Free Republic

Kellyanne Conway weighed in Thursday on the bitter Twitter feud between her husband George and President Trump, calling her spouse's criticism of her boss "unusual" while thanking Trump for defending her from what “he thinks is unfairness.” “My husband has been very critical of the president publicly, which is unlike him because he’s usually a very private person,” she told Maria Bartiromo In the interview, Conway spoke at length about the household tensions over her administration work, with her husband openly questioning the president's mental health and Trump publicly attacking him as a "loser" on Twitter. “This is new," she...

Sweden: Shia Muslims fearful of returning Islamic State jihadis The Shia Muslim community in Sweden is concerned about its safety “if Islamic State militants return home.” Unfortunately for the Shia, Leftist Swedes believe that it is “racist” for Sweden not to embrace Swedish jihadis as they would any other Swedish citizen. Many other nations, such as Canada, hold the same view. Leftists and the many charlatans who are gainfully employed in the anti- “racism” industry have managed to exacerbate racial divisions. In this industry, those who do not fit their narrative do not exist. Muslims who are threatened by other...

The previous bidding in the government debate over new border wall construction seemed to come down to an offer of $5.7B from the President and one dollar from Nancy Pelosi. With those talks effectively turning into a stalemate, President Trump has been looking into alternate funding options, and it now appears that he’s latched onto something else. And that “something else” is big. We’re talking about nearly $13 billion and it would all be coming from the military. But not everyone is happy about it. (Reuters) The U.S. Department of Defense is proposing to pay for President Donald Trump’s...

Noah Millman wrote a marvelously honest piece for "The Week" last week about the pay-to-play college admissions scandal. He acknowledges what many have known for a long time: First, that admission to the most elite schools is not purely based upon merit. Second, that education as good as -- and often better than -- that at the Ivies and other top-tier institutions can be obtained elsewhere. What parents are really after, Millman says, is status. This has become more important than the education itself, or even connections, which the children of these grasping, bribing parents frankly already have. Millman makes...

As the pilots of the doomed Boeing jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia fought to control their planes, they lacked two notable safety features in their cockpits. One reason: Boeing charged extra for them. For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons. Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the...

Italy: Muslim father tries to run over daughter for being too Westernized “A 53-year-old Moroccan man who tried to run over his 22-year-old daughter near Vercelli because she lived ‘western-style’ on Monday said ‘I’ve never laid hands on my daughter, I’m strict but I do it for my children’s good.’ El Mustafa Hayan was arrested on charges of attempted murder.” So much for the freedom of women to make choices and the duty of migrants to assimilate. This incident captures the meaning of honor killing and violence by Muslims who believe that they commit such crimes for the “honor” or...

Or so “sources” say, but how can this story not be true? I made the same point in a post last week. Lost amid the outrage over rich parents buying college seats for their dimwit children is the fact that Lori Loughlin’s daughter Olivia was doing quite well for herself as a social-media “influencer.” If you can pull a million views for a video, as she could, you can make serious money from that alone. If you can bring a sponsor’s products to an audience of that size, as she routinely did, you’ve got serious ad money on top...

‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ Appendix THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism…It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous...

CONCORD -- New Hampshire residents will face expanded background checks and a seven-day waiting period for gun purchases if a pair of bills passed in the House of Representatives become law. The House voted Tuesday to expand background checks for private gun sales and transfers, as well as add a seven-day waiting period before a sale can be completed. The bill, which passed on a 203-148 vote, would close a loophole in the current New Hampshire law that allows for private firearm transactions to take place at gun shows without a background check.

There’s an obvious reason. What I can’t figure out is whether the numbers here are strong evidence that Democratic leaders do have serious influence over the rank-and-file’s views — or that they don’t. The decline — from 43% in favor in December to 36% now — stems largely from a change in Democratic views on impeaching the President. In December, 80% of self-identified Democrats said they were in favor of impeachment — that now stands at 68%, a 12-point dip. Among independents and Republicans, support for impeachment has fallen 3 points over the same time.The only major subgroup among...

March 21, 2019, marks yet another milestone. While it is not his birthday, Carter becomes the oldest living former president in United States history.At the age of 94 years and 172 days, he passes George H.W. Bush, who was 94 years, 171 days when he died last November.

In the wake of the college admissions scandal where meritocracy was bypassed by the wealthy and connected, New York City leftists Bill de Blasio and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are demanding an end to the strict meritocracy governing admission to the crown jewels of public education, Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High. Yesterday, the freshman congresswoman tweeted out her outrage at strict meritocracy:   68% of all NYC public school students are Black or Latino. To only have 7 Black students accepted into Stuyvesant (a *public* high school) tells us that this is a system failure. Education inequity is...

For those in the political world, Election 2020 is already here, and the biggest question is whether or not President Donald Trump will get re-elected. Fifty percent of voters think that is likely to happen, while 49 percent disagree. In reality, of course, there are two huge unknowns that will define the parameters of the campaign. The first is the state of the economy. If we are in a recession on Election Day, it will be very difficult for the president to get re-elected. But assuming the economy remains strong, we could have another close election to watch. In that...

As. Sen. Bernie Sanders runs for President again, he keeps trying to persuade voters that his governing socialism would be the soft Scandinavian kind, not the hard Soviet kind. There’s immediately a problem with his Scandinavian analogy, since the countries of that region have been running away from Sanders-style economics and in recent years have become champions of corporate tax rate-cutting. The larger problem is his ongoing commitment to an abusive regime. The candidate understands that he needs to find a way to spin Marxist central planning as voter-friendly. Mr. Sanders tells National Public Radio in an interview broadcast this...

The Case for Jexodus It must be based on a fight to repair this country by restoring its values and its truths. March 21, 2019 Daniel Greenfield 16 FrontPage comments Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Zionism has always appealed to two kinds of Jews: those who are running to it and those who are running away from something. Jexodus, meaning a Jewish exit from under the shadow of the donkey, also has those who are running away from something, usually...

Had there been eyewitnesses, we'd have known about the Bering blast within minutes, but it happened beneath the cloud deck in a sparsely populated region off the east coast of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula (58.6°N, 174.2°W). Military satellites designed to look for nuclear explosions picked up the blast, as did more than 16 infrasound detectors worldwide. Luckily for us, so did the Japanese Himawari 8 satellite, which took striking images of the sooty trail of dust ablated from the meteoroid during its atmospheric passage.

Researchers there have developed a way to levitate and propel objects using only light, by adding specific nanoscale patterning to their surface. Scientists have the ability to move and manipulate tiny objects with the use of ‘optical tweezers.’ The tweezers move objects via the radiative pressure from a sharply focused beam of laser light. However, this impressive tool can only move small very small objects a very limited distance. The trick is to create very specific patterns on the object's surface. These nanoscale patterns interact with the light so that the object keeps ‘righting’ itself if disturbed so that it...

On March 5, 2019, Democrats and their mainstream media allies tried to deploy yet another tactic in their endless efforts to disrupt the internal working of the Trump administration. This time, it was over the matter of security clearances. National security in the White House is a strange issue for Democrats to pursue now, given the recent history of the Obama administration. For just one stunning example among several, Huma Abedin not long ago had a high-level security clearance in the Obama White House. As Hillary Clinton's longtime assistant, Huma held that clearance while working as a top aide to...

There is a loud debate going on in Washington right now, one that we participate in, about border security -- whether to build a wall, how much funding ICE should get and whether our detention centers are big enough to hold everyone they need to hold. People argue about these questions every day. And so it seems like the parties are divided on the matter. But on a deeper level, there really is no debate, there is instead consensus. Virtually everyone in the political system knows, as an article of faith, that mass immigration is good for our economy. Immigrants...

thiopian Airlines was ahead of its competitors in implementing the simulator to train would-be pilots of the new plane, according to reports. Yared Getachew, co-pilot of Flight 302, had taken a course on another simulator as recently as October, but not one specifically designated for the Max 8, The New York Times reported, citing someone familiar with Ethiopian Airlines. The source told the Times that Getachew was not due for another training until after the crash. Flight 302, much like Indonesia’s Lion Air flight, which crashed in October, likely failed after its automated "anti-stall" system inadvertently pushed the plane’s nose...