Free Republic

RUSH: The top story I have in the Hillary Stack is not the Crime Family Foundation stuff. It is a piece at the Washington Post. "Clinton Banking on the Obama Coalition to Win." The story is about Hillary believes that the only way to win is to move even further left than Obama. Hillary believes the country has already gone there. Hillary believes the country has reached its tipping point and has officially become European socialist, and, in order to win, this story says she has to move in that direction to let the majority of Americans know that she...

Ahmad is a parliamentarian in a rogue Middle East nation where women 17 and under are the property of their fathers. Each year, thousands of young girls are sold into sex-slavery by age 7. Typically, a girl’s father signs a lucrative 10-year contract with an adult male who in turn possessed the girl as his slave until she turned 18. At that time, he returns the girl to her family and pays for a special surgical procedure that restores the appearance of physical virginity, allowing her father to re-sell her to another man in marriage. Ahmad is deeply grieved by...

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- What a difference a border can make. Sometimes it marks a difference not just in altitude but attitude. When our neighbors in Oklahoma find the ground shaking beneath their feet, they know well enough what's causing it. Or they should know by now. As quake follows quake in the center of that state, the cause becomes undeniable: the injection of wastewater into deep wells as part of the process called fracking. The number of good-sized tremors in our neighboring state has multiplied tenfold within just the past three years. The revolution in oil-and-gas production that's making...

The last week has been unimaginably difficult for many Americans who lost friends or family members in the tragic derailment of Northeast Regional Amtrak train 188, which crashed on a curved track just north of downtown Philadelphia on Tuesday evening. Eight lives were lost, eight more individuals remain in critical condition and more than 200 were injured. The day after the derailment, I visited the scene to speak with Amtrak President Joe Boardman, Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Acting Administrator Sarah Feinberg, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Vice Chairman Bella Dinh-Zarr and Board Member Robert Sumwalt, and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter....

A recent Pew Research Center study found there has been a big drop since 2007 in the number of Americans who identify as Christian. Although 70 percent of Americans still describe themselves as Christian, more people are identifying with no religion at all.The survey found Americans who call themselves atheist, agnostic, or of no particular faith showed the largest increase jumping from 16 percent in 2007 to nearly 23 percent in 2014. In the same period, Christians dropped from 78 percent to just under 71 percent.Though not an affirmed Christian, George Washington realized the importance of religion in maintaining our...

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, an expected GOP presidential candidate, drew the ire of the political right and left recently over his comments on immigration. When it comes to the immigration issue, Republicans are expected to use the tried and true, consultant tested “secure the border” talking point and move on to other issues.Gov. Walker, like former US Senator, Rick Santorum, has taken things further than just a discussion of illegal immigration. They have dared to discuss the impact of legal immigration on American workers. Like most Republicans, I’m still undecided about the Presidential field. But I have an enormous amount...

On Friday, the House passed a massive National Defense Authorization for 2016 that will guarantee U.S. involvement in more wars and overseas interventions for years to come. The Republican majority resorted to trickery to evade the meager spending limitations imposed by the 2011 budget control act - limitations that did not, as often reported, cut military spending but only slowed its growth. But not even slower growth is enough when you have an empire to maintain worldwide, so the House majority slipped into the military spending bill an extra $89 billion for an emergency war fund. Such "emergency" spending is...

Eight people died on an Amtrak train last week, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio took selfies at the crash scene. He wasn’t literally holding a selfie stick and saying “Cheese!” But he certainly found a way to transform the tragedy into a political opportunity for himself. Around 9:30 p.m. last Tuesday, the driver of Amtrak Train No. 188 cruised around a sharp corner at 106 m.p.h.—more than double the 50 m.p.h. speed limit. According to an Associated Press report late last week, “Investigators have found no problems with the track, signals or locomotive.” Common sense tells you...

There is a move on Capitol Hill to fix the way we maintain America's airports by bringing free-market reforms to the massive transportation bill the Republican leadership is dead-set on passing this summer.Capitol Hill conservatives may not be able to stop the transportation spending bill, but some right-thinking members of Congress are working to leverage the Passenger Facility Charge as a way to move Uncle Sam further out of the airport business.It is not privatization, which is still a non-starter given that President Barack Obama still checks the mailbox at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But, the plan relies on one of...

Section 215 of the Patriot Act will not survive another month. The most controversial piece of the post-9/11 law that broadly expanded the federal government's surveillance powers is set to expire on June 1, and the House of Representatives on Wednesday gave its overwhelming approval to a far less sweeping replacement. On a 338-to-88 vote, Republicans and Democrats registered broad support for the USA Freedom Act, which will end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of "metadata" from millions of Americans' phone records.The legislation faces some opposition in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing to extend the...

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's life is a meager compensation for the murder of Martin Richard, Lingzi Lu, Krystle Campbell, and Sean Collier. But it is the highest price he can be made to pay under our system of justice, and a jury of his peers has unanimously recommended that he pay it.From the outset, the death penalty was the sentence most Americans believed Tsarnaev should receive, assuming he was guilty of the grisly Boston Marathon bombing. Long before the case went to trial, all doubt of his guilt had vanished. Not even his lawyers tried to suggest otherwise. On the trial's opening...

Ronald Nelson from Memphis, Tennessee, is a senior at Houston High School. He was accepted to all eight Ivy League schools--that's Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and UPenn--along with Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Vanderbilt, among a few other schools. While any of these schools are fantastic options, Nelson made headlines for another reason: he turned them all down. Nelson will be attending the University of Alabama this fall, as a member of the school's honors program.While it may seem shocking that a student would turn down a prestigious university for a state school, Nelson actually showed impressive maturity...

My, my, the bigger they are, the dumber they think we are. Dan Rather of CBS was toppled by a phony document scam. Lyin’ Brian Williams at NBC casually mixed fact with self-aggrandizing fiction. Now George Stephanopoulos is caught in a Clinton web of deceit at ABC. The hat trick of arrogant anchor scandals helps explain why Americans don’t trust network news. With apologies to Walter Cronkite, that’s the way it is, and the way it is stinks. Stephanopoulos shares with Rather and Williams the rotten distinction of fessing up only after being exposed by real journalists. In his case,...

Jeb Bush began a talk the other day by addressing the issue of his brother George, noted architect of the Iraq war, and he did not shrink from the challenge. "I can't deny the fact that I love my family," announced Jeb. So if you suspected that the Bush Thanksgivings in Kennebunkport resemble "August: Osage County" -- with lots of screaming, sobbing and clawing -- you probably feel pretty silly right now. On a more pertinent question -- whether the war was a wise idea -- the answer is not so clear. The former governor of Florida first said that,...

While actions speak louder than words, words often predict future actions. Secular progressives’ words and actions rarely align. This is because the pseudo-utopian, wholly dystopian perch from which they view the world is so detached from reality that, from a cultural and public policy standpoint, they must disguise their intended actions in flowery and euphemistic language, or face near universal rejection. When they don’t like the terms, liberals redefine the terms to mean something they do not, never have and never can mean. Consider, for instance, the once meaningful words “marriage” and “equality.”Other “progressive” doublespeak includes words like “invest” (meaning...

Last week, the Ohio Constitutional Modernization Commission abruptly canceled its planned public meeting. On the OCMC’s agenda was to have been the proposed weakening of legislative term limits, from the current eight-year maximum to 12 years, which the august Legislative Branch and Executive Branch Committee had advanced, 8-1, to the full commission. Perhaps the cancelation came from concern that supporters of term limits were riding to the capitol for a news conference to coincide with that now-scuttled meeting of the commission, announcing a campaign to confront this latest gambit against citizen-imposed limits. Goodness, a meeting of this elite tribunal and...

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...

Dianne Feinstein of California arguably used to be the CIA's best friend on the Democratic side of the Senate. I think it's fair to say that San Francisco voters were not enthusiastic about her pro-intelligence posture during the George W. Bush presidency. One thing DiFi has going for her, though, is that it's hard even for critics to not crack a smile at her famously idiosyncratic stubborn streak. She's old-school. She makes up her mind and digs in deep. And then something else sticks in her craw. As Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chairwoman during President Barack Obama's first six...

Summer is usually a relaxing time for family vacations, a little rest and relaxation, a time to recharge one's “batteries”, hang out with the kiddos and to get in some light summer beach reading. Ahhh … summer. Pass me an ice cold Corona, por favor. This summer, however, could be the beginning of the end for several Texas politicos who’ve been doing creepy crap when they were supposed to have been representing the Texans who trusted them and put their haggard backsides into office. For those of you who don’t follow closely Texas politics, a forthcoming scandal is brewing based...

It wasn’t exactly a “stop the presses!” moment, but it was still a little surprising. George Stephanopoulos, former White House communications director under President Bill Clinton and ABC News “chief news anchor,” donated one and one half times the average American income to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The $75,000 Stephanopoulos ponied up is enough to cover Chelsea’s speaking fee, but who would want that? It’s pocket change for the Bill and Hillary, who wouldn’t entertain the idea of sending a personalized birthday card for that price. But that price was enough to expose Stephanopoulos as what observers...