Free Republic

Nine reasons why a conservative should prefer a Trump presidency to a Democrat presidency. When you differ from people you admire, you have to question yourself. After all, what is the purpose of admiring people if they aren't capable of influencing you? So, I have had to challenge my position -- stated since the outset of the Republican presidential debates -- that if Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, I will vote for him over Hillary Clinton, or any Democrat for that matter. I devoted many hours of radio and many columns to criticizing Trump. His virtually assured nomination has...

America today has the proven resources to be the world’s number 1 producer of oil, number 1 producer of natural gas, and number 1 producer of coal. What is the policy of the Clinton/Obama Democrats flying under the flag of so-called “progressivism” today? Leave it in the ground!Their reason: if we continue to use the fossil fuel energy that powered the industrial revolution, life on the planet is going to fry, and we are all going to die. This is calculated deception, to justify vastly expanded government power and control, and a socialist takeover of American energy, which offers today...

The first lesson from how the Iran deal was sold to the public is that it is important to follow the money. Eight hundred eleven op-eds. Three hundred fifty- two letters to the editor. Two hundred twenty-seven editorials. That’s the number of “pro-diplomacy” articles that Ploughshares Fund takes credit for helping support as part of its “proactive” media campaign to support the Iran deal last year. They “were published during critical moments of the Iran campaign,” the website of the fund boasts in its 2015 annual report. The revelations about the work that this one fund did to support the...

Is Trayvon Martin the Only Black Life that Matters? We all know why leftists aren’t rushing to live in inner city black neighborhoods. May 23, 2016 Crystal Wright    Apparently, Trayvon Martin is the only black life that really matters to many blacks and liberals. Blacks are getting gunned down by other blacks every day in cities across the country and there’s no outrage from liberals.  These kids are nameless and faceless to liberals’ Black Lives Matter Movement. But when George Zimmerman decided to auction off the gun he used to shoot Martin in self-defense, people lost their minds. I...

Ah, the "good old days," the ones that President Obama took a sarcastic swipe at during his recent commencement speech at Rutgers University when he said that America's "good old days weren't that great." Certainly he misread his teleprompter. Sure, we've experienced enormous advances in things like technology and medicine, but the "good old days" aren't so bad, especially compared to what's happening today. During the speech Obama said, "...by almost every measure, America is better and the world is better than it was 50 years ago, or 30 years ago, or even eight years ago." Apparently, Hillary Clinton missed...

The Freddie Gray Lynch Mob Lie Show trial against officer ends in acquittal. May 24, 2016 Matthew Vadum    A white Baltimore police officer accused of wrongdoing in the highly politicized death of black career criminal Freddie Gray last year that sparked days of rioting has been completely exonerated by the courts. No matter what Baltimore's corrupt Democrat-controlled political machine tries, it can't manage to convict anyone in the unusual April 19, 2015 death of Gray, a 25-year-old man with a long arrest record. Gray passed away a week after his arrest after apparently suffering ultimately fatal injuries during...

If China begins to reclaim and militarize Scarborough Shoal, says Philippines President Benigno S. Aquino III, America must fight. Should we back down, says Aquino, the United States will lose "its moral ascendancy, and also the confidence of one of its allies." And what is Scarborough Shoal? A cluster of rocks and reefs, 123 miles west of Subic Bay, that sits astride the passageway out of the South China Sea into the Pacific, and is well within Manila's 200-mile exclusive economic zone. Beijing and Manila both claim Scarborough Shoal. But, in June 2013, Chinese ships swarmed and chased off a...

In the late 1800s, it took railroad companies six years to lay 1,907 miles of track for what was to become the Transcontinental Railroad (or as Barack Obama calls it, the Intercontinental Railroad). Building that railroad line required tunneling through mountains — at one foot a day — building bridges — including one that spanned 700 feet — and doing all the work almost entirely by hand. As best, it will now take seven years for California to lay 119 miles of track — on relatively flat ground in the middle of nowhere. That news came from a contract revision...

Women, lamented Hillary Clinton in an April 2014 tweet, make just 77 cents on the dollar to men. As a presidential candidate she has repeated that lament again and again, updating the numbers, in line with government statistics, to 78 cents in July 2015 and 79 cents this year. This injustice, she says, must be remedied by government. "Last time I checked," Clinton told an event sponsored by a salary site called Glassdoor, "there's no discount for being a woman. Groceries don't cost us less, rent doesn't cost us less, so why should we be paid less?" There is, as...

“Congress designated May as National Military Appreciation Month in 1999 to ensure the nation was given the opportunity to publicly demonstrate their appreciation for the sacrifices and successes made by our servicemembers - past and present. Each year the president makes a proclamation, reminding Americans of the important role the U.S. Armed Forces have played in the history and development of our country.”That is the official explanation of the purpose of May as National Military Appreciation Month. My question is, how many of you actually knew about this? And what exactly does Military Appreciation mean in America? Does it mean...

This is the season of college Commencement speeches -- an art form that has seldom been memorable, but has increasingly become toxic in recent times. Two themes seem to dominate Commencement speeches. One is shameless self-advertising by people in government, or in related organizations supported by the taxpayers or donors, saying how nobler it is to be in "public service" than working in business or other "selfish" activities. In other words, the message is that it is morally superior to be in organizations consuming output produced by others than to be in organizations which produce that output. Moreover, being morally...

White people are being asked—or pushed—to take stock of their whiteness and identify with it more. This is a remarkably bad idea. I opened Twitter recently and saw 20+ notifications. Most of the time that means the new generation of white nationalist Twitter trolls are filling my feed with racist and anti-Semitic cartoons. It was the trolls, but this was different. They were celebrating my use of the word “anti-white” in a tweet. They saw it as a victory that a “mainstream conservative” was using this term that for so long has been their calling card. They had a point....

Left-wing, conservative and libertarian pro-crime policies lead to a rise in crime. The left's insane propositions in California included Proposition 47 or the "Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act". That Orwellian name made as much sense as calling a bill to legalize arson the "Fire Prevention and Non-Torched Homes Act". Proposition 47 effectively decriminalized a bunch of crimes, including shoplifting. And you'll never guess what happened next. Shoplifting. Lots and lots of shoplifting. Perry Lutz says his struggle to survive as a small businessman became a lot harder after California voters reduced theft penalties 1½ years ago. About a half-dozen times...

The secret to Trump's success: Treating us with respect Posted: Monday, May 23, 2016 12:15 am By EDWARD FARLING Richard Cohen and the New York Times have, quite unintentionally, explained to me Donald Trump's appeal. The explanation was wrapped in the usual patronizing characterizations of his supporters; racist, hateful, uneducated (and therefore unintelligent), but it is not that. Trump supporters want jobs. Sure, the pundits never said it. They hate Trump and dismiss his supporters, and would never give them that much credit. But they did manage to leave it as the only logical conclusion. From the first of Cohen's...

During the showdown over Obamacare, the pro-Obama PAC Organizing for Action put out an ad now known as “Pajama Boy.” It showcased a young fellow in thick retro-rimmed glasses, wearing black-and-red plaid children’s-style pajamas, and sipping from a mug, with a sort of all-knowing expression on his face. The text urged: “Wear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.” Most men in Dayton or Huntsville do not lounge around in the morning in their pajamas, with or without built-in footpads, drinking hot chocolate and scanning health-insurance policies. That our elites either think they do, or think the...

About the same time I was listening to those girls sing “Imagine,” this item came across my news feed: By morning, three newborns were already dead. The day had begun with the usual hazards: chronic shortages of antibiotics, intravenous solutions, even food. Then a blackout swept over the city, shutting down the respirators in the maternity ward. Doctors kept ailing infants alive by pumping air into their lungs by hand for hours. By nightfall, four more newborns had died. “The death of a baby is our daily bread,” said Dr. Osleidy Camejo, a surgeon in the nation’s capital, Caracas, referring...

American Republicans who support Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid are knowingly backing “the meanest, whitest, most vile bigot possible” because they fear losing majority status. That’s according to The Guardian’s Steven Thrasher, who contends that minorities will never prosper in the United States until 2043 “when this white supremacist nation becomes mostly non-white.” Thrasher calls Trump’s rise to political power on the right predictable nearly eight years after the nation elected its first black president because “every bold advancement of progress in the United States is met by a racist backlash.” Calling Obama “a clear symbol that the country is...

This controversy is surreal because it’s totally artificial. Transgender men and women have been using bathrooms without incident since long before any right wing extremist group dreamed up legislation to alienate and punish them.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Baltimore. Freddie Gray. Arresting officer Edward Nero found not guilty on all charges. Not guilty on every single charge. He rejected a jury trial and chose a bench trial. For those of you in Rio Linda, that means he let the judge decide. It was a wise, wise move. He obviously figured he couldn't get a fair and impartial jury in Baltimore, given the racial component here. Now, this case... Let's go back and listen to Marilyn Mosby. She's the state attorney here, and this is the day -- it's May 1st of 2015, a little over...

In 2004, Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro launched the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our Americas, a regional alliance of leftist leaders designed to subvert a hemispheric free trade agreement that the United States had been pushing for a decade. Today Latin America's leftist ramparts appear to be crumbling because of widespread corruption, a slowdown in China's economy and poor economic choices. For the most part, leaders failed to create diversified economies capable of withstanding slumps. The welfare and pension programs that kept voters loyal proved unsustainable. Leaders in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia flouted democratic traditions by expanding or...