Free Republic

Ron DeSantis always makes a big deal about signing all of the Florida laws that stem from new legislation the people behind his administration submit from his office. However, when he signed the new law that sealed all his travel records [Previously Discussed Here], he did so quietly. .... Snip.... Ron DeSantis ’24 is 100%, guaranteed to be an absolute construct of the billionaires, multinationals, and hedge fund managers who must stop Donald Trump and the America First platform. Look backward at the professional Republican outcomes in 2018, 2020 and 2022 to see the background of what this is all...

(May 8, 2023) — The 2024 presidential election cycle is now underway with a few candidates having already declared their candidacy. Presidential candidates now are required to file the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) Financial Disclosure Form 278e with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) within 30 days of declaring their candidacy. From my experience and from the experience of others who have contacted me with questions about various candidates, several of the candidates are not being responsive to this author and others when sent questions regarding their full life narrative, background, and family history. Their tactic seems to be to...

Lawmakers are considering sealing the governor’s travel records. Republicans say it’s about the governor’s safety and security while Democrats say it’s about the safety of the governor’s political ambitions. Lawmakers readied the bill Monday for a final vote on Tuesday. The bill would make all travel logs of the governor, the state’s cabinet members, legislative leaders, and the Chief Justice exempt from public record requests. Also, the bill is retroactive, meaning if signed into law any records regarding protection, travel, and potential threats in the past, present and future would be sealed. “That’s what the bill is about, safety and...

Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that President Joe Biden’s lack of cooperation and transparency on classified documents found at his and former President Donald Trump’s homes was “outrageous.” Mitchell asked, “Have you had access to the substance of the classified documents either from Mar-a-Lago, from Biden, from Pence, any of that?” Warner said, “This is where the Biden administration gets an absolute failing grade. Their position is outrageous. You got Mike Pence saying yesterday as well. He would be happy to have the intelligence committee. He trusts us to look...

Florida’s bipartisan Senate Governmental Oversight and Accountability Committee has just approved a bill that seeks to shield Governor Ron DeSantis’ travel records from the general public. SB 1616 allows Florida’s Governor, the governor’s close family, visiting governors, and others state officials to be exempt from disclosing their travel records. Currently, Florida has several “sunshine laws” which permit the general public to request travel logs of state officials. The new bill attempts to amend state statute 943.68, that requires records of the Governor’s transportation and protective services to be disclosed to the public.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was on a Zoom meeting this afternoon with members of Congress, the Fed, the Treasury, and FDIC. The call was organized after Silicon Valley Bank crashed and was taken over by the State of California on Friday. Silicon Valley Bank was the largest US bank to crash since the 2008 banking crisis. During the call on Sunday afternoon Massie reported that one Democrat Senator asked if there was a program in place to censor free speech at this time on social media. The first thought of the Democrat Party is to strip Americans of their right...

Democrats who control the state legislature are continuing to defend their use of an online survey they fill out in secret to help determine which bills should live or die. Leaders of the House and Senate said this month they’re considering using the system again this spring despite allegations from a transparency group that it violates the state’s open meetings laws. When the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition read a KUNC report in October about how the so called quadratic voting system was quietly killing bills at the statehouse, the group did something it said it rarely does. It sent...

Below is my column in the New York Post on the pledge of transparency by President Joe Biden in the classified documents scandal. Yesterday, President Biden assured the public that it could take “the word of a Biden” on their bright future. That would be more reassuring if he would fulfill his pledge to be “very transparent” on his storage of documents from his time as senator and vice president. Here is the column: White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has repeatedly assured the public that President Biden is committed in the classified-document scandal to move forward in “a very...

Race to the Bottom describes the process of competitive devaluation, where value is gutted to remain competitive with those who are grabbing market share by stripping out quality, value, durability, transparency, accountability and competence.We see the global Race to the Bottom in everyday products: the quality of goods has plummeted as manufacturers compete to reduce costs to maintain high profit margins by stripping out the quality and durability of components. We see it in shrinkflation, where the cereal box contains less cereal while the price ratchets higher.We see it when cereals that once contained no sugar are now sickly-sweet because...

Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton vowed that lawmakers would stall Biden government nominations until it handed over the materials the FBI recovered from both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. "Until the administration stops stonewalling Congress, there will be pain as a consequence for them," Cotton said, according to The Hill. "Whether it's blocking nominees or withholding budgetary funds, Congress will impose pain on the administration until they provide these documents." "I'm prepared to refuse consent to fast-track any nominee from any department or agency and to take every step that I can on every committee on which...

Staffers at The Washington Post are livid at publisher Fred Ryan. That's according to conversations I had on Wednesday with nearly a dozen employees at The Post who expressed fury at the way Ryan announced in a town hall that the company would undergo layoffs in early 2023. Ryan said that the layoffs would only amount to a single-digit percentage of the workforce and that the overall size of the company would not shrink, given there would be reinvestments in other areas. But none of that quelled outrage from staffers. The staffers at The Post, who were already seeking answers...

Below is my column on Fox.com on the firing of former FBI General Counsel James Baker at Twitter. The move by Elon Musk is raising serious questions of whether he has faced a type of “deep state” problem within his own company obstructing his efforts to restore transparency and free speech values to Twitter. Here is the column: On Tuesday, Elon Musk surprised many by firing former FBI General Counsel James Baker as legal counsel for Twitter. For many of us, the most surprising thing was that Baker was still at Twitter. I had assumed that Baker had left the...

Summary:How is it possible for proprietary AI models to enter patient care, without extensive peer reviews for algorithmic transparency? That's a question we should be asking about Epic's Deterioration Index, which has been utilized for several use cases, including COVID-19 patient risk models.The conversation about machine learning development largely centers on how individual organizations proceed - and whether they use adequate data, methods, algorithms, transparency, and a process that guarantees models do not go into production until they are tested and vetted.At the other end of the spectrum are AI models developed by Google and Facebook that are completely opaque,...

Former President Trump called for the immediate release of the "completely unredacted" Mar-a-Lago affidavit in a late night post on Truth Social. Trump said the move would be in the interest of "TRANSPARENCY." "There is no way to justify the unannounced RAID of Mar-a-Lago, the home of the 45th President of the United States (who got more votes, by far, than any sitting President in the history of our Country!), by a very large number of gun toting FBI Agents, and the Department of 'Justice,'" Trump wrote on Truth Social. "But, in the interest of TRANSPARENCY, I call for the...

DOJ *opposes* the release of the underlying FBI affidavit because "it would serve as a roadmap to the government’songoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps."— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) August 15, 2022I thought Merrick Garland said they wanted to be transparent? Guess that was only until they lost control of the narrative?!? https://t.co/p0PmcWRScf— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) August 15, 2022

Breitbart is facing widespread criticism after the far-right media outlet published the names of FBI agents who carried out the raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. The conservative outlet published a leaked version of the search warrant that allowed the FBI to execute the raid hours before the document was unsealed Friday evening. Breitbart released a version of the warrant that included the names of the FBI special agent and supervisor agent who signed off on the receipts detailing the documents taken from the Mar-a-Lago residence — prompting widespread criticism that the outlet put a target on the...

According to a recent headline from The New York Times, “the CDC isn’t publishing large portions of the COVID data it collects.” That headline downplays what the article in fact reveals:Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said.The article says when the Centers for Disease Control “published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65…it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population:...

A federal judge has thrown out an obstruction charge against a defendant charged with breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a ruling that could reverberate across hundreds of cases stemming from the attack on Congress. In a 29-page opinion issued Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols ruled that ambiguities in the federal obstruction law required him to narrow the case against defendant Garret Miller, who is facing multiple felony charges connected to the attack. Under that narrow interpretation, Nichols ruled, defendants can be charged with obstruction only if they directly attempt to affect “a document, record, or other...

The Biden administration has yet to release December border crossing numbers that Customs and Border Protection has circulated internally for at least 10 days, raising concerns on Capitol Hill that the White House is concealing damaging information about the severity of the border crisis. On Jan. 14, CBP submitted the December data in a court filing. Those data revealed 178,840 migrant apprehensions in December, an increase from 173,620 in November. A spokeswoman for CBP told the Washington Free Beacon the December numbers are "scheduled to be released soon," although she did not answer why they were delayed. Congressional Republicans have...

White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the non-release of visitor logs from President Biden’s Delaware homes Tuesday — despite the fact that the commander-in-chief was in his home state for more than a quarter of all days during his first year in office. The Post asked Psaki at her regular press briefing if the White House’s decision not to make the Delaware logs public still stands after Biden spent long stretches of time at his Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach residences.