Free Republic

What’s a white person to do? Recently, I had the pleasure to participate in the Interplay Hip Hop Symposium at Lehigh University. The event was hosted by the inimitable hip hop theatre pioneer Kashi Johnson and keynoted by brilliant lyricist and hip hop educator Asheru. I gave a lecture about white appropriation of rap. My lecture led to a discussion about how white people fit into the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Together, we came up with these, the ten cracka commandments for 2015: 1. #AllLivesMatter won’t matter until #BlackLivesMatter. This commandment is a litmus test and the greatest commandment. 2. Always remember...

Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley are auditioning for the role of Eugene McCarthy. RFK has not yet revealed himself. Nor has HHH. One thing is clear - Hillary! is cooked. She just doesn't realize it yet.

Activist calls for widespread reform as community reels from verdict that acquitted Michael Brelo for firing 49 shots at two people in car chase.When Al Sharpton got up to speak at the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland on Friday night, he was given a standing ovation. At what was billed as a “justice and reform revival”, attendees, mostly congregants of the church itself, had been primed by several hymns and scriptural invocations. Their pastor, reverend Jawanza Colvin, introduced the civil rights campaigner as “one of God’s trombones”. Sharpton proceeded to deliver a barn-burning speech that had the assembled on...

Smash the patriarchy! New York police allegedly arrested two men for “manspreading” (sitting with their legs far apart) on the subway, according to a report entitled “That’s How They Get You” released by the Police Reform Organizing Project. “On a recent visit to the arraignment part in Brooklyn’s criminal court, PROP volunteers observed that police officers had arrested two Latino men on the charge of ‘man spreading’ on the subway, presumably because they were taking up more than one seat and therefore inconveniencing other riders,” the report states.

RUSH: A new Gallup poll out. Headline: "Americans Continue to Shift Left on Key Moral Issues." Now, before you go off getting depressed about this, let me tell you what the reason for this is, after we give you the details. "Americans are more likely now than in the early 2000s to find a variety of behaviors morally acceptable, including gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage and sex between an unmarried man and woman. Moral acceptability of many of these issues is now at a record-high level." It's a subtle message to the Republican Party, and...

Pro-adoption organizations should have the same speech rights as any other organization, said the attorney representing a group whose pro-life license plate has been denied for the past 13 or 14 years in New York. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Friday reversed a lower court ruling ordering the state to let an adoption advocacy group put the words "Choose Life" on its own plates. By a 2-1 vote, the court said the commissioner of the state Department of Motor Vehicles had "broad discretion" to decide which plates to permit, and did not violate the First Amendment free speech rights...

Murders are way up so far this year in Manhattan, The Post has learned. Sixteen people were killed around the borough between the first of the year and Sunday. Over the same period last year, the figure was 11. That’s an increase of about 45 percent. Shootings in the borough have also soared. There have been 50 “shooting incidents’’ since Jan. 1, compared with 31 in the same time period in 2014 — an increase of about 38 percent. Some of these “incidents’’ involved more than one victim. The number of shooting victims nearly doubled, from 33 to 61. ....

This Sunday, Oprah is sitting down with the renowned Al Sharpton to discuss how his work as a Civil Rights leader has changed over the years, why he made the decision to get healthy and his beginnings as a preacher. Stuff we probably already knew or wouldn’t be too surprised to learn about Al Sharpton. But in a surprising revelation, Sharpton talks about the moment that changed his life: his father leaving his family, taking Sharpton’s older, half sister with him and having a child with her. Yes, you read that correctly. And yes it was a complete a hot...

New York City police chief Bill Bratton is worried about ISIS. So worried, in fact, that he's going to assign 450 New York Police Department cops to fight terrororism that may come from the Islamic State. “We need to be very concerned about terrorism … The significantly increased threat from ISIS using social media to recruit people not only to go to Syria to fight, but encouraging people … to attack police, to attack government officials, to basically brainwash them under their screwed-up ideology. That threat has expanded significantly in the now 16 months I’ve been police commissioner,” Bratton said...

I just finished reading Eugene Robinson’s article “We find trouble when we go looking for it.” Robinson seems to leave out some factual analysis. Robinson says that 85 percent of stops in New York City under the stop and frisk policy were blacks and Hispanics. The fact is 95 percent of murders in New York City are committed by people of color.

She learned at the feet of a master. Shakedown artist Al Sharpton’s eldest child wants $5 million from city taxpayers after she fell in the street and sprained her ankle, court rec­ords show. Dominique Sharpton, 28, says she was “severely injured, bruised and wounded” when she stumbled over uneven pavement at the corner of Broome Street and Broadway downtown last year, according to a lawsuit

Actress and liberal activist Susan Sarandon is still blaming America’s homeless problem on Ronald Reagan. The actress, probably best known for her role in the 1988 baseball hit movie Bull Durham, was invited on the May 13 edition of PBS’s Tavis Smiley to plug her son’s 2014 documentary, Storied Streets, that is now available on AMC’s streaming service. When Smiley asked Sarandon why the issue of homelessness was no longer on the “radar for discussion” she blamed former President Ronald Reagan, as seen in the following exchange: TAVIS SMILEY: There was a time that I recall where the issue of...

Michelle Obama for president? What if she ran against the seemingly impregnable Hillary Clinton? A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 14% of Likely U.S. Voters think the first lady should run for president. Seventy-one percent (71%) disagree, but another 15% are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.) Among black voters, however, 40% think Obama should run, and only 41% disagree. One-in-five (18%) is undecided. Seventy-eight percent (78%) of whites and 59% of other minority voters oppose a presidential bid by the first lady. In a hypothetical matchup with Hillary Clinton, the putative Democratic...

EVERY day, millions of Americans rely on a remarkable network of roads, bridges, subways, trains and buses to connect us to work, school and opportunity. But our transportation system, once the envy of the world, is in jeopardy. In New York City, subways and buses are overcrowded and often unreliable, and roadways and bridges are in dire need of repair and rehabilitation. From the next phase of the Second Avenue subway to plans to connect the Metro-North Railroad to Pennsylvania Station, to the proposed new subway line under Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, there isn’t a short- or long-term expansion project...

He’s on the road again. As violent crime soars in the Big Apple, Mayor Bill de Blasio has far more pressing matters to deal with — touting his progressive agenda in two more out-of-state locales. Hizzoner will be heading off Tuesday for his 11th trip outside New York in the last 12 months to address national or international issues. After speaking in three Midwestern states last month on income inequality, de Blasio is headed to DC to unveil details of his progressive agenda.

NBC announced on Sunday they were starting a new series called "Meet the Money: The Billionaire Donors." They started with GOP-backing Sheldon Adelson. When will they get to George Soros? In an effort to revitalize and unify the far-left Democratic party, progressives have relied on the very thing they often criticize -- the deep pockets of a billionaire supporter. Agenda supporters were linked to at least $159 million dollars in donations or political contributions from Soros. Many of those self-proclaimed progressives will gather on the steps of the U.S. Capitol May 12 at 3 p.m. to celebrate a new, far-left...

RUSH: This is from the "Monkey Cage" section of the Washington Post: "Blacks Die Sooner than Whites. How Many Votes Has This Cost Democrats?" This is an honest-to-God story by Dean Robinson. "Black people in the United States continue to be sicker and die sooner than whites. ... [T]hey suffer from 'excess mortality' -- that is, black deaths that would not have occurred had the death rate among blacks been the same as that among whites." So we have here, as now documented in the Washington Post, yet another terrible inequity that is distinctly American: The death rate inequality. So...

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker are tied atop a crowded 2016 GOP primary field in the early state of New Hampshire, with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush slipping into a tie for third with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who picked up some support since a separate poll was released in February. Mr. Paul and Mr. Walker were the first choice of 12 percent of GOP primary voters, followed by Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio at 11 percent apiece and businessman Donald Trump at 8 percent, according to the Bloomberg Politics/Saint Anselm poll. Next were...

Keep in mind that polls this early in a presidential cycle measure mostly name recognition rather than solid voter choice. Even with that caveat in mind — or perhaps because of it — the Bloomberg/St. Anselm poll released last night delivers bad news to Hillary Clinton and Democrats for 2016. Instead of a commanding lead over a field of emerging names, Hillary barely edges out most of the GOP field: There’s no clear Republican front-runner in the New Hampshire presidential nominating contest, while Hillary Clinton retains an overwhelming advantage among Democrats in the Granite State’s first-in-the-nation primary.Clinton’s advantage over...

Economic and political prowess necessary to buy themselves their safe-passages within the corrupted system While I get used to hearing the name of Hillary Clinton mentioned just about everywhere I turn to as her political campaign for the 2016 presidential elections gets underway, I cannot help but reminisce on the trail of lies that she and husband Bill have left behind in their Machiavellian crusade to ‘making it’. Bill and Hillary’s legacy of deceitful politics and politically smeared crusades for prowess comes as a renewed version of our own 21st century Bonnie and Clyde parody of outlaws—a tad less colorful...