Free Republic

My wife is not a big fan of President Trump. So when I got back from covering the Trump rally in Wildwood Tuesday, she asked me a question: “Were there any empty seats?” Were there any empty seats at Woodstock? I’ve never covered a Trump event that didn’t evoke images of that 1969 rock festival. As with Woodstock, the organizers have no need to advertise the event widely. The mere mention of it is enough to attract massive throngs of the faithful. Another similarity is the opportunity to hear a lot of great rock music from the 1960s. I arrived...

A great man once explained why New Jersey needed to tighten up its requirements for issuing driver’s licenses. "In an era after 9/11 it is so critical to have working safeguards to show we are who we say we are,” this man said back in 2004 as he implemented an ID system with a six-point verification system to prevent fraud. That great man – or perhaps I should say “great politician” - was none other than Jim McGreevey. Though his run as governor ended later that year for unrelated reasons, McGreevey had the soundest of political instincts. As for the...

What took him so long? That’s the question we should be asking about President Trump’s decision to remove troops from Syria. If you paid attention to Donald Trump’s comments on foreign affairs during the 2016 campaign, you heard a lot of pronouncements like the following: “The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE....

I woke up the other day and checked my messages. The first was from the most right-wing member of the state Senate. “Trump needs to rein in Captain Kangaroo and Mike Plumpeo,” read the message from Mike Doherty of Warrren County. “They are out of control.” The first reference is to John Bolton, the comic character with the white mustache. He got the job as President Trump’s national security adviser despite opposing the president on virtually every aspect of his “America First” foreign policy. The second reference is to Mike Pompeo, the somewhat portly secretary of state who is, like...

Here’s a quick quiz: Name one issue on which Mitt Romney has ever taken a principled stand and continued to defend it in the face of criticism. Can’t think of one? Me neither. So I got a good laugh the other day when the incoming senator from Utah penned a piece for the Washington Post in which he attacked President Trump’s character. Say what you will about Trump, but this is a guy who takes a position and sticks to it in the face of whatever opposition is thrown at him. Just in the past couple weeks, he has outraged...

LOS INDIOS, Texas – Photographer Andre Malok and I were three days into traveling the banks of the Rio Grande before we saw any sort of wall along the Mexican border. We finally saw one in McAllen. So did half the TV crews in Texas. It was Thursday, the day President Trump came to this border town to give a speech on his current tiff with Congress over $5 billion in funding for a border “wall” – or “fence” – or whatever. The day before, Andre and I had driven along 150 miles of border without seeing any barriers at...

Perhaps it is uncharitable of me, but the minute I hear the words "as a former addict myself," I stop listening to the speaker. Yesterday that speaker was Patrick Kennedy of the famed Kennedy clan. Kennedy, who had some problems with drugs back when he was a congressman, was testifying before a joint committee of the Legislature that is looking at legalization bills. He did a lot of fulminating, as Kennedys do, raising his voice and gesturing with his hands as he said things like, "As a father of five, the last thing I want is edibles sold on every...

Most of my fellow members of the mainstream media are of the opinion that last week was a bad one for President Donald Trump. I beg to differ. Last week it was announced that the Weekly Standard was going out of business. It seems there’s no market for a “conservative” publication dedicated to opposing Trump. That’s good news. It’s further proof that - if there’s one thing Trump has done since assuming office - it is solidifying his support among conservatives. As for the “conservatives” who worked in the offices of the Standard until last week, only inside the Beltway...

Till Tuesday I thought it was Donald Trump who had the most bungled transition in history. It turns out it was Phil Murphy. We learned that at a legislative hearing Tuesday into the allegations of rape leveled against one of his ex-staffers by one of his current staffers. The current staffer is Katie Brennan of the Housing and Mortgage Finance Authority. In October, the Wall Street Journal published her allegations that she had been raped during the 2017 gubernatorial campaign by Al Alvarez, who was at the time the campaign’s Hispanic/Latino outreach director. That article prompted Alvarez to resign his...

A lot of my fellow journalists are upset that CNN's Jim Acosta was banned from White House press conferences. Not me. I would prefer that all press conferences be restricted to the press, by which I mean the print media. I've been a print journalist since before Acosta entered kindergarten. For the first five years or so of my career I never attended a press conference that included TV and radio people. That made for a much more informative interchange between journalists and politicians. The reporters wanted simply to have their questions answered. The answers could then be incorporated into...

A reader asked me the other day why I was writing about marijuana legalization in Canada instead of President Trump's tangled relationship with Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman.Simple.  Because it's more fun to go to Canada to write about pot than to write about the Mideast. But now that I'm back in the U.S.A., let me address the Saudi issue. I told you so.For as long as I've been writing about Saudi Arabia, I have had nothing but bad things to say about the place. A month after the 9/11 attacks, I wrote, "If Saudi Arabia had only sand, we...

Don't look now, but Donald Trump is on the verge of accomplishing one of the biggest goals he endorsed during the 2016 presidential campaign.  He promised he would debunk the notion that the Beltway crowd was capable of micromanaging the Mideast.Thanks to Saudi Arabia's recent conduct, we now have irrefutable proof of that thesis.  The way Trump did so was brilliant. He named as his envoy to the Mideast a Jersey guy whose prior experience in diplomacy consisted of  getting the Eatontown Township Committee to cooperate on his plan for remaking an aging mall his family owns there.Jared Kushner then went...

I was driving over to Trenton the other day when I noticed a white sports car coming up on my left. At first I thought it was a Corvette. But as it sped past I realized it was something far more exotic: an Acura NSX. At $200,000, the NSX costs about $130,000 more than a Corvette. But it was so beautiful I decided I needed to buy one anyway. Unfortunately, I have a revenue problem. The Star-Ledger doesn't pay me that kind of dough. So I'm stuck with my current sports car, which was built in the prior millennium. That's...

The 2018 version of Donald Trump should listen to the 2004 version when it comes to Mideast policy. That guy was one heck of a hard-headed realist. Here's what he said about the Iraq War in an Esquire magazine interview that occurred about a year after George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" appearance on an aircraft carrier: "Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the county? C'mon....

(ABOVE: Am I the only one who's curious how the Washington Post uncovered so many women who made 40-year-old allegations against Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore while uncovering none who made one-year-old allegations against Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Menendez?) Stop me if you've heard this one before. Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore walked into a brothel ... ... and then he walked right back out. That's the account I got from Bill Staehle, a lawyer living in Asbury Park who served in Vietnam with Moore in the early 1970s. Staehle, who is now 70, was a captain in...

-snip- But let me focus on one historical instance of a tax-reform plan gone wrong. That was pointed out to me by my old high-school buddy Jim Byrnes, who was just re-elected to the township council of Berkeley Township, which includes Bayville as well as a chunk of oceanfront across the bay. It concerns big boats. Back in 1991, President George "Read My Lips; No New Taxes" Bush signed into law a bill meant to reduce the deficit by imposing a 10 percent "luxury tax" on yachts costing more than $100,000. What Bush forgot is that yachts really are a...

-snip- At the bottom were all the local candidates. But at the top was the presidential candidate of whom the lieutenant governor had said a month earlier, "While I cannot vote for Hillary Clinton, I will not vote for Donald Trump" in reaction to those "Access Hollywood" tapes. In the early evening, as Guadagno was shmoozing the crowd, that might have looked like a safe stance. All of the networks were predicting a Clinton victory. By morning, however, Republicans awoke to find themselves in a new era, one for which Guadagno was uniquely ill-suited. Her attack on Trump had alienated...

The Diversity Visa Lottery program was in the news last week after it was revealed that Sayfullo Saipov, the Paterson resident accused of masterminding that Manhattan terrorist attack, came here from Uzbekistan on such a visa. The program hands out 50,000 green cards per year to randomly chosen people from all over the world, none of whom have to prove they have anything more than the equivalent of a high-school diploma. I have always been critical of such programs not because of any potential for terrorism but for the simple reason that the United States does not need unskilled workers....

As we prepare to enter the final two weeks of this presidential campaign, here's how things shape up: On the one hand, we have a candidate who's accused of hiring crazed fanatics to aid in her campaign. On the other hand, we have a candidate who gets crazed fanatics to help in his campaign for free. Who's going to win? At the moment the most reliable poll in recent history is giving a slight edge to the guy who fires up fanatics for free. That's Donald Trump, and as of Saturday the Investors Business Daily/TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence Poll had him...

For some years now I have been endeavoring to instruct my readers on the difference between conservatives and "neo" conservatives. (If you remain confused please read this simple description.)I have Donald Trump to thank for making that distinction quite clear. The emergence of Trump as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party has sent the neocons into a frenzy. Meanwhile we genuine conservatives consider him a huge improvement over the prior Republican presidential nominee.