Free Republic

President Biden argued that it never occurred to former President Trump to take a competitive stance against China, while rolling out a slew of actions Wednesday intended to protect the U.S. steel industry from Chinese exports. Biden was in Pittsburgh at the United Steelworkers headquarters touting the new actions, which involves him calling on the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to consider tripling the existing 7.5 percent tariff rate on Chinese steel and aluminum imports. The president also said to boost competition with China, he has revitalized partnerships in the Pacific with countries like India, Australia, South Korea, the...

President Biden fired back at former President Trump's repeated assertions that he was behind the criminal charges his predecessor faces. In an interview with Nexstar correspondent Reshad Hudson, Biden was asked about the comments made by Trump, whose trial in New York City started this week on the charges brought by Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg pertaining to his 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. "He directly blames you, President Biden, as being responsible behind those prosecutions. How do you respond to that?" Hudson asked. "His lack of ethics has nothing to do with me," Biden responded.

President Joe Biden, 81, “has no impairment,” Attorney General Merrick Garland claimed in the octogenarian’s defense on Tuesday. While testifying under oath before a House appropriations subcommittee, Garland said “the president has no impairment” because he “watched” Biden conduct meetings. About one-third of Democrats doubt Biden’s mental fitness, a Harvard/Harris survey recently found. Another poll revealed 82 percent of Americans harbor concerns about his physical and mental health. Only about one-quarter of voters say Biden is physically or mentally fit to serve a second term, Quinnipiac found. “I have watched him expertly guide meetings of staff and of cabinet members...

In The Wall Street Journal’s latest poll of swing states, 74% of respondents said inflation has moved in the wrong direction in the past year. This assessment, which holds across all seven states, is startling, sobering—and simply not true. I’m not stating an opinion. This isn’t something on which reasonable people can disagree. If hard economic data count for anything, we can say unambiguously that inflation has moved in the right direction in the past year. In the 12 months through February, inflation, according to the century-old consumer-price index, was 3.2%, compared with 6% a year earlier. Use a slightly...

The CBS News boss who signed off on the controversial ouster of Catherine Herridge — a respected Washington correspondent who has been embroiled in a high-profile First Amendment case — is nevertheless being honored with a free speech award next month. CBS News president Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews was selected by Radio Television Digital News Association to be among 13 honorees at the 33rd annual First Amendment Awards at The Watergate Hotel in Washington DC on March 9. The irony was not lost ... “The RTDNA must be tone deaf to give Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews and CBS News an award for the First...

The notion that Biden is less mentally fit for the presidency than Trump is extremely dubious. The president has been involved in public policy for more than half a century and Biden has almost certainly forgotten more about geopolitics and the federal bureaucracy than Trump has ever learned. Age notwithstanding, Biden remains far more cognitively qualified for the presidency than his 77-year-old rival... The president’s mental competence is similarly well established. Last year, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told allies that he “found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations,” as Politico put it. This comports with the assessment of...

Members of the established media in recent weeks defended President Joe Biden’s “poor” memory by claiming the president’s health is “acute” and that any speculation to the contrary is “ageist” and a “right wing media” conspiracy theory. The media’s defense is the latest effort to support Biden, who is trailing in national 2024 polling to former President Donald Trump. The media apparently felt compelled to defend Biden before and after special counsel Robert Hur described the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory” in his report on Biden’s classified document scandal: Hur described Biden as not competent to...

NEW YORK (AP) — As some of the world’s biggest economies stumble into recession, the United States keeps chugging along. Both Japan and the United Kingdom said Thursday their economies likely weakened during the final three months of 2023. For each, it would be the second straight quarter that’s happened, which fits one lay definition for a recession. Yet in the United States, the economy motored ahead in last year’s fourth quarter for a sixth straight quarter of growth. It’s blown past many predictions coming into last year that a recession seemed inevitable because of high interest rates meant to...

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre adopted the 'everybody does it defense' as she was asked to explain President Biden's latest gaffe of mixing up world leaders during a speech. Jean-Pierre got pressed repeatedly on the latest flub, since this one involved name-dropping a long-deceased world leader for the second time within days while retelling a story dating to 2021. 'As it relates to the names and what he was trying to say, many people, elected officials – many people they can misspeak sometimes,' she said.

A Palestinian-American teenager, Tawfic Abde Jabbar, was killed in the West Bank on January 19, allegedly after an altercation with armed Israelis. More on his death, and how it was differently reported in its English and Arabic language versions, can be found here: “A Tale of Two Narratives: English-Language & Arabic-Language Reports Differ on Palestinian-American Teen’s Death,” by Chaim Lax, HonestReporting, January 25, 2024:On Friday January 19, 2024, a Palestinian-American teenager, Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, was killed in the West Bank, allegedly following an altercation with armed Israelis.The Israeli inquiry into this matter is still ongoing.However, an investigation by the Jewish...

At the opening of the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for increased cooperation between governments and private businesses to enact tech censorship in the face of “industrial scale disinformation”.Following in the example of WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab’s ‘Global Risk Report’, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen used her address in Davos on Tuesday to highlight the supposed risks of allowing the free flow of information in light of the alleged threat of “disinformation and disinformation”. (snip) Going into the election year, Brussels will have also have more censorship powers...

I completely missed this when it was published at the end of last month. Fortunately, Jesse Singal did a great write-up about it which I noticed today. As you may know, Bill Adair is the founder of Politifact, a site which has generate a lot of content for this blog over the years. Last month, Adair was asked to share his predictions for 2024 and he wrote a piece titled “Fact-checking needs a reboot.” Part of that reboot would be pressuring social media companies to “suppress misinformation” more often.After I founded PolitiFact in 2007, I often said that our goal...

Everyday costs incurred by American workers since President Joe Biden assumed office are only “more expensive on paper,” New York Times economic reporter Jeanna Smialek wrote Wednesday about the “good news” economy. Members of the establishment media constantly appear to use a semantic trick to express optimism about the president’s economy, when, in fact, Americans are very unhappy about the increased costs: Gallup: 61 percent of Americans say price increases caused them financial hardship. CNBC: A record high 66 percent of Americans are “pessimistic” about the future of Biden’s economy. Lending Club: 62 percent of adults in December said they...

The latest target is Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned Tuesday. In her case, the outrage came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who put her career under intense scrutin y. Conservatives zeroed in on Gay amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus. Her detractors charged that Gay — who has a Ph.D. in government, was a professor at Harvard and Stanford and headed Harvard's largest division before being promoted — got the top job in large part because she is a Black woman.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The downfall of Harvard’s president has elevated the threat of unearthing plagiarism, a cardinal sin in academia, as a possible new weapon in conservative attacks on higher education. Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday followed weeks of mounting accusations that she lifted language from other scholars in her doctoral dissertation and journal articles. The allegations surfaced amid backlash over her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus. The plagiarism allegations came not from her academic peers but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a...

Heatwaves, droughts and wildfires struck Asia, Africa, Europe and North America over the last three months, with dramatic impact on economies, ecosystems and human health. The average global temperature in June, July and August was 16.77 degrees Celsius, smashing the previous 2019 record of 16.48C, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said in a report. "The three months that we've just had are the warmest in approximately 120,000 years, so effectively human history," C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess told AFP. "Climate breakdown has begun," said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. "Scientists have long warned what our fossil fuel...

There is “no evidence that Biden is behind Trump’s indictment,” NBC News reporter Sahil Kapur claimed Monday. NBC News, a media organization that frequently ignores the Biden business scandal, announced no evidence exists linking President Joe Biden in any way to the indictments of former President Donald Trump, Biden’s political rival and likely 2024 opponent: There is no evidence that Biden is behind Trump’s indictments — two from special counsel Jack Smith, and one each from prosecutors in New York and Georgia who don’t answer to Washington. Yet the claims have been echoed by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and many congressional...

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Katy Tur Reports,” White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jared Bernstein responded to a majority of Americans saying they’re living paycheck-to-paycheck and those who aren’t feeling the economy improving by acknowledging that “it’s early days for those wage gains,” and so he’s “very sympathetic to the idea that people need to see them continue, and I think if the job market stays tight, they will.” Guest host Alex Witt asked, “[A]s you know, a majority of Americans still say they are living paycheck-to-paycheck. So, what is the message to those people who don’t really...

The Washington Post’s third-rate “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler butchered the facts when he claimed that the sky-high inflation brought on by Bidenomics barely made a dent in Americans’ spending power. Economists interviewed by MRC Business were having none of it. Kessler went after presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) for his nuanced assertion during the GOP presidential primary debate that the average American family has lost “$10,000 of spending power” in President Joe Biden’s economy. “This seems wildly overstated,” objected Kessler. He then attributed Scott’s argument to an analysis by Heritage Foundation Research Fellow EJ Antoni, estimating that American families have...

Thursday on CNN’s “The Lead,” anchor Jake Tapper told House Oversight and Accountability Committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) that he has not seen evidence President Joe Biden did anything illegal related to his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Tapper said, “So let’s pause it for the sake of argument that Hunter Biden is sleazy, and the president’s relatives tried to profit off the Biden family brand, something CNN has reported on. What’s new in this memo?”