escorting Shaman Jacob Chansley inside the Capitol. In addition, Carlson argued the footage showed that Democrats knew Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick had not been murdered during the riot but misled the public about his death, and that Ray Epps lied to the committee about when he left...

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell joined a chorus of widespread attacks on Fox News host Tucker Carlson for his portrayal of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol since he accessed more than 40,000 hours of security footage. Carlson and his team had exclusive access to the security tape surrounding the attack thanks to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, drawing concerns the host would use the tapes to spread a new wave of disinformation. McConnell said he aligned himself with remarks issued earlier Tuesday by U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger to his rank-and-file slamming Carlson's "offensive and misleading conclusions" about...

But for some reason, CNN seems to think that just because Burns has made films about stuff like baseball or Prohibition, he’s qualified to deliver competent analysis of modern American politics. Evidently they didn’t learn anything from the time they had him on and he and anchor John Berman drew parallels between Ron DeSantis sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and the freakin’ Holocaust, because he was back today on “CNN This Morning” with more parallels between Ron DeSantis and Nazi Germany, plus a few other things sprinkled in for good measure: Transcript: Ken Burns: “You know, what makes America great...

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) says Fox News made “a mistake” by depicting Jan. 6, 2021, as a largely peaceful if chaotic protest, a revision of history that the Capitol Police chief criticized as “offensive” and “misleading.” McConnell told reporters that he endorsed Police Chief Tom Manger’s criticism that Fox host Tucker Carlson “cherry-picked” calmer moments from the violent day failed to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened in the Capitol. “I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the chief of the Capitol police about what happened on Jan. 6,” McConnell told reporters...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Handed some 41,000 hours of Jan. 6 security footage, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has launched an impassioned new effort to explain away the deadly Capitol attack, linking the Republican Party ever more closely to pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2021 riot. The conservative commentator aired a first installment to millions of viewers on his prime-time show, working to bend perceptions of the violent, grueling siege that played out for the world to see into a narrative favorable to Donald Trump. He promised more Tuesday night. The undertaking by Fox News comes as Trump is again running for...

WASHINGTON — Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday released security video from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, using footage provided exclusively to him by Speaker Kevin McCarthy to portray the riot as a peaceful gathering. Carlson acquired the tapes as part of a push by McCarthy, R-Calif., to win the speaker’s gavel. When McCarthy was struggling to gather the votes to lead the House, Carlson used his program to list two “concessions” he could make to win over far-right Republicans. “First, release the January 6 files. Not some of the January 6 files and video —...

As a yoga teacher, Dina Pinelli exercised and had a healthy diet. That didn't prevent her from having three heart attacks in less than a month when she was 45. She thought her symptoms were anxiety or allergies, but has learned to advocate for her health.

IN THE THIRD installment of the ongoing “Twitter Files,” Substack writer Matt Taibbi detailed the internal Twitter correspondence that led to the ban of then-President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Like the first and second “leak” of documents, which Elon Musk touted as exposés of “free speech suppression,” the third part of the Twitter saga boils down to a lengthy explainer piece about social media’s most historic content-moderation decision: Kicking a sitting president off of their service. “Is this the first sitting head of state to ever be suspended?” an unnamed Twitter employee asks early in the...

During CNN’s coverage of the Georgia Senate runoff on Tuesday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) reacted to Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-GA) victory in the runoff by stating the Warnock win was because “the state saw through whatever political lens they had” or “everything everyone’s been through with COVID and inflation all over the world. And they said, you know what, I believe Raphael Warnock is going to have my back and he’s going to help our country and he’s the right guy in terms of our democracy.” Klobuchar said, “A lot of this has to do with Donald Trump, I agree....

Democrats would not have had such a good election night without the support of independent voters. ...Despite plenty of polling this year showing that independents were, like Republicans, primarily concerned with the state of the economy and inflation, they ended up making nuanced decisions in key statewide races — and that worked to benefit Democrats.... ...Perhaps the most confounding result for pundits across the spectrum was how the negative perception voters, and especially independents, had of President Joe Biden’s job performance and the state of the economy did not translate into a massive swing for Republicans. But voters weren’t viewing...