Free Republic

Donald Trump now needs a swing of only 3 to 4 percentage points in key battleground states to win this election. The rule is simple: Throw lots of mud and see what sticks. It works. For instance, Trump just called for a “special prosecutor” to investigate the Clinton Foundation: It made for a good headline . The key issue here is how Trump is polling in context. He has just gone through almost a month of terrible campaign news. Yet he remains within a 4-point swing of winning in battleground states. That should be terrifying for Team Clinton. No wonder...

If photo ID laws are the bane to minority voting rights that leftists and assorted federal judges claim, you’d expect the public to agree. Not even close. Eighty percent of Americans, white and nonwhite across party lines support photo ID laws, according to a Gallup poll taken Aug. 15-16: Nonwhite:       77%Republicans:    93%Independents:  83%Democrats:      63% Last July, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals held that Texas’ “strict photo ID law” discriminated against or disproportionately affected black and Latino voters who allegedly face hardships in obtaining the necessary documents, which include any of the following: Election identification certificateDept. of Public...

You probably never heard of Max Boot, not that you missed much. Like Ash Carter, Mister Boot is one of those defense intellectuals who makes a living from all things vicarious; consulting, “scholarship,” partisan journalism, political appointments, and think tank sinecures. The shorthand for the Boot stereotype in Washington is “Beltway bandit.” Boot was born in Moscow and has served as one of Senator John McCain’s foreign policy advisors. You could do worse than think of Boot as a Russophobic wing nut. He also is a rabid advocate of regime change, global intervention, Russia-baiting, small wars for Islam, and other...

The News: A Letter to President Barack Obama and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of August 19, 2016 was signed by a bipartisan group of 36 former national security officials, e.g., Democratic Party luminaries like Ed Rendell, Gov. & DNC Chair, Howard Dean Gov. & DNC Chair; and prominent Republicans, e.g., Mayor Rudy Giuliani, DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, & UN Amb John Bolton. The letter stated, “We fear that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS), and its Quds Force will attack the remaining residents [of Camp Liberty Iraq].” On Aug. 2, the MOIS website stated its opposition to the...

I have long been a believer that, in most cases, a private company will do a more effective and efficient job than any government agency charged with the same task. My recent travel experience solidified that belief. It all started out with a half-empty water bottle at Ronald Reagan National Airport just outside the District of Columbia. I had checked in the night before, checked my bag at the curbside when I arrived, and now had a full hour to go through security. With Congress gone since late July and much of the District emptied out until Labor Day, I...

Donald Trump has no choice but to soften his view on deporting eleven million illegal immigrants. I'm not disagreeing with the idea of deporting these illegals. I'm simply explaining why he has to alter his position. Over the last two decades we have allowed our country to become overwhelmed by Third World values. What are these values? Third World values are a complete distrust of the system - so much in fact that you believe you should overrun it. It’s not just a movement of restoring the democracy, it’s an arrogance of vanity and self-interest that puts one’s interests above...

Pro-abortion activists, hiding behind the (often undeserved) cloak of credibility provided by a peer-reviewed journal, made a concerted effort this week to mess with Texas. A recent study on increasing maternal mortality rates (MMR) in America made some blatantly dishonest claims about maternal deaths in the Lone Star state, concluding: “Adjusted maternal mortality rates for Texas show only a modest increase from 2000 to 2010, from a rate of 17.7 in 2000 to 18.6 in 2010. However, after 2010, the reported maternal mortality rate for Texas doubled within a 2-year period to levels not seen in other U.S. states.” Just....

The problem with environmentalists isn't merely that they have destructive ideas about the economy, but that so many of them embrace repulsive ideas about human beings. Take a recent NPR piece that asks, "Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?" If you want to learn about how environmentalism has already affected people in society, read about the couple pondering "the ethics of procreation" and its impact on the climate before starting a family, or the group of women in a prosperous New Hampshire town swapping stories about how the "the climate crisis is a reproductive crisis."...

On June 6 [2012] of this year, a bomb planted at the U.S. compound in Benghazi ripped a 12-foot-wide hole in the outer wall. On June 11 [2012], the British ambassador’s motorcade was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, wounding a medic and doctor. The next day, the ambassador was gone and the British Benghazi post was closed. At the same time, the Red Cross, after a second attack, shut down and fled the city. “When that occurred,” says Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, who headed the military security team in Tripoli, “we were the last flag flying in Benghazi; we were...

An important new survey by Pew Research asks why people who were raised in religious homes but who now identify as religious “nones” – having no religious affiliation – decided to leave the faith of their childhood. The results were varied, but according to the survey, “Half of ‘nones’ left childhood faith over lack of belief, one-in-five cite[d] dislike of organized religion.”Of this half (more exactly, 49 percent) of “nones” who say they no longer believe, many “mention ‘science’ as the reason they do not believe in religious teachings” while others “reference ‘common sense,’ ‘logic’ or a ‘lack of evidence’...

Prediction: If Hillary Clinton wins, within a year of her inauguration, she will be under investigation by a special prosecutor on charges of political corruption, thereby continuing a family tradition. For consider what the Associated Press reported this week: The surest way for a person with private interests to get a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton, or a phone call returned by her, it seems, was to dump a bundle of cash into the Clinton Foundation. Of 154 outsiders whom Clinton phoned or met with in her first two years at State, 85 had made contributions to the Clinton...

If the judge is on your side, you can win a case despite pathetic arguments. So if the cost of losing is near zero and the possible gain from winning is huge, why not launch a suit and see what happens? That’s the thinking behind a case challenging Idaho’s Right to Work (RTW) statute on the grounds that the state is taking property that belongs to labor unions when it allows workers to keep their jobs even if they don’t pay the dues demanded by the union. The theory of the suit is that Idaho’s law (and, logically, all other...

erry McAuliffe is a Hillary Clinton pal. He fronted $1.3 million for her house in Chappaqua, New York. We should all have such friends. Thanks to the Republicans who shut down the government in 2013, McAuliffe is now the governor of Virginia, a swing state, and thus in a position to help Clinton get another house -- on Pennsylvania Avenue. Any governor has political strings to pull, but Gov. McAuliffe is going beyond sharing voter information, get-out-the-vote operations and other traditional political tools. He's creating new voters by unilaterally restoring voting rights to 206,000 convicted felons. McAuliffe is focused on...

Hold on; we may finally be getting some fireworks in this lackluster presidential campaign -- as the Clinton Foundation scandal seems to be gathering steam. Could the Clintons finally have to face the music for their adult-lifetime of corruption? Is it possible that Hillary Clinton's lifelong scheme to be America's first female president could be derailed by this power couple's wanton venality? I've watched closely through the years the Clintons' uncanny agility at hurdling real scandals and coming out almost unscathed. Yes, Bill Clinton was impeached, but what a dud that turned out to be, with Clinton rising to the...

Do you know the old wheelbarrow joke? It's truly funny only to grandpas and the grandkids they tell it to, so I won't bother with the elaborate setup. For years a factory worker pushes a wheelbarrow full of straw past a security guard on his way out. Suspicious that the guy is stealing something, the guard looks in the straw but can't find anything. Finally, when the worker is retiring, the guard asks, "I know you've been stealing something -- can you tell me what it is? The guy smiles and says, "Wheelbarrows." That joke keeps popping into my head...

Comedy Central frustrated racial bean counters across America when it abruptly canceled "The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore" for the obvious reason: It "hasn't resonated." Its ratings were terrible, and nothing it aired went viral. It was a desperate stretch when one Wilmore staffer described their audience as "small, but (mighty)." A lack of market demand on a for-profit network is apparently no excuse to cancel a show. NPR TV critic Eric Deggans leaped to the microphone to pound the affirmative-action hard line: Had Comedy Central's audience "ultimately rejected a black man talking boldly about race in late night television?"...

Hillary's flacks maintain that she has no serious health problems, but there is an increasingly public amount of evidence that they are lying. Her coughing fits, for example, have gone on for minutes during interviews and speeches and debates. The leftist establishment media has totally ignored this running story, but there is one venue in which her uncontrollable coughing and hacking cannot be hidden from the American people: the presidential debates. Because her health seems to getting worse all the time and because she has never appeared in a nationally televised presidential debate (indeed, even her few debates with Bernie...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Once again evidence that my instincts are right on the money. This is from a website called UCSD News I've shared with you over the course of the history of the program that when I was 15, I wanted to be 20, 20 wanted to be 25, cause no matter what age I was, people older than I seemed happier, they seemed adjusted, they seemed successful, they seemed stable, rooted, what have you. In other words, to me it looked like life got better with age and that that had a calming effect on people. And that's...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: New polling data out. This is from TheHill.com. "Hillary Clinton leads Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump by 3 points in the latest national poll, a tighter margin than earlier this month. Clinton, the Democratic nominee, leads Trump 47 percent to 44 percent in the Economist/YouGov online poll of registered voters based on a head-to-head match-up. Although Clinton held a 3-point edge in the poll early this month, she had expanded that lead to as many as 7 points in recent weeks." The headline should be: "Hillary Loses Half of Her Lead Over Trump," but of course it...

Hillary Clinton did something today that is worse than anything Donald Trump has ever said or done. It was pandering. It was gross. And she should be embarrassed. She ran an ad that basically said the KKK will be in charge if Trump wins. Politics doesn’t get any lower than this. There are a few problems with the ad other than how childish it is. Not only has the KKK endorsed Hillary, but Hillary used to be good friends with someone who was actually a member. Flashback time. From Breitbart: In 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fondly eulogized Sen....