Free Republic

Tom Hanks has a sense of humor, and he’s not that bad an actor. One of my favorite lines from him comes from the movie “Turner and Hooch.” Playing a police officer solving a contentious murder mystery, he struggles to raise a slobbery bloodhound that really pushes his limits. At one point, he shouts: “What do you want me to do? Make you a margarita?” A statement laced with humor and frustration, that’s how I feel right now about the Trump Administration and their stunning tardiness on cracking down on California’s latest illegal alien lawlessness.In his unprecedented speech to the...

“About 1,400 students wearing orange shirts gathered on a hill at East Chapel Hill High School in North Carolina to listen as student organizers read the names of each of the Parkland victims…students gathered in discussion circles to talk about gun violence in America. [...]”It’s really scary to me how in America we seem to have this constant, or this prevailing, notion that we should fight violence with violence,” said senior Frances O’Grady, 18, “and that’s never, ever the solution…I think that’s just a very dangerous idea.”"On the classroom wall behind O’Grady hung a banner with the image of Che...

It is no secret that the Left are big supporters of a politically correct culture. They see no issue with constantly stifling the free speech of anyone who disagrees with the politically correct narrative of the mainstream. They regularly clamp down on your free speech in the name of protecting the sensibilities of all those who happen to disagree. This policy has become so widespread on college campuses throughout the nation that it goes beyond merely condemning what people happen to say or feel, to physically placing the potential "victims" of your speech into so-called "safe spaces" in order to...

Nancy Pelosi welcomes your hatred. Okay, that may be an exaggeration. But when the Republican Party spends so much of its time talking about her, you'd think she'd be a bit more perturbed. And there's no sign she is. She has good reason. We just saw yet another election in which Republicans tried everything they could do to tie the Democratic candidate to Pelosi, and he won anyway. Conor Lamb, the victor in that Pennsylvania special election, said at the campaign's outset that he wouldn't be voting for Pelosi for speaker in 2019 if he were elected, since he thought...

RUSH: When we left the program yesterday, the bridge at Florida International University had collapsed only moments ago. There was still some confusion being reported. The way it was being reported, I thought the bridge was open. The bridge wasn’t open. The span had been put in place on Saturday. The bridge not supposed to open ’til early next year. At any rate, the left has already found a way to politicize this. The left has already found a way to incorporate the name Donald Trump into the assignation or the assignment of blame. When, in fact, the culprit here...

KNOXVILLE, Iowa — As Democrats have fled rural America — or rural America has fled Democrats — many of them, living in cities, are left without an understanding of rural culture and its core values. If it isn’t on abortion, our deepest cultural divide might be on guns. The guns issue also has a profound political dimension, reliably driving rural Americans into Republican arms. It’s been many years since I hunted squirrels and rabbits with my Grandpa Leonard. I grew up around guns and remember the pride I had when I completed my N.R.A.-sponsored gun safety training in Boy Scouts,...

“MASON CITY: To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new.” — Robert Penn Warren, “All the King’s Men” (1946) WASHINGTON — Appropriately, Warren began the best book about American populism, his novel based on Huey Long’s Louisiana career, with a rolling sentence about a road. Time was, infrastructure — roads, especially — was a preoccupation of populists, who were mostly rural and needed roads to get products to market, and for travel to neighbors and towns, which assuaged loneliness. Today, there is no comparably sympathetic constituency clamoring...

Voters in Illinois head to the polls this Tuesday. They should vote for Jeanne Ives in the Republican gubernatorial primary over the thoroughly disappointing incumbent governor Bruce Rauner, who has forfeited any claim on his party's nod. Failing to pass the fiscal reforms he promised wouldn’t alone justify his ouster in the primary. But Rauner’s duplicity on the issue of abortion should be disqualifying to conservatives. During the election, Rauner — who is pro-choice, had once donated to Planned Parenthood, and whose wife is an abortion-rights activist — insisted that he was merely running to fix the state’s coffers. He...

President Donald Trump will reportedly name Larry Kudlow head of the White House National Economic Council. For fans of pro-growth policies -- deregulation, low taxation and open trade -- it's great news for obvious reasons. Kudlow has been a decadeslong champion of these ideas, and those with coherent philosophies tend to offer some stability and continuity. This administration could use more of those things, not less. Kudlow is also a noticeable upgrade over the outgoing Gary Cohn, not only because he has been a far more consistent voice for free markets -- Cohn's support of carbon tax and a value...

After the victory of Donald Trump in 2016, the GOP held the Senate and House, two-thirds of the governorships, and 1,000 more state legislators than they had on the day Barack Obama took office. "The Republican Party has not been this dominant in 90 years," went the exultant claim. A year later, Republicans lost the governorship of Virginia and almost lost the legislature. Came then the loss of a U.S. Senate seat in ruby-red Alabama. Tuesday, Democrats captured a House seat in a Pennsylvania district Trump carried by 20 points, and where Democrats had not even fielded a candidate in...

Just over a week ago, turnout in the Texas primary raised serious questions about how big the Democratic wave could grow by November. This week, however, Conor Lamb won a narrow special victory in a Pennsylvania district that President Trump had carried by 20 points. Democratic spirits soared and some began dreaming that 100 or more Republican House seats could be at risk. It's natural for political types to overstate the importance of the most recent election or the one that's coming up next. After all, convincing voters that the fate of the world hinges on the results is a...

Hillary Clinton's abhorrent remarks in Mumbai, India, last week warrant our attention because, like it or not, they represent the thinking of a large swath of the modern Democratic Party. But my aim is not to highlight Clinton's never-ending catalog of excuses for losing the presidential election, except to note that rather than blame everyone and everything but herself, she should apologize for stealing the nomination. If she hadn't done that, she wouldn't have to blame anyone. She should also have to answer for FISA-gate, but I don't want to waste space demonstrating Clinton's unfitness for office -- because I...

What if they held a special election and nobody won? That's more or less what happened in southwestern Pennsylvania, in the special election to fill the vacancy in Pennsylvania's 18th Congressional District. Democrat Conor Lamb narrowly defeated Republican Rick Saccone -- by 627 votes out of 228,378 counted -- in a district held by Republican Tim Murphy since 2003. More to the point, the district was carried by a 20-point margin by Republican Donald Trump in 2016 and by a 58-41 percent margin by Republican Mitt Romney in 2012. Lamb's margin seems likely to hold up under a possible recount,...

The leftist-organized wave of school walkouts on March 14 to protest gun violence is a classic example of the way protests are categorized by our news and entertainment media. 1. Liberal protests are authentic cries from the grass roots; conservative protests are "Astroturf." How homegrown were these liberal walkouts? They were organized weeks ago by the Women's March on Washington leftists. Liberal parents forced school administrators to knuckle under and allow the walkouts without punishment. They were supported by passionate media coverage and media conglomerates like Viacom, which dedicated 17 minutes of airtime to show solidarity. So, was this organized...

Free speech has become a conservative idea by default because liberals don’t believe in it any more. Liberals have given up on the idea of coming up with the best argument and now work tirelessly to silence their opposition so they can win the argument by default. Liberals NEED to do this because their ideas don’t work very well in the real world and if their ideas are tested and evaluated logically, they will be rejected by most people. So, how do they get around that? 1) Libsplaining: For every guy out there mansplaining, there are probably 500 liberals libsplaining what...

The tax-reform provision repealing the penalty on those who refuse to participate in ObamaCare has freed millions of Americans to escape a system that exploits them. But while Americans can escape ObamaCare, they still can’t buy insurance in the individual market independent of ObamaCare because private insurers are prohibited from selling it. If this prohibition can be removed through the granting of state waivers by the Department of Health and Human Services, or by the passage of a new federal statute, ObamaCare will collapse into a high-risk insurance pool for the seriously ill rather than become a stepping stone to...

In Hillary Clinton's recent visit to the India Today Conclave, she made what would be, if she were anyone other than Hillary Clinton, some astonishing statements. She asserted that "all that red" in the middle of the United States map comprises poor, backward denizens who "don't like black people getting rights" or "women getting jobs." Here's a peculiar statement that's gotten a lot of attention: [Democrats] do not do well with white men, and they do not do well with married, white women. And part of that is an ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss,...

RUSH: Grab sound bite No. 3. Mike Murphy, Republican consultant extraordinaire — this is the guy that ran Jeb Bush’s campaign, hundred thousand dollars, got three delegates, he and Mark McKinnon are the two probably most prominent Republican consultants out there. They’re both on CNN last night with — well, I don’t know if they both were on with Don Lemon or not, but the first one is Murphy on CNN Tonight. And he says the problem that the Republicans have in the November elections is Trump, Trump, Trump, that’s the problem, and it’s a problem the Republicans just cannot...

RUSH: From the New York Times that Mueller subpoenas Trump Organization. This is the Trump Tower company. This is the real estate and building company. This has nothing to do with the campaign, nothing to do with collusion, nothing to do with the Russians and elections. Is Mueller trying to prove that he is conducting a witch-hunt? What in the world does the Trump Organization have to do with the Trump campaign colluding with the Russian government? And I want to read to you something here from the New York Times piece that’s just leaked here. It’s from Maggie Haberman....

One hundred years ago this month, all hell broke loose in France. On March 21, 1918, the German army on the Western Front unleashed a series of massive attacks on the exhausted British and French armies. German General Erich Ludendorff thought he could win World War I with one final blow. He planned to punch holes between the French and British armies. Then he would drive through their trenches to the English Channel, isolating and destroying the British army. The Germans thought they had no choice but to gamble. The British naval blockade of Germany after three years had reduced...