Free Republic

I admit I clearly was not born with the patience gene. As a kid my mother was always saying to me, "Patience, patience, patience." Today my wife Colleen is always saying the same thing,"Mike. Patience, patience." It's no use. For example, when I go to a movie I hate standing in line. It's always just driven me absolutely nuts. Now at least I can have my son go online and buy the tickets before we get there. Whenever there's a line at a restaurant, I just turn and walk away. When my friends just look at me, I tell...

In the fallout of President Donald J. Trump’s historic victory, the Democratic Party is in a state of panic. They suffered record-breaking defeats across the country, and are still trying to clean up the mess caused by Hillary Clinton, a candidate who explored uncharted depths of political corruption. One of the Democrats’ biggest problems is how their grassroots base was ignored by elites who used a complicated process of “Superdelegates” to steal the primary election from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Now, there’s new leadership at the Democratic National Committee. Chairman Tom Perez on a “Unity Tour” has committed himself to...

If you’re a conservative who judges Donald Trump on his performance in his first 100 days in office, you should be fairly happy. That doesn’t mean Trump has been perfect or that he should keep tweeting about everything that pops into his head, but he’s had a solid start to his presidency. 10) An Economic Confidence Boost: Trump is not responsible for every good thing that happens in our economy, just as he’s not responsible for every bad thing that happens. That being said, it’s hard to miss the fact that the American economy seems to be taking off...

RUSH: Hey, did you see Obama’s accepted another $400,000 speech? That’s two of them now. The first $400,000 speech was from a Wall Street firm, Cantor Fitzgerald. It slips my mind who the second one is from, but I have an idea.That’s how much he made per year as president.And we’re toldthat liberals don’t care about money.We’re toldthat liberals do what they do for altruistic reasons.We’re toldthat liberals are compassionate.They care. They don’t care about getting rich, they aren’t rich, and they, of course, have negative comments and things to say about everybody who is rich. And yet when they...

Rather than accept electoral defeat, the mainstream of the Democratic Party now believes in “resisting” -- resisting anything the party in power enacts into law, does, wants to do, or even wants to think. Their new goal is to disrupt, obfuscate, destroy, and neuter their opposition. They are doing it with revolting politicians who think their job is to say anything incendiary, nasty, boorish, off the wall, and destructive. Ditto with their “journOlists.” And, unfortunately, ditto with far too many of their voters. None have a clue that they are beyond the bounds of what was once called civilized discourse....

RUSH: Donald Trump is addressing the NRA, and he just told the attendees here that we will build the wall. We are going to build the wall. He got a massive round of applause. But the point is, he reasserted it yet again, which, remember, there aren’t a whole lot of members of Congress who want to build the wall. Senators, as I reported yesterday, are openly laughing about the idea. “It’ll never happen. You believe Trump will build this wall?” Five or six of them laughing about it. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Grab sound bite number 22 quickly. Here’s Trump...

RUSH: You see what Texas is doing with sanctuary cities? Folks, this is magnificent. Texas is not waiting. They’re just declaring sanctuary cities illegal, and if they have to, they are saying they’re going to jail police chiefs and sheriffs who refuse to enforce the law. They are through. They’re not gonna take it anymore. We have some hand wringers out there in the blogosphere wondering if this is maybe not going a bit far. “Jailing police chiefs and sheriffs? Maybe there’s a better way but maybe Texas knows what it’s doing. We’ll just have the to wait and see,”...

RUSH: President Trump told a funny story not long ago. A bunch of people were seated around the dinner table, and President Trump was talking about not long after I’d arrived in New York. He said, “Yeah, I’m asking everybody who’s this Limbaugh guy? Nobody knows who this Limbaugh guy is. And they start telling me who this Limbaugh guy is and I said, ‘Well, I gotta get on that show.’ And my friends told me, ‘You can’t get on that show. He doesn’t take guests. He does three straight hours with no guests and hardly any phone calls. You...

White people are always stealing stuff from black people. And black people, like Oprah, don’t like it. Neither do third-grade teachers in lily white schools. Just a few months ago, my friend’s third-grade son informed him that white music record labels steal black music and never pay for it. He learned that from a teacher who spent an hour breaking it down how the Beach Boys stole "Surfin’ USA" from Chuck Berry’s "Sweet Little 16". But the teacher left out the punchline: Chuck sued and won and today he is listed -- and paid -- as co-author of the song....

Considering GOP control of Washington, one might have expected “concealed-carry reciprocity” – national legislation declaring that if you have a concealed carry permit in one state, is must be recognized by all other states — to have been either featured in President Trump’s 100 days agenda or rapidly approaching passage. The bill has 188 cosponsors in the House, but has been sitting in subcommittee since January. Justice Gorsuch is a fantastic win for the administration, but there’s still a lot of lower court judicial vacancies to fill: Circuit courts need nominees for 19 vacancies, and district courts are waiting to...

Bill Nye has some detestable ideas about humanity. This shouldn't surprise anyone. Many environmental doomsdayers share his totalitarian impulses (he has toyed with the idea of criminalizing speech he dislikes) and soft spot for eugenics. In his Netflix series, "Bill Nye Saves the World," the former children's television host supplies viewers with various trendy notions to adorn his ideological positions with the sheen of science. In the final episode, Nye and his guests contemplate a thorny "scientific" question: How can the state stop people from having "extra kids"? All of this was pretty familiar to me, and not only because...

So, Donald Trump delivers a speech in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the anti-Semites are up in arms. He is not the man they thought he was. In reality, he never was that man, which was more a projection of their own ideology than a right assessment of his. As Sam Kestenbaum reported on the Jewish Forward, “Trump Gives A Holocaust Speech — And The ‘Alt Right’ Screams ‘Betrayal’.” How, exactly, did Trump betray the “alt-right”?In his speech, he said, “The State of Israel is an eternal monument to the undying strength of the Jewish people. The fervent...

While we're examining the accomplishments of Donald Trump's first hundred days -- putting his man on the U.S. Supreme Court is the biggie -- Hillary Clinton is getting the once-over (and the second and third) for all the reasons why she's not the first woman to preside over her first hundred days in the Oval Office. She never understood that "the fault, dear Hillary, is not in the stars, but in yourself." In "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign," the book Washington, D.C., is talking about, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes write a sweeping drama with lots of supporting actors...

Has President Donald Trump outsourced foreign policy to the generals? So it would seem. Candidate Trump held out his hand to Vladimir Putin. He rejected further U.S. intervention in Syria other than to smash ISIS. He spoke of getting out and staying out of the misbegotten Middle East wars into which Presidents Bush II and Obama had plunged the country. President Trump's seeming renunciation of an anti-interventionist foreign policy is the great surprise of the first 100 days, and the most ominous. For any new war could vitiate the Trump mandate and consume his presidency. Trump no longer calls...

Jonathan Haidt is a member of one of America's smallest fraternities -- those who attempt to see beyond their own prejudices. In the left-leaning Chronicle of Higher Education, he notes that "intimidation is the new normal" on college campuses. The examples are well-known: The shout-down/shutdown of Heather Mac Donald at Claremont McKenna College; the riots sparked by Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley; the experience of Charles Murray at Middlebury College, where he and professor Allison Stanger were physically assaulted by a mob. Stanger was sent to the hospital with injuries. She said she feared for her life. Haidt writes: "We are...

The totalitarian left is emboldened by its selective suppression of speech. Just as scary is the deluded thought process that inspires its Stalinism. Recognizing its inability to compete in the marketplace of ideas, the left has been chipping away for years at the concept of free speech. You have to give leftists points for cleverness, not to mention persistence, because they don't openly advocate censoring conservative speech as such. They pretend to be protecting some greater good or preventing imminent harm to certain groups. When they failed in talk radio, they resurrected the Fairness Doctrine, which is euphemistically disguised as...

Demosthenes, the Athenian rhetorician and champion of liberty, pointed out around 355 B.C. that residents of Athens were free to praise Sparta's regime, but Spartans were banned from praising Athens. In 1689, the British passed a law guaranteeing freedom of speech in Parliament. A century later, French revolutionaries incorporated into law the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which established free speech as a universal right. Two years later, the Americans ratified the First Amendment, which guarantees that the state shall not infringe on the right to free speech. Roughly a century and half later, in 1948, the United Nations...

Author’s Note: This column contains some bad language from a critic – although I don’t mind. The fact that I am receiving flak shows that I am flying over the target.Good Afternoon, Margaret (president@northcarolina.edu):I am sure that you will recall an interview you gave back in January in which you characterized my political views as “hate speech.” I know that you and other administrators have been concerned that my views are causing prospective students to decline to enroll in the UNC system. A phone call I recently received from the parent of one prospective student shows that your fears are...

Socialized Health Care: Never let it be said that California doesn't march to the beat of a different drummer. While the rest of the country has had second, third and even fourth thoughts about having a single-payer health care system, the Golden State boldly marches forward into fiscal oblivion. As the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday, "A sweeping measure that would establish government-run universal health care in California cleared its first legislative hurdle Wednesday as scores of supporters crammed into the Capitol to advocate for a single-payer system." Let's unpack that sentence a bit. It's true that so-called State Bill...

Money in Politics: President Obama's devotees no doubt had hoped he would come out swinging against President Trump. Instead, the only thing he's done so far is cash in on his presidency with a massive book deal and a six-figure speech gig. Earlier this month, Obama reportedly signed a book deal with Penguin Random House for more than $65 million for one book written by him and another written by Michelle. (The exact amount wasn't made public.) Assuming that figure is correct and they both write 500 page books, that amounts to roughly $144 per word for each of them....