Free Republic

Before the lynching of The Donald proceeds, what exactly was it he said about that Hispanic judge? Stated succinctly, Donald Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over a class-action suit against Trump University, is sticking it to him. And the judge's bias is likely rooted in the fact that he is of Mexican descent. Can there be any defense of a statement so horrific? Just this. First, Trump has a perfect right to be angry about the judge's rulings and to question his motives. Second, there are grounds for believing Trump is right. On May 27,...

On June 2, a few days before the California primary, Hillary Clinton gave up trying to compete with Bernie Sanders on domestic policy. Instead, she zeroed in on the soft target of Donald Trump’s most “bizarre rants” in order to present herself as experienced and reasonable. Evidently taking her Democratic Party nomination for granted, she is positioning herself as the perfect candidate for hawkish Republicans. Choosing to speak in San Diego, home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, on a platform draped with 19 American flags and preceded by half an hour of military marching music, Hillary Clinton was certain...

The most disturbing part of the Donald Trump phenomenon is the abysmal reaction of others on the right and across our political-media landscape. It is not merely left-wing protesters who turn violent or Trumpkin racists and anti-Semites on social media who should alarm us. Rather, it should concern us when so many wake up to say, "Let's do the wrong, cowardly thing." Imagine if: • Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus never went on bended knee to Trump with his worthless pledge but instead routinely denounced his utterances. • Republican candidates with no real chance to win chose not to...

Several people were caught on camera punching Trump supporters. At least one attacker was arrested, according to CNN, although police did not release much information. “The San Jose Police Department made a few arrests tonight after the Donald Trump Rally,” police said in a statement. “As of this time, we do not have specific information on the arrests made. There has been no significant property damage reported. One officer was assaulted.”

June 04, 2016, 12:55 pm Former attorney general: Trump right to question judge’s fairness By Mark Hensch Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says Donald Trump is right to challenge the fairness a judge overseeing lawsuits against him. “An independent judiciary is extremely important. But that value is not the only one in play here,” Gonzales wrote in a Saturday op-ed for The Washington Post. "Equally important, if not more important from my perspective as a former judge and U.S. attorney general, is a litigant’s right to a fair trial,” he continued. “The protection of that right is a primary reason...

Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, is the New York Times bestselling author of The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents and The Secrets of the FBI. FBI agents investigating the death of Bill Clinton's Deputy White House Counsel found that Hillary Clinton 'triggered' his suicide when she attacked and humiliated her mentor from their former Rose Law Firm in front of other White House aides a week before he took his own life. Vince Foster's suicide has been the focus of much speculation since he shot...

The following piece appeared on the Coach is Right website, one day after the death of Marion Barry on November 23rd, 1994. Lest we forget the quality of Democrat politicians. Now that Marion Shepilov Barry has gone to the great crack den in the sky it is worth noting what a lowlife he was. This is an honest obituary of one of the worst mayors in American history. *Democrat Marion Barry was the mayor of the District of Columbia from 1979 to 1991 and again from 1995 to 1999. Marion Barry *Because he loved Communism so much Barry took the...

Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine had an anti-Trump cover story. Three Muslim boys and three Muslim girls (all wearing a jihab) appear in their Scouting garb on the cover with the text: “Be Prepared: Muslim American Scouts grapple with the Trump era.” Throughout the piece, Post feature writer David Montgomery paired apparently outrageous quotes from Donald Trump (as well as Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Mike Huckabee) with Post rebuttals with all-American Muslim teenagers in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. It was all about "Islamophobia" clashing with American values: Yet the wave of Islamophobia had brought on a new level of...

The "Never Trump" movement died on Tuesday night. That's when the loose affiliation of Republican pundits and conservative thinkers, banded together by their shared distaste for Donald Trump as the GOP nominee, leaked the news to Bloomberg that conservative lawyer David French was the secret third party candidate they have been working to recruit into the 2016 race as an alternative to the real estate mogul. The French news ended days of frantic speculation set off by a tweet -- yes, this is the world we now live in -- by Weekly Standard editor and "Never Trump" leader Bill Kristol....

Fishermen call the animals “thumb-splitters” — at least one man has had a finger amputated after a mantis shrimp strike — and a blow from the crustacean’s truncheon can crack a pane of stock aquarium glass... The mantis shrimp, only distantly related to the species you would find covered in tempura batter, come in two types, which marine biologists divide into “spearers” or “smashers.” The spearers impale prey with a javelin strike of a pointed claw, whereas the smashers use their fist-like appendages to pop the shells of their food. Smashers, and their shrimply hammers — technically known as dactyl...

“YES, IT is going to be like this,” Donald Trump said during a news conference Tuesday, after a reporter asked if he would be as hostile to legitimate scrutiny once elected as he is now. His honesty offered a bracing counterpoint to the pusillanimous Republican leaders who continue to insist that the reality-television star would be different once in office.

Donald Trump, the apparent Republican presidential nominee, attended the annual Rolling Thunder rally this weekend in the nation’s capital. The event, now a decades-old tradition, honors veterans and draws thousands of bikers. At this year’s event, some 5,000 bikers motored past the Pentagon to the Mall... The phenomenon of biker gangs mixing with ultranationalism, of course, is not simply an American one. In fact, perhaps the most successful convergence of bikers and power politics can be found thousands of miles away in Russia, a putative adversary... President Vladimir Putin has for many years cultivated a muscular nationalism, beginning with his...

The senior senator who once told New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand not to lose "too much weight" because he liked his girls "chubby" was the late Hawaii Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, the New York Times reports. In a memoir published earlier this month, Gillibrand revealed that some of her male colleagues in Congress felt free to comment about her weight. “Don’t lose too much weight now," one "of my favorite older members of the Senate" told her, squeezing her waist. "I like my girls chubby!”

To the casual observer, it would seem that gay rights falls neatly on the political spectrum. Democrats champion bills that aim to protect LGBT people from discrimination, and Republicans increasingly propose and pass ones aimed to protect the religiously devout. But there's growing evidence that Republicans in Congress and across the country are sidestepping the more controversial religious protection and bathroom bills and, in some cases, embracing LGBT non-discrimination laws instead.... And more broadly, Republicans in Congress, Southern-state governors and a business community that usually aligns with the GOP seem to be eschewing some of the more controversial religious freedom...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Well, that's what you've all wanted. That's what everybody's been asking for I don't know how long. That was a press conference. That was a press conference. That was the kind of press conference Republicans voters have been dying to see for who knows how many years. Greetings, my friends. Great to have you here, and great to be back. A short busy broadcast week. Rush Limbaugh back at it. It is 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program; the email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com. Say what you will about Donald Trump -- how many years have...

The mammoth, multi-million-dollar mansion where resident Barack Obama and his family will reportedly live after the first family exits the White House is located 1,096 feet from the Islamic Center of Washington — one of the largest mosques in the Western Hemisphere. ... The exterior of the Islamic Center features horseshoe arches, Arabic script and tall, ornate minaret. The building is surrounded by an array of flags representing the countries of the world where Islam is the state-sanctioned religion. ... In addition to the Islamic Center of Washington, the embassy of Oman and the former embassy of Iran are very...

**SNIP** Jarrett has denied that she leaked any damaging information about the Clintons. "I'm trying to light a fire under Joe," Jarrett is quoted as saying in the book, which claims Obama sees Biden as the best person to carry on his legacy.

In significant news that has thus far either gone under or outright unreported by the media, U.S. military advisors have “boots on the ground” in Yemen, according to a recent report in the Washington Post by Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Missy Ryan: “The Pentagon has placed a small number of U.S. advisors on the ground in Yemen to support Arab forces battling al-Qaeda, military officials said on Friday, signaling a new American role in that country’s multi-sided civil war. Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said U.S. personnel had been in the country for about two weeks, supporting Yemeni and...

Conservative and center-right columnists often have to do far more digging than their liberal counterparts, simply because overwhelmingly left-leaning beat journalists, aka "Democrats with bylines," provide such unbalanced reporting on current events on a daily basis. Fortunately, the Washington Post's Marc Thiessen did the entirely necessary work of rummaging through available information about federal court nominations in 1988 and 1992. Any beat reporter could have done the same thing, but either didn't, or decided not to report what was found. What Thiessen unearthed makes an argument-ending mockery of Vice President Joe Biden's claim, made in a Monday evening tweet, that when he...

A federal judge has ordered the release of internal Trump University documents in an ongoing lawsuit against the company, including "playbooks" that advised sales personnel how to market high-priced courses on getting rich through real estate. The Friday ruling, in which Judge Gonzalo Curiel cited heightened public interest in presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, was issued in response to a request by The Washington Post. The ruling was a setback for Trump, whose attorneys argued that the documents contained trade secrets. [Snip] Trump, who previously questioned whether Curiel's Hispanic heritage made him biased due to Trump's support for building...