Free Republic

What does ‘The Best of Enemies’ get wrong? Just about everything, but especially the battle between left and right. I'm disappointed to report that “The Best of Enemies,” the new film about William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, is the worst of documentaries. I should know—I was acquainted with both men, and neither the individuals nor their philosophies are accurately portrayed. Worst of all, the movie badly misrepresents the very issue it purports to illuminate: the titanic battle between liberalism and conservatism in the middle of the 20th century. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, as a second-generation neoconservative Democrat,...

The conservative 2014 Senate challengers have endorsed the candidate who, like them, hopes to be a vessel for anti-establishment frustration.Ted Cruz's presidential campaign may not get many endorsements from Senate colleagues. Not coincidentally, the Texas senator is racking up support from primary challengers who tried but failed to unseat some of those senators last year. Tennessee's Joe Carr, Mississippi's Chris McDaniel, and South Carolina's Lee Bright, three conservatives who opposed longtime GOP senators in 2014 primaries, have all backed Cruz for president. It's a small part of Cruz's effort to do next year what those candidates did last year: serve...

NCLR president Janet Murguia blames Trump for the beating of a Hispanic man in Boston and says the GOP’s attacks on birthright citizenship and immigration will further damage its reputation with Latinos. Pointing to an assault against a Hispanic man last week allegedly inspired by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, National Council of La Raza (NCLR) president Janet Murguia said the GOP’s embrace of Trump and lurch to the right on birthright citizenship and immigration could damage them in 2016 with Latino voters. On Wednesday, two Boston white men with extensive criminal histories allegedly urinated on and beat a homeless...

The environmental justice and Black Lives Matter movements are complementary. We can’t afford to choose between the two. Those of us from low-income communities of color are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. US cities and towns that are predominantly made up of people of color are also home to a disproportionate share of the environmental burdens that are fueling the climate crisis and shortening our lives. One has only to recall the gut-wrenching images of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath to confirm this. At a time when police abuse is more visible than ever thanks to technology, and our communities...

The odds of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination are up from 1% in late July to 19% now on Pivit, an interactive prediction marketplace that combines public opinion, news and data to predict the live odds of election outcomes. Over the last month, the billionaire business man has topped several national polls that show him leading the Republican pack of 17 candidates. But his worth in the Pivit's prediction game had not followed suit until recently. Trump still trails former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is at 24% odds to take the GOP nomination on the Pivit marketplace. Pivit...

The GOP frontrunner’s surprising staying power has inspired soul-searching and agony among party elites.What is happening to the Republican Party? I put that question to Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina and basement-dwelling presidential candidate, who was getting ready to hold a campaign event in Hooksett, New Hampshire. “Well, the front-runner is crazy,” Graham said. He was referring, of course, to Donald Trump, the GOP’s seemingly unstoppable chart-topper, who has survived outrage after outrage that would have ruined a conventional candidate. He commands, on average, double the support, among potential Republican primary voters, of his nearest challenger. Graham—who is...

A man caught by D.C. police after carjacking a woman in the Sibley Hospital parking lot on Wednesday is an illegal immigrant who had already been deported once. He also carjacked another woman earlier in the week in Potomac, Maryland minutes after getting out of jail. On Monday, Guaymar Cabrera-Hernandez was released from the Montgomery County Detention Center where he has been since June. The charges against him for that arrest are unclear. He then showed up at an Islamic education center in Potomac and violently carjacked a 38-year-old woman. “He was standing at the driver side door -- her...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sam Clovis, the highly touted Iowa campaign co-chair for Rick Perry, has departed the Texas governor's presidential bid, a blow that comes as the campaign prepares to restructure its program in the early states. Confronted by anemic fundraising that forced the candidate to stop paying all its workers, Perry's campaign is preparing to off-load some of its field operation to an allied super PAC. The move will test whether an outside group can organize just as well as a traditional campaign. Over the next two weeks, Perry's field program will revamp as the $17 million super PAC...

It's more than a little ironic that a guy as hardline on immigration as Donald Trump has been surrounded by immigrants his entire life, starting from the very beginning. "My mother was born in Scotland, in the Hebrides, in Stornoway, so that's serious Scotland. And she was a great woman," Trump said in a 2010 documentary. "Whenever anything was on about, ceremonial about the Queen she could sit at the television and just watch it. She had great respect for the Queen and for everything (she) represents" In 1930, an 18-year-old Mary MacLeod sailed for America from Glasgow on the...

A former White House fellow has a unique proposal to take affirmative action to a whole new level. He wants to give votes cast by African-Americans a greater weight than those cast by non-blacks. So much for “one man, one vote.” “Racial reconciliation is impossible without some kind of broad-based, systemic reparations,” career Naval officer and PhD candidate Theodore R. Johnson wrote in The Washington Post. “But if a pecuniary answer can’t fix the structural disadvantage — and it can’t — what can?” Johnson proposes that each black vote count as five-thirds of a vote, flipping around the old constitutional...

Ted Cruz got a big boost in Iowa recently when the influential social conservative activist and radio host Steve Deace endorsed him. To call it a sought-after endorsement would be an understatement. Deace says prospective 2016 GOP campaigns began contacting him well before the 2012 election. (All just assumed that Mitt Romney was going to lose.) The recruitment efforts picked up in 2013 and 2014. When few people were paying any attention to the still-forming Republican race, Deace was hard at work. “For me, this vetting process has been going on for a couple of years,” he says. “In our...

The municipal court judge in Ferguson, Missouri, on Monday announced sweeping changes to the city's court system, including an order to withdraw all arrest warrants issued in that city before December 31, 2014. Municipal Court Judge Donald McCullin, who was appointed in June, also changed the conditions for pretrial release. According to a press release put out by Ferguson, all defendants will be given new court dates with alternative penalties like payment plans or community service. Those caught for minor traffic violations should be less likely to end up behind bars because of McCullin. Under the new policy, they won't...

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he stands by his outspoken criticism of fellow candidate and reality show star Donald Trump because he is worried about the country succumbing to an obsession with celebrity over substance. "My fear ... is that there are countries that do succumb to celebrity... often in the developing world, celebrities and very wealthy people will win," said Paul during a 22-minute pre-taped interview posted on the web site of NBC's "Meet the Press." "I worry about the country because I don't believe that there's any sincerity to what [Trump's] message is." "And even...

Conservatives usually believe in American exceptionalism, and in upholding the Constitution. Which is why it's strange to see so much conservative ebullience over Donald Trump's proposal to end birthright citizenship. It's not news that there are a significant number of Americans who are anxious about immigration — illegal and otherwise — and that they exert considerable political clout (though ultimately less than is sometimes breathlessly suggested). And many of those people fret about so-called "anchor babies." The problem with "anchor babies" is that they're a myth. (Trust me. As a Frenchman with a fertile wife who often wanted to emigrate...

A specter is haunting the West — the specter of immigration. All the powers of the old establishment have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Liberal and Conservative, democrat and aristocrat, college radicals and billionaires. Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as fascistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of racism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? Obviously, I’m having some fun here by reworking the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto to fit...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he would change the tax laws to force people who work at hedge funds to pay more in taxes, because "the hedge fund guys are getting away with murder." In an interview with Time Magazine published last week, Trump said he might want to "switch taxes around" because "I have hedge fund guys that are making a lot of money that aren't paying anything." He confirmed on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday that he would change the tax system to force those who work for hedge funds to pay more. "They're paying nothing and...

In order for a candidate to attract supporters, he needs at least one of two things: to show that he is winning, or to show that he has the potential to win. In the early stages, which we are now, a candidate can be viable and still be in single digits in the polls, as long as people think he has potential to move up. The minute he concedes that he's not going to win, he's lost. And that's just what Rand Paul has reportedly done. In March, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul put his odds of winning the Republican presidential...

Who are the leaders in this crowded race for the GOP nomination? If you look at national polls, the top three are Trump, Bush, and Carson. If you look at New Hampshire, it's Trump, Kasich, and Bush. If you look at Iowa, it's Trump, Carson, and Walker, though I don't know how proud Scott Walker can be to be third in a state that should almost be giving him a home-state advantage. But these polls by themselves don't show who the leaders are in the race. To know the answer to that question, you have to look at all the...

The clear hatred of the Republican establishment for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and the mainstream media’s genuine fear that the articulate Cruz could be the nominee of the Republican Party in 2016 were clearly revealed in a telling exchange on NBC’s Meet the Press. Charlie Black—who worked on Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns in 1976, 1980, and 1984 before serving as senior political adviser to the 1992 re-election campaign of George H. W. Bush and chief campaign adviser for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in 2008—bluntly told host Chuck Todd that Donald Trump will not be the nominee of the Republican Party....

SOME blondes have all the fun. As Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush get more testy, Donald Trump gets more chesty. And more blond. It’s mind-boggling to contemplate a President Trump trying to make peace between North and South Korea, even as we watch the pugnacious Candidate Trump trolling poor Jeb on Twitter and predicting that poor Hillary would have to run the country from Leavenworth. But, as Trump would say, deal with it. The pol who refused to identify himself as a pol on his jury duty questionnaire has utterly scrambled American politics. And he has trademarked the phrase “Make...