Free Republic

"Bullying isn't cool. Bullying is lame.Bullying is ugly and has a stupid name.For a healthy world, bullying's unfit.And I think I know what we should do to i-it.Do do do do do to i-it.Let's all get together and make bullying kill itself.Bullying's an ugly thingLet's shove its face in the dirt and make bullying kill itself.Woah-oh. Woah-oh. Woah-oh." -- From the song Make Bullying Kill Itself on South ParkWhat’s the difference between a bully and a victim? It seems like a simple question, but in America’s victim-obsessed culture, the bully is often the supposed victim. As Voltaire said, “To learn...

According to press reports, a man arrested as part of an Islamic State (ISIS) group in Minnesota claimed he wanted to setup a pipeline to funnel terrorists into the U.S. through Mexico. The story rekindles concerns over the security of our southern border.It should come as no surprise that there are reports of terrorists trying to cross from Mexico to the U.S.—it’s been tried before. In 2011, Iranian agents tried to recruit a Mexican cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States with a car bomb while he dined at a restaurant in Washington, D.C.The assault on our border...

Trust can be a double-edged sword when it is not founded on insight. In politics as in personal relations, one can trust the wrong person or distrust the right one -- with unfortunate consequences. Political candidates almost universally craft their public image to play to the voter’s perception of their character -- the “kissing babies” syndrome. They know that their audience is susceptible to emotional manipulation and so present themselves as deeply concerned with the public welfare, as scrupulously honest and, most importantly, as likeable and trustworthy. But let the candidate refuse to play by the rules of the electoral...

My unscientific poll of Maryland voters in next week’s Democratic presidential primary gives Bernie Sanders a 100 percent lead in early returns. “I just voted for Bernie Sanders today,” said Thomas Frank, author of several books, including 2004’s best-seller What’s the Matter with Kansas?, and this year’s Listen, Liberal: or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? “I advance voted in Maryland. I have my little ‘I Voted’ sticker on my shirt,” Frank told me in an interview this week. Frank spoke with Sanders back in 2014, when he was deciding whether to run for president and whether to...

DO YOU remember when Donald Trump crudely mocked the disability of a New York Times reporter, and then lied about having done so? No? That’s just as the Republican candidate might hope. Now that he is nearing the Republican nomination, he says he will become more “presidential.” After winning the New York primary, he referred to “Senator Cruz” instead of “Lyin’ Ted.” You can expect multitudes of office-seekers and sycophants to follow Chris Christie’s craven path to believing, or pretending to believe, in a presidential Trump. So it is important to remember. Remember that Mr. Trump said that Mexicans crossing...

One of the biggest stories of the last couple weeks was Ted Cruz's complete shutout of Donald Trump in the Colorado delegate selection at the Colorado state Republican convention. The story, pushed hard by Trump and his zombie followers, is that the election was "stolen" by Cruz in an "unfair process."Okay, fine, sour grapes and all. But on Sunday I watched Media Buzz with Howard Kurtz, and realized that real story is this: the media has not, and apparently will not, do the tiniest bit of research in order to get the grossest, most basic facts about this correct. "It...

You might think 97-year-old Ralph Kimball of Murray, Utah, would be more careful with his hair. Instead, this World War II veteran and two-time Purple Heart recipient says with a sly chuckle, “I trust it to a kid.” That “kid″ is 91-year-old Wayne Chidester of Springville, Utah. Chidester is also a World War II veteran, and in the age of social media and digital relationships, their lengthy, loyal friendship is refreshing. Approximately once a month for more than 30 years, Kimball has visited Chidester’s barber’s chair for what he calls “the perfect haircut″ and a reminder of what matters most...

I am often asked why I, a Christian libertarian and intellectual, would publicly support Donald Trump, a man of no fixed ideology, no apparent religious beliefs, multiple marriages, visible ties to the Clintons, and whose taste and sophistication tends to resemble that of a nouveau riche rhinoceros. It is a reasonable question. After all, how can anyone support a candidate whose public statements are, to put it mildly, inconsistent—when they are not completely self-contradictory. The answer is as simple as it is conclusive and convincing. Donald Trump is the only candidate in either major party whose personal interests are aligned...

Now you’ve done it, Republicans. You’ve disappointed John Kasich. In a Wednesday interview with The Washington Post, Kasich — continuing his sad presidential campaign’s efforts to equate Ted Cruz with Donald Trump — whined about being one of few Republicans who cares about ideas.“See, I am a fundamental believer in ideas,” Kasich said. “If you don’t have ideas, you got nothing. And frankly, my Republican Party doesn’t like ideas. They want to be negative against things.”Every word of this is trademark John Weaver, the sometime Democrat consultant running Kasich’s campaign. Within a few hours, lefty opinion columnists were using Kasich’s...

On Saturday night, HBO debuted its account of the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings. While it was billed as “meticulously researched” by the leftist screenwriters and Hollywood executives behind the film, Confirmation rewrites history to advance the myth that Anita Hill was a victim of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas. The fictional “docudrama” that twists and omits key facts, and in some cases, outright makes things up, is yet another attempt by the left to establish through persistence what could not be established through evidence. At the end of Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings, polling done by Pew and others showed that...

*Co-authored with Tim GrahamHBO should stand for History Bungling Office. Over and over again, they have abused their disclaimer that certain films are "fact-based dramatizations." They re-litigated Al Gore's 2000 "victory" in "Recount." They viciously cartooned Sarah Palin's vice-presidential candidacy in "Game Change" without putting up any such disclaimer. Now, they're smearing Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a pervert and painting Anita Hill as a saint of sexual harassment in "Confirmation." The makers of this "fact-based" movie claim it's balanced. Baloney. The advertisements alone give away the game. Over the face of actress (and executive producer) Kerry Washington,...

If it concerns sex in any way, you can be sure that our culture will fixate on it and manage to defy common sense with hyperventilating indignation. Same-sex marriage roiled the waters for decades, but now that the Supreme Court has big-footed that question, culture warriors are prowling for new realms of transgression to embrace. So, coming to a bathroom near you — transgenderism. I’m just back from a weekend at Harvard University where unisex bathrooms are the norm. On behalf of womankind, I say: To the Bathroom Barricades! Bathroom injustice has been a feature of the world for a...

Home-state candidates notched up impressive victories in New York's presidential primaries Tuesday. Donald Trump topped 50 percent for the first time -- and handsomely, with 60 percent of Republican votes. And Hillary Clinton won 58 percent of Democratic votes in her adopted home state. Trump's capture of 89 of New York's 95 delegates gets him closer to, but does not guarantee him, the 1,237-delegate majority needed for the nomination. Clinton's delegate edge in New York was smaller, 139-108, but Democrats' rules allocating delegates proportionately give Bernie Sanders no chance to overcome the lead she's won in primaries, much less her...

The left has always had great admiration for the conscientious objector. I know something about that because I was a kid in the late 60s and early 70s when the Vietnam War was being fought. Some people refused to serve in the war because of their deeply held religious beliefs. To those on the right they were cowards. To those on the left they were heroes. As the son of a military officer I got one side of the story. As a student in the public schools I got the other. My teachers did their best to convince me there...

On Thursday, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump took the liberal stance on transgender restroom access. Media outlets can call it "moderate" all they want, but it is inescapable that Trump defended biological men using women's restrooms. The Donald is not exactly hesitant to offend people, and transgressing political correctness has been one of the centerpieces of his campaign. He even declared in the past that he would protect Christians and social conservatives, but this acceptance of "transgender rights" may be a sign that he has started pandering to the "center" for the general election.Conservatives have long warned that Trump is unpredictable,...

It’s not often that one can take issue with the argument that Barack Obama is needlessly dividing the country, but this might be the exception. The US Treasury has decided to honor Harriet Tubman, the woman who helped innumerable slaves escape to freedom, by putting her face on the $20 bill, replacing President Andrew Jackson. Right now, more people are concerned about finding their next $20 bill than are emotionally invested on whose face will be peering back at them when they get it. Greta van Susteren, however, argues that Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew are dividing the country...

President Obama made his fourth trip to Saudi Arabia Wednesday, ostensibly to “clear the air” in an attempt to repair the damaged relationship with the Kingdom brought about by what many will regard as his administration’s mistakes — cozying up to the Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, and embracing the Arab Spring which toppled the Saudi ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. But perhaps the biggest mistake Obama has made with regard to the Saudis is the one they’ll likely thank him for; namely, opposing — and threatening to veto — a bill authored by Sens. John Cornyn and Chuck...

There is an old adage among overworked and overstressed staffers (both congressional and military) that, “if you put off everything to the last minute, you can do everything in a minute.” This adage is actually a commentary on workloads and the pressure they produce, not about the truth of completing the tasks at hand. Now Congress seems to be attempting to do everything in a minute by applying money in an attempt to make up for lost time. Specifically, Congress and multiple administrations should have begun – decades ago – seriously planning for replacement and deployment of the US Space...

DUBLIN -- They called it the Celtic Tiger, a period of prosperity between 1995 and 2008, during which everything in Ireland appeared to come up shamrocks. According to Wikipedia, between 1995 and 2000, the long-dormant Irish economy took off, expanding by a startling 9.4 percent. There was a building boom; roads were widened to accommodate more traffic; newly confident people started buying things they had long denied themselves, including bigger and nicer houses, which, it turns out, many could not afford. Even after 2000 when the Irish economy continued to grow at an average rate of 5.9 percent, still well...

In 2014, President Barack Obama signed 12 executive orders directing various agencies in the departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security to refrain from deporting some 4 million adult immigrants illegally present in the United States if they are the parents of children born here or legally present here and if they hold a job, obtain a high-school diploma or its equivalent, pay taxes and stay out of prison. Unfortunately for the president, the conditions he established for avoiding deportation had been rejected by Congress. In response to the executive orders, 26 states and the House of Representatives sued the...