Free Republic

The U.S. Fourth Quarter GDP growth was reported two days ago at 2.6% and that stunned everyone who were expecting a much higher number. All U.S. economic indicators including U.S. Holiday consumer spending, which accounts for around two-thirds of total GDP, were off the charts in the fourth quarter growing +5.5% over the prior holiday.

The Hill published a story today based on leaks from a recent House Judiciary Committee meeting where FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe discussed elements of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Republicans on the committee say McCabe outlined some irregularities that suggest the outcome of the investigation was rigged in Clinton’s favor. Among the new findings is that an unnamed tech specialist who used Bleach Bit to wipe Clinton’s server after a congressional subpoena was issued admitted lying to the FBI [emphasis added]: A computer technician who deleted Clinton emails from her server in March 2015 after a congressional subpoena...

A recent article by David Samuels at the New York Times Magazine, based on an interview with Obama's foreign policy guru Ben Rhodes, purported to explain how, and about what, the Obama administration lied to get public support for the Iran Scam. According to the article, the principal Obama lie involved who was the Iranian president when the negotiations with Iran began. It's much deeper and worse than that. As Paul Harvey would say, “Here’s “the rest of the story.”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uogp40PeddI Iranian President Rouhani was elected on June 15, 2013 and assumed office on August 3d. According to Rhodes, negotiations started...

Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday that he “did what was necessary” in 2012 when he falsely accused Mitt Romney of not having paid his taxes for 10 years. Reid was asked about those comments, which he made during a speech on the Senate floor, in response to call during a live interview on Las Vegas’ KNPR. The caller asked Reid if he thought that “the brazen lie he told about Mitt Romney not pay his taxes has in anyway contributed to the fake news debate that we now find ourselves in.” {..snip..}

A few weeks after the election, I was hit by a sickening realization. Not only would my children have to learn about Donald Trump in school, but by the time they are old enough for college, there will probably be whole academic departments devoted to the study of him. (That is, assuming we still have colleges, and America, by then.) Before Trump was elected, the United States was a deeply imperfect democracy. Afterward, it became a sh*tty kleptocracy, run, against the will of the majority of the American citizenry, by a cruel, gaudy, grandiose lunatic. Overnight, the very texture of...

Plenty of media outlets have blamed Hurricane Harvey on climate change, but one journalist used it as an excuse to claim people who don’t agree with him on climate should be punished. “The science is too clear about what will happen in the near-term to continue to allow profiteers and ideologues to place the public in danger without consequence,” Motherboard editor Brian Merchant wrote Sept. 1. Motherboard is Vice Media’s science and technology outlet. “Climate change denial should be a crime,” he concluded. Hurricane Harvey “is what climate change looks like,” Merchant declared. But that claim doesn’t fit with history....

Is every lie intrinsically evil? Q. Is every lie intrinsically evil? I remember 60 years ago, when the Jesuits were still faithful teachers of Holy Mother Church, being taught that if a person was not entitled to the truth, one could, in fact, lead them away from the truth, by lying. For example, if I knew the hideout of Anne Frank, and the Gestapo asked me if I knew her whereabouts, according to you (“Intrinsically Evil?” TCA Faith, November/December 2015), if I said I did not, that would be intrinsically evil? Ed Siering, Muscatine, Iowa A. Permit a personal reply...

Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz accused ex-DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson of lying under oath when he said the DNC refused the help of the DHS in their hacking scandal. Johnson said during testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday that the Democratic National Committee refused DHS help with Russian hacking and opted not to turn over their hacked servers. However, in a Thursday interview on CNN, Wasserman Schultz accused him of being “misinformed,” and said the DNC was never even made aware that their network had been compromised.

President Trump's private lawyer plans to file a complaint against fired FBI Director James Comey with the Senate Judiciary Committee and Department of Justice Office of Inspector General after Comey said Thursday he released a memo documenting his interactions with the president, sources familiar with the lawyer's thinking tell CBS News' Margaret Brennan. It's unclear exactly what the complaint will allege, but Mr. Trump's personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, kept the possibility of legal action open Thursday in a statement he made in response to Comey's testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, accusing Comey of leaking privileged communications with the president....

President Donald Trump 's outside counsel said Thursday that James Comey is lying. Marc Kasowitz claimed the president never demanded loyalty from Comey as the former FBI director alleged in Senate testimony. ... Comey testified that, at a dinner in January, Trump said, "I need loyalty. I expect loyalty." Kasowitz says Trump "never told" Comey that in "form" or "substance." He also denied that Trump said he hoped Comey could "let go" a probe into former national security advisor Michael Flynn. Trump never "directed or suggested that Mr. Comey stop investigating anyone," Kasowitz said. ... Kasowitz also declared that Comey...

Inoculation theory suggests that exposing people to the tricks used to spread misinformation can equip them with the tools to recognize and reject such bogus claims.

Wednesday in Ranchos Palos Verdes, CA at the annual Code Conference, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said the media coverage of the investigation into her handling of classified emails turned into “the biggest ‘nothing-burger ever.” Clinton said a factor in her losing the election to Donald Trump was that the media treated the email story like “Pearl Harbor.”

The president of the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) on Saturday pushed back against President Trump's claims that news outlets covering his administration critically are reporting "fake news." "We are not fake news, we are not failing news organizations and we are not the enemy of the American people," WHCA president and Reuters correspondent Jeff Mason said at the organization's annual dinner. Trump and his chief strategist Steven Bannon have repeatedly referred to members of the media as the "enemy of the American people," while Trump himself has long maintained an antagonistic relationship with the press. Mason's speech received a...

If you can't see that's a serious story, you must be a Democrat-shill media dinosaur. Or a Democrat. Not that there's any difference at this point. You knew it would go this way, didn’t you? The media didn’t have a problem with Susan Rice lying to them about Benghazi, so why should they care about her illegally unmasking Trump campaign officials for blatantly political purposes that had nothing legitimate to do with national security? They wouldn’t, and they don’t. What they care about is making sure their worst nightmare doesn’t come true - that Trump allegations of improper surveillance by...

***Strictly my Opinion*** How deceptive is she?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL81W5WY694  

Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice pushed back Wednesday against President Donald Trump’s claim that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration during the 2016 election. “Nothing of the sort occurred,” Rice told PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff, in her first interview since stepping down as national security adviser when President Barack Obama left office. Rice also took aim at the Trump White House in a Washington Post op-ed Wednesday. “False statements from the White House are part of a disturbing pattern of behavior that poses real and potentially profound dangers to U.S. national security,” Rice wrote. In the PBS NewsHour...

President Donald Trump has charged that the previous president tapped his phones during the 2016 election campaign. With Democrats and the old-line establishment media in a fury, the people would do well to recall the 44th president’s high-tech harassment of journalists and his legacy of lies. “If you like your health plan, you can keep it,” he told the nation. As countless Americans verified, they could not keep the health plan they liked, nor the doctor they liked, and they would not save thousands of dollars a year. In California, the president’s Affordable Care Act was responsible for “widespread consumer misery,”...

Obama’s attack against Fox News reporter James Rosen is a really, really big deal James Rosen is a law abiding reporter for Fox News. However, the Obama administration falsely labeled him as “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in a criminal investigation when it applied for a warrant to read his emails.The New York Times wrote of this:With the decision to label a Fox News television reporter a possible “co-conspirator” in a criminal investigation of a news leak, the Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news. Leak investigations usually focus...

MSNBC's Brian Williams may not be the best person to discuss another man's lying. On his show "The 11th Hour," Williams hosted a segment that discussed President Donald Trump's alleged lying. [Snip] "This is what the Trump Administration is counting on. Why does he lie? Because he can. Because anyone who corrects him, he'll say that's the opposition, that's partisan," [Guest Charlie] Sykes said.

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that untrue statements by President Obama were “within the normal parameters” while President Trump’s aren’t. Maher began by saying, “We just can’t have a country ruled by what the president believes.” Later on, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist stated, “Obama said, repeatedly on the campaign, not once in a tweet, but again and again and again in speeches, that he was never going to raise taxes on anyone who earned less than $250,000 a year. That lasted 16 days, before he did.” Maher responded, “Okay, but that’s...