Free Republic

I love me some Black Friday. Always have. There's something about a deal I can't resist. Add to it the energy around the anticipation of the doors opening, and it's the Kentucky Derby for people. But what started as a good way to save money on some things you wanted has turned into "The Purge." My love of Black Friday goes back to my early days in Washington. I worked in the bookstore at the Heritage Foundation. It was an entry-level job answering phone calls of donors who wanted books and papers Heritage had published. It was a "would you...

The other day I was talking to an acquaintance of mine at the gun range about the Paris terrorist attacks. What he surmised was the root cause of that senseless slaughter by Islamic radicals nearly made me drop my Sig Sauer on the range floor. The Texan told me that he believes Islam wouldn't be killing innocent peeps as they ate their dinner or enjoyed a death metal concert or watched a soccer game if said nutters had more "job opportunities". What he said was shocking to me because of two primary things: 1). A frickin' Texan said that crap....

Republican candidates for the presidential nomination claim that Democrats kill babies and harvest their organs to sell them, insist the U.S. is at war with an "evil state of consciousness," compare Muslims to rabid dogs, and call for closing mosques and registering Muslims. These are not fringe candidates. They are the front-runners. American politics has descended from principle into tribalism. The descent began in 1968. That year's presidential election looked to be a principled fight, with Democrats Hubert Humphrey and Robert F. Kennedy articulating a vision of an inclusive America in which the government expanded efforts to guarantee equality. For...

Sharyl Attkisson, the former CBS reporter and independent journalist, has a long history of getting under the government’s skin. In her book Stonewalled, she detailed many of the battles she encountered when attempting to expose the truth in the tradition of the Fourth Estate and how unpopular stories tended to wind up being discounted or silenced. Later, her Nosy Nellie ways attracted the interest of the Department of Justice, though they have thus far failed to file any actual charges against her. This week, Attkisson tells the story of how she finally sought to obtain her own FBI file and...

Should computers decide who gets a job? That’s a question recently asked by Government Executive Magazine which looked at a study of hiring practices and how much hiring recommendations generated by standardized testing differed from managers who “went with their gut” in terms of eventual employee performance and retention. The results were, at least as I read it, a bit muddled.First of all, the test subjects they looked at were all applicants for low skill service jobs. (Such as you’d find for new hires at call centers or data entry firms.) They were all given standardized tests and those results...

The recent “clock boy” protests in Texas surrounding one local mosque continue to generate controversy and before everyone headed out for Thanksgiving there was another “incident” in the Lone Star State. One spokesperson for BAIR (the Bureau on American Islamic Relations) went on Facebook and published a list of local Muslims and their supporters who opposed a law which would have forbidden Sharia Law (or any other religious court) supplanting civil authority. I first saw this reported at a link from TPM. The leader of a group of armed anti-Muslim protesters in Texas posted the addresses of dozens of local...

Turkey may have succeeded in scuttling the idea of an international coalition under the United Nations auspices to fight the Islamic State (IS). The talks in Moscow on Friday between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the visiting French President Francois Hollande leave a gloomy impression. Of course, Hollande conveyed his condolences over the death of the Russian pilot last Tuesday. It was a significant gesture and contrasted sharply with US President Barack Obama’s studied preference to express solidarity with Turkey. Hollande openly supported Russia’s determination to disrupt the nexus between Turkey and the IS in oil trade. He vowed to...

Texas Senator Ted Cruz has been rising in the polls of late, not only in Iowa, but nationally as well. (And high time, if you ask me.) It’s far too soon to declare him a resident of the top tier aside Trump with so few samples, but the prospect of his being a serious contender for the nomination can’t be discounted. And if he wins the Party’s endorsement, he may be in fine shape to take on Hillary Clinton and then be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. So then what? Well, at least according to...

Once upon a time, "Black Friday" was a major event in the United States. Yes, the mainstream media is still endlessly hyping it up, and major retailers are still rolling out their "incredible deals", but it appears that most Americans are tiring of this particular gimmick. Or perhaps it is just that U.S. consumers don't have as much discretionary income as they once did. As you will see below, retail traffic this Black Friday was "much, much slower" than anticipated. And expectations were not great anyway - the number of shoppers was down last year, and it was being projected...

Why did it take so long? I don't know. But it's happened. Students at Princeton University have discovered that the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs on their campus is named after … well … after Woodrow Wilson. Why is that important? Because, say the students, Wilson was a racist. And he wasn't just a garden variety racist. He was the most racist US President of the 20th century. Maybe the most racist president ever. In an editorial in the New York Times by the grandson of a victim of Wilson's purge of blacks from all management responsibilities...

"From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia ... could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide." -- Abraham Lincoln The winning streak enjoyed by campus activists this fall was violently...

How radical, weird and out of touch have liberals on college campuses gotten since Obama came into office? It's worse than you ever thought and although there is an almost unlimited number of problematic incidents to choose from, these 15 are particularly effective at getting across how bad things have become.1) "College Students Say Remembering 9/11 Is Offensive to Muslims The everything-is-offensive brand of campus activism has struck a new low: Students at the University of Minnesota killed a proposed moment of silence for 9/11 victims due to concerns insulting, childish concerns that Muslim students would be offended."2) "Portland State...

In Erdogan's usual Sunni supremacist language, he accused the victims of jihad rather than the jihadists. "New tragedies will be inevitable," Erdogan said, "if the rising racism in Europe and other countries is not stopped." Yet Erdogan willingly ignores the rising racism, xenophobia, and anti-western, jihadist sentiments that increasingly command the hearts and minds of his fellow Turks. How should Erdogan fight Islamic terror -- something he does not believe exists? One of Erdogan's famous remarks is, "there is no Islamic terror." But he thinks that "just like fascism," Zionism is a crime against humanity. It is so funny...

Unlike the revolution started by the printing press which soon stabilized, internet changes are not merely drastic but continually accelerating.The internet has changed everything, so much so that even I, a man who has been online for 19 years, am constantly amazed at the pace of accelerated change. The printing press changed the world in a few decades in the 16th century. The internet is even more revolutionary. Even more so than the press, the internet has evaporated prior means of didactic instruction. The printing press created change, but only the rich could afford to buy one. For less than...

...........Yes, everything is different, now, for elite Democrats. As we have seen, they are inspired by the EU. And as we have also seen, they no longer worry about worker's wages-and that only makes sense, because the two big magnetic poles of the new Democratic coalition, Al Sharpton and George Soros, are both oblivious to wages. Why? Because Sharpton's core constituents aren't in the workforce; they make their living through welfare, not work. And as for Soros and his fellow billionaires, they couldn't be bothered to think about anything as microscopic as a mere wage. Meanwhile, Democratic politicos believe that...

The Republican establishment is nearing full-blown panic about Donald Trump… "He has a real shot at this. He is the clear front-runner," said Ron Bonjean, a consultant and former aide to GOP leaders on Capitol Hill…Robinson, who is not affiliated with any candidate, was scathing toward those GOP centrists who assert that Trump will be unable to translate his polling support into votes because of a weak ground game. "That is the wishful thinking of the establishment," he said. "That is what they tell themselves so they can sleep at night. The truth is, Trump has one of the better...

...Mocking a disabled person for their disability has been universally passe since at least the 1950s, and so some of his supporters have been out on twitter over the last couple of days offering various defenses for Trump's behavior on this video. It is important to note that Trump himself has (as far as I know) offered only this by way of "explanation" for his actions: Defense 1. Trump didn't know Koveleski was disabled... So, to believe that Trump had no idea what Koveleski looked like or the particulars of his disability, you would have to believe a) that the...

In Tuesday's USA Today, Supreme Court correspondent Richard Wolf (not to be confused with the former MSNBC exec Richard Wolffe) reported another one of those sob-story pieces about how women seeking abortions will have to drive more than an hour to have their babies "terminated." The headline was "In Texas, Going the Distance for an Abortion." The star of the article was "Veronica" in San Antonio, but she "didn't want her last name used because of the personal nature of the procedure." Wolf began:

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal often tackles newspapers contradicting themselves under the headline "Two Papers in One!" Wednesday's edition, though, went back to point out that the sudden revulsion at Woodrow Wilson's racism is at odds with The New York Times editorial page arguing in favor of Wilson for President back in those times. Now Wilson represents a "toxic legacy" of unapologetic racism, but in 1912 , the Times oozed over him as "a man of high equipment for the office, worthy of the full confidence of the people." To wit:

In the November 16 Presidential Debate, the Democratic candidates argued about the minimum wage. They all favored raising it, with Hillary Clinton arguing for $12 per hour. What she preaches is not what she practices, when running her own campaign. Recently, her lawyers asked the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for permission to use unpaid interns during "the spring, summer, or fall at the Campaign's headquarters office in Brooklyn." The lucky students would receive nothing from the Clinton campaign. However, Clinton wants the college to give the interns college credit. She also wants the college to pay the student $3,000. The...