Free Republic

Wow, so I was actually tuned in to KPCC - the local NPR branch affiliate for Los Angeles. And one analyst gave a thorough rundown about California voter registration and polling trends. Here are some points: * Voters registering Independent of either party is up 169% as opposed to 25% for Dem and down 9% for Republican. This is especially true for new, young voters. Independents are the 2nd largest voting constiuent. * Independent candidate for Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner is currently leading against his Democratic counterpart by 6 points. * Californians express fiscally conservative views with socially moderate policies....

With five days to go until midterm elections,President Trump is escalating his attacks on Democrats,immigrants and the media,despite calls to tone down the rhetoric after a week of hate-based violence.

What do you get when you intersperse the ominous-sounding narration of PBS’s “Frontline” with the patois of a (Silicon) Valley Girl, whose resume belies her you-know-like-wow series of reaction shots to allegations that Facebook is an online sieve of personal data and social division, whose corporate newspeak fails to address the proliferation of fake news and bogus accounts on the world’s biggest platform for groupthink and the promotion of chain letters? The answer confirms that Mark Zuckerberg needs to steal—I mean invent—new tools that prevent the public from learning the truth, that Donald Trump is a Nazi and that Lee...

Some personal secrets are so well-kept that even family and friends are oblivious. So it is with the story of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist's marriage proposal to a Stanford Law School classmate in the early 1950s. When 19-year-old Sandra Day entered Stanford Law School in 1949, her frequent seatmate was 26-year-old Bill Rehnquist, attending Stanford on the GI Bill. The two shared their equally meticulous class notes and eventually were dating regularly. But by December of their second year, she broke up with him while somehow retaining what she called their "study buddy" relationship; she even entered the...

President Trump has appointed digital strategist Brad Parscale to lead his 2020 re-election effort, his campaign announced Tuesday. "Brad was essential in bringing a disciplined technology and data-driven approach to how the 2016 campaign was run," said Jared Kushner. The Trump campaign pledged its apparatus would not only prepare for the president's re-election, but also play a role in the 2018 midterm elections this year. Parscale, who will serve in the role of campaign manager, is a longtime Trump aide whose connection to the president stretches back well before the president's campaign began in 2015. Parscale began working for the...

There is a new, well-financed, well-oiled smear machine that is spinning up mud and using the media to spread it as though it is legitimate news. It goes like this: The Southern Poverty Law Center uses its anti-conservative, anti-Christian, pro-Muslim, pro-illegal immigration, pro-LGBTQ metrics to identify “hate groups.” The result: It has managed to label as hate groups such organizations as the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Center for Family and Human Rights, social scientist and researcher Charles Murray, Muslim analyst Frank Gaffney, the non-profit Center for Immigration Studies and its leader Mark Krikorian and Ayaan Hirsi...

The Museum of the Bible said Monday that five of its 16 famous Dead Sea Scrolls fragments are fake. A team of German experts analyzed the privately funded Washington, D.C., museum's fragments and found they had "characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin." The fragments will no longer be displayed at the museum. "Though we had hoped the testing would render different results, this is an opportunity to educate the public on the importance of verifying the authenticity of rare biblical artifacts, the elaborate testing process undertaken and our commitment to transparency," said Jeffrey Kloha, chief curatorial officer for the museum, said...

Our friend David Rutz at the Washington Free Beacon listened to a typically one-sided hour of National Public Radio on climate change on Tuesday and wrote an article titled "NPR: How Do We Talk to the Dangerous Idiots Who Disagree With Us?" The national talk show 1A tweeted out this summation: "Climate change is a fundamental threat. The science is clear and scientists around the world agree that this a man-made problem. What, if anything, can be done to win over climate skeptics?" Rutz summarized it this way: "I listened to a remarkable bit of self-parody on National Public Radio...

During a two part interview with President Trump aired on 60 Minutes on Sunday night, Lesley Stahl asked “what’s the biggest surprise” he's learned as President? Trump cited the duplicity of Washington politicians, but when he relayed how “the other thing I’ve really learned is I never knew how dishonest the media was and I really mean it. I’m not saying that as a soundbite. I never knew how dishonest,” Stahl cut him off: “I’m going to change the subject again.” Referring to an earlier exchange, Trump pointed out: “Well, no, even the way you asked me a question, like,...

Not so long ago — the administration of President George W. Bush — $1 million could get you elected to Congress. Now, four weeks from Election Day, Democrats say 60 of their candidates raised that much or more, just in the last three months. Fueled by an energetic base of small donors, Democrats are going into the final stretch of the election with a substantial financial advantage, erasing Republicans' typical fundraising edge. The money is flowing to unlikely districts and is frequently tied to Democrats' opposition to President Trump. In Fresno, Calif., prosecutor Andrew Janz, a Democrat, raised an eye-popping...

Dear Professor Christine Blasey Ford, Like millions of women, I watched you testify about the worst day of your life. Millions of us identified with your fear and wondered if we would be brave enough to wrestle ourselves past that grip of terror if we were in your shoes. Millions of us watched how you held onto the tears that wanted to come up; we know where that place is in the body — the place that pushes down on the rising tide of remembered pain. We know how hard that is. We’ve been holding onto our tears for a...

The politically convenient, scientifically baseless theory that sexual assault so traumatized Christine Blasey Ford she mixed up her attacker is now something like common wisdom for many Republicans.

PBS’s Judy Woodruff asked former president Bill Clinton Thursday whether he thought it was a “good thing” that norms have changed when it comes to sexual harassment. Woodruff’s example was former Minnesota senator Al Franken being forced to resign his post after accusations that, Woodruff said, were less serious than what happened in the Lewinsky scandal. "Well, in general, I think it's a good thing, yes," Clinton said about norms changing. He then proceeded to defend Franken and question the legitimacy of some of the accusations against him. "I will be honest,” he said, “the Franken case, for me, was...

The North Korean email hack of Sony continues to haunt Hollywood. The leftist group WikiLeaks recently posted a searchable set of the documents and the London Daily Mail found a new scandal subject: Ben Affleck ... and PBS. Harvard black-studies professor Henry Louis Gates produces a show for New York PBS superstation WNET called "Finding Your Roots." Gates tells celebrities about their ancestors. A few years back, NBC had a show just like this called "Who Do You Think You Are?" It's now on cable, on TLC. Why PBS believes it's right to use taxpayer money to copycat commercial television...

These previous weeks have been nothing short of unprecedented. The Democrats pulled every dirty trick in the book to make sure Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh never donned the robe of a Supreme Court Justice. But all of this now seems to be coming to an end as the FBI investigation has come back with nothing damning against Kavanaugh, and Mitch McConnell now calling for the vote to confirm Kavanaugh to be held tomorrow. As Joe Cunningham wrote earlier, McConnell wouldn’t be calling for the vote if he didn’t have them. Sen. Jeff Flake and Susan Collins also appear to...

There are two immediate reasons that President Trump might have decided that, after weeks of holding his fire, it was worth disparaging Christine Blasey Ford during a rally in Mississippi on Tuesday night. The first is that Ford’s allegation that Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett M. Kavanaugh, had assaulted her when the two were in high school was putting Kavanaugh’s nomination at risk. Trump insists that he punches his opponents only after they punch him first, which isn’t true, but it’s certainly unusual for him to incur political damage without lashing out. On Tuesday, that moment arrived for...

After a day of wrenching testimony from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford — who has accused him of sexual assault in high school — more Americans say they believe Ford's account over Kavanaugh's denials, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released Wednesday. In choosing who is telling the truth, 45 percent said Ford is, up from 32 percent ahead of her Sept. 27 testimony. A third (33 percent) said Kavanaugh is the one telling the truth, up slightly from 26 percent before he testified but not as much of a rise as for Ford. The daylong...

t’s not nice or politically correct to say, but people do sometimes lie to get money, revenge, power, attention, or political advantage. False allegations of assault have been documented. Adam Mill By Adam Mill SEPTEMBER 25, 2018 I stand athwart the streamroller of sexual misconduct complaints that crush the innocent, end marriages, and destroy careers. In the Me Too era, I am an employment attorney in the politically incorrect vocation of defending who must pay if misconduct is found. My skin is thick, and I do not melt when asked, “How dare you!” I dare because I do not want...

NPR described Kermit Gosnell as an “abortion doctor” back in 2013 when a Philadelphia court convicted him of murdering babies. But last month, the taxpayer-funded radio group rejected an ad that used the exact same term to describe Gosnell, claiming it is not “value neutral,” according to The Daily Beast. The makers of the movie “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer” have been hitting roadblocks since they began their project more than four years ago. Their struggles started when the crowdfunding site Kickstarter refused to allow filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney to fundraiser there. They later broke...