Free Republic

It was only a few weeks ago when outgoing Ohio Governor John Kasich said he was seriously considering a 2020 primary challenge to President Trump, if only to “send a message.” (Who that message was intended for remains unclear.) But hey… the guy is going to be unemployed come January so he needs something to keep himself busy.But now, with Christmas fast approaching, something seems to have changed. During an interview with the Associated Press, Kasich was striking a decidedly different tone. Clearly, if you’re going to mount a primary challenge, you need to believe that you at least have...

The Harvey Weinstein scandal has a lot of moving parts headed towards an important hearing next week that will set the next stage in the criminal proceeding. On one end, Weinstein has been pushing a Delaware bankruptcy court to allow him to recover files maintained by The Weinstein Co. and then permit him to use those emails and other documents to defend himself from sexual assault charges in New York. On the other end, there's still pending civil lawsuits including one class action from his many accusers. On Thursday, those women sounded the alarm about Weinstein's efforts. "He should not...

A Scottsdale couple sparked toy brand Mattel's attention with a social media post asking for a same-sex Barbie wedding set. Matt Jacobi and Nick Caprio are set to be married May 2019 and their two nieces will be flower girls. When one of the girls' 8th birthday came around, Jacobi and Caprio wanted to get her something special to get her excited about the big day. The couple found some Barbie wedding sets but none of them were same-sex wedding sets... Jacobi said Mattel reached out to him Wednesday to set up a meeting to discuss the issue and they...

A 3-year-old boy was "severely" beaten and abused -- including being burned with scalding water -- by six adults, in a consistent and coordinated form of punishment, New Jersey officials said. Patricia Gamarra, 62, Mary Buchan, 55, Patricia Buchan, 28, Bridget Buchan, 23, Natacha Smith, 43, and Homer Searcy, 39, were arrested and charged with aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of the toddler, Essex County Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement Wednesday. Smith is the 3-year-old boy’s mother, though it’s unclear if the five others have any relation to the child. The six people were living in the home...

Barack Obama pushed gun control for “Trayvon” and “those congregants in Thousand Oaks,” among others, during a December 13 acceptance speech for the Robert F. Kennedy Ripple of Hope Award. Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in self-defense on February 26, 2012, after attacking a neighborhood watchman, and 12 people were killed in Thousand Oaks’ Borderline Bar & Grill on November 7, 2018. During his acceptance speech, IJR magazine quoted Obama saying: “The horror of gun violence continues to plague our nation, a pain that many in this room know too well,” he said. “The bullets that took Bobby, JFK,...

The federal government’s failure to study risks of oil spills in the powerful Gulf Stream is “stunning” and “beyond foolish” given the stakes and current’s force, drilling opponents said this week. Packing more power than all of the world’s freshwater rivers combined, the Gulf Stream flows about 55 miles off the South Carolina coast. Yet federal regulators haven’t done computer simulations of how oil spills would interact with this mighty river in the sea, The Post and Courier reported earlier this year in its investigative project “Into the Gulf Stream.” Critics said this omission is particularly glaring in the wake...

WASHINGTON - Throughout Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency, he repeatedly promised to build a high, impenetrable, concrete wall along America’s nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico. And he further promised that it wouldn’t cost American taxpayers one red cent, saying he would make Mexico pay for it. “Who’s going to pay for the wall?,” he asked legions of supporters at his campaign rallies, who yelled back in unison: “Mexico!” How could a U.S. president force Mexico — a sovereign nation and a major trading partner — to pay for it? Trump didn’t say, and his supporters didn’t ask, even though...

Thursday marks the 10th anniversary of former Vice President Al Gore’s prediction that within five to seven years, it was likely that the North Polar Ice Cap would be completely free of ice during some months of the summer. The Gateway Pundit blog recalled Gore’s remarks to the United Nations Climate Change in Copenhagen on Dec. 13, 2009, referencing computer models by scientists. “Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” said...

New York (CNN Business)The Weekly Standard, the magazine that espouses traditional conservatism and which has remained deeply critical of President Donald Trump, will shutter after 23 years, Clarity Media Group, the owner of its publisher announced Friday morning. It will publish its final issue on December 17. The announcement came after the magazine's editor-in-chief, Stephen Hayes, met privately with Ryan McKibben, the chairman of The Weekly Standard's publisher, MediaDC. "For more than twenty years The Weekly Standard has provided a valued and important perspective on political, literary and cultural issues of the day," McKibben said in a press release. "The...

University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass has been called plenty of names, including climate “denier,” but it wasn’t until he came out against the state’s proposed carbon tax last month that he was accused of being a racist. Since then, Mr. Mass said he has been upbraided by the university’s diversity dean and subjected to a faculty “inquisition,” events that have stoked alarm about the threat posed by campus climate-change activism to academic freedom. “I’m really worried about the intolerance that has developed at the university,” Mr. Mass told The Washington Times. “It’s really a minority of graduate students...

This has been a rough year for news junkies. Changing stations for network and cable-TV news reveals not coherence but alternative realities. It's easy to be confounded when caught in the middle of a muddle of polarizing differences, as social media spreads interpretations of the theology of what Flip Wilson, a popular comic of an earlier time, called the Church of What's Happening Now. Today, the abundance of sources enables the news to fit personal prejudices and predispositions. It's the famous slogan of The New York Times, "All the news that's fit to print," distorted to "All the news that...

A stable world order is a rare thing. When one does arise, it tends to come after a great convulsion that creates both the conditions and the desire for something new. It requires a stable distribution of power and broad acceptance of the rules that govern the conduct of international relations. It also needs skillful statecraft, since an order is made, not born. And no matter how ripe the starting conditions or strong the initial desire, maintaining it demands creative diplomacy, functioning institutions, and effective action to adjust it when circumstances change and buttress it when challenges come. Eventually, inevitably,...

Is it coincidence or contagion, this malady that seems to have suddenly induced paralysis in the leading nations of the West? With lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen's confession that he colluded with Donald Trump in making hush money payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, America's stage is set for a play that will run two years. As Democrats test the waters for a presidential run by savaging Trump, the establishment Trump detests and defeated in 2016 will use every weapon in its considerable arsenal to break and bring him down, as it did half a century ago to Richard Nixon. By...

Many of our political differences today stem from different perceptions of American history. On the surface, it appears as if there's a lot of common ground in understanding that history. Ninety-five percent of voters believe that the founding ideals of freedom, equality and self-governance played an important role (including 74 percent who consider those ideals "very important"). There's also a broad recognition that there are many other strands of history that helped define the United States as a nation. Eighty-eight percent believe the tradition of pragmatic problem-solving played an important role. Seventy-eight percent say the same about the Protestant work...

Six Christian organizations have won their years-long legal battles against an Obama-era federal mandate ordering the provision of contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs in their employee health care plans.U.S. District Court Judge Phillip Brimmer in Colorado issued an order granting the organizations an injunction against the Department of Health and Human Services Affordable Care Act contraception mandate that they felt required them to violate their organizations’ deeply-held religious beliefs about the sanctity of human life or be forced to pay millions in crippling fines.Those organizations include three Christian higher-education institutions — Taylor University in Indiana, Indiana Wesleyan University and Asbury Theological...

When you apologize for using a term that you yourself call "vulgar, crass and offensive," wouldn't you include in your apology the person against whom you used it? Apparently not, if you're Mika Brzezinski, and the person you insulted is a prominent conservative. Returning to Morning Joe today after a day off for "a family matter," Mika Brzezinski apologized for having on Wednesday's show called Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a "butt boy." NewsBusters editor Scott Whitlock reported the slur here. But whereas Brzezinski apologized "especially to the LGBT community" and to her colleagues, she didn't apologize . . ....

Here's the rule: If something can be automated, it will be automated. If a machine can perform a task more cheaply and efficiently than a human worker, that's what will happen. That's why professions like town crier and rickshaw driver and blogger are no longer in demand. That's why "Please place item in bagging area" is the new "You've got mail." That's why, in the unlikely event that anybody is reading this, you're reading it from a screen instead of a flimsy, disposable piece of pulverized wood that a kid threw on your lawn instead of your porch like you...

President Trump took a lot of flak from the left for warning that the migrant caravan, heading up to the U.S. from Honduras, had a lot of "stone cold criminals" in its ranks. Here's a Nov. 26 report from USA Today to show just how insistent the left was with that 'narrative': President Donald Trump continued his attacks against a caravan of Central American immigrants Monday, describing some of them as "stone cold criminals," but his administration provided scant details to back up the president's assertion. Trump's attempts to portray members of the caravan as criminals capped off a chaotic weekend...

Few 'deplorables' on this side of the pond are shedding any tears over the predicament that French President Emmanuel Macron finds himself in with the violent protests erupting throughout France. The man is an arrogant globalist whose pretensions both for himself and his country reach far beyond their means. And it is hard to forget that Macron recently insulted America by saying Europe needs a strong military to defend itself not just from the Russia and the Chinese but also the U.S. The ignorance of such a statement is breathtaking. And it is humorous to think that the fragmented European...

Indicting Trump on campaign finance charges is a Democratic revenge fantasy. The most legally fraught part of the Russia probe now revolves around payments to an American porn star. As of yet, instead of a dastardly scheme to participate with the Russians in the hacking of Democratic emails to subvert the election, prosecutors have uncovered a dastardly scheme to try to keep from the voters — as if they weren’t aware — that Trump is a womanizer. The advantage of the story of the hush payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal is that they actually happened, and always passed...