Free Republic

"More specifically, Netanyahu's Likud Party won by siphoning voters away from the other right parties who will become its coalition partners. Mainstream Israeli opinion has shifted to the right: to win, Likud didn't need to win over a swath of centrist voters. It needed to jazz up the Right with nasty rhetoric about Palestinians and Arabs." "Meanwhile, Likud is going through a process that some observers have referred to as Tea Party-ization. Younger Israelis tend to be more conservative, increasingly empowering the more right-wing factions inside Likud. That causes center-right voters to defect to centrist parties, pushing the party ever...

Intrepid boy reporter Dylan Matthews at General Electric (also Comcast) Vox got hilariously spanked in public recently when he proposed that the U.S. Senate be abolished because it was "anti-democratic." Matthews somehow forgot (or never learned) that we have a federal system so such an abolition would be impossible under our system of government. Therefore, young Dylan found another outlet for his pubescent enthusiasms. Why, if we can't abolish the Senate under the current system then BINGO! Ditch the despised constitution and replace it with a parliamentary system. To get a proper fix on Dylan's latest crusade, let us take...

One of Washington’s most discussed articles over the past week was Matthew Yglesias’s Monday piece in Vox contending that this country’s combination of a presidential system and increasing ideological polarization is a recipe for eventual breakdown (the article was headlined “American democracy is doomed”). New York magazine blogger Jonathan Chait thinks Yglesias overlooked something important. In a Tuesday post, Chait argued that the major threat to our political stability is that American conservatives are considerably farther to the right than are conservatives in, say, western Europe. “[T]he shape of our presidential system is not the only thing that separates the...

Say it! SAAAAY IT!!! ---Sam Kinison General Electric Vox published a photo essay about the crises in Venezuela. The photos of the protests were picturesque but something important was missing. It was especially noticeable when the essay by Amanda Taub, 11 stunning photos of the protest movement sweeping Venezuela, touched on the dismal economy. Therefore the most stunning thing about the essay wasn't the photos but the very noticeable failure to mention a certain word seen all over Venezuela. A certain S-word seen all over the walls and billboards of Venezuela. A word that the corrupt government in Caracas proudly...

‘There’s Nothing Random About the Threats Against Jewish Targets:’ US Jewish Leader Chides Obama Over Paris Terror Comments President Barack Obama’s description of the January 9 Islamist terrorist attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris as a “random” assault on “a bunch of folks in a deli” has sparked widespread outrage, with a top American Jewish leader telling The Algemeiner, “President Obama absolutely misspoke…there’s nothing ‘random’ about the threats against Jewish targets.” In wide-ranging interview on foreign policy with Vox magazine editors Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias – “Again and again, they serve him softball—no, make that Nerf ball—questions and...

Update: On November 20, the Supreme Court refused to stay a decision that struck down South Carolina's same-sex marriage ban, allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry starting at noon. Since 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on same-sex marriage, lower courts have followed with their own decisions effectively ending same-sex marriage bans in several states. As the decisions pile up, it can get a little difficult to track which same-sex marriage bans are legally valid and which have been overturned. This simple list tracks where each state stands.

When it became clear that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker had won reelection handily Tuesday night, I was all set to write an article hyping up his prospects to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. It seemed to make total sense — he's been elected three times in a blue state, while fighting hard for conservative priorities in a way that's impressed both the GOP's base and its elites. But then I sat down and watched his victory speech from Tuesday night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wxEfnPakLYM The very beginning is nice, as Walker thanks God for his win and gets some applause. But...

Who was Michael Brown?Why was Michael Brown shot?Who is Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown?Was the shooting of Michael Brown legal?Is the Michael Brown shooting being investigated?What's happening in Ferguson, Missouri?Is the black community represented in Ferguson's government?Have the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, been peaceful?How have police handled the protests in Ferguson, Missouri?Why do police have military-grade equipment in the first place?How have government officials reacted to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri?

For years, first at the Washington Post's Wonkblog and now at Vox, Sarah Kliff has been happily chirping away about the wonders of Obamacare. She has been perhaps its biggest cheerleader by far. And then the predictable collapse of its cooperatives hit and now poor Sarah has gone silent on the whole topic of Obamacare since November 19 when she sadly delivered apocalyptic news about the nation's largest health insurer, UnitedHealth:

A new poll indicates that 68% of my supporters would vote for me if I departed the GOP & ran as an independent. https://t.co/ztP5d2ctZl — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2015

In 2010, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas published his book American Taliban, which detailed his belief that “fundamentalist Muslims [are] basically hard-right Christians…American [religious conservatives] may be more constrained by American society and laws than their Middle Eastern counterparts, but…their goals are the same.” This past weekend, one current and one former Daily Kos writer carried on the tradition of lumping the two groups. On Sunday, Daily Kos’s Susan Grigsby opined, “It is very difficult to find much space between the coming Christian caliphate, which reveres the Second Amendment as a holy text, and the one set up by [ISIS] in Syria and Iraq.”...

We are all free to say what we think, and must be, for without this freedom we will no longer be America. More on that below. But you always hope what is said will be constructive, helpful, maybe even at some point heartening. You have a responsibility as an adult to do your best in this area. But as soon as the story broke Wednesday afternoon, and while it was still going on, there were accusations and bitter words flung all over the Internet. The weirdest argument came almost immediately. A person named Chris Murphy, who is a U.S. senator...

The little-known group at the center of the Turkey-Russia crisis Updated by Jennifer Williams on November 24, 2015, 2:50 p.m. ET @jenn_ruth jennifer@vox.com Jennifer R. Williams: How do you think this incident will affect Turkish-Russian relations? Henri Barkey: Until recently, the Turks and the Russians had succeeded in compartmentalizing their differences over Syria. Because they're on opposite sides: Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the Turks have tried to do everything they could to overthrow Assad, and Russia has done everything they could to keep Assad in power. But it didn't affect the relationship between [Turkish President Recep...

Liberals sometimes say that law enforcement’s approach to the Mafia offers a model for how to deal with jihadists, even though the latter tend not to limit their demands to protection money. This past Sunday, Egberto Willies of Daily Kos claimed that if terrorist attacks were “treated as they should be, like organized crime, it would neuter ISIS. After all…the group is no more powerful than a large band of thugs with weapons.” But crimefighting methods weren’t the main concern of Willies’s piece. Rather, it was his belief that “neocons” wish to exploit fear of terrorism in order to start a war which...

Donald Trump's interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week (above) is a great distillation of why covering the Republican frontrunner is proving so difficult for mainstream press outlets. On the one hand, he demands coverage. He's leading the race everywhere: nationally, in Iowa, in New Hampshire, in South Carolina. And with the exception of a brief surge for Ben Carson that's quickly dissipating, Trump has been leading consistently for more than three months. So outlets like ABC and shows like This Week would, naturally, like the longstanding GOP frontrunner to appear on their programs from time to time. It...

A lot of conservative voters — especially those old enough to have lived through the high inflation of the 1970s — are convinced that America is currently suffering from an inflation problem. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) pandered to those voters in a recent Republican presidential debate, blaming the "loose money" policies of the Federal Reserve for raising the prices of various consumer products. But new data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that overall, prices aren't going up. At all. Between September and October, prices actually fell slightly. And over the past year, the inflation rate was...

A lot of conservative voters — especially those old enough to have lived through the high inflation of the 1970s — are convinced that America is currently suffering from an inflation problem. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) pandered to those voters in a recent Republican presidential debate, blaming the "loose money" policies of the Federal Reserve for raising the prices of various consumer products. But new data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that overall, prices aren't going up. At all. Between September and October, prices actually fell slightly. And over the past year, the inflation rate was...

Last night's off-year elections produced a number of noteworthy outcomes, none larger than Republican Matt Bevin's upset victory in Kentucky's gubernatorial race. Bevin ran as a hard-charging outsider conservative, warts and all. Public polls gave his opponent, Democrat Jack Conway, a modest but stable lead throughout the race's home stretch, averaging out to a three-point Conway advantage in a three-way contest. They were off by double digits. Bevin won handily:DailyKos tweet at link ... Bevin, boosted by a massive investment from national Republicans and help from his former nemisis Mitch McConnell, nationalized the race, tying Conway to President Obama at...

RUSH: Matthew Yglesias, no relation to Julio Iglesias, no relation to Enrique Iglesias and therefore no relationship to that blonde Russian tennis player. What's her name? Runs... (interruption) That's right, Anna Kournikova. Matthew is a lone Yglesias. He runs around with his buddies at Vox, which would be Ezra Klein and a number of other young Millennial types for the most part that grew tired of working for the old stand-by big guys, New York Times, Washington Post. They found some funding, which is what liberals do, and got this site that... I guess it's owned now by... I forget...

Just how bad is the movie 'Truth' that will be released tomorrow? So bad that even the notoriously liberal Vox is mocking it. Vox writer Todd VanDerWerff goes so far as to describe it as an example of why "so many people hate Hollywood liberals." As we shall see even Dan Rather in 2004 disagreed with the premise of "Truth."