Free Republic

All of their predictions are based on the conventional wisdom and assumptions of an insulted and excluded D.C. intelligentsia, and all are wrong. Media bias is an old constant. It has never and will never go away. A reporter or host can use all the proper, sanitized words he wants, but behind the scenes lie the decisions that went into which stories to pursue and which to drop; where to pull back and where to push forward; who to interview, who to skip; what is most important versus what can be buried or even cut.And then, of course, there’s the...

The Democrats are pushing for straight-up infanticide, and they're emboldened enough to not even bothering hiding it any longer. When asked about the controversial late term abortion bill presented in Virginia's House of Delegates this week, Governor Ralph Northam said a fully developed child born in the third trimester would be kept alive, but the physician and mother would get to discuss and decide whether to take its life or not. "If a mother is in labor... the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the...

Jonah Goldberg wrote a column for National Review before departing for his Christmas holiday in Hawaii. Was it a retelling of a long ago night before Christmas, when a tiny Jonah in footy PJs couldn’t sleep for hope of a pony under the tree? No. It was a screed titled “Conservative Facts.” What set off Goldberg was a column in American Greatness by Chris Buskirk titled “Death of The Weekly Standard Signals Rebirth of the Right.” Goldberg speckles his efforts with pop culture references to things like Star Trek. Example: in this column, he says Washington “picked a wrong week...

“Wow, 19,000 Texts between Lisa Page and her lover, Peter S of the FBI, in charge of the Russia Hoax, were just reported as being wiped clean and gone,” Trump posted Saturday morning. Page and Peter Strzok, who worked on both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the probes into Trump’s campaign, reportedly texted each other about plans to “stop” Trump from winning the presidency. The Justice Department revealed Thursday that thousands of their messages to each other had disappeared, blaming the loss of data on a technological failure. “Such a big story that will never be covered by the...

Khashoggi’s murder is only a symptom of a much bigger problem. The biggest mistake the Trump administration made in the Jamal Khashoggi case occurred while Khashoggi was still alive: letting Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, think he could get away with something so heinous — and so heinously stupid. But the bell was rung, as it were, and there is no way to unring it. The Saudis surely made everything worse by lying about it. But the aftermath is such a complicated mess because it illuminates decisions made long before Prince Mohammed’s goons brought a bone saw to...

Nineteen days after Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi disappeared in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, the Saudi regime has at last acknowledged the obvious, that Khashoggi is dead. After first insisting that he had left the consulate of his own accord despite video evidence to the contrary, and then slamming the allegations of his murder as “baseless” and threatening oil sanctions against those claiming otherwise, the kingdom has finally settled on its official story: Khashoggi was inadvertently killed inside the consulate during a fistfight that just happened to break out in the midst of an otherwise standard meeting with...

Going all in on attacking President Trump isn’t proving to be a particularly effective business strategy for media outlets.The Weekly Standard, a 28-year old neoconservative institution, is reportedly headed towards dissolution after its founder, Bill Kristol, devoted almost three years of work to attacking the President and his supporters.It’s not just Kristol. The entire world of clickbait Trump-hate seems to be in jeopardy, including sites that cater to the liberal base.The same week that The Weekly Standard’s troubles broke, Vanity Fair dropped a bombshell report about the struggles faced by those hip, millennial-targeted left-wing rags with the cool names...

New York (CNN Business)The Weekly Standard, the magazine that espouses traditional conservatism and which has remained deeply critical of President Donald Trump, will shutter after 23 years, its owner Clarity Media Group announced Friday morning. The magazine will publish its final issue on December 17. * * * Employees were told at an all staff meeting, which CNN obtained an audio recording of, that they would be paid through the end of the year, and that afterward they would receive severance which would range in scale depending on factors like seniority. To receive severance, however, employees would need to sign...

“This is before and this is after. Before and after,” Cory Booker is saying on Snapchat. He’s just met a young fan with an Afro and is drawing the contrast to his own shiny bald head. It’s a routine he will repeat again later in the day and as he crisscrosses the country before the midterms. The New Jersey senator can’t say no to a selfie. If you are standing around looking idle, he’ll probably ask you to take one and upload the photo to his social media accounts for his millions of followers. Social media are Booker’s bread and...

The fate of The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine that has staked out a position as a publication on the right still critical of President Donald Trump, is uncertain, Editor-in-Chief Stephen Hayes told staff in a series of phone calls Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the matter. The magazine's precarious position comes after its leadership spent months searching for a buyer, the people told CNN. The people explained that The Weekly Standard's leadership had butted heads with MediaDC, the current publisher of the magazine, and that the two parties had agreed to allow Hayes to search for a...

New York (CNN Business)The fate of The Weekly Standard, the conservative magazine that has staked out a position as a publication on the right still critical of President Donald Trump, is uncertain, Editor-in-Chief Stephen Hayes told staff in a series of phone calls Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the matter. The magazine's precarious position comes after its leadership spent months searching for a buyer, the people told CNN. The people explained that The Weekly Standard's leadership had butted heads with MediaDC, the current parent company of the magazine, and that the two parties had agreed to allow Hayes...

(snip) -- So-called “conservative” commentator Bill Kristol reportedly has his never-ending campaign to take down President Donald Trump receive funding from a left-wing billionaire. Kristol, the editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard, seems to have taken his never-Trump activities to another level, actively opposing Republican candidates and conservative causes through the group he founded, “Republicans for the Rule of Law.” But despite its name, the group seems to have no Republican donors according to a report by Julie Kelly of American Greatness, though there is one prominent benefactor: progressive billionaire Pierre Omidyar, the co-founder of eBay. One of Omidyar’s nonprofits, the...

Donald Trump was asked this week, "Do you believe in raising taxes on the wealthy?" He replied, "I do. I do - including myself. I do." Yet Trump's own tax plan would cut the highest marginal federal income-tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. How does this tax plan square with Trump's newly professed support for "raising taxes on the wealthy"? This is similar to Trump's rampant inconsistency on Obamacare. Trump says he's for repealing Obamacare, but he's not for cutting Medicaid which, thanks to the efforts of those like John Kasich, accounts for most of Obamacare's coverage increases....

The other storyline is simply fantastical. Congressional Republicans have uniformly run away from Trump's Obama-wiretap accusation. Clapper denies it. FBI Director James Comey denies it. Not a single member of Trump's own administration is willing to say it's true. Loopier still is to demand that Congress find the truth when the president could just pick up the phone and instruct the FBI, CIA and DNI to declare on the record whether this ever occurred. And if there really was an October 2016 FISA court order to wiretap Trump, the president could unilaterally declassify the information yesterday. The bugging story is...

Editor-at-Large of The Weekly Standard Bill Kristol accused President Donald Trump of trying to “shut down” the Russia investigation Tuesday, despite the White House’s continued cooperation with special counsel Robert Mueller. “The president hates the investigation. He fears it, and he wants to shut it down or curb it as much as he can,” Kristol said on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” “It may be that he intends to fire Mueller,” Kristol added. “Trump is trying systematically to discredit the FBI … and he’s doing so by attacking individuals, by attacking the whole organization, by saying the whole thing is a...

The Republican elites are not going down without a fight. Donald Trump shattered the GOP primary record this year by more than a million votes. He was running against 16 challengers – another record. But that won’t stop the GOP elites from trying to steal the nomination. The Weekly Standard today called on delegates to steal the nomination from Donald Trump at the Republican Convention this month.The traitors would rather see Hillary win than support Donald Trump.Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard reported: This election cycle hasn’t been kind to Republican big shots. Their favorite presidential candidates—Jeb Bush, Scott Walker...

So I just stopped by the Corner blog at National Review Online to see their reaction to Trump's speech today. To my surprise, there wasn't a single post commenting on it. The NR writers spent the day posting about Brexit, and about Rubio's senate run, and about a picture of Trump they don't like. But not a word about Trump's speech. If that isn't proof that Trump hit a home run today, I don't know what is.

unday on ABC’s “This Week,” Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol commented on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s chances in the general election and said that he was “afraid” presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump could win.

Realville, as Rush often says, is where he lives. That’s a place without blinkers or rose-colored glasses. That’s actually where we all live, though some of us prefer to deny it. That is, until reality bites. Then our wishful thinking or willful ignorance dashes upon the hard rock of unforgiving reality. The crackup always smarts. Thus is the case with the 2016 presidential election. There’s Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In other words, there’s Column A and Column B. That’s the choice. Column C is fairyland. Come November, tens of millions of voters will flock to the polls to choose...

Glenn Beck: Why Do Conservative Pundits Support Trump? Glenn Beck wants to stage a conservative intervention. The former Fox News host and prominent conservative commentator is confounded that so many Republican voters are attracted to Donald Trump. And Beck is particularly bewildered by the conservative pundits who are hooked on the bombastic real estate mogul. "Why are big name 'conservatives' supporting him?" Beck asked wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday. Beck went on to name names, calling out some of Trump's biggest boosters in conservative media: Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. "I am not talking...