Free Republic

The latest revelations in the Russia saga should refocus our attention on a critical period during the 2016 presidential campaign. I’m talking about the seven weeks or so that began in June 2016, when Donald Trump Jr. planned the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians, and ended in late July, with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump publicly calling on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. What we now know is this. During much of that period, the Trump Organization was secretly pursuing a business deal in Russia that required Kremlin approval — even though the most senior members of Trump’s...

President Trump has become “the face of climate denial,” global warming activist and former Vice President Al Gore said Wednesday night, telling The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah that the 2020 election will provide the opportunity for voters to “make a statement — that we want to get back on the track to the real America.” After Noah had some fun with Trump’s comment, during a recent Washington Post interview, that U.S. air and water were “at a record clean,” Gore turned serious. “It’s really significant, Trevor, that Donald J. Trump is now the face of climate denial,” he said. “His...

Veteran leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office as Mexican president on Saturday, vowing to see off a “rapacious” elite in a country struggling with corruption, chronic poverty and gang violence on the doorstep of the United States. Backed by a gigantic Mexican flag, the 65-year-old took the oath of office in the lower house of Congress, pledging to bring about a “radical” rebirth of Mexico to overturn what he called a disastrous legacy of decades of “neo-liberal” governments. “The government will no longer be a committee at the service of a rapacious minority,” said the new president, who is...

First there was the ‘I really don’t care’ jacket. Now there are her sinister decorations. What is she trying to convey?There is something exquisite about Melania Trump, and I am not talking about her appearance or what she (probably) smells like. She doesn’t defy interpretation so much as beguile it; you want to strip away the layers, but you know you do so at your peril; the layers might be all there is. Mystery piles on mystery: who owns a jacket sporting the words “I really don’t care”, like the one she wore to a detention centre for child migrants?...

"Shortly after the election is when I became aware of it,” says Lois Brenner, a New York–based divorce attorney. “People were thinking about splitting up their marriages because of political differences.” She’d never encountered this before, but she’s since found herself litigating two such divorces. “After people got over their shock,” she says, “they started arguing.” By now it’s a truism to point out that the election of Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement have prompted a wholesale realignment of American politics. But it’s also sent shock waves through heterosexual romance. Donald Trump and the Republican Party have plenty of...

After losing close governor’s races in Georgia and Florida, Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum are joining other black leaders to oppose one of President Donald Trump’s picks for a lifetime federal judgeship. Abrams and Gillum say in a joint statement Tuesday that the Senate should reject Thomas Farr’s nomination to a district court in North Carolina. The Democrats say Farr has a “discriminatory ideology” that threatens the voting rights of nonwhites. …

Facebook has hired one of the top antitrust lawyers in Silicon Valley in a sign that the company could be preparing for war with Donald Trump's administration. Kate Patchen, the chief of the Department of Justice's antitrust division in San Francisco, has joined Facebook as director and associate general counsel of litigation. Patchen's hire comes during the same month that US President Donald Trump said his administration was "looking at" antitrust proceedings against tech giants Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

The levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the main driver of climate change, have hit a new record high, the UN said Thursday, warning that the time to act was running out. Ahead of the COP 24 climate summit in Poland next month, top United Nations officials are again trying to raise the pressure on governments to meet the pledge of limiting warming to the less than two degrees Celsius, enshrined in the 2015 Paris accord. “Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gases, climate change will have increasingly destructive and irreversible impacts on life on Earth,” the...

Had John C. Fremont not run as a Republican in 1856, there would probably would have been no Lincoln in 1860. The Republican Party formed in the 1850s with the collapse of the Whig Party. The central unifying issue Republicans shared was abolition of slavery. It unified people across political parties, bringing them together into something new. In the early 1990s, fueled by a single billionaire's calls for reform, the Reform Party sprang up under H. Ross Perot. He won 18.9 percent of the popular vote. The Reform Party, unlike the Republicans in the 1800s, was one man's party,...

A top U.N. scientist on Thursday shrugged off an online quip from U.S. President Donald Trump that questioned global warming, saying a U.S. government report will show the “fundamental impacts of climate change on the U.S. continent.” Officials at the World Meteorological Organization also said environmentally minded efforts by the state of California, in parts of the financial sector, among grassroots activists and others will have more of an impact to help the fight against climate change than “political disturbance” and “discourse” will impede it. The science, they said, will have the last word. Some of that science comes Friday...

Amber Tamblyn shared her grim-sounding story from the 2016 presidential election as well as the impact the aftermath had on her as an expectant mother. The star revealed that she had brief thoughts of having to give her child away to Canada or Sweden in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. [Snip] “A dark realization swallowed me: I was going to bring a baby into this world. And not just any baby: a girl,” she said, revealing that’s when she had the thought about having to give her daughter away to Canadians or Swedes to save her from whatever perceived...

(snip) -- So-called “conservative” commentator Bill Kristol reportedly has his never-ending campaign to take down President Donald Trump receive funding from a left-wing billionaire. Kristol, the editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard, seems to have taken his never-Trump activities to another level, actively opposing Republican candidates and conservative causes through the group he founded, “Republicans for the Rule of Law.” But despite its name, the group seems to have no Republican donors according to a report by Julie Kelly of American Greatness, though there is one prominent benefactor: progressive billionaire Pierre Omidyar, the co-founder of eBay. One of Omidyar’s nonprofits, the...

Actress Amber Tamblyn confessed in a recent public appearance that she considered giving her unborn baby girl away to Canadians following the election of Donald Trump. Amber Tamblyn told attendees at Vulture Fest’s “Feminist AF” panel in Los Angeles Sunday how she felt like giving her baby away on election night 2016. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “When Clinton’s director of strategic communications informed Javits Center attendees that Clinton would not be speaking, Tamblyn came to a grim conclusion: ‘A dark realization swallowed me: I was going to bring a baby into this world. And not just any baby: a...

Even if Elvis popularized an art form that people of another race largely invented, it’s hard to argue that a lots and lots of successful black artists didn’t walk right through the doors he opened. Presley was initially a hero among black musicians in Memphis for that reason, and there’s no reason to think Elvis himself was racist. Quite the opposite, in fact. In 1956, it was reported the ‘“the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon cracked Memphis’s segregation laws” by attending the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement park “during what is designated as ‘colored night.’”Elvis’s personal reputation for being opposed to racism is...

The man who shouted “Heil Hitler, heil Trump” at a Baltimore performance of “Fiddler on the Roof” apologized Friday for his outburst, saying he chose the wrong words when he was attempting to compare President Donald Trump to the Nazi leader. Anthony M. Derlunas II, 58, said the play, which tells the story of a Jewish family facing persecution in tsarist Russia, reminded him of Trump’s immigration policies. His comparison “came out wrong” and was “beyond a mistake” he said during an interview at his home in Joppa. “Instantly it was like, ‘Oh my God, what did you do?’ ”...

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...

Thursday on ABC’s The View, co-host Joy Behar slammed Wednesday night’s Country Music Awards show for staying out of politics. As nearly every entertainment awards show has made itself part of the resistance against President Trump, Behar was sorely disappointed to see this was one show where Trump’s name wasn’t mentioned. . . Whoopi pointed out that people “voted” to fulfill that duty of resisting Trump. “I'm happy for that,” Behar acknowledged, before touting that she, unlike the country music artists, was willing to take a financial hit in order to be loudly anti-Trump.

In a post on his website, Young said he hoped the calamitous fires would urged people to take action on the impact of climate change. “Firefighters have never seen anything like this in their lives. I have heard that said countless times in the past two days, and I have lost my home before to a California fire, now another,” he wrote. “Hopefully we can come together as a people to take climate change on. We have the tools and could do it if we tried. There is no downside.”

Michelle Obama says in her new book that she stopped “even trying to smile” during President Trump’s 2017 inauguration. She writes in her book that the celebratory feel during her husband’s two inaugurations was gone when Trump was sworn into office on Jan. 20, 2017. The former first lady opened up about her criticism of Trump in her book, writing that she would “never forgive” him for spreading the “birther” conspiracy theory that her husband wasn't a natural-born citizen of the U.S. "The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed," Obama writes....

Staunch anti-Trump Republican strategist Rick Wilson claimed Friday night that President Donald Trump nearly called April Ryan the “N-word” during his contentious exchange with the reporter earlier this week. The panel on Friday’s “CNN Tonight with Don Lemon” consisted of Wilson, Nina Turner, and Alice Stewart. They were discussing the president’s heated remarks towards journalists of color this week.