Free Republic

Farewell, left versus right. The contest that matters now is open against closed AS POLITICAL theatre, America’s party conventions have no parallel. Activists from right and left converge to choose their nominees and celebrate conservatism (Republicans) and progressivism (Democrats). But this year was different, and not just because Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party. The conventions highlighted a new political faultline: not between left and right, but between open and closed (see article). Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, summed up one side of this divide with his usual pithiness. “Americanism, not...

Myth-busting website Snopes flagrantly lied about the lack of visible American flags on the first day of the Democratic Convention, claiming an image from the second day of the convention was actually from the first day in an attempt to debunk a factual story from The Daily Caller. First, the facts. TheDC reported on Monday about the lack of visible American flags at day one of the convention. Several flags were briefly on stage for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance, at which point they were carried off stage, as the C-SPAN video for Monday clearly shows at the...

Paul Krugman is confused. He can’t figure out why Americans are so gloomy that they might vote for Donald Trump in November. From the columnist’s perch at the New York Times, things in America seem A-okay: If you want to feel good about the state of America, you could do a lot worse than what I did this morning: take a run in Riverside Park. There are people of all ages, and, yes, all races exercising, strolling hand in hand, playing with their dogs, kicking soccer balls and throwing Frisbees. There are a few homeless people, but the overall atmosphere...

Paul Simon took to the Democratic National Convention stage last night to perform his hit "Bridge Over Troubled Water." A lot of fans were quick to point out that the singer's performance was, well, troubled. Éponine15191 @Eponine15191 So I've just caught up with the footage of Paul Simon at the DNC yesterday singing Bridge Over TW, I'm so sad for him. He looks sick. #sad 5:26 AM - 26 Jul 2016 Public_Interest @Public_Interest Paul Simon fan here: Paul Simon was awful tonight. 10:05 PM - 25 Jul 2016 Mr. Cummings @APGOPOHHS I've always loved Paul Simon but that was more...

Moderators, I hope you'll permit the vanity. I wanted to solicit opinion from FReepers on the remaining NeverTrumpers. What amuses me is the degree to which the NeverTrumper disdain for Trump seems to be personal. It goes well beyond the superficial pettiness of a faculty lounge dispute, and seems bitter and vindictive. With some evidence (not much of which I can post here), I'll posit three motives: Personal slight against one or more NeverTrumpers, perhaps an ancient slight Trump has not paid sufficient fealty to the Conservo-sphere of writers and political consultants He has not hired Mike Murphy or Matthew...

Objectives—This report presents preliminary 2015 data on U.S. statistics offices in 2015. Comparisons are made with final 2014 data births. Births are shown by age and race and Hispanic origin of mother. Data on marital status, cesarean delivery, preterm births, and low birthweight are also presented. Results—The 2015 preliminary number of U.S. births was 3,977,745, down slightly (less than 1%) from 2014. For the three largest race and Hispanic origin groups in the United States, the number of births decreased for non-Hispanic white women, increased for Hispanic women, and were essentially unchanged for non-Hispanic black women in 2015. The general...

Last September (when bitcoin was trading at $230) we said that "As China Scrambles To Enforce Capital Controls, This Is Great News For Bitcoin" and that it is only a matter of time before Chinese buyers figure out that in a world in which the freeflow of capital out of China is increasingly more suppressed and where physical gold is actively being stored in China but is next to impossible to get it out of the country, it is only a matter of time before bitcoin explodes as China's bubble berserk population scrambles to buy. One month ago, we showed...

Before Tuesday, I’d have said that Puerto Rico had no chance to win its legal fight to let its municipalities and utilities declare bankruptcy. That's how the island hopes to resolve its overwhelming debt problems, but the federal bankruptcy code says that it can't. That's what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit held last summer, unanimously. The statute seemed so clear that even Judge Juan Torruella, the appellate court’s only Puerto Rican member, concurred in an outraged separate opinion criticizing the federal law. Puerto Rico's Slide Then Sonia Sotomayor stepped in. Oral arguments before the Supreme Court...

No one misses David Letterman ... except perhaps Rupert Jee. Miffed about the absence of tomato in his B.L.T., new host of "The Late Show" Stephen Colbert toted a blow-up photograph of his sandwich to its place of origin, Hello Deli, to give shop-owner Rupert Jee a piece of his mind. "It's bacon, lettuce, tomato — the recipe is right in the name! The lack of tomato isn't just an insult to centuries of B.L.T. craftsmen who died toasting bread at Gettysburg; it's an insult to me personally," Colbert said, in segment on Thursday's night's episode. "Stephen, I'm sorry," Jee...

It’s a coin toss between China and Turkey for the title of least honest country, according to a new study. As part of a 15-nation honesty study, researchers from the University of East Anglia had the 1,500 subjects participate in a coin flip, telling them they’d get up to $5 every time it came up heads. The researchers theorized that if the percentage reporting heads was over 50 percent, participants were being dishonest, since heads statistically shows up only half the time. An estimated 70 percent of Chinese participants lied — the most dishonest of the bunch, according to the...

<p>Chinese President Xi Jinping was in no mood to grant favors at his White House state dinner — not even for Mark Zuckerberg’s unborn baby.</p> <p>Among the many tech and media titans who were invited, a few who came to kiss Xi’s ring at the Sept. 25 dinner hosted by President Obama and First Lady Michelle also asked for something in return.</p>

The FDA on Tuesday cleared Sprout Pharmaceuticals' once-daily non-hormonal oral drug Addyi (flibanserin) for generalised hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) in premenopausal women, with the agency noting it is the first FDA-approved drug available to treat sexual desire disorder in either men or women. The decision follows a majority vote by an advisory panel in June recommending Addyi for approval. The US regular stated that Addyi is being approved with a boxed warning about the risks of severe hypotension and syncope in patients who drink alcohol, in those who use moderate or strong CYP3A4 inhibitors and in patients with liver...

UNLIKE previous Alabama governors, Robert J. Bentley is not a fount of oratory. Nor is he a champion of “kinder and gentler.” His dyspeptic refusal to accept federal funds for Medicaid expansion, in a state where more than one million of 4.8 million residents depend on the program, betokens a stunning indifference to the Hippocratic oath. (The governor is a dermatologist.) Yet Mr. Bentley recently took a page from the Obama playbook and used a surprise executive order to remove four Confederate flags from the Alabama Capitol grounds, not far from the very spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in...

One evening several years ago, John Mary was up late reading a local blog when he came across a comment from a man who said he lived in Gulfport, Mississippi. The commenter had been watching his kid mow a relative’s lawn, he wrote, when a couple approached the boy and asked if he could cut their grass sometime. The commenter recognized the man. It was Senator Thad Cochran, he wrote, and the woman with him sure as hell wasn’t his wife. The gossip stuck with Mary, a 62-year-old from Hattiesburg, about 70 miles north of Gulfport. But he didn’t think...

Horne v. Department of Agriculture.decision is a big win for those of us who try to make a living in Ag Any net proceeds the raisin growers receive from the sale of the reserve raisins goes to the amount of compensation they have received for that taking. It does not mean that the raisins have not been appropriated for government use, nor can the government make raisin growers relinquish their property without just compensation as a condition for selling in interstate commerce. This is a major blow to government's program of trying to boost prices by keeping crops off the...

Long before he was caught lying about his chopper being forced down by enemy fire in Iraq, Brian Williams boasted how he bravely rescued a terrified puppy from a house fire. Or maybe it was two puppies. The truth-challenged NBC anchor told dueling versions of his supposed heroics as a teenage volunteer firefighter with the Old Village Fire Company in Middletown, NJ. In October 2011, Williams waxed rhapsodic about how his dad took him to fires. “I remember one such house fire . . . conducting a search on my hands and knees, when I felt something warm, squishy and furry on...

Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus. The students, who were recorded on a building surveillance camera wearing baggy hooded sweatshirts to hide their identity, littered Mahmood’s doorway with copies of his column, scrawled with messages like “You scum embarrass us,” “Shut the **** up,” and “DO YOU EVEN GO HERE?! LEAVE!!” They posted a picture of a demon and splattered eggs. This might appear to be...

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without proving that a crime occurred. Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs. Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing. The program has enabled local and state...

In response to a wave of bad behavior by the popular ride-sharing service Uber—with one executive suggesting digging up dirt on journalists who write negative articles about the company—many advocated a switch to Uber’s competitor, Lyft. But this approach ignores the fact that Uber’s abuses are baked into how “sharing” companies operate, a way of doing business that is shared by its competitors. More important, it misses a way to transform these companies that is right there in front of us: by socializing ownership among their workers. Cutting through the marketing BS of Silicon Valley is a good goal for...

How does one explain liberals’ relentless obsession with race? Democrats and left-wing activists clutch the notion of racism as America’s defining characteristic just as streetcorner drunks cling to their fifths of cheap booze. No matter what, neither community can unhand those bottles. In fact, this debilitating liberal addiction deserves a name: raceaholism. Advertisement Raceaholics like President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, New York mayor Bill de Blasio, overexposed circus barker Al Sharpton, Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, their allies, and their media enablers cannot stop talking about race. They refract almost every issue through that prism. According to them,...