Free Republic

If it was the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that black and white would come together in friendship and peace to do justice, his acolytes in today's Democratic Party appear to have missed that part of his message. Here is Hakeem Jeffries, fourth-ranked Democrat in Nancy Pelosi's House, speaking Monday, on the holiday set aside to honor King: "We have a hater in the White House. The birther in chief. The grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. ... While Jim Crow may be dead, he's still got some nieces and nephews that are alive and well." At the...

So, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has announced she commissioned a DNA test to address her long-standing claims of having Cherokee ancestry. The Boston Globe reported that her DNA analysis "suggests she's between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American." The fraction 1/1,024 works out to 0.09 percent. So since Sen. Warren is .09 percent American Indian, she may now be eligible to own .09 percent of a casino. There are two ways to understand this story. Let's start with some sobering reality. Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr. issued an angry afternoon statement saying: "A DNA test is useless to determine...

The New York Times featured another jab at Senator Ted Cruz, a reliable target of liberal media loathing, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Reporters have been tittering at the thought of the fiscal conservative being obliged to change his tune to secure help for his home state of Texas, battered by Hurricane Harvey. NYT reporter Matt Flegenheimer took his turn in Saturday's “Trump and Harvey Push Cruz to Adjust His Style.” The text box: “A fiscal conservative shifts to constituent service when disaster strikes his hometown.” The online headline was slightly smarmy: “Ted Cruz 2.0? Senator Adjusts With Trump in...

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...

In case you missed the Senate's overnight drama, Matt's explanatory post does a nice job of filling in the blanks. Basically, after being warned over violating a Senate rule in her speech impugning the character of Jeff Sessions -- who is still a sitting member of the upper chamber -- Elizabeth Warren continued her angry harangue unabated. As she leaned on the words of Coretta Scott King in order to effectively call Sessions a racist who's sought to disenfranchise black voters, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell intervened. He invoked Rule 19, which prohibits any member from taking to the floor and “directly or...

If past is prelude, America has a lot to look forward to. Sound cabinet choices across the board by President-elect Trump seem to be emerging, and with regularity. Controversial, at a time when everything is controversial, perhaps. But scrolling back the rhetoric, these choices are rational, thoughtful, experienced and – in a word – appropriate for the times. Consider the President-elect’s selections to date. Vice President Mike Pence is a rock-solid, tested, proven national leader. The press says little of him, because he is principled, no-nonsense, dispassionate, hard worker. We need more of those in government. Pence was in...

A shocking new poll shows Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., ahead of Hillary Clinton in Iowa, the first caucus state, and in New Hampshire, the first primary state. The YouGov poll, paid for by Moveon.org, found Warren ahead of Clinton in Iowa, 31 percent to 24 percent, among likely Democratic primary and caucus voters. In New Hampshire, Warren's lead was 30 percent to 27 percent. Other polls, however, show Clinton enjoying a substantial lead. This poll is an outlier, and the upstart 15-year-old polling firm gathers its data via the Internet, using complex methodology and algorithms. Some of their polls in...

One, and only one, candidate, Barack Obama, caught the X-factor and improbably got himself nominated and elected, and re-elected, president. Another improbable candidate could catch it again.What is that X-factor? How does it upend things?Peace and personal security continued to flourish in 2014 and are likely to continue into 2015 and beyond. This is important news. It also is news the news media can ill afford to report. But voters sense it.Two of our greatest public intellectuals, Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack, provide a defining “state of the world” summation in Slate.com inThe World Is Not Falling Apart. The evidence...

Waging class warfare can get pretty tiresome for some Democrats… Which kinda explains why they have decided to make companies wage it on themselves. As part of the regulation requirements in Dodd-Frank, publicly traded companies will soon have to spend millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of man-hours, to officially report how rich their CEO is compared to rank and file employees. According to the Washington Free Beacon:The provision is backed by labor unions like the AFL-CIO, which seeks to “shame companies into lowering CEO pay.” The price tag of the regulation is expected to be “substantial,” costing more than...

Politicians do politics because they can't help it. It's what they do: their whole reason for existence. A public man -- or woman -- can no more help legislating and campaigning and back-scratching and log-rolling and fundraising than -- than what? Than a writer on politics can stop bloviating and prophesying. I state the comparison with a degree of shame. We're all in this together -- politicos and pundits. We love the game, and that's too bad, for everybody. These reflections come to mind on account of the Great Political Repositioning now underway in Washington due to Republican takeover of...

WASHINGTON -- It is the end of the year 2014 and the beginning of 2015. Perhaps it is an appropriate time to think about what we are to be confronted with in the presidential year 2016. Ever since the autumn electoral rout of the Democrats, we have been confronted by news stories of the looming presidential prospects of Hillary Rodham Clinton and hints about the rise of the presidential prospects of Elizabeth Warren. Only rarely is there a news story about the presidential prospects of the Republicans, though I count more than 25 possible Republican candidates. On the Democrats side...