Free Republic

Washington Post reporter Caitlin Dewey’s beat is the Internet. But her big piece on the front page of Wednesday’s Style section is about something broader: “Forsaking monogamy: The evolution of relationships has made affairs less clandestine and less combustive. And of course there are Web sites to help match tryst-seekers.” This being the Post, there is no space for critics of the "evolution" of online adultery Web sites or their users. Dewey promoted the “non-monogamous dating site Open Minded,” where her married female subject, Jessie, advertised, “I’m into building deep and loving relationships that add to the joy and aliveness...

RUSH: FIFA. When I first heard about this, I was stunned. We've got a new attorney general, and how long has this investigation been going? She didn't do this. Did she start this? How many moons ago has this been going on? Holder started this or some -- not that that matters. The thing about this that blows my mind, of course FIFA is corrupt. They're a bunch of Western socialist guys. Of course it's corrupt. That's the story of the world before the United States of America came along. It's just another opportunity here to define American exceptionalism in...

RUSH: This is last on NPR's On Point. They have a guest host of this program named Jane Clayson. She interviewed an author named David Shipler. His book is Freedom Of Speech: Mightier Than The Sword. Kirsten Powers is also on this show. More about that in a moment, because she acted like she didn't know me. It's disappointing. Anyway, first things first. The host says to David Shipler, the author of Freedom of Speech: Mightier than the Sword, "You write about people like Rush Limbaugh using racial imagery to criticize Obama with no repercussions. But you write in the...

RUSH: A new Gallup poll out. Headline: "Americans Continue to Shift Left on Key Moral Issues." Now, before you go off getting depressed about this, let me tell you what the reason for this is, after we give you the details. "Americans are more likely now than in the early 2000s to find a variety of behaviors morally acceptable, including gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage and sex between an unmarried man and woman. Moral acceptability of many of these issues is now at a record-high level." It's a subtle message to the Republican Party, and...

The GOP is falling apart. How else to explain the wide variance of positions within the Republican Party on basic issues ranging from same-sex marriage to immigration to tax policy? For years, GOP bigwigs have explained that the Republican Party can only succeed if it expands and evolves, embracing as many views as possible. There’s only one problem: that simply doesn’t work. While the Democratic Party has moved toward leftist purity in which Hillary Clinton’s policy positions are virtually indistinguishable from socialist Bernie Sanders’, the Republican Party has become to political positions what COEXIST bumper stickers are to religion –...

On May 27, the American novelist Herman Wouk will attain the prodigious age of 100. Over his long career, Wouk has achieved all the wealth and fame a writer could desire, or even imagine. His first great success, The Caine Mutiny (1951), occupied bestseller lists for two consecutive years, sold millions of copies, and inspired a film adaptation that became the second highest-grossing movie of 1954. Wouk’s grand pair of novels, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, likewise found a global audience, both in print, and then as two television miniseries in the 1980s. Wouk won a Pulitzer...

Mike Huckabee doesn't have a lot of prominent defenders, and I am not volunteering for the job. Huckabee has always struck me as a right-wing populist-progressive. A deeply religious -- and by all accounts decent -- man, Huckabee nonetheless has a view of the state that would have jibed almost perfectly with such forgotten titans of the Progressive Era as Richard Ely, Josephus Daniels and even William Jennings Bryan. Ely, a mentor to Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt and the founder of the "Wisconsin school" of progressivism, believed that "God works through the state in carrying out His purposes more...

The latest scorecard from the American Conservative Union is out, and the voters of Virginia might want to file a complaint about truth in advertising with the press corps. Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner have routinely been portrayed in news reports as "moderates" and "centrists." But after two years in the Senate, Tim Kaine has a perfect zero on the conservative scale. Mark Warner has a lifetime score of 10.33 percent conservative, but his last two annual scores have been a 4 and an 8. They could be mistaken for Barbara Mikulski. Far-left is middle of the road on...

By now, many readers have probably heard about the recent revelation that Josh Duggar, the oldest son of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar of 19 Kids and Counting fame, has admitted to molesting some young girls a decade ago when he was a teenager. The information about this came out recently when a heavily redacted police report from 2006 was released by In Touch Weekly detailing the incidents. Duggar has since apologized for the acts, even as the scandal has grown and the Duggar's television show has been pulled from TLC. I have no interest here in defending Josh Duggar...

Most Americans hold either liberal or conservative positions on most matters. In many instances, however, they would be hard pressed to explain their position or the position they oppose. But if you can’t explain both sides, how do you know you’re right? At the very least, you need to understand both the liberal and conservative positions in order to effectively understand your own. I grew up in a liberal world — New York, Jewish and Ivy League graduate school. I was an 8-year-old when President Dwight Eisenhower ran for re-election against the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson. I knew nothing about...

Black freedom & opportunity in America has always required the very federal intervention the right wants to destroy The continuing decline of public sector jobs at local, state, and federal levels is having an abysmal economic impact on African Americans, for whom steady, stable government employment opportunities have provided a sure path into the middle class. The New York Times reported yesterday that “roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs.” Because Black people hold a disproportionate number of government jobs, cutbacks that affect everyone...

Is Bernie Sanders pulling Hillary Clinton to the Left? No, for the same reason a canoe doesn’t pull an aircraft carrier. The Vermont socialist running in the Democratic presidential race is currently at 7.4 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, versus Clinton’s 64.2 percent. Clinton is in fact moving leftward on issues like immigration, gay marriage, inequality and more, but it’s not because she’s feeling the heat from a little-known competitor. Still, Sanders is staking out a role as the forward scout of the Democratic Left,

John F. Nash Jr. is widely known as the subject of the Oscar-winning film “A Beautiful Mind,” but his contributions to the advancement of human knowledge are far greater. Nash paved the way for game theory to spread from a collection of toy cases in mathematics to a generalizable theory applicable to virtually anything — board games, economics, politics, international relations — to the point where now it’s practically a mode of critical thinking in its own right. On Saturday, the 86-year-old mathematician and his wife, Alicia, were killed in a car crash in New Jersey. There have been...

When I was commissioned as an Army officer in 1982, one of the books listed on our mandatory reading was Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.” I willed my original copy to a young subordinate officer years ago. However, I still maintain a copy in my office at the NCPA. One of the memorable quotes from that seminal strategic work is, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither...

It's graduation time! Have we learned much? No. College has become a scam. Some students benefit: those with full scholarships and/or rich parents so they don't go deep into debt, those who love learning for its own sake and land jobs in academia and those who get jobs that require a college credential. But that's not most students. Half today's recent grads work in jobs that don't require degrees. Eighty thousand of America's bartenders have bachelor's degrees. Politicians such as Hillary Clinton promote college by claiming that over a lifetime, college graduates "earn $1 million more." That statistic is true...

Socialist genius Bernie Sanders has figured out what's really ailing America. Our store shelves have too many different brands of deodorant and sneakers. Just look at all those horrible, fully stocked aisles at Target and Walgreens and Wal-Mart and Payless and DSW and Dick's Sporting Goods. It's a national nightmare! If only consumers had fewer choices in the free market, fewer entrepreneurs offering a wide variety of products and fewer workers manufacturing goods people wanted, Sanders believes, we could end childhood hunger. Nobody parodies the far left better than far-leftists themselves. In an interview with financial journalist John Harwood on...

Exclusive — Walker: We’d Be Sending in Navy to Stop Illegals if They Were Swarming Our Sea Ports Like They Do Southern Border [SNIP] ".........Since former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush—one of amnesty’s biggest proponents—has now backed off his previous support for citizenship for illegal aliens (he wants to give them amnesty via legal status), that means Rubio is the only candidate who still stands with the AFL-CIO and their brothers in the Chamber of Commerce wanting to give illegal aliens full blown American citizenship. That means Walker, the anti-special interest union battler, has an even better opportunity to fight Rubio—who’s...

Of those running for president, who will give this speech? “Ladies and Gentlemen, my administration will implement a series of economic policies to cause the economy to grow at an average rate of 4 percent or more a year. Growth of 4 percent-plus per year will create jobs at a faster rate than the growth in the labor force and provide hope for those who had despaired of finding a good job again. At a growth rate of a little over 4 percent per year, real incomes for all of our citizens will double in only 17 years. (At the...

The news from Africa and the Third World is seldom good, and much of the bad news is about disease born of ignorance, superstition and primitive sanitation, news dispatched by a media addicted to tales of unrelieved gloom, certain doom and inevitable disaster. We were all supposed to be dead by now from strange diseases reduced in the public prints to acronyms and bold initials — AIDS, SARS, MERS, swine flu, avian flu and most recently Ebola. These diseases are rightly feared, but in most places they’re diseases only of a tiny part of the population of a country or...

Back in 2009, when Congress was debating the Affordable Care Act, many liberal Democrats felt it did not go far enough — that it should be even more sweeping, even more expansive, even more costly. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, one of the Senate's most liberal Democrats and a veteran of many legislative battles, urged his colleagues on the Left to go ahead and pass the bill. "The key to this is that this modest home, we can put additions onto it in the future," Harkin told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in December 2009. "But if we don't have the starter home, we're...