Free Republic

It's never easy to predict the future. But as PM's 110th anniversary celebration draws to a close, we've decided to try. Here are 110 ambitious ideas for the decades ahead. (For more about PopMech's brain trust and methodology, read Editor-in-Chief Jim Meigs' introduction. And if you want to try your hand at predicting the future, take our Facebook survey, and see when other readers think the most important events of the next 110 years will happen.) 2012—2022 · People will be fluent in every language. With DARPA and Google racing to perfect instant translation, it won't be long until your...

ISAAC ASIMOVAssuming we haven't destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet—and widespread hunger. These troubles can be traced back to President Ronald Reagan who smiled and waved too much. GREGORY BENFORD YOUR FUTURE AND WELCOME TO IT … 25 years from now. World population stands at nearly 8 billion. The Dow-Jones Industrial Average stands at 8,400, but the dollar is worth a third of today's. Oil is running out, but shale-extracted oil is getting cheaper. The real shortage in much of the world is…water. Most Americans are barely literate, think in...

Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson said Monday he thinks President Barack Obama will defeat Mitt Romney to win a second term. “I think Obama’s going to win, that’s what I think,” Johnson told POLITICO in an interview. “[My vote is] really spread out, meaning I don’t think there’s any state that I’m going to do better than another.” Johnson, who’s on the ballot in 48 states and the District of Columbia, hovers in single digits in the polls. The former two-term New Mexico governor declined to single out any state where he expected to do particularly well but said...

State by state, here’s how it’ll happen. ...I’m going to make my predictions on this race based on more than just the polls. Over the past few months there have been many indicators that this race is going to be drastically different from the one we saw in 2008 — Romney’s crowd sizes, volunteer efforts, fundraising efforts, and a change in the Obama campaign from presenting the candidate as an uplifting symbol of hope to presenting him as a beleaguered president trying to claw his way to reelection. First, I believe Romney will squeeze out a popular-vote win of about...

O'REILLY: "Campaign 2012 Segment" tonight, as you may know, Dick Morris predicting a big landslide for Mitt Romney even though, as we mentioned, a "New York Times" poll out today says the President will most likely win in three vital swing state. Morris, the author of the big new bestseller, "Here Comes the Black Helicopter"; he joins us now Dick Morris from Detroit. So you, I'm sure, repudiate the "New York Times" poll? DICK MORRIS, FOX NEWS POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes. And let me go through the numbers because it's important for people to get in. In Florida, the "Times" says...

No one doubts Michael Barone's credentials; the guy has established himself as the pre-eminent political nuts and bolts expert in the country. If you watch Barone on election night, you will realize he knows the politics of America down to the key individual counties in each state. His encyclopedic mind recognizes when a state's vote is trending toward one candidate or another early on, and while he is carefully not to predict a winner, he leaves the viewer with little doubt as to who is in trouble and who isn't. But it makes me wonder when he reels off a...

Bottom line: Romney 315, Obama 223. That sounds high for Romney. But he could drop Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still win the election. Fundamentals.

It comes down to numbers. And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney. ~ snip ~ In addition to the data, the anecdotal and intangible evidence—from crowd sizes to each side's closing arguments—give the sense that the odds favor Mr. Romney. They do. My prediction: Sometime after the cock crows on the morning of Nov. 7, Mitt Romney will be declared America's 45th president. Let's call it 51%-48%, with Mr. Romney carrying at least 279 Electoral College votes, probably more.

According to the latest Rasmussen state polls, Mitt Romney is in position to win the presidency; he should win at least 279 electoral votes. Romney leads in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, and New Hampshire; Obama leads in Nevada. Wisconsin and Iowa are tied. Were Romney to win both Wisconsin and Iowa, he’d secure another 16 electoral votes, putting him at 295 electoral votes...

Ohio Gov. John Kasich declared Sunday that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney is now poised to beat President Barack Obama in his critical battleground state. Appearing on NBC's “Meet the Press,” Kasich cited internal campaign polling that shows Romney with a lead in The Buckeye State. This was the first time that Kasich said Romney could carry the state. He pointed to a swing in momentum since the first presidential debate in which Romney bested President Obama’s lackluster performance. The debates were a turning point in Romney’s campaign for president because they gave people a chance to see him, rather...

Lately a simple question has been coming to mind: just how did Mitt Romney get elected governor of heavily Democratic Massachusetts ten years ago?  Romney could have run for governor of Utah instead, which would have been not only easier but would have spared us the egregious Jon Huntsman.  Saying that he ran as a moderate, pro-choice Republican is not a fully adequate explanation.  Nor is a weak Democratic opponent (Shannon O’Brien), or the strange fact that Democratic Massachusetts had elected three Republicans in a row before Romney.  If anything that made it an even harder race to win.Now, you...

An economic model aimed at predicting presidential elections suggests that Gov. Mitt Romney has a narrowly better chance than President Barack Obama of carrying the race. Yale University economist Ray Fair has analyzed economic data from every presidential election since 1916. The model he developed has, after the fact, named the winners of all but two races — the 1960 election, when Richard Nixon lost to John Kennedy, and the 1992 election, when George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. With Friday’s gross domestic product report, the three economic variables that Mr. Fair has found are best at predicting elections...

Dick Morris' "Lunch" video this morning involves a claim that a realistic reading of today's polls indicate that Romney (or anybody else other than Rick Santorum more or less) will beat Obama very badly. The basic gist is that Obama needs to be over 50% among likely voters at this point to break even and the fact of his being no better than around 45 spells wipeout in November since the undecideds almost never break for an incumbent under such circumstances. Morris notes that it's as if marriages were five year contracts with options to renew and somebody were to...

China’s Communist Party is gambling that this year’s tap on the brakes has been just enough to curb the housing boom and stop inflation pushing up to danger levels, but not enough to tip the economy into a hard-landing. The great hope is that Goldilocks growth can be kept on track to ensure an orderly transition of power in October 2012, when a new generation of leaders takes charge of the 1.3bn strong nation for the first time in a decade. The front-runner for General Secretary appears to be Xi Jinping, China’s "Redder than Red" mystery man. With public debt...

Nate Silver, in his role as New York Times political poll analyst, has generated a graphical analysis of the various Republican contenders for the 2012 nomination. Clearly we’re still the better part of a year away from the primaries, but what else did you really have to do this weekend aside from arguing over election predictions? Let’s take a look at the graph and then spend a moment discussing how it was crafted. We can skip over the relative merit of the chances assigned to each candidate (at least until the comments begin) since Nate took each person’s prospects for...