Free Republic

I'm beginning to think that Donald Trump was right when he said that he could "stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody" and not lose support among certain segments of the population. The man who crafted a campaign around two primary issues--illegal immigration and trade--just caved on the first of these. After months of being the toughest talker on illegal immigration, he's basically come around to the establishment's way of thinking--namely, that there are just too many lawbreakers out there to do anything about it now. Trump maintains that if he's elected president he will still build...

Does it matter what our kids learn about Islam in public schools? Jenny McKeigue of Olmsted Falls, Ohio thinks so. This small town mother has battled her local school board for about four years to get them to remove parts of the curriculum that seem to promote Islam. In 2012, McKeigue learned that her son had been shown a video in his seventh grade social studies class that she considered to be blatant Muslim propaganda. The video, an episode of the discontinued "30 Days" reality TV series, featured a "regular American" (the host's terminology, not mine) spending thirty days immersing...

National Organization for Women (NOW) President Terri O'Neill doesn't care when life begins. As someone who speaks, writes, and advocates incessantly on the abortion issue you'd think she would have given it more thought; but you would be wrong. Professor O'Neill, who is rabidly "pro-choice" (on abortion at least), is blithely unconcerned with when a developing fetus is actually a person deserving of protection from lethal violence. O'Neill sat for an interview at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia with Jason Rantz, a radio host from Seattle's KIRO. When the topic turned to abortion she became belligerent, calling out Republicans for...

The "queering" of the armed forces took a giant leap forward last week with the announcement of a new ship being named in honor of Harvey Milk, a Navy veteran and the first openly homosexual elected official in California. The Village People are reportedly thrilled. Milk, who was a city supervisor in San Francisco until his 1978 murder, is perhaps best known for his fight against the Briggs Initiative, a statewide ballot question that would have banned openly homosexual teachers from public schools. Governor Ronald Reagan, to his discredit, opposed the measure and it failed by a wide margin. Milk,...

Angela Merkel owes her countrymen an apology--and her resignation. In the wake of four terrorist attacks in the space of a week, all of which were perpetrated by Muslims and three of which were committed by refugees, she should have the courage to admit that she was wrong and that her error has gotten people killed. But that won't happen. For those who missed Germany's week of unspeakable carnage, let's take a moment to recap. On July 18th, a 17-year old Afghan refugee went on a hacking spree using an ax and a knife onboard a train near Wurzburg. Three...

With friends like Saudi Arabia, who needs enemies? Last week we learned that the Saudi government almost certainly played a role in the 9/11 terrorist attack and that our government kept that secret from the public for about fourteen years. A brief history of the coverup is in order here. In 2002, a joint congressional committee investigated the intelligence failures that led to the attack. That committee found suspicious clues that pointed toward Saudi Arabia--an official "ally" of the United States known for exporting radical Wahhabi Islam across the world. In a 28-page summary, the committee detailed the connections between...

The rule of law died a little last Tuesday when FBI director James Comey announced the Bureau's findings concerning Hillary Clinton and her illegal email server. After a short speech in which he detailed the findings of the investigation, he recommended against charging her with anything. You didn't think it would happen any other way, did you? I certainly didn't. As blatant as her lawbreaking was--some of which was not even discussed in Comey's speech--it seemed fanciful to believe that Hillary Clinton, the ultimate insider, would actually do the perp walk. As a former First Lady, former senator, and former...

In case more proof was needed that the homosexual movement does not want to "live and let live," Aaron Werner and Richard Wright will gladly provide it. The two "gay" men sued Christianmingle in 2013, claiming that the website violated their rights under California law because it offers only opposite-sex matchmaking. Last week, they won their case. Christianmingle must now accommodate homosexuals. Oh yeah--and it has to pay Werner and Wright $468,000 in damages and attorney's fees. The two men sued under the Unruh Civil Rights Act, a state law that prohibits discrimination based on a number of protected categories...

The Supreme Court momentarily impeded President Obama's attempt to "fundamentally transform America" last week with its 4-4 vote on his executive amnesty action plan. When the court is deadlocked, previous decisions by lower courts are allowed to stand. In this case, Obama lost because the lower court found that his plan exceeded his executive authority, which is actually what Obama himself said before he decided to do it. The evenly divided court apparently couldn't make up its mind as to whether the president is permitted to act like a dictator and suspend laws he doesn't like. That's a tough question,...

Zack Ford of the ThinkProgress blog really ought to invest in a dictionary. As the editor of the left-wing blog's LGBT section, he took the lead in blaming Christians, conservatives, and traditionalists for the deaths of 49 people in Orlando last week while simultaneously braying about conservatives "scapegoating" radical Islam. Note to Zack Ford: it's not scapegoating to blame radical Islam when a radical Islamist shoots up a nightclub. It is scapegoating to blame Christians when a radical Islamist shoots up a night club. Scapegoating, by definition, is blaming the innocent. His revolting article represents everything that's wrong with the...

In what is being called “the mother of all corrections,” the American Journal of Political Science has admitted that the results of a study it published were unintentionally misrepresented. The study, “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies,” purported to show that conservatives are marked by an authoritarian streak. After the study had garnered much scholarly attention, Steven Ludeke and Stig H. R. Rasmussen of the University of Southern Denmark noticed that the data did not support the published results. The correct conclusion is that liberals, particularly economic liberals, lean toward authoritarianism. This study, which was...

Hillary Clinton breathed new life into her "girl power" campaign last week when she complained in a New York Magazine interview about latent sexism. According to Mrs. Clinton, she'd encountered people at campaign events who told her "I really admire you, I really like you, I just don't know if I can vote for a woman to be president." Yeah--said no one ever. It's as if someone said to her "You're awesome, I love you, but I'm just too sexist to check the box next to your name." We're supposed to believe that sexism is now so pervasive that even...

Using the "wrong" pronoun in casual conversation can cost you big bucks these days--even when it happens to be the right one. Gresham-Barlow School District in Oregon was forced to cough up $60,000 to a teacher who prefers the pronoun "they" because she "identifies" as neither male nor female. The teacher, Leo Soell, was granted damages in order to compensate her for the emotional distress of being "misgendered." For the uninitiated, "misgendering" is nothing more than using the correct pronoun to refer to a person who prefers to be called something else. In the old days we just called it...

Who says there's no such thing as life after death? If voting rolls are any indicator, dead people these days are living very active lifestyles. According to an investigative report by CBS2, Los Angeles's CBS affiliate, some dead people continue to vote years after meeting their maker. The investigation revealed that 265 dead voters across five counties in southern California voted in recent elections, 215 of them in Los Angeles County. Some of the deceased cast ballots in multiple elections. Thirty-two of those deceased voters were found to have voted eight times since kicking the bucket. One woman who died...

I was pleasantly surprised to see the media pause for a moment last week to recall China's Cultural Revolution on the 50th anniversary of its regrettable birth. Unlike a lot of the media's silly anniversaries this one is actually worth remembering. If you aren't familiar with the Cultural Revolution just think of Stephen King's "Children of the Corn" being played out in China rather than rural Nebraska. The movement began in 1966 and lasted about ten years. Children rose up against their elders and seized for themselves the reins of power, humiliating their parents and teachers and sometimes even murdering...

Has there ever been a president cooler than Obama? That's the question that Newsweek, an ostensible "news" magazine, asked last week via Twitter. The tweet featured a picture of the president slapping hands with his friend and political supporter, the rapper Jay Z. It's hard to argue with Newsweek on this one. Obama is cool -- though that alone doesn't make him a great president. When it comes to leaders, coolness and greatness might actually be mutually exclusive. Cool people aren't usually substantive and frequently lack the moral courage to do the right thing when the right thing isn't cool...

If you're like me you're probably searching for a third party candidate in the wake of Donald Trump's clinching of the GOP nomination. For those of you considering the Libertarian Party (LP), I hope you'll reconsider. The party's current frontrunner, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, doesn't seem to understand this liberty thing. He thinks it means drugs and abortion but should you decide that you don't want to engage in a business transaction he wants the government to coerce you. The party's other candidates aren't quite as extreme in their statism though none of them will make an unqualified...

White House College Reporter Day took an interesting turn last week when President Obama showed up unannounced to deliver a speech to journalism students on the importance of voting Democrat. He didn't actually tell them to vote Democrat, of course -- he just told them to vote, though there's no doubt which party he was hinting they should vote for. The message was about as subtle as a punch in the face. The students were listening to Press Secretary Josh Earnest drone on and on when the president suddenly burst onto the stage. Earnest feigned surprised because, you know, everything...

Gloucester County, Virginia wasn't expecting to find itself in the midst of the never-ending culture wars when it told a female high school student named Gavin Grimm that she isn't entitled to use the boys' facilities just because she suffers from the delusion that she's a boy. Grimm sued her school with the assistance of the Department of Justice and the ACLU. In a recent 2-1 decision by the 4th US Circuit of Appeals, Grimm won her case. In order to find some accommodation for Grimm her high school went as far as installing three single-stall bathrooms throughout the school....

Four hundred protesters associated with the Democracy Spring movement were arrested in Washington, DC last week after demonstrators descended upon the US Capitol. They spoke out against money in politics, the Koch brothers, and the Citizens United ruling that overturned key provisions of campaign finance law. The demonstration was clearly a statement against corporate influence in politics. The protesters aren't entirely wrong. Yes, political influence is unequally distributed because money begets power and vice versa. A guy who changes oil for a living doesn't have as much pull as a guy who owns an oil company. But what can be...