Free Republic

My unscientific poll of Maryland voters in next week’s Democratic presidential primary gives Bernie Sanders a 100 percent lead in early returns. “I just voted for Bernie Sanders today,” said Thomas Frank, author of several books, including 2004’s best-seller What’s the Matter with Kansas?, and this year’s Listen, Liberal: or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? “I advance voted in Maryland. I have my little ‘I Voted’ sticker on my shirt,” Frank told me in an interview this week. Frank spoke with Sanders back in 2014, when he was deciding whether to run for president and whether to...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s effort to close out the Democratic race may be going awry, as a new poll shows she’s in danger of losing California to Sen. Bernie Sanders. According to a new Fox News poll conducted April 18-21, Clinton has the support of 48 percent of likely Democratic primary voters, while Sanders is right behind with 46 percent. That’s the closest margin yet between the two in the state, which awards more delegates to the Democratic National Convention than any other. Clinton holds a substantial delegate lead over Sanders and remains heavily favored to win the...

Sanders, he says, is a "false prophet" who could be as dangerous as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.With Donald Trump putting Mexico at the center of the Republican presidential conversation, the country's former president, Vicente Fox, has gone hard at the GOP front-runner, saying, "He reminds me of Hitler." But Fox, who served as president from 2000 to 2006, has some comparisons for Bernie Sanders that are not much more flattering. "In Latin America, we have a century of experience of suffering from messianic, populist leaders that have broken our economies, that have brought poverty into all of Latin America,"...

t seems a concerted effort is under way to conceal the identity of the Harvard law student who hurled anti-Semitic epithets at Israel's former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni during her recent address at the university. During the question and answer session at her speaking engagement, someone identified merely as "the president of a student organization," invoked an age-old anti-Semitic slur, asking Livni, "how is it that you are so smelly?” He then repeated the question: "A question about the odor of Ms. Tzipi Livni, she’s very smelly, and I was just wondering." CanaryMission.org notes that great lengths are being taken...

Gov. Charlie Baker, under pressure to take a position on the Legislature's transgender rights bill, "believes people should use the restroom facility they feel comfortable using," his office said yesterday, offering the governor's strongest statements on the issue so far. Baker was responding to remarks by GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, who objected to a controversial North Carolina law, saying at an NBC Today Show town hall event, that North Carolina should "leave it the way it is right now" and let people use the bathroom they prefer. The new law in North Carolina requires transgender people to use bathrooms that...

The chair of the Michigan Republican Party has pledged to vote for Donald Trump at the Party's National Convention. She also happens to be the niece of one of the GOP's most prominent Trump critics -- Mitt Romney. Ronna Romney McDaniel said she hasn't spoken with the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican nominee about her decision.

The State Department official who issued visas to many of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists is still employed by the federal government, according to J. Michael Springmann, the author of Visas for al-Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World. Springmann, former head of the visa section at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, told PJM that Shayna Steinger approved 11 of the visas granted to the 19 9/11 hijackers. Fifteen received their visas at the Jeddah consulate. Page 7 of the 9/11 Commission report states that “one consular officer issued visas to 11 of the 19 hijackers.” Those visas...

“Oh my God, they’re so rude” he told me. “We get complaints about them all the time. Just the other day one came into the lobby and caused a scene.” Any guesses who this 20-year Boston hotel doorman was talking about? Trump supporters? Drunk Bruins fans? Nope. He was answering my questions about the cab drivers he deals with day in and day out.

Blunders on Israel abound in the Bernie Sanders camp. On April 14, Sanders suspended his new national Jewish outreach communicator, Ms. Simone Zimmerman, after just two days on the job. Her sacking followed discovery of her calling Benjamin Netanyahu “an arrogant, deceptive, cynical, manipulative a[**]hole,” accusing him of “sanctioning the murder of over 2,000 people,” and presiding over a “brutal military occupation” of the West Bank (a canard I debunk here). In an April 1 interview with the NY Daily News, Mr. Sanders stated that Israel killed over 10,000 Gazans in the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas. He later...

President Barack Obama will host a Passover seder this year, but not on either of the nights it is required according to Jewish custom. A spokeswoman told JTA that Obama will host the seder next week following his return from travel overseas. Obama will be in Saudi Arabia on the first and second nights of Passover, Friday and Saturday, attending a regional cooperation summit.

Just when you think once-prestigious Harvard could fall further from grace, Harvard students hurled anti-Semitic epithets at Israel's former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni during her recent talk at the University. Last Thursday, Harvard Law School hosted a panel discussion with guest speakers Dennis Ross and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. During a question and answer session a president of a student organization mocked the Israeli leader, asking her, “How is it that you are so smelly?” When his question drew stunned silence, he clarified his "question." “A question about the odor of Ms. Tzipi Livni, she’s very smelly, and I...

In 8 out of 10 national polls, Hillary Clinton’s favorability ratings are negative by 15 points or more. According to recent CBS and NBS/WSJ polls, Clinton holds negative favorability ratings by 23 and 24 point margins, respectively. A progressive said to “get things done” won’t be able to win the White House with such negative national ratings. In contrast, Bernie Sanders is the only leading candidate with positive favorability ratings, and this has nothing to do with Clinton being more “vetted.” Bernie doesn’t need private servers and speaks to millions of people in open forums; Clinton is the antithesis of...

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – As Donald Trump looks poised for victory in New York, he continues to lead with Republican voters on this side of the Hudson as well, according to the latest Rutgers-Eagleton Poll. Breaking the 50-percent mark in New Jersey for the first time since announcing his candidacy last summer, Trump was named by 52 percent of registered Republican voters as their first choice if they had to cast their primary vote today. Ohio Gov. John Kasich has ascended to a distant second in the Garden State, with 24 percent. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz comes in third at...

The United States will push for a two-state peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians until the end of President Barack Obama's mandate, Secretary of State John Kerry announced on Monday, according to AFP. Speaking in Washington to a conference held by J Street, Kerry said attacks like Monday's on an Israeli bus in Jerusalem only underlined the need for a negotiated solution. "Despite the fact that we have spent time and effort to try to get there for these past few years I can tell you that for these next nine months we will not stop working to find...

Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe is not the only thing that isn’t necessarily working in her favor these days. Even less flattering is the popularity of Bernie Sanders, whose campaign -- according to conventional wisdom -- should have been suspended long ago. And now, instead of promoting her vision for America and the world, Hillary finds herself sidetracked into defense mode over the high fees and undisclosed lowdown in her speeches to Wall Street moguls. She’s under threat of an FBI investigation over possible e-mail and server abuses. She’s even had to dodge the protesting rabble at her outrageously pricey celebrity fund-raisers....

Her mixing of official work with Yunus and others is reportedly the focus of a FBI public corruption investigation, according to the report.The Daily Caller News Foundation says its investigation revealed that the tax funds were given to Yunus through 18 separate USAID award transactions listed by the federal contracting site USAspending.gov.Yunus is a long-time friend of Clinton, and was managing director of the Grameen Bank before Bangladesh Bank forced him to leave office on the grounds that he had crossed the official age limit.He had challenged his dismissal in the Supreme Court but lost and has been at loggerheads...

June 7, 2011NPR defends Palin? Aaron Gee While coming home I often listen to our local NPR station. This afternoons "All Things Considered" asked the question "How Accurate Were Palin's Paul Revere Comments?" The story started out with; "Sarah Palin is defending her knowledge of American history."  Here we go again, I was prepared for the usual "Palin is a moron" storyline. Surprisingly that didn't happen. What I got was Robert Allison, a professor and historian at Suffolk University, tell the NPR host that Palin basically got it right. The interviewer, Melissa Block, tries to cajole a different narrative...

One if by land, and two if by sea … and then what? According to historians interviewed by the Boston Herald, Paul Revere then warned the British not to challenge a roused and armed populace. That came as news to many observers who had rushed to criticize Sarah Palin for her response to a gotcha question at the Old North Church: Sarah Palin yesterday insisted her claim at the Old North Church last week that Paul Revere “warned the British” during his famed 1775 ride — remarks that Democrats and the media roundly ridiculed — is actually historically accurate. And...

During an interview with "The Breakfast Club" Monday morning, Angela Yee asked the Democratic candidate what she always has in her purse. "Hot sauce," Clinton answered. "Yeah." "Now listen, I want you to know that people are going to see this and say, 'She's pandering to black people,'" Charlamagne Tha God told Clinton.

CNN political commentator and NY1 host Errol Louis said during a Monday morning discussion that the reason Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has such high unfavorability numbers in most polls was because of unconscious sexism on the part of respondents. New Day host Chris Cuomo asked Louis about a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll that found that even among Democrats, Clinton had a 56% unfavorable rating. “Let me suggest, because some of her strategists have said this kind of quietly, it’s not really a big thing on this campaign trail: a lot of this is sexism,” he responded “It’s buried...