Free Republic

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump is dishonest about a whole lot of things. But he is rarely as comprehensively dishonest as he has been about his dealings with Ukraine and the impeachment inquiry they have triggered. Relentless deceit has seemed to be his primary defense strategy in the court of public opinion. Trump has made false claims about almost every separate component of the story, from his July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the whistleblower who complained about the call to Democrats' impeachment inquiry hearings. The President is dissembling about so many different topics at once that it...

Since 2007, there have been three whole Spider-Man franchises. First Tobey Maguire, then Andrew Garfield, and now Tom Holland. In one fewer year, we’ve had three different iterations of the Joker. Hollywood is stuck in an endless cycle of remakes and reboots, and since politics is downstream from culture, it makes sense that instead of doing something unique, new, and weird in 2020 (perhaps a true progressive running on a leftist platform), we’re just gonna go back to the old hits that make us comfortable, tweaked around the edges to give them the veneer of something fresh. It’s why Joe...

President Donald Trump broke his silence on the increasing trend of states passing restrictive abortion bans late Saturday, denouncing bills like the one that passed last week in Alabama. Trump said he is "strongly Pro-Life," but said he does favor allowing women to get abortions in the case of rape, incest or the health of the mother. The bill passed by the Alabama legislature and signed by Gov. Kay Ivey on Wednesday contains no exemption for rape or incest, though it does allow abortions if the mother's life is threatened.

CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour called "lock her up" chants by Donald Trump supporters "hate speech" in a new interview and asked James Comey if he wished he had "shut down that language" in his capacity as FBI Director at the time. Amanpour recounted the frequent chants at Trump 2016 campaign rallies about imprisoning Hillary Clinton for her perceived crimes and wondered if they should have been legal, but Comey responded it was not the role of government officials to censor that speech. "Do you, in retrospect, wish that people like yourself, the head of the FBI, the people in charge...

Friday night, the Special Counsel’s office released an extremely rare statement that took a buzz saw to BuzzFeed News’s Thursday night bombshell that alleged President Trump directed former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about possible construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow. In the statement, a Mueller spokesman called it “not accurate.” Despite the fact that the BuzzFeed News story was not confirmed by — well — any news outlet from when it was first published to the statement from Mueller’s team, the broadcast networks devoted 27 minutes and 33 second on their Friday morning and...

President Trump's personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, claimed Wednesday night that he "never said there was no collusion" between members of President Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russian officials -- but he did say that Trump himself never colluded with Russian officials. The former New York City mayor also said on CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time" that "if the collusion happened, it happened a long time ago. It's either provable or it's not. It is not provable because it never happened ... I'm telling you there's no chance it happened." Trump previously denied any member of his campaign conspired with Russian officials....

This is the third federal government shutdown this year. And this one comes at a particularly hard time — during the holidays. How are you and your family faring? Is there a specific consequence you're facing this time compared with others? NPR's Weekend Edition is working on a story about federal workers during the shutdown. If you are affected, please share your story with us in the form below, or here. A producer may contact you to follow up.

Climate change isn’t just about extreme heat waves in distant future decades, or melting glaciers far away from the neighborhoods, forests and farms of Virginia. Storms are dropping heavier rainfall, summer nights aren't cooling off as much, tides are creeping higher than before – and it’s already happening in our backyards. Those trends are likely to continue and intensify by the time a child growing up today gets to retirement age. The scenarios and the evidence are laid out in a new report called the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which was composed by hundreds of experts across 13 federal agencies.

A disruption at a Baltimore performance of "Fiddler on the Roof" made national news today. A man stood up before the act break of the seminal Jewish musical and shouted, "Heil Hitler, Heil Trump," holding his arm out in a Nazi salute. The story ran like wildfire, with national outlets and reporters picking up the Baltimore Sun's story of the "pro-Nazi and pro-Trump" salute. There's just one problem: The police report investigating the incident clearly states that the man loathes President Trump. In the police report obtained by the Washington Examiner, the reporting officer, Jake Aumack, says: "During my interview...

HOUSTON — Days after a top adviser to President Trump questioned Senator Ted Cruz’s chances of winning re-election, the Texas lawmaker casually stepped into the pinnacle of his hometown’s energy industry on Tuesday — the lobby of the Petroleum Club of Houston, on the 35th floor of a downtown skyscraper. Mr. Cruz shook hands while holding a cup of McDonald’s coffee. By the end of his remarks to the American Petroleum Institute, the audience rose for two standing ovations. It was not a campaign event, but it might as well have been: Mr. Cruz was relaxed and confident, eager to...

Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) former campaign spokesperson said that it’s “possible” for Cruz to lose his reelection bid to Democrat Beto O’Rourke. Rick Tyler, who served as Cruz’s former communications director during his 2016 presidential run, appeared on MSNBC Sunday and admitted that Cruz could lose in the red state. “As the former Cruz strategist, it does seem as though the signs are that Ted Cruz might actually lose this race?” MSNBC host Kasie Hunt asked. Tyler said that even in a predominately Republican state, O’Rourke is posing a real challenge for the senator. “It’s possible

Washington (CNN)Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz told supporters at a rally on Saturday that Democrats wanted to make Texas like California and listed off a few things as stereotypical staples of the blue state. "We are seeing tens of millions of dollars flooding into the state of Texas from liberals all over the country who desperately want to turn the state of Texas blue," Cruz said. "They want us to be just like California, right down to tofu and silicon and dyed hair." Cruz added that his wife, Heidi Cruz, was "a California vegetarian." "She's wonderful, but I brought her...

Some of you need to cease the denial and accept the harsh reality that the left hates you. It’s a fact, as much as the liberal gaslight gang and the conserva-sissy weakhearts deny it. You can tell that leftists hate you by the way that leftists tell you that they hate you.Take Sarah Jeong, please – hey, the New York Times was happy to get this bitter creep onboard because of her history of virulent racism. The Times saw her hate as a plus, not a negative, an asset, not a liability. You can’t draw any other conclusion – if you...

Wolf Blitzer: ‘We Are Not the Enemy of the American People, We love the American People’ 'Everybody's always criticizing us' Y: David Rutz Follow @DavidRutz June 13, 2018 2:22 pm CNN host Wolf Blitzer said on behalf of the media "we love the American people" on Wednesday in response to President Donald Trump's latest broadside against the profession. Apparently angered by the media's coverage of his nuclear summit with North Korea, Trump tweeted Wednesday that the "fake news" press was "our country's biggest enemy." So funny to watch the Fake News, especially NBC and CNN. They are fighting hard to...

President Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on the special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election may be taking hold not only among Republicans but Democrats and independents as well, according to a poll released Wednesday. The Politico/Morning Consult poll found Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s favorability among Democrats and independents took a slight dive over the last 11 months. Twenty-four percent of Democrats registered an unfavorable score for Mueller, while 33 percent of independents also viewed Mueller in a negative light. (snip) Overall, a record 53 percent of the poll’s respondents shared an unfavorable reaction to Mueller, a 26-point jump...

Drudge and establishment/leftwing news sites have been going crazy with the notion that incredibly high Democrat turnout in Texas means that Texas is going blue. But election results show that Republicans are absolutely SPANKING Democrats in turnout, getting 50% more votes than the Democrats. https://www.politico.com/election-results/2018/texas/ And that's with the Democrats having fiesty, expensive primary contents while the Republicans are mostly merely coronating their incumbent governor, Greg Abbot, and senator, Ted Cruz (although both candidates had multiple opponents). Abbot received 1.4 million votes, compared to Lupe Valdez and Andrew White, who will be headed to a runoff after receiving about half...

From British GQ to US Vogue, Melania Trump appeared on many magazine covers as a professional model. But since she became first lady, few editors have dared to put her on the front page. Her absence is notable, particularly as the wife of a president who rarely spends a day out of the media spotlight. While cable news outlets have dedicated near wall-to-wall attention to the president and his administration, it's a different story in the magazine world. There's a clear reluctance among editors to put themselves in the cross-hairs of the culture wars. Mostly New York-based editors may fear...

Many of America’s leading television networks did a poor job of covering climate change last year, even as the newly minted Trump administration worked to unravel regulations meant to tackle the phenomenon and the U.S. was pummeled by a series of record-breaking natural disasters, according to a new report. The group Media Matters for America analyzed climate change coverage on major broadcasters’ nightly news programs and Sunday morning political shows - including those on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News and PBS - over the course of 2017. While a total of 260 minutes were devoted to climate change during the...

CNN’s Alisyn Camerota confronted a literal Nazi who is currently poised to nab the GOP nomination for Congress — and the interview predictably derailed, as the Nazi ranted about “the Jewish media.” Arthur Jones, a holocaust denier, anti-Semite, white supremacist and all around lunatic is set to become the Republican nominee for an Illinois congressional seat near Chicago — and appeared on CNN to defend himself. “It is shocking to hear how vocally and unapologetically racist you are,” Camerota opened the interview. “Are you a Nazi?” Jones contended that he does not call himself a Nazi, but an “American patriot...

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald on Sunday addressed a report that President Donald Trump’s administration had banned the CDC from using seven words or phrases in next year’s budget documents. The terms are “fetus,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “evidence-based” and “science-based,” according to a story first reported on Friday in The Washington Post. But Fitzgerald said in a series of tweets on Sunday said there are “no banned words,” while emphasizing the agency’s commitment to data-driven science.