Free Republic

As I have made the stroll from my wife’s hospital room to the NICU these past few days it has been hard to fathom the way that our family has been put together. This past Sunday, my gorgeous wife – a white evangelical, like me — gave birth to our beautiful African-American triplet daughters whom we adopted as embryos. These sweet girls will hopefully soon be coming home to meet their 3-year-old African-American brother and 2-year-old biracial sister, both of whom we adopted as infants. The normalcy of this paragraph is something I have come to take for granted. Yet...

If the opinion polls are correct, Sen. Ted Cruz will be shown a thing or two on Tuesday by the New York voters he’s been insulting by going on about fellow Republican presidential contender Donald Trump’s “New York values.’’Everyone knows what values he meant, Cruz says. We sure do. Cruz meant freedom, respect, diversity and striving. But he disdains those values when it means gays are free, women are respected, and immigrants strive. Unfortunately for Cruz, those all-inclusive values help build prosperity — and win national elections.Here are some of our New York values:Hard work. If you can do the job,...

Abstract OBJECTIVES: The objective this prospective, open-label study was to determine the long-term effect of medicinal cannabis treatment on pain and functional outcomes in subjects with treatment-resistant chronic pain. METHODS: The primary outcome was change in pain symptom score on the S-TOPS (Treatment Outcomes in Pain Survey - Short Form) questionnaire at 6 months follow-up in intent-to-treat (ITT) population. The secondary outcomes included change in S-TOPS physical, social and emotional disability scales, pain severity and pain interference on brief pain inventory (BPI), sleep problems, and change in opioid consumption. RESULTS: 274 subjects were approved for treatment; complete baseline data were...

On Tuesday Donald Trump announced he would force Mexico to pay for a border wall by threatening to cut off billions of dollars in remittances sent by immigrants living in the United States. Later that day Barack Obama took time to scold Donald Trump on his plan to cut off remittances to Mexico until they fork over the funds to pay for a border wall. Of course, Barack Obama is wrong about this, too. The US already cuts off remittance payments to Somalia. "Following the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Congress passed stricter money-laundering regulations, which caused several large U.S. banks...

What disturbs you? What childhood event, adolescent disappointment or even adult despair has scarred you beyond repair? Did it ever make you want to become a politician? It's a tangential question incited by Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz's appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live." Asked how many of the "Star Wars" movies he's seen, Cruz proudly said, "All of them." And when probed about the last movie that made him cry, he exposed his deeper innards. "As someone who grew up -- I mean, I stood in line for two hours to watch 'Empire Strikes Back,'" he said. "Han Solo was...

It’s easy to get wrapped up in men and moments. In the current election season, for instance, we may see a candidate appearing to embody all our hopes and dreams (or at least many) and come to assign him country-savior status. Even the great Thomas Sowell — a man for whom I have tremendous respect — has called the November choice “the last chance for America.” Yet even if we do choose the “right” president, it will only amount to a stay of execution. Many people lament that “Obama has destroyed America these last eight years” or, alluding to same,...

Clinton backers who tout their "realism" need to get real about how she'll handle the shitstorm coming from Trump There are many nauseating aspects of the new reality TV series, “America Picks a Prez,” which airs around the clock on every single channel on earth: the cynical, open-air conspiracy between our Fourth Estate and Donald “Ratings Viagra” Trump. Ted Cruz uttering the word “prayerfully“ while not exploding into a cloud of synthetic piety. Caucasian patriots heroically exercising their right to punch people of color. Among these, let me nominate one more: listening to Hillary partisans explain to those of us...

“The Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.” These were not the words of a radical social justice warrior from “Black Lives Matter,” or even a liberal Democrat in Congress. They were the deliberate and percipient observations from one of the most substantive and constitutionally faithful of Supreme Court Justices -- the late Antonin Scalia. The tragedy of Scalia’s untimely passing is amplified by the need for voices such as his in the current fight between iPhone manufacturer Apple and the federal government, over forced access to an encrypted phone...

Lerach, who recently emerged from an almost two-year stretch in prison, is greatly responsible for this rigged game. As an attorney who filed hundreds of class-action suits against corporations, he became a bigger fraudster than a lot of the companies he was pursuing. First, he filed many dubious suits, rejoicing when 90 percent of the companies decided to settle for millions of dollars rather than spend the time and money fighting. That stratagem wasn’t illegal, but it was grossly unethical — the classic shakedown. Companies called it getting “Lerached.” Second, Lerach and his firms paid fat kickbacks to shifty characters...

Five-time Jeopardy! champion Tom Nichols1 writes today about why so many people are attracted to Donald Trump. Nichols is a Republican, but makes it very clear that he deeply loathes Trump("hideous," "narcissistic," "creepy," "stupid," etc.) and will never vote for him. So what's his take on Trump's popularity? Is it due to economic insecurity? Inchoate anger? Bubbling racism and xenophobia? Hatred of the Republican establishment? Nah. He says that Trump's rise is basically the fault of the left: To understand Trump’s seemingly effortless seizure of the public spotlight, forget about programs, and instead zero in on the one complaint that...

Remember 2012, when the most vulnerable issue for Democrats was the overwhelmingly unpopular imposition of ObamaCare? The Establishment stuck Republicans with Mitt Romney, who couldn’t use the issue because he was responsible for imposing ObamaCare’s prototype on Massachusetts. Since it looks like Obama will keep Shrillary out of jail, she remains the Democrat frontrunner for 2016. Her most vulnerable point is her illegal use of a private email server for top secret communications, presumably to cover her influence peddling activities. When the server was subpoenaed by Congress, she tried to wipe it — an arrogant crime that would land you...

While Carly Fiorina has unquestionable debate skills, the more I research her background, the more troubled I become. While it's clear that she is -- politically speaking -- somewhere to the left of Jeb Bush on policy, it is her business record that is most alarming. Let me start with a little history lesson and a company called Lernout & Houspie. Founded in 1987 by two Belgians, L&H went public in 1995 on NASDAQ and operated from U.S. headquarters in Burlington, MA. Specializing in voice recognition software, L&H rode the tech boom to a peak market valuation of $10 billion....

HER silver tongue honed by decades in corporate marketing, Carly Fiorina has used two debates, and a steely determination on the campaign trail, to climb near the top of the polls for the Republican nomination. But Americans should pause on her biggest professional credential for our highest office: a short, disastrous stint atop one of America’s iconic technology companies, Hewlett-Packard. The clearest measure of her performance — and the report card preferred by Wall Street — is H.P.’s stock price, which dropped by 52 percent during her tenure of almost six years. Yes, Mrs. Fiorina served during the worst fall...

For those of us that live in California, there’s a palpable deja vu in Carly Fiorina’s declaration to run for president on the Republican ticket. Smatterings of those late night TV advertisements are still sloshing around our brains. Her campaign positions her as the outsider, the embodiment of the American dream. As her website informs us, “Only in the United States of America can a young woman start as a secretary and work to become Chief Executive of one of the largest technology companies in the world.” Implicit in that leap is the kind of power that is a companion...

As a professor, hearing my name once, let alone twice, before 25 million TV viewers in an historic U.S. presidential debate is a surreal experience. “The head of the Yale business school, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, wrote a paper recently,” Donald Trump proclaimed in his attack on Carly Fiorina’s business record, “one of the worst tenures for a CEO that he has ever seen.” Immediately, the phones started ringing, text messages dinging, emails beeping—notes from thrilled old students, proud colleagues, teasing friends, pleased former teachers, curious clients, and my own immediate family in shared, flushed, utter shock. So used to being identified...

As Fiorina admits, I have been critical of her for over a decade—long before she announced her political aspirations. I have studied her business record, challenged her leadership abilities and have come to agree with the assessment that she was one of the worst technology CEOs in history. I stand by that evaluation. Fiorina can attack me all she wants, as she did when she called me “a well-known Clintonite” (an absurd allegation I’ll get to later) who “had it out for me from the moment that I arrived at Hewlett Packard.” But no amount of one-liners to Trump, weekend...

Bill Bennett, a great American and a great Republican was all over television promoting his new book Going to Pot co-written with Robert A. White. This is a topic I have followed for years and previously written about so I thought I would read the book and hope for an interview with Dr. Bennett. I was unable to land the big fish, but did interview his co-writer for an hour discussing the issue of whether the legalization of marijuana should continue. I have previously written that the experiment of legalization should go forward in Colorado and Washington and let us...

http://media.salon.com/2015/05/hillary_warren_de_blasio.jpgEarlier this week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with a gaggle of bored reporters and some boldfaced names in the progressive movement, unveiled a “Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality.” Much like the media event that accompanied its unveiling, the agenda is supposed to be understood as a kind of 21st-century, liberal version of the storied “Contract with America,” the PR stunt that, as legend (erroneously) has it, rocketed Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party to power after the 1994 midterm elections. As my colleague Joan Walsh reported on Thursday, this backward-looking attempt to lay out a...

Since Colorado voters legalized pot in 2012, prohibition supporters have warned that recreational marijuana will lead to a scourge of “drugged divers” on the state’s roads. They often point out that when the state legalized medical marijuana in 2001, there was a surge in drivers found to have smoked pot. ...]

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog With help from 80 years of self-described “progressives,” Obama is now waging the biggest war against medical marijuana of any president in history Anyone who has been following the self-described “progressive” politicians since FDR should not be surprised at Obama’s war against medical marijuana.Obama’s war against medical marijuana is a direct result of the policies of the self-described “progressives” in the White House, Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court, going all the way back to FDR’s New Deal.During the Great Depression, while millions of Americans were hungry, the self-described “progressives” who controlled the federal government passed...