Free Republic

“Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.” A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Donald Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to...

Attorney General William Barr on Thursday corrected a reporter’s assertion that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was “his,” reminding him that Mueller authored the report on behalf of the Justice Department. “There’s a lot of public interest in the absence of the special counsel and members of this team. Was he invited to join you up on the podium? Why is he not here?” asked the New York Times’ Eric Lipton. “This is his report, obviously that you’re talking about today.” “Not it’s not,” Barr shot back. “It’s a report he did for me as the attorney general. He is...

While it doesn’t get much play in the heat of the final days leading up to the midterms, U.S. energy policy is still in the news. Unfortunately, not all of the coverage is quite as honestly depicted as you might hope. We’re still riding a nearly unprecedented energy boom in the United States, but the New York Times found a way to cast a dark cloud over it this weekend. Eric Lipton et al. published a look at oil and gas drilling on federal lands in Wyoming designed to send chills down your spine just in time for Halloween. To...

A push by the casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson to outlaw online gambling has ignited a bitter civil war in the gambling industry, dividing one of Washington’s most powerful interest groups and posing a major test of the Republican megadonor’s political clout. Mr. Adelson’s effort officially kicked off on Wednesday, when lawmakers, including a senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has accepted tens of thousands of dollars from the businessman and his family, introduced legislation originally drafted with Mr. Adelson’s lobbyist. The bill would close a three-year-old loophole in federal law, banning online gambling — a growing industry that Mr....

The New York Times has an article today titled, "Inquiry of Democratic Senator Started With Partisan Push." The story by Eric Lipton describes our success in getting media coverage for our original research about Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and his relationship with a major donor, Dr. Salomon Melgen. Lipton then states that to Menendez and his staff our work is "proof that the news media frenzy focusing on his actions to help a Florida eye doctor is at least in part a political smear." The only problem with this story line is that that New York Times approached us shortly...

Security System Failed, Napolitano Acknowledges ERIC LIPTON and SCOTT SHANE December 28, 2009 WASHINGTON — The secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, said Monday that the thwarted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner represented a failure of the nation’s aviation security system, not the success she and other administration officials had portrayed in comments over the weekend. [Pic in URL] An undated handout photo of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect in the thwarted bombing, was made available by the U.S. Marshals Service. Ms. Napolitano said Monday on NBC’S “Today” that her remark the day before — “the system has worked really...

Among the findings that emerge in the mass of documents and testimony: ¶Federal officials knew long before the storm showed up on the radar that 100,000 people in New Orleans had no way to escape a major hurricane on their own and that the city had finished only 10 percent of a plan for how to evacuate its largely poor, African-American population. ¶Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal official to oversee the response before the hurricane arrived, an omission a top Pentagon official acknowledged to investigators complicated the coordination of the response. His department also did not plan...