Free Republic

The opponents of liberty are relentless and we see that relentlessness on full display when it comes to the Second Amendment. Those who don’t think that individuals should be free to keep and bear arms keep looking for ways to deprive as many Americans as possible of that right. Among their lines of attack is to drive away businesses that sell firearms. A new case involving such an effort comes to us from, naturally, California. An Alameda County zoning ordinance has been written in such a way that that there is for all intents and purposes, no place in the...

RUSH: I was overwhelmed with email reaction to Fox News Sunday yesterday, more than ever. I’m hard-pressed to figure out why. I think it’s probably ’cause I don’t do these things very often and we’re in the midst of massive audience growth and so forth, but I just want to thank everybody. And even though those of you who were snarky about the glasses, I love you. I absolutely love you. “You look like Harry Potter.” You know, every time I go on TV, I prove what it is about TV. The only thing that matters is how you look,...

Aaron Feis was the right man in the right place at the right time, but he was legally prevented from using the right, constitutionally protected tool to do the job. Mr. Feis was shot on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, shielding students from a killer with his own body. Ultimately, he and 16 other people, mainly students, died. Mr. Feis was truly a remarkable and courageous man. Most media reports have focused on his after-school job as a Stoneman Douglas High football coach (here, here, here, here, and here) - but, on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Feis was...

A new interview with Mitch McConnell this week showed the first cracks in the wall of his optimism about the midterms. While not going down a path of gloom and doom, he no longer sounds positive of breaking a long-standing trend of the party in power losing ground in such scenarios. He’s not coming out and saying the GOP’s majorities in both chambers are toast, but he seems to think they’ll be losing seats. (The Hill) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says in a new interview that he expects to see GOP majorities in the House and Senate shrink...

On Thursday, Minneapolis station WCCO reported on guns and crime in Minnesota. Anchor Frank Vascarello's introduction: "More people are carrying guns than ever before, but the crime rate remains low." Imagine that. Reporter Pat Kessler also treated more guns and less crime as paradoxical. Reporting on crime and guns has been infested with the "Fox Butterfield effect." It is named after a New York Times reporter, who in November 2004 was surprised that: The number of inmates in state and federal prisons rose 2.1 percent last year, even as violent crime and property crime fell. Later, a puzzled Butterfield referred to "the paradox...

Bags of cash delivered to a Rome hotel for favored Italian candidates. Scandalous stories leaked to foreign newspapers to swing an election in Nicaragua. Millions of pamphlets, posters and stickers printed to defeat an incumbent in Serbia. The long arm of Vladimir Putin? No, just a small sample of the United States’ history of intervention in foreign elections. On Tuesday, American intelligence chiefs warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia appears to be preparing to repeat in the 2018 midterm elections the same full-on chicanery it unleashed in 2016: hacking, leaking, social media manipulation and possibly more. Then on Friday,...

John Sexton at Hot Air pinpointed an obnoxious Washington Post article on President Trump visiting the victims of the Parkland school shooting. Trump made a point of not bringing reporters with him as he visited victims, so he could milk the publicity out of it. We can predict reporters might have either (a) found it crass for Trump to be politicking in the hospital so soon or (b) found some gaffe in what he said to victims. Post reporter Josh Dawsey openly editorialized that Trump doesn't care about victims as much as he wants to praise cops and first responders,...

Imagine you open the faucet of your kitchen sink expecting water and instead out comes cash. Now imagine that it comes out at the rate of $1 million a minute. You call your plumber, who thinks you’re crazy. To get you off the phone, he opines that it is your sink and therefore must be your money. So you spend it wildly. Then you realize that the money wasn’t yours and you owe it back. Now imagine that this happens every minute of every day for the next three years. At the end of the three years, you owe back...

One of the memorable anecdotes of Hollywood concerns the film noir The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, because of its complex story. It is a puzzling story, almost incoherent, with its convoluted plot and many double-crossing characters who come and go. Neither the original writer, Raymond Chandler, nor William Faulkner, one of the screenwriters, could fully explain what and why some incidents occurred. The director, Howard Hawks, was particularly concerned with one plot point and telegraphed Chandler with the question "Who killed chauffeur?" Chandler replied, "How the hell do I know?" The same could be asked about...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller laid out the law clearly in his indictment of numerous Russian nationals and groups for their attempts to interfere in the 2016 election. As the indictment notes, the U.S. Department of Justice administers the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). FARA establishes a reporting protocol for foreign nationals, including non-government individuals "attempting to influence U.S. public opinion, policy, and law." To its credit, the FBI seems to have done a good job tracking Russian individuals and entities that violated FARA even if there was no evidence of collusion with the Trump campaign or Russian hacking of the...

A. The Latest IndictmentsShortly after Rod Rosenstein announced the latest series of indictments against Russians largely for posts on social media, the stock market rose and hit its highest weekly gain since 2013. And for good reason – the indictments are idiotic. They would never have been issued by a prosecutor, only a special counsel looking as if he's doing something as his case against his big catch – General Michael Flynn – seems to become less and less certain to lead to conviction. As Power Line blog notes: But when all the details are added up a much murkier...

I created this. It illustrates the dozens of systemic failures around the Florida school shooting. But the conclusion for liberals? "LET'S BLAME GUNS!" (This will serve as the basis for a long editorial. Keep your eyes peeled.)

As we wade through the news reports and the commentary on the Florida shooting, we can’t help but think that nearly everyone – from journalists to politicians to gun control or gun rights advocates – is missing the point. Everyone is pointing the finger at someone. It’s President Trump’s fault because he practically handed guns to mentally ill people! It’s Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s fault for not banning bump stocks. It’s the NRA’s fault – it’s always the NRA’s fault. Here’s the thing: you can blame anyone you want. You can make any argument you want about the...

“Two Baltimore detectives were convicted Monday of robbery and racketeering,” the Washington Post reported, “in a trial that laid bare shocking crimes committed by an elite police unit and surfaced new allegations of widespread corruption in the city’s police department.” Before reaching the guilty verdicts, Assistant U.S. Attorney Leo Wise presented the 12-member jury with “things more horrible in some cases than you ever could have imagined.” Test your own imagination: * Four police officers, already convicted of felonies, testified in amazing detail to routinely violating the rights of citizens in order to steal cash and property worth hundreds of...

You never know how you will be affected by someone who enters your life. Especially someone who is mature and has a defined way of being. Even though we only had a short time together, losing Rocky has a left a major hole in my life. You, as my reader, met Rocky when I wrote about the loss of my best friend, Cookie. Rocky had just arrived in our house. He was being given away by a family who only had him for a short while after getting him from their friends where he had been since he was a...

Canadian professor and psychologist Jordan Peterson is the latest YouTube pop-culture conservative phenomenon. He deserves recognition. His erudite responses to complex issues are stirring and instructive. He has given hope to young men too long weighed down by an academic diktat toxic to masculinity. I began listening to his unique insights on many issues, including how to solve problems, find meaning, and understand the complexities of life. I also heartily embrace his recognition that Communism is evil, that we should stop blaming everyone else for our failures, and that human nature is flawed. How badly Western societies need to return to...

Have you ever wondered why liberals, particularly activist liberals, are so angry all the time? It’s not that they’re angry people, or at least it’s not just that they’re angry people, it’s for a different, very important reason – anger overrides logic. Anger is kryptonite to logic, and for liberalism to work, to attract a large audience, logic has to be overridden. You’ve undoubtedly heard at least some of the news over the past few years coming out of college campuses, the shout-downs and the riots when an Ann Coulter or Ben Shapiro go to a school to commit the...

After days of bitter hurt, anger, deep savage argument, and plenty of non-thinking social media trolls blurting whatever comes to mind through their thumbs, it’s time we as Americans begin a genuine discussion about how to stop the next school shooting from occurring. It’s important that we do this even though gun deaths are by no means the most dangerous form of death in America today. In 2017, with 300,000,000-plus guns in the hands of Americans, there were 15,549 gun deaths. This ranks less than half the number of automobile deaths even though there are fewer cars in existence than...

Mueller’s indictment is an ineffectual response to a provocation by Russia. The Russians are engaged in “information warfare” against the United States. That was the big soundbite at Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s press conference Friday afternoon, announcing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s election-meddling indictment against 13 Russians and three Russian businesses. That is certainly a fair assessment of what the indictment alleges. The account is disturbing, but its form leaves many of us underwhelmed. Our government says Russia is levying war. It is attacking a foundational institution — the electoral system of our democratic society and, more basically, our society’s...

ince the Florida school shooting happened in an election year, liberals have been working valiantly to somehow tie the National Rifle Association to the tragedy. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but some of them seemed to think they’d struck gold when they found out about a marksmanship program operated at the school which the shooter previously belonged to. It turns out that the program received a grant to partially fund it from the NRA, leading to some hot take headlines which are melting down laptop and phone screens today. These include, “Nikolas Cruz was reportedly on an NRA-funded rifle team...