Free Republic

Never Trumpers’ myopia blinds them from seeing the greater danger that a Clinton presidency would have created. Reprinted from BadgerInstitute.org. The Never Trump Republicans have been adamantly opposed to Donald Trump since the day in June 2015 that he announced his candidacy. They argue that the New York mogul is singularly unfit for the presidency, that he has no experience in government, coming from the somewhat unseemly world of N.Y. construction, casino development and reality TV. They say his character and temperament are decidedly unpresidential –– vulgar, bombastic, prone to outbursts and loose with the truth. And, they argue, he...

Russia takes on key role in de-escalating tensions between Israel and the Mullahs. On October 16, Syrian anti-aircraft units fired a SAM-5 anti-aircraft missile at Israeli planes conducting a reconnaissance mission over Lebanon. Israel frequently conducts these types of intelligence gathering operations over Lebanon to keep tabs on Hezbollah. The missile missed and all Israeli planes returned safely back to base. Shortly thereafter, Israel retaliated transforming the missile battery, located approximately 50 kilometers east of Damascus, into an expensive heap of scrap metal. Following the Israeli strike, an Israel Defense Force spokesman stated that Israel “hold[s] the Syrian regime responsible...

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly confronts leftist congresswoman's politicization of soldier's death. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly pushed back against a sleazy left-wing congresswoman who is trying to exploit a young soldier’s combat death in West Africa to score cheap political points against President Trump. “I was stunned when I came to work yesterday morning, and broken-hearted at what I saw a member of Congress doing,” said Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general whose son was killed on the battlefield. Without naming publicity-hungry Rep. Frederica Wilson (D), Florida’s flamboyant answer to Maxine Waters, Kelly referred to...

Hollywood's hypocrisy about Harvey Weinstein is only outdone by its hypocrisy about gun control. We still don't know why Stephen Paddock unleashed his arsenal in an evil attack on an outdoor concert crowd in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, killing 59 people and injuring more than 500. But Hollywood's glitterati seem to know, apparently. They quickly and predictably jumped on Twitter and other media outlets to denounce the National Rifle Association as a terrorist and demand "common sense gun control" that, as usual, wouldn't have stopped Paddock in any way. So why does America have this problem with mass shootings?...

Russian Scandal: As the old saying goes, it's not the crime, it's the cover-up. That's certainly true with the growing scandal over the Russians' extortion racket in the U.S., possible bribes to the Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation, and the FBI's curious decision not to reveal the Russians' activities and ties to the Obama administration. This week, IBD discussed new reports from the Daily Caller, The Hill and Circa.com, of how the Russians, through their state nuclear company Rosatom, engaged in a campaign of bribery, extortion, money laundering and racketeering to gain control over U.S. nuclear assets in the private...

President Donald Trump is doing something that has not been seen in the last eight years. He is devolving -- returning -- power from the Executive Branch (the Office of the President), primarily to the Legislative Branch (the Congress). We are seeing this in three recent developments. First, he announced an Executive Order cancelling the program created by former President Obama commonly known as DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). The DACA program was fashioned by way of an Executive Order signed by President Obama in June 2012. Under the DACA program, Mr. Obama ordered the Department of Homeland Security...

Blame Sean Hannity. Or give him all the credit. The intrepid talk show host has been claiming for months that there is nothing to the Trump-Russia allegations, that the real tale of Russian collusion is linked to Hillary Clinton. The fact that very few people have taken this seriously has only caused the firebrand conservative to dig in deeper and repeat his talking points both more often and more fervently. His insistence the Russian story would “boomerang” against the Democrats has been largely based on his communications (both on- and off-air) with Julian Assange and investigative reporters John Solomon and Sara...

In the wake of the Weinstein scandal, the commissars of feminism are policing ideological infractions with increased vigor. Several women in the entertainment industry have had to apologize abjectly to the commissars for daring to suggest that women seek protection from a salacious, pawing Hollywood culture by not participating in it. “Big Bang Theory’s Mayim Bialik Publishes Irresponsible Essay On Sexism In Hollywood,” ran a headline in Newsweek, capturing this atmosphere. Bialik had merely allowed herself a brief aside in the New York Times reflecting on the prudence of modesty in an industry of creeps: I dress modestly. I don’t act flirtatiously...

Policymakers want to unleash economic growth in America by fixing our broken tax system. Or so they say. Now that the conversation has moved beyond just lowering tax rates, pro-growth tax reform is in danger of losing the stuff that actually makes it pro-growth. That’s because policymakers are caving to big-government advocates and other special interests. Here are the top five worst ideas that would surely dampen pro-growth tax reform. 1. Failing to enact full expensing. Full expensing—allowing businesses to deduct the full cost of their investments when they incur those costs, instead of spreading them out over many years—is...

It’s as if people here have not turned on the television to hear pundits drone on and on about how badly Trump is losing in Pennsylvania.

Well, we’ve done it. We’ve given Kirkuk to the Iranians. Kirkuk. The Heart of Kurdistan. It’s the Jerusalem of the Kurds, our only trusted and loyal allies in Iraq. It’s also the last piece of terrain needed by Tehran to complete its overland, unimpeded access to the shores of the Mediterranean and to its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon. And it’s precisely where President Trump’s new hard line on Iran, barely 72 hours old, was put to the test and failed. Actually, it didn’t fail. Our State Department failed it. Rather than act to dissuade or disrupt this past weekend’s bold...

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Nate highlighted the exposure to life and property all along the Gulf Coast. Of the critical national assets that took a hit, the crux of the U.S. refining industry suffered dramatically. As a result of Harvey alone, twenty refineries in the 300 miles between Corpus Christi and Beaumont were forced to shut down or dramatically reduce rates. The spot price of ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) promptly increased by 10%, while that for gasoline and jet fuel increased by 25%. All three prices remain about 10% higher than before the hurricanes, in part due to regulatory constraints...

RUSH: So we have the Bloomberg story — Fewest Jobless Claims Since 1973 Show Firm U.S. Job Market — and here is a companion story: “NBC Amazed by Stock Surge Despite ‘Chaos in Washington.'” Hey, NBC, you’re not supposed to be “amazed” by it. You’re just supposed to report it. Ah, but they can’t do that, because they are invested in it because NBC is helping to create the chaos. NBC is part of the cabal trying to undermine any of the good that might come out of the Trump administration. NBC Amazed by Stock Surge Despite ‘Chaos in Washington’...

Permit me to confess: I am one of the very last people in the United States who does not consider the word “politician” to be an insult. On the contrary, the work politicians do is important because politics is a good and essential thing in a free society. It’s the degradation of politics in the Trump era we need to worry about, not politics itself. President Trump has always prided himself on being an anti-politician. This is supposed to be one of his greatest assets. But he has thrown our government into chaos and our country into tumult precisely because...

Actress Mayim Bialik has responded to criticism after she wrote a New York Times essay over the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Bialik wrote of the pressure to appear attractive that she felt as a teen actress, affecting her self-esteem to this day. She added that when she returned to acting after earning a doctorate in neuroscience, she “experienced the upside of not being a ‘perfect 10.’… Those of us in Hollywood who don’t represent an impossible standard of beauty have the ‘luxury’ of being overlooked and, in many cases, ignored by men in power unless we can make them money.” Bialik,...

FATAH-HAMAS RECONCILIATION, A FUSION OF EVILSBY ISI LEIBLER OCTOBER 17, 2017 20:32 Unpacking what the reconciliation effort includes, and doesn't include. World leaders – including some of our American friends – are apparently still unwilling to face reality and continue to delude themselves that Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority can be induced to make a peace settlement if Israel continues to appease them and excuse their crimes. Even more delusional is the almost universal consensus that a merger between Fatah and the more radical, genocidal Hamas is a positive step toward achieving an accommodation. It is contrary to all...

President Donald Trump’s decision to throw out the Obamacare contraception mandate — and to largely exempt religious groups from non-discrimination statutes — has drawn withering criticism from many liberal Jewish organizations. The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women and a number of other groups are united in their dismay at the measures, which say that businesses and institutions are no longer compelled to pay for contraception demanded by their employees, including abortion-inducing drugs. In this, they probably speak for the majority of Jews who are politically liberal and deeply opposed to Trump’s decision. As...

The State Department announced on Thursday that the United States would be withdrawing from the UN agency UNESCO, citing financial reasons, the need for reform and the body’s “continuing anti-Israel bias.” President Donald Trump’s decision to leave UNESCO — the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — as of December 31, 2018, was an appropriate foreign policy decision that will hopefully prompt a much-needed rethink of the United Nations, its purpose and practices. It will also send a strong message to the Palestinians that statehood cannot be achieved on the basis of UN resolutions alone, and that the only...

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO, faces an existential problem.No — it’s not about getting member states to fulfill agreed-upon spending on defense projects, nor finding a role after the Soviet collapse, or standing up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Rather, it’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Islamist, dictatorial ruler of Turkey whose policies threaten to undermine this unique alliance of 29 states, which has lasted nearly 70 years.Created in 1949, NATO’s founding principles ambitiously set out the alliance’s goal “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of [member states’] peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty...

Dear President Stearns (prestalk@umontana.edu):Earlier this semester, I was invited to speak at the University of Montana (UM) as part of a distinguished lecture series funded by an outside benefactor. For ten years, the series has been organized in conjunction with the school of journalism and has involved meetings with journalism students and professors. The nine previous lectures went off without a hitch. Then, they invited me to speak in February of 2018. Now, I have been banned from speaking on your campus.The decision to ban me from speaking at UM was made by Dean of Journalism Larry Abramson. In an...