Free Republic

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.

Biden said there is 'no federal solution' in call with US governorsPresident Biden’s administration continued to show its difficult relationship with the press on Monday. Biden took calls from governors to discuss ongoing efforts to combat rising COVID-19 cases due to the new omicron variant. After speaking with the governors, Biden addressed White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeffrey Zients as to whether the governors had questions. ...Zients then responded "Good. I think we are going to clear the press first," ushering the press pool out of the room.... ...Biden was later confronted by the press before leaving the White House...

U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols has issued a protective order in Steve Bannon's criminal contempt of Congress case, effectively barring him or his lawyers from releasing to the public case material given to them by prosecutors. However, any evidence related to the case that is already in the public sphere or obtained by Bannon outside of the evidentiary discovery process is not subject the judge's ruling. ... ...Bannon and his team had asked the judge not to issue the order, citing what they argue is the public's need to understand the case. But prosecutors told the judge they feared...

At the end of the day, senators care more about protecting themselves and their colleagues from unpredictable, inconvenient floor votes than they do about passing legislation.Official Washington’s conventional wisdom about the Senate filibuster is a fairy tale. It is utterly unmoored from the choices being made by individual senators, party caucuses, and the body as a whole. Every person who has ever told you that the mean, nasty, outdated legislative filibuster is the source of Senate gridlock and the obstacle to common-sense legislating in Congress has either swallowed, or is peddling, a lie. In an op-ed in the Washington Post...

President Biden wrapped up remarks on the state of the economy ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday in approximately 10 minutes Tuesday, then exited stage right with shouted question from reporters ringing in his ears — including “When will you answer our questions, sir?” “Thank you for your time and effort, and I’ll have plenty of time to talk to you later,” Biden said before strolling off the stage at the Executive Office Building next door to the White House. CBS News Radio correspondent Steven Portnoy, the president of the White House Correspondents Association, tweeted that he was the one who...

A U.S. government watchdog on Friday accused the State Department and Pentagon of suppressing information that lawmakers and the public need to understand the collapse of Afghanistan's former government and military and the chaotic U.S. troop pullout. John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), spoke out on Friday after it emerged that many of the routine documents had now been marked as classified.... ...After a review, his agency found only four items meriting redaction, and left the remainder accessible. Noting that Congress tasked him with investigating the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government and military, he said...

White House reporters are protesting after President Joe Biden’s handlers did their best imitation of screaming banshees as they blocked reporters from asking him questions during British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's visit to the White House on Tuesday.

A little-discussed but transformative patient protection policy put into place by the Trump administration is proving to be an extremely effective tool in unwinding the tangled mess of American medical pricing. Under the orders, hospitals must provide the federal government with records on all the prices they negotiate with private insurers.Some hospitals banded together to sue the administration (they lost…twice), and the insurers’ trade association wrote a 57-page letter to the government calling the Transparency Rule “unconstitutional” and insinuating that too much transparency would not be helpful to the average health consumer.Every American should be able to get the health...

A report in Vanity Fair details actions by some members of the U.S. State Department to block efforts to investigate the origins of the coronavirus because the inquiry could open “a can of worms.” An internal memo sent to department heads by Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, warned “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19.” The “can of worms” in question was the extensive funding by the U.S. government into the Wuhan Virology Lab’s “gain-of-function” virus research. It’s unclear whether DiNanno was concerned that an...