Free Republic

Opinion polls, particularly in the buildup to a presidential election, are not designed to reflect public opinion, but instead to shape it. For the media, objectivity is only of historic interest, a journalistic tenet from a bygone era. Now most of the media is embedded within the Democrat party, serving as an advocacy arm or political action committee to influence elections and agendas. A CNN staffer, who bragged that he was “one step down” from a director, admitted to an undercover Tinder date, actually a real journalist working for James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, that CNN was “creating a story” that...

On 2 September 2018, Kansas University released a summation of a study on how gun owners affect politics.  The study will be presented at the American Political Science Association annual meeting in 2018, in Boston. A problem all scientists face is overcoming assumptions about reality they have already made. It is particularly true in social sciences such as political science. In such studies, it is very difficult to keep the world view of the person studying a subject from influencing the study.Most political scientists today subscribe to the Progressive political philosophy. It seems to be the case in the study...

House Democrats needed a big showing from their public impeachment hearings to rally public opinion and build a consensus for Donald Trump’s removal. After the first few days of testimony under Adam Schiff’s direction, they find themselves losing ground instead. In the latest Politico-Morning Consult poll, opposition to impeachment and removal has hit a recent high, and independents are bailing out on the project: The survey, which has tracked support and opposition for the inquiry each week, support for the investigation inched down 2 points — to 48 percent from 50 percent — while opposition to the inquiry ticked...

Apple is one of ten tech giants to once again call on the US Government not to reauthorize the Patriot Act in its current form. The Act expires on 1st June unless it is renewed by Congress. Apple was joined by AOL, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo.In an open letter to President Obama, NSA Director Admiral Rogers and other prominent government figures, the companies urge Congress to end the bulk collection of communications metadata–the logs that determine how and when ordinary citizens contact each other.The letter says that mass surveillance must end, and that a revised bill must contain mechanisms to ensure...

They can't be this dumb, can they? They just can't be. Our progressives Democratic friends aren't that stupid, right? But they are counting on the American people being stupid when it comes to world affairs. And there's very little to suggest they won't be successful in that endeavor. Be it the president saying ISIS is "contained" hours before the group unleashed evil on the streets of Paris, or the secretary of state saying the Paris attacks were crazy, unlike the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, where there was "legitimacy" and a "rationale" to them, nothing they say can...

Ever-higher temperatures are melting the ice sheets faster than projected. Sea level is rising. International efforts to reduce greenhouse gases are taking longer than expected. It's a nightmare scenario that could soon demand an emergency response. What to do? One idea gaining traction is to seed marine clouds with salt water or other particles, increasing their potential to reflect solar rays, cooling the earth. It's part of a nascent and controversial branch of science known as "sunlight reflection methods," or SRM. "We think SRM could buy time for other (carbon-reduction) measures to be put in place," said Philip J. Rasch,...

First they tried suing the utility companies. Then they tried suing the automakers. They even tried suing oil companies on behalf of an Alaskan village in danger of being inundated by oil-fueled rising sea levels. Each approach ended when courts said that the judiciary branch wasn’t the right place to address human-induced global warming, a problem so big it requires a coordinated international response that only legislators can implement. Now private plaintiff lawyers and their allies in government are trying a new strategy: Suing under state-law theories of public nuisance. San Francisco and several other California cities and counties have...

Left-wing scholars, particularly in academe, make lots of attention getting assertions. Regrettably, they usually offer little in the way of illuminating evidence. "In the midst of almost unimaginable horror in Puerto Rico, a bright light has shone on one of America's most unjustifiable and economically backward laws, the previously obscure Jones Act," Brink Lindsay and Steven Teles wrote on October 2, 2017 for Washington Monthly. "First created in the aftermath of World War I to buffer the impact of post-war demobilization, the Jones Act requires that all ships that carry cargo within the United States be built in America, with...

Behind the Headlines by Justin RaimondoAntiwar.com April 8, 2002 WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA POSTREL?Post-9/11: Who speaks for libertarianism – the Old Right or the Neocon Clones? A note from the author: I apologize, in advance, for the sheer length of this column, but since it addresses the sell-out of basic libertarian principles by people and institutions who purport to speak in its name, I thought it important to address these questions thoroughly, with extensive quotations from those I name. Too bad, in attacking Antiwar.com, these pathetic losers didn't do the same – but then what can one expect from craven...

I think I must have been ill that day. At some point, no one can say precisely when, libertarians apparently swore a feudal oath of fealty to the Republican Party. In response to an American Prospect article on libertarian disenchantment with the Bush administration, Reason's own former editor in chief Virginia Postrel explained that "real Dean voters don't like Jeff Flake. (I do.)" On the Crossfire view of politics, this makes sense: You pick your team and root for it, come hell or high water. The Platonic Real Dean Voter can't possibly hold any affection for a member of the...

US Muslims are tolerant, peaceful, and integrated into American society. Donald Trump has proposed profiling Muslim Americans and shutting down mosques. He claims that Muslim “hatred is beyond comprehension.” But the truth is that Muslim Americans are not only integrating into U.S. society, but are actually more opposed to violence and more tolerant than many other Americans. Muslim Americans Hold Mainstream Religious and Political Views US Muslims score higher than most on Gallup’s religious tolerance index. Muslims are similar to other religious Americans. Pew’s major survey of Muslims in 2011 found that religion was equally important to Christian and Muslim...

Conservative climate champions are often laughed off or ignored. But what’s happening within the American political right could change everything, and fast.Each year since 1989, the JFK Library bestows its Profile in Courage award to a public servant who takes a principled but unpopular position. This year,the award went to Bob Inglis, a former congressman from South Carolina who’s turned into America’s best hope for near-term climate action. Oh, he’s also a Republican.As you might expect, Inglis wasn’t always a climate campaigner. In his acceptance speech last week at the JFK Library in Boston,he described how and why he changed...

To the casual observer, the American right can appear an undifferentiated wall of denial and obstructionism on climate change, but behind the scenes there are signs of movement. A growing number of conservative leaders and intellectuals have come to terms with climate science and begun casting about for solutions. Led mainly by libertarians and libertarian-leaning economists, they've begun to coalesce behind a carbon tax, which they consider the most market-friendly of the available alternatives. Jerry Taylor, a longtime veteran of the libertarian think tank Cato Institute who recently founded his own libertarian organization, the Niskanen Center, is a vocal proponent...

Jerry Taylor believes he can change the minds of conservative climate skeptics. After all, he helped plant the doubts for many in the first place. He’s president of the Niskanen Center, a libertarian-leaning Washington, DC, think tank he founded in 2014. He and his colleagues there are trying to build support for the passage of an aggressive federal carbon tax, through discussions with Washington insiders, with a particular focus on Republican legislators and their staff. Lesson one: Pick the right targets Political scientists consistently find that mass opinion doesn’t drive the policy debate, so much as the other way around....

So Obama decided to warn everyone that Manhattan is about to turn into Atlantis. "The majority of people believe in things like science -- and scientists. And so when scientists tell us that the planet is getting warmer and we need to do something about it, the majority of people think that's a good idea, let's do something about that, because we don't want Manhattan to be underwater." Manhattan going underwater isn't science. It's science fiction. It's the sort of thing you get from watching movies like The Day After Tomorrow where evil Republican politicians neglect the Flying Global Warming...