Free Republic

For most American Jewish liberals, November 8 was not only a watershed election, but a day in which the music died. They have been left speechless and silent, unwilling to fathom the implications. These liberal Jews have become disoriented and unsure about what to do and what to say; they seem to be suffering from a bad case of PTSD (Post Trump Stress Disorder). For many of these liberal Jews, they are slowly waking up to a new reality of losing their political clout, being left out of the multiple loops of power and access to the White House. They...

It’s not uncommon for a Republican to be pro-business. But President-elect Donald Trump showed Tuesday night he’s pro-worker, too, by saving 1,000 jobs at the Carrier plant in Indiana. His standing up for the blue-collar workers who helped get him elected is no small feat, even for the very accomplished billionaire, who has a long record of delivering under budget and on time. Sure, it’s unusual for a president-elect to interject himself in the economic mechanizations of a specific company — let alone the economy writ large — but everything about Trump being the next president is unusual... The brutally...

Democrats Must Dig Faster and Use Bigger Shovels Things the Democratic elites should do in order to live up to their party principles. The biggest media topic of the day, apart from how president-elect Trump is Hitler, is how the Democratic party can dig its way out of the sinkhole in which it woke up on November 9th.  In the meantime, perpetual panic attacks among Democratic elites result in uncontrollable anger, projections, verbal incontinence, hallucinations, and outright lunacy. Amidst alarming reports that her own party is being consumed by crisis, chaos, and infighting, Elizabeth Warren all of a sudden decided...

It’s Time for Honest Talk about Muslim Immigration Some immigrants from jihad zones will be involved in murdering Americans. Is this an acceptable price for compassion? By David French — November 30, 2016 At 9:52 a.m. on Monday morning, a silver Honda jumped a curb at Ohio State University and plowed directly into a crowd of students, sending bodies flying through the air. As students rushed to help, a young Somali immigrant, Abdul Razak Ali Ratan, got out of the car and began attacking horrified students with a butcher knife. All told, eleven people were wounded before a university...

After taking white working-class voters for granted in November, the Democratic Party seems poised to do the same for Jews – and that could have important implications for the already troubled U.S.-Israeli relationship. Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who lead the party's progressive wing, are backing Rep. Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim with a long history of anti-Semitic leanings and anti-Israeli positions, as the party's next chairman. So too is the incoming Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, who is considered one of Israel's strongest Democratic backers. Ellison's bid and high-level backing reflect the party's increasing...

A group of distinguished trade economists have quietly released a paper estimating that if Chinese imports had grown half as quickly over the past 15 years, Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump would be preparing to move into the White House right now. There’s reason to be skeptical about this specific result, since it focuses on regions harmed by trade with China and doesn’t factor in benefits enjoyed by people elsewhere in the country. Nevertheless, it underscores just how big an impact trade with China has had on the American economy — and on our politics. For decades, experts have...

..... Ellison's sordid past associations with Louis Farrakhan -- the long time leader of the Nation of Islam -- will hurt him in Middle America.... In addition to embracing American enemies abroad, Farrakhan has exhibited a penchant for lacing his sermons with anti-Semitic hate speech. Around the time that Ellison was working with the Nation of Islam, for example, Farrakhan was delivering speeches attacking "the synagogue as Satan." He described Jews as "wicked deceivers of the American people" that have "wrapped [their] tentacles around the U.S. government" and are "deceiving and sending this nation to hell." .... Ellison has struggled...

With the Hillary/Stein swing-state recount effort likely going nowhere, some Democrats are still pinning their hopes of preventing Trump from becoming president on persuading enough electors to violate their commitments and become so-called faithless electors. The immediate problem with this approach is that many states have laws requiring electors to vote for the candidate whose party won the state. But as Politico reports, Democrats are gearing up to send a group of lawyers out to defend anyone who chooses to challenge those laws: Leaders of the effort, mainly Democrats, have plans to challenge laws in the 29 states that force...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The left and the Democrats are continuing to spin out of control. They do not know what has happened to them. They are still blaming polls. Nate Silver is the latest target for the Democrats. Nate Silver didn't use the polling data correctly and misled Democrat voters. I mean, they're just... (laughing) Obama is out there; he's gone to Rolling Stone magazine to complain about fake news! Rolling Stone magazine just lost a lawsuit of something like $7 million about their fake rape story at the University of Virginia. You know, an infobabe reporter made it all...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Frank Sesno. You know, Frank Sesno teaches journalism now. He's a former CNN anchor. My memory of Frank Sesno... I'll just share this. Frank Sesno used to be an anchor at CNN, and this is back during the Reagan years, and the Soviet Union back then was not an economic power. The media wanted it to be. The Democrats wanted it to be. They were a nuclear power. They were a Third World nation with a First World military. But they couldn't feed their own people. Anyway... This might have been post-Reagan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: So what was your reaction when you heard that Carrier was going to keep a thousand jobs in the United States after talking to Trump? What was your reaction? I mean, you're standing up and cheering, right? You're saying, "My gosh, this is really happening! I mean, this is just flat-out cool. Somebody campaigned on something that nobody else has ever even tried to do and pulls it off even before he is inaugurated." BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Let's just get to the news here. "Trump to Announce Carrier Plant Will Keep Jobs in U.S." This is the...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Yeah, this is gonna be fun, folks. It's gonna be fun. I don't quite know how to describe how much fun it's gonna be, but I can try to give you an idea here. What happened to that call that was on line 4 that I want to...? (interruption) Remember what the subject matter of that call was? (interruption) What was it? What was it? (interruption) Oh, yeah, yeah. We had a caller up there. I gave advice to somebody on how to do what? (interruption) Oh, yeah. How to deal with schoolmates razzing her because she...

John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published a bestselling book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, in 2002. Judis hailed the continuing validity of their thesis in an Atlantic article published in November 2012. Other authors, such as Democrat pollster Stanley Greenberg and National Review’s chief political correspondent Tim Alberta, have taken up the drumbeat. The gist of this argument is that a combination of demographic changes to American society and key socioeconomic developments are making it likely that the future will belong to the Democratic Party. Among the demographic changes is the assertion that groups especially likely to vote Democrat – African...

Smart energy policy could give the next President his best prospect for spurring growth in manufacturing jobs—and thus delivering on the promises his voters think matter most. Pundits are terrible at predicting presidencies; remember the hymns to the greatness of the Second Lincoln, the New Roosevelt, and the Democratic Reagan that wafted to the heavens during the Obama transition. And the pundits were even worse at predicting Trump’s fate during the election; how many times did they predict his demise? But now, as convinced as ever of his incompetence and their infallibility, the punditocracy is telling us why the Trump...

Since Election Day the great intra-Democratic debate over What Went Wrong has been dominated by two visions of how liberalism should be organized, identity politics versus economic solidarity, with writers variously critiquing or defending each tendency, or arguing that they are complements and that any tension can and ought to be resolved. This is an interesting and fruitful debate (my own outsider’s contribution can be found here), but it has been mostly about a debate about two different ways of being (sometimes very) left-wing. There has been much less conversation about the ways in which the Democratic Party might consider...

Most people couldn't wait for the grueling, nasty, seemingly interminable 2016 election to end. Jill Stein wants to keep it going. And she's willing to waste a lot of money, time, and attention to do so. Like a bad actor that insists on one last curtain call after the audience has headed for the exits, the Green Party nominee seems to stubbornly believe in her relevance even after the election demonstrated its non-existence beyond any doubt. Stein's demand for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania demonstrates arrogance bordering on parody. Stein didn't lose the election so much as she...

President-elect Donald J. Trump has been mocked for his tweeted claim that if it were not for illegal aliens voting, he might very well have won the popular as well as the electoral vote. Is his claim less credible than the one put forth by some of Trump’s opponents that Russian hackers got into voting machines that aren’t even connected to the Internet to switch votes around? Trump puts the number at several million. Certainly the number is higher than one, considering the loosening of voting restrictions in recent years, from motor voter laws to same-day registration to handing out...

The only thing Hillary is going to achieve by backing Jill Stein’s shameless recount stunt is to make herself a TWO-TIME loser and drag America’s reputation as a democracy through the mud. How very Clinton of her! When it comes to losing, I’m very much from the Vince Lombardi school: ‘Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.’ Like the legendary NFL coach, I love winning and hate losing. I mean, I really REALLY hate losing. At anything. It eats away at my soul like a giant, agitated parasite infesting my internal organs. Even being beaten by...

Fidel Castro died as he lived: to the sound of useful idiots making allowances for his crimes. (That's not my term: It was Lenin who called liberal apologists for Communism "useful idiots.") The gold medal in the Useful Idiot Olympics should probably go to Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada. In a statement, he expressed his "deep sorrow" upon learning that "Cuba's longest serving president" had died. One can only imagine what George Orwell could do with that one word, "serving." Castro did not serve; he ruled a nation of servants, often cruelly, while making obscene profits for himself...

One of the world's last brutal communist dictators, Cuba's Fidel Castro, died last week at the age of 90. While Cuban exiles celebrated long into the night, on America's "objective" networks, they pulled out hankies and mourned this despot's filthy works and celebrated the hellhole he made. ABC's Jim Avila made the Founding Fathers roll over in their graves by touting how Castro "was considered, even to this day, the George Washington of his country among those who remain in Cuba." Notice only "those who remain" -- under the thumb of the Castros -- can be counted as fans. On...