Free Republic

Alabama’s special U.S. Senate election is less than one month away and a new poll shows Republican nominee Roy Moore holding a solid lead over his Democratic opponent Doug Jones. In a poll conducted by Sky Research on Tuesday Nov. 21 among registered Alabama voters, the results show Moore with 46.7 percent support to Jones’ 39.6 percent. 13.7 percent of voters polled remain undecided. With a margin of error of 3.1 percent, Moore maintains significant lead over Jones, but the undecided voters could swing the election either way. When asked “Do you consider your political views to be more in...

The imam of a Galway mosque which was attacked during the hour of prayer on Monday evening has appealed for “calm” in the wake of the London terrorist attack. Imam Ibrahim Ahmad Noonan of the Masjid Maryam mosque in Galway told The Irish Times that up to 100 members of the Galway mosque were left “terrified” when rocks smashed through the windows during the attack on Monday evening. The attack comes in the wake of the terror attack in London on Saturday night and news that one of the three attackers lived for a time in Ireland and got married...

I don’t want to beat up on Hillary Clinton. She thought she’d win and she lost, embarrassingly, to a man she considered deeply unworthy. At the same time she won the popular vote by 2.9 million. It would take anyone time to absorb these things emotionally and psychologically. But wow. Her public statements since defeat have been malignant little masterpieces of victimhood-claiming, blame-shifting and unhelpful accusation. They deserve censure. Last weekend she was the commencement speaker at her alma mater, Wellesley, where she insulted the man who beat her. This Wednesday she was at the 2017 Code Conference, hosted by...

Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal about the efforts to take out White House strategist Steve Bannon. While offering a candid assessment of Bannon’s shortcomings and strengths, Noonan summarizes Bannon’s populist and nationalist worldview as outlined in a speech he gave at the Vatican in 2014 — a speech that predicted the issues that propelled Trump to victory in 2016. From Noonan’s column: But there’s something low, unseemly and ugly in the efforts to take [Bannon] out so publicly and humiliatingly, to turn him into a human oil spot on the tarmac—this not only from...

"The president should confound expectations, pivot, and turn to the Democrats for a bipartisan deal. Here is the tradition. If you are Franklin Roosevelt in 1935 and you want to create Social Security—an act that affects Americans very personally—you get the other party in on it. You need them co-owning it, invested in it. You want the American people saying, “Congress did this,” not “the Democrats did this,” because if they say the latter the reform will always divide. FDR got 81 Republicans to vote for it in the House, and 284 Democrats. The same with Medicare in 1965: Lyndon...

I was more moved than I expected. Then more startled. The old forms and traditions, the bands and bunting, endured. I thought, as I watched the inauguration: It continues. There were pomp and splendor, happy, cheering crowds; and for all the confounding nature of the past 18 months, and all the trauma, it came as a reassurance to see us do what we do the way we do it. A friend in the Southwest, a longtime Trump supporter, emailed just before the swearing in: “I have been crying all morning.” From joy. The inaugural address was utterly and uncompromisingly Trumpian....

The president-elect should make a handful of appointments quickly, briskly, with an initial emphasis on old hands and known quantities. Ideological foes need not be included but accomplished Washington figures, especially those from previous administrations, should be invited in. It is silly to worry that Mr. Trump’s supporters will start to fear he’s gone establishment. They believe in him, are beside themselves with joy, and will understand he’s shoring up his position and communicating stability. Third, there are former officials and true experts with esteemed backgrounds who need to be told: Help him

The signature sentence of this election begins with the words “In a country of 320 million . . .” I hear it everywhere. It ends with “how’d it come down to these two?” or “why’d we get them?” Another sentence is a now a common greeting among Republicans who haven’t seen each other in a while: “What are we gonna do?” The most arresting sentence of the week came from a sophisticated Manhattan man friendly with all sides. I asked if he knows what he’ll do in November. “I know exactly,” he said with some spirit. “I will be one...

DID Amelia Earhart survive her plane crash? This is the most likely theory, with evidence emerging that she was making contact for days after her plane disappeared.The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) believes Earhart safely landed her plane when it disappeared in 1937 and died as a castaway. During a presentation in the US last month, TIGHAR’s Ric Gillespie backed up all of the group’s theories. Earhart’s plane was last seen on the radar on July 2, 1937. After becoming the first woman pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, she embarked on a mission to fly...

Those in power see people at the bottom as aliens whose bizarre emotions they must try to manage. ############# This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist. Recently I spoke with an acquaintance of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and the conversation quickly turned, as conversations about Ms. Merkel now always do, to her decisions on immigration. Last summer when Europe was engulfed with increasing waves of migrants and refugees from Muslim countries, Ms. Merkel, moving unilaterally, announced...

This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist. Recently I spoke with an acquaintance of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and the conversation quickly turned, as conversations about Ms. Merkel now always do, to her decisions on immigration. Last summer when Europe was engulfed with increasing waves of migrants and refugees from Muslim countries, Ms. Merkel, moving unilaterally, announced that Germany would take in an astounding 800,000. Naturally this was taken as an invitation, and more than a...

Beyond that, anti-Trump Republicans treat his voters like immoral enablers of a malignant boob. Should Mr. Trump lose decisively in November they’ll lord it over everyone, say “I told you so,” and accept what they imagine will be forelock-tugging apologies. Then they will get to work burying not only Mr. Trump but his issues. That’s where the future of the GOP will be fought, and found: on whether Trumpism can be defeated along with Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump would care about that if he cared about that. I end with a new word, at least new to me. A friend...

or this reason among others, I do not understand the impulse of the NeverTrump people to anathametize and shun those Republicans who will not vow to oppose Mr. Trump and commit to defeating him. They have been warned that if they don’t do these things they will not be allowed to help rebuild the party after Mr. Trump destroys it. Conservatives love to throw conservatives out of conservatism; it’s like an ancestral tic. But great political movements should not be run like private clubs. And have the anathemitizers noticed they aren’t in charge anymore? That in the great antiestablishment disruption...

You could see this aspect of Trumpism—I’m about America, end of story—in his much-discussed foreign-policy speech this week. I have found pretty much everything said about it to be true. It was long, occasionally awkward-sounding and sometimes contradictory. It was interesting nonetheless. He was trying to blend into a coherent whole what he’s previously said when popping off on the hustings. He was trying to establish that there’s a theme to the pudding. He was also trying to reassure potential supporters that he is actually serious, that he does have a foreign-policy framework as opposed to just a grab bag...

Have you had your 2016 Moment? I think you probably have, or will. The Moment is that sliver of time in which you fully realize something epochal is happening in politics, that there has never been a presidential year like 2016, and suddenly you are aware of it in a new, true and personal way. It tends to involve a poignant sense of dislocation, a knowledge that our politics have changed and won’t be going back.

We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump.

We're in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you're teasing him. Trump.

Images from Jan. 28, 1986, are seared into the memories of former schoolchildren, teachers, parents, and pretty much any American now older than 30 - the Challenger space shuttle, meant to carry school teacher Christa McAuliffe into orbit, reduced to a snaky tunnel of smoke in the sky near Cape Canaveral. In the years that followed, a lot would come out about a disaster watched in countless classrooms across the nation: about faulty O-rings, about dangerously cold temperatures, and about how five crewmen, an engineer and a New Hampshire teacher meant to represent NASA in its finest hour became the...

Thursday on “CBS This Morning” while discussing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump hinting at a third-party run, Peggy Noonan, a former speech writer for President Ronald Reagan and weekly columnist for The Wall Street Journal, said the Republican Party is in a “delicate” position because they can’t afford to ostracize Trump’s supporters.

You can see a coarsening in how we respond and react on social media. No one feels ashamed to exploit the tragedy for political purposes even while it is happening. But as soon as the story broke Wednesday afternoon, and while it was still going on, there were accusations and bitter words flung all over the Internet. The weirdest argument came almost immediately. A person named Chris Murphy, who is a U.S. senator representing Connecticut, sent out what struck me as the most manipulative message of recent political history. The background is that Republican presidential contestants responded online to the...