Free Republic

Donors just didn’t want to back a loser — and that’s just what Mr. Trump is now — a loser. “Hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, the second-most prolific GOP donor of the midterms, said Tuesday that he would support [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis over Trump, pointing to the Florida governor’s dominant reelection victory in a state that was considered competitive until recently,” The Hill reported this week. “I’d like to think that the Republican Party is ready to move on from somebody who has been for this party a three-time loser,” said Mr. Griffin, who funded a pro-Trump super political...

Biden's sinking and the Left has no agenda to run on Way back in 2015, after reality-star, talk-show host Donald Trump announced he was running for president, Democrats were ecstatic. “Hey,” they said giddily to one another, “let’s make that wacky billionaire the face of the Republican Party!” That didn’t work out so well. In fact, it can be (and has been) argued that CNN and The New York Times had as much to do with electing Trump president as did Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Trump was ratings gold that even the far-Left networks and “news”...

Dog the Bounty Hunter is giving up the hunt for Brian Laundrie, who disappeared shortly before the body of his fiancée, Gabby Petito, was found in a Wyoming park. The 68-year-old bounty hunter, whose real name is Duane Chapman, said he has left Florida and flown back to his home state of Colorado to nurse a sprained ankle. He and his team had been searching for the 23-year-old fugitive in the swampy Carlton Reserve. His daughter, Lyssa Chapman, wrote on Twitter that the “bait is set.” Late last week, police hunting for Laundrie reportedly found a recently used campsite at...

The former editor of the Drudge Report, Joseph Curl, announced Tuesday the launch of Off The Press, a conservative-oriented aggregator that he says will have a "fearless attitude" toward covering "everything for those who devour news all day." Curl says the marketplace is ripe for a premier, 24/7 news aggregator that consumers can trust, with the Drudge Report having become just another echo chamber for the mainstream media. "Now more than ever, keeping up with the most important stories is a battle," Curl says. "With social media deluging everyone with endless posts on their news feeds, the internet needs an...

Before Joe Biden jumped into the 2020 race, this very columnist wrote a piece headlined: “Biden will run and Biden will win.” The premise of the brilliant piece was that while all the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination moved hard left — offering socialist programs like free health care and free college and pushing trillion-dollar projects and 70% tax rates — Biden would waltz in, play the sane moderate, be embraced by the mainstream media, and sweep to victory. It all may still happen, but he’s certainly not running away with the race (one recent poll showed him statistically...

NEW YORK -- Joseph Curl, a veteran political writer and most recently an editor for The Drudge Report, unveiled a new politics-focused, aggregation-heavy site on Monday called Right Read. In an interview with The Huffington Post, Curl said Right Read is “going to be an aggregation site in which I read hundreds and hundreds of stories so you don’t have to.” He noted that his nearly four years working on The Drudge Report, the conservative aggregation powerhouse, gave him the skills needed to wade through the sheer volume of stories published each day in order to find the most newsy,...

Is it just me, or does anyone else out there wonder why the mainstream media is gushing over Gov. Chris Christie? The Washington Post got all wee-weed up over his decisive win in New Jersey last week. The New York Times planted a big kiss on his chubby tookus. The networks in Manhattan all ran a variation of “Boy, this guy is really something, huh?” (snip) In coronating the rotund governor as the next sure-fire GOP presidential nominee in 2016, none of the mainstream media pointed out his stances on issues that they no doubt hate: Mr. Christie vetoed a...

The first rule for President Obama: It’s all about 2014. The second rule for President Obama: See Rule No. 1. Make no mistake: The president couldn’t care less about the plight of Syrians, the 1,500 gassed to death — including nearly 500 children. It’s all about 2014. Win the House, reign supreme. Consider this: Mr. Obama made his dramatic Rose Garden statement Saturday — then headed to the golf course. Congress has no plans to cut short its 30-day vacation, and the president did not call lawmakers back. So much for urgency. The conventional wisdom is, as usual, wrong. Losing...

Joseph Curl @josephcurl Midnight call from my CIA source. 'This is the one.' Said the real question is why all those agents were in Benghazi. …4:49 AM August 2,2013

joseph curl‏@josephcurl8m CIA source says Fox News scandal the "4th Shoe"; says it goes much deeper; says WH also sitting on "something" that has top aides terrified.

According to Drudge editor and Washington Times columnist Joseph Curl, the pouring rain ain’t over yet. He says a CIA source revealed another shoe could drop.

. . . of online media manipulation isn’t exactly new. In fact, it goes back well before Romney’s 2008 campaign got underway in earnest. It seems to date back to sometime in 2005, when RNC operatives arranged a meeting between Matt Drudge and Matt Rhodes — a highly placed operative in the Romney organization. Last year, a delegation of RNC officials flew to Miami Beach, where Drudge lives, for a dinner at the Forge steakhouse to introduce the Internet maven to Matt Rhodes, the party’s new opposition research director. Due to Drudge’s now-close friendship with Romney’s chief aide and longtime...

Matt Drudge is the Howard Hughes of the Internet. Like Hughes, he lives in splendid isolation, communicating only through a small group of trusted friends. Like Hughes, his influence has quietly helped shape Republican politics for a generation. But while the eccentric Hughes used money to put his pals in the White House, Drudge has always relied on blogs and Tweets. The Drudge Report, which started life as an emailed gossip column, now receives millions of unique visitors per month. One study found that it drives more traffic than Twitter and Facebook combined. Drudge’s claim to be the authentic voice...

ANALYSIS/OPINION: You know you’re running a lousy presidential campaign when you get bitten by a penguin. The Newt’s presidential campaign has got to be one of the worst ever run in American history. Last May, when Newt was casually campaigning, as is his way, he found himself exhausted. He had, after all, been at it for weeks. So, he did what any pooped-out candidate would do: He split on a luxury cruise to the Greek Islands with Wife No. 3 (22 years his junior — he was already out of college when she was born). Newt rose during the debates...

Facing the unthinkable here just seven days ago — a second loss in a row to Newt Gingrich — Mitt Romney’s campaign team hatched a two-part plan to win in Florida: make Newt mad and Mitt meaner. -snip- A team of some of the most fearsome researchers in the business, led by Mr. Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, spent days dispensing negative information about Mr. Gingrich, much of it finding its way to the influential Drudge Report, which often serves as a guide for conservative talk radio and television assignment editors and to which Mr. Rhoades has close ties. The...

So much for Matt being fair and balanced and showing just headlines and stories others will not...no...he has 14 stories front and center all anti-Newt right now. No excuse for this...not even ABC/NBC/CBS have 14 anti-Newt stories on their front page. Bias? What bias? Conservatives can trust about nobody in media today and this proves exactly why.

......The Drudge outburst seems to reflect a growing sense among the conservative opinion commentariat that Gingrich as nominee is a serious liability in a pivotal election year, a fact the GOP base has yet to fully grasp. The pundits apparently view themselves as the sober older sibling warning a starry-eyed sister about the hot guy on the Harley who's been around enough to leave a mark.

Newt Gingrich better hope voters who lapped up his delicious hits on the “elite media” and liberals don’t read the Drudge Report this morning. Or the National Review. Or the American Spectator. Or Ann Coulter. If they do, Gingrich comes off looking like a dangerous, anti-Reagan, Clintonian fraud. It’s as if the conservative media over the past 24 hours decided Gingrich is for real, and they need to come clean about the man they really know before it’s too late.

"The POTUS is on board!" yelled a man of nearly 60 wearing a Navy baseball cap, dark pants and no tie, who had just climbed the drop-down backstairs of Air Force One in the dark and slipped into the rearmost cabin, crammed full with reporters and photographers. It was, in fact, not just the customary announcement made when the president of the United States (POTUS) boards his plane. This was, in fact, the POTUS himself, minutes before Monday night's secret trip to Baghdad, one so elaborately planned that it included the president lying to his closest aides and the White...