Free Republic

"Faris’ response to the Normalcy program is that there is no value in conserving a burning house. The endangered state of American liberal democracy, he argues, calls for emergency steps from Democrats and the left. They should take advantage of legal and constitutional silences to “transform American politics in a lasting progressive direction,” Faris writes. “Doing so will require party leaders to pursue policy changes that will be ridiculed by their opponents as outrageous affronts to democratic decency and received by their own voters with puzzlement or even shock. They need to do it anyway.” The list of those changes...

Nancy Pelosi sits in a black-leather booth at Americana, a burger bistro in downtown Des Moines, radiating optimism. "We're in a very good place," she says of Democrats' odds in November. Special-election results suggest more than 100 seats in the House of Representatives are in play, and Democrats need less than two dozen to regain a majority. At the prospect of a victory that could check Trump's power – and, Pelosi expects, reinstall her as House speaker – she bangs a piece of cutlery, hard, on the table. "The gavel," she says. "The gavel makes all the difference in the...

President Donald Trump, like everyone alive today, never met Prussian military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz, but the author of “Vom Kriege” (“On War”) would have found pleasant company with the man who inspired “The Art of the Deal.” For Clausewitz, war involved politics in addition to “other means” to arrive at a “deal”; in other words to obtain the objectives of a nation at war.For Mr. Trump, it’s about maximizing one’s leverage in obtaining the “deal,” one of his 11 tenets in the art of deal-making. And in that regard, Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he understands both the Clausewitzian...

No matter how much the left has come to believe in its own delusions, for any reasonable observer, it's shockingly clear that the Obama years have left a lasting toll on America. If more proof were needed, look no farther than America's energy system. After an eight-year environmental crusade, the Trump administration was recently forced to step in and underwrite the country's ailing coal and nuclear plants in a last-minute bid to avoid imperiling the reliability of the nation's power grid. Despite renewed political will to shore up America's energy dominance, hard-line liberal and environmentalist lobbies are not letting go...

Following the most recent school mass shooting – this time in Santa Fe, Texas, where 10 students and teachers were killed and 10 were wounded Friday – family members, friends and investigators find themselves searching for illusive answers. Why did this happen? How do you make sense of such a senseless tragedy? Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pointed out that unlike other recent mass shootings, “there were not those types of warning signs. The red-flag warnings were either nonexistent or very imperceptible.” The accused shooter’s parents said the media reports of the shooting seemed “incompatible with the boy (they) love,” and...

The Israeli parliament late on Monday granted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greater authority to take his country to war, at a time when tensions between Israel and Iran are reaching new heights. Netanyahu can now declare war with only the approval of the defence minister, currently hardliner Avigdor Lieberman, in "extreme situations", according to Israeli daily Haaretz. Previously the prime minister would need the approval of the entire Israeli cabinet in order to declare war. The news of the Israeli parliament’s decision emerged following a 20-minute presentation in which Netanyahu accused Iran of continuing to pursue its nuclear weapons programme...

For you insufferable wymyn out there it’s time for a trip to the woodshed and a good old-fashioned spanking. I’m not some wigged-out dominatrix but a grandmother ashamed of women behaving badly. After the death of Barbara Bush claws came out double quick. Fresno State Professor Rhonda Jarrar labeled the former first lady, “an amazing racist…I’m happy the witch is dead. can’t wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million iraqis have. byyyeeeeeee.” Such eloquence. Such shortsighted ignorance from a supposedly well-educated professor trusted with the training up of our young people....

Shortened title. Full title: Trump Attorney Uncovers New Unmasking Docs Showing Samantha Power Actively Worked With Media to Undermine Trump During Transition An attorney for Trump, Jay Sekulow and his senior counsel Carly Gammill appeared in a Washington D.C. federal court last week to find out when they will be receiving documents related to the Obama unmasking scandal. The ACLJ (American Center For Law and Justice) filed a FOIA lawsuit last summer and they are just now beginning to receive documents.

KEY LARGO, Florida -- At dinner with friends, I was asked what is wrong with Washington. The question presumes a standard by which "wrong" can be defined. I am frequently asked this question by people who do not live in "the swamp." They don't behave like Washington politicians. If a disagreement arises in their personal or professional life, they discuss it and usually compromise and work things out. Only in Washington, they note, does this rarely happen, and when it does it makes headlines. The most obvious answer to the question I am asked -- often before the appetizer arrives...

excerpt: In 2009, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein published a book, called “Nudge,” on how government and other organizations could induce people to avoid common errors. Last year, Sunstein gave the Storrs Lectures at Yale on the topic, which will soon be published as a book called “Nanny Statecraft.” Last month, the Obama administration announced that it is creating a new team to explore applications of this sort of empirical research to policy-making.

Two ominous tweets, one written by former CIA Director John Brennan, the other by former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power, openly threaten a sitting president — President Trump. This must be investigated. Both of these tweets raise enormous questions, not only about what is meant by these threats, but what kind of inside information these former Obama officials might be receiving from unauthorized sources. Friday night, after the long overdue firing of Andrew McCabe, the disgraced former acting FBI director, the president tweeted to the American people that McCabe’s termination (and possible loss of pension) marks a “great day for...

Samantha Power delivers ominous message to Trump: 'Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan' Samantha Power, who was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under former President Barack Obama, warned President Trump on Saturday that it was "not a good idea to piss off John Brennan" after the former CIA director told him in a tweet that America would "triumph over you." MOTE AT LINK:

So what's Ben Rhodes been up to these days? His unmaskings and leaks are over, he doesn't have Seb Gorka to lie about, and his failures as a national security official have pretty well been exposed. I kid you not: he hasn't been idle. His latest scheme is launching a "shadow" National Security Council, called "National Security Action," co-chairing the operation with Jake Sullivan. Showing that he was always the one running things in the Obama White House, despite his creative writing major, his past career as a failed novelist, and his lack of national security experience, he's herded a...

Its millions of members are motivated by ideology, not money, and they vote in droves. As the political fallout from the tragic shooting in Parkland, Fla., continues, progressives and anti-gun activists have directed their ire increasingly at the National Rifle Association (NRA). One argument that has been circulating is that the NRA is a special-interest group that effectively buys off members of Congress with campaign contributions, inducing them to vote against the interests of their constituents for the sake of their own reelections. This is an inaccurate picture of the substantial power that the NRA wields in the political process....

Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin spends several pages of his book discussing the lessons to be learned from Mussolini’s seizure of power in Italy in the early 1920s. It was something that happened gradually, in stages, when institutions that should have been able to bring him to heel did nothing, either due to their own lack of resolution or tacit support of his power grab.Italy after the First World War was, like many European countries, rife with instability and factionalism. Mussolini’s “fascist” party in 1922 had collected only 35 out of 500 seats in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies; despite this apparent...

Suffering a crisis of confidence over his leadership on Ebola a week before the midterm elections, President Barack Obama assembled a massive staff meeting on the issue at the White House Sunday.Including the president, there were 24 people in physical attendance at the meeting CBS News said was convened “to discuss a nationwide policy for health care workers returning from West Africa.” Vice President Joe Biden joined via telephone, and Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thomas Frieden and US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power joining via video teleconference.Sunday, the New York Times reported President...

Where the seats of power are located matters. Given the populist revolt in the United States and Europe against the so-called "global elite," it is time to refigure the geography of governmental and transnational power. Take the United Nations. Much of the international body's perceived negatives derive from being in the world's richest and most visible city, New York. But what if U.N. elites did not have easy access to instant television exposure, tony Manhattan digs, and who's-who networking? Most of the world is non-Western. Many Western elites are apologetic over past sins of imperialism and colonialism. So why not...

In a moment of woeful irony in the Obama-administration documentary “The Final Year,” UN Ambassador Samantha Power travels to Cameroon to offer photo-op comfort to families terrorized by Boko Haram — only to have her motorcade kill a 7-year-old boy. Greg Barker, director of this fan film, does his best to downplay the accident: It is discussed while we watch a clip of Power’s convoy moving at a crawl when in fact it was reportedly traveling at over 60 miles an hour when it struck the boy. Despite Barker’s intentions, the handiwork of the Road to Hell Paving Co. is...

Obama's backing for the Arab Spring, pandering to Iran and mismanagement of Iraq helped create the ISIS monster. And now Samantha Power, Obama's UN emissary, is revising history while trying to blame Trump. Initially on Maliki, then on Abadi in Iraq, to be bringing in the Sunnis, and to be ensuring that we’re doing away with the virus that gave rise to ISIS in the first place. Where is the respect for human rights? Where are the processes for accountability, so you can distinguish real ISIS people from ordinary Sunni who got caught up in a firefight? And it was our...

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) - A new HBO Film that fake-documents the last year of the Obama Administration will premier on Jan. 19. The Daily Caller reports this morning that the film contains a scene in which ex-UN Ambassador and serial unmasker Samantha Power hosts an Election Night “female empowerment” party for women diplomats from all over the world to celebrate the impending victory by the Pantsuit Princess. “I thought what an amazing night for them. I mean, that’s what America represents to the world, when a glass ceiling is shattered in our country, it creates...