Free Republic

[...] Matchup Republican wins Democratic wins Margin of error Cruz vs. Clinton 50.6 49.4 1.4 [...] Trump vs. Clinton 46.9 53.1 1.1 [...] According to our multilevel model, the expected number of electoral votes won by Cruz against Clinton is only 256. [...] According to the model, the expected number of electoral votes won by Trump against Clinton is 236, which is 34 fewer than the 270 needed to win the election. [...]

Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said on Tuesday that if he had to choose between the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) and Iran on the country’s borders, he would “choose ISIS” every time. In comments made at the Institute for National Security Studies’ (INSS) conference in Tel Aviv, Yaalon said that if the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were to fall ...

Alexander Nazaryan, senior writer for Newsweek, on social media Wednesday compared the Cruz campaign in Iowa to the Nazi Beer Hall Putsch in a gross Tweet featuring the Nazi swastika flag. Eventually, Nazaryan deleted the tweet. He then tweeted an "explanation" for why he deleted it (but not an apology). Do note that the tweet was there for about nine hours before he finally decided he was tired of people replying to it and deleted it to save his mentions column. Not a word of apology in this tweet.

A senior writer for Newsweek apologized Wednesday after tweeting that Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and his supporters were Nazis.The reporter, Alexander Nazaryan, covers a range of topics including the 2016 GOP race, higher education, and technology. He has since deleted the tweet, which showed people marching with flags bearing swastikas in reference to the Cruz campaign's "ground game": And here's what he deleted @TwitchyTeam @Newsweek @alexnazaryan pic.twitter.com/Ula6kHIx4p - Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) January 6, 2016 Nazaryan then apologized for "calling Ted Cruz a Nazi": I deleted my tweet calling Ted Cruz a Nazi. Not fair to his totally...

You know that racist flag? The one that supposedly honors history but actually spreads a pernicious myth? And is useful only to venal right-wing politicians who wish to exploit hatred by calling it heritage? It’s past time to pull it down.Oh, wait. You thought I was referring to the Confederate flag. Actually, I’m talking about the POW/MIA flag.I told the story in the first chapter of my 2014 book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan: how Richard Nixon invented the cult of the “POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam in a...

You know that racist flag? The one that supposedly honors history but actually spreads a pernicious myth? And is useful only to venal right-wing politicians who wish to exploit hatred by calling it heritage? It’s past time to pull it down. Oh, wait. You thought I was referring to the Confederate flag. Actually, I’m talking about the POW/MIA flag.

If you thought violent biker gangs were a relic of the Altamont era, the shootout at a Waco, Texas, restaurant on May 17 might have come as a shock. A long-simmering beef between the Bandidos and Cossacks boiled over into gunfire. When police arrived at the scene, gang members shot at them too, leaving nine bikers dead, 18 people injured, and 170 suspects in police custody. Over 100 weapons have been confiscated. The scale of this incident dwarfs a typical urban gang confrontation, says Harold Pollack, co-director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and an expert on gangs and...

Republican presidential candidates gathered last month at the Oklahoma City Cox Conference Center, just a few blocks from the site of what was the Alfred R. Murrah Federal Building. Two decades ago, anti-government militia sympathizer Timothy McVeigh blew it up in what he called an act of war against the U.S. government. It was the worst crime of domestically bred terrorism in American history. McVeigh was executed in 2001, but since then, some of his militia ideals have gone mainstream and even been introduced as laws in many states, including Oklahoma. Legislators in dozens of states have submitted proposals to...

It’s an industry trade show like Comic-Con, but also a feel-good festival à la Burning Man. It’s got Super Bowlesque hoopla, and for activists on the right, the annual meeting is the get-together in Washington. Thousands of conservatives will gather Wednesday for the weeklong Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where presidential hopefuls Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and others will try to woo their base in the lead-up to 2016. The event, long held at Washington’s Omni Shoreham Hotel, was moved by organizers to the recently built Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland—a Democratic stronghold,...

In the Gospel of John, we read a story where a group of Jewish Torah teachers and Pharisees (members of a legalistic sect of Judaism) bring to Jesus a woman whom they caught in adultery, asking Him what punishment He thinks the woman deserves. Masterfully — as He always did — Jesus answers the scholars with a simple, yet profound statement: “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7, NIV).Recently, Newsweek featured a cover article on the Bible in which author Kurt Eichenwald — not a Biblical scholar...

Newsweek has outdone itself in its pre-Christmas issue with a vitriolic assassination of the Bible, under the title "The Bible: So Misunderstood It's a Sin," by Kurt Eichenwald. This isn't, by any measure, a balanced piece. It doesn't approach fairness. Eichenwald doesn't even attempt to hide his bias, though he seems oblivious to how it compromises his own fairness and objectivity and how hypocritical he is in condemning Bible believers for allegedly allowing their biases to influence them. It is an unusually long article, by which one might infer that Eichenwald and the magazine consider the subject a matter of...

Newsweek magazine decided to greet the start of 2015 with a massive cover story on the Bible. For decades now, major newsmagazines have tended to feature cover articles timed for Christmas and Easter, taking an opportunity to consider some major question about Christianity and the modern world. Leading the journalistic pack for years, both TIME and Newsweek dedicated cover article after article, following a rather predictable format. In the main, scholars or leaders from very liberal quarters commented side-by-side those committed to historic Christianity on questions ranging from the virgin birth to the resurrection of Christ. When written by journalists...

President Barack Obama has wisely chosen to ignore bipartisan bleating over the lawful use of his executive authority to address pressing issues long championed by the so-called professional left. He has instead decided to flex his muscle, at long last. He struck a deal with China to reduce greenhouse gases by 30 percent over the coming years, pushed for regulating the Internet as a public utility, raised the minimum wage of workers employed by companies with federal contracts, created gender equity rules for such employees and protected from deportation as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants. Also, his Environmental Protection...

America reached an important milestone in 2011. That occurred when, for the first time in the history of the country, more minority babies than white babies were born in a year. Soon, most children will be racial minorities: Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and other nonwhite races. And, in about three decades, whites will constitute a minority of all Americans ... This milestone signals the beginning of a transformation from the mostly white baby boom culture that dominated the nation during the last half of the twentieth century to the more globalized, multiracial country that the United States is becoming ...

A mere month after releasing the security video footage showing Ray Rice committing a horrific act of domestic violence, TMZ has outed another celebrity who would rather keep his abusive behavior secret. The tabloid website released the purported audio of Stephen Collins, a long-time actor most famous for his role as the pastor-dad on the WB show 7th Heaven, confessing to his wife during therapy his repeated sexual abuse of underage girls. The NYPD is investigating and at least one woman, the daughter of his first wife, is coming forward with accusations. - snip - While it’s always alarming to...

Should he have switched hands? Dropped the cup? Not drank the coffee? Declared war on coffee growers? Any way, the right woulda whacked him.Since his inauguration, Republicans have criticized President Obama for everything. For launching military strikes. For not launching military strikes. For taking vacations. For being too uptight. For fist-bumping. For being too detached. You name it. Progressives and those who simply like fair-minded political debate have alleged that the actual facts of President Obama’s actions are irrelevant, that Republicans who were determined to oppose everything the president did from Day One would criticize his every move no matter...

Maunder Minimum and Global Warming“Why We’re Definitely Not Headed for Another Ice Age.” When I saw that headline in Newsweek, I thought, do they know something that I don’t? But once I read the article, it left me wondering how in the world they came to that conclusion. It reminds me of the great retort by paleontologist Robert Bakker to those who did not agree with his belief that many kinds of dinosaurs were birds. “There are still a few of my colleagues who think if it walks like a duck, breathes like a duck and grows like a duck,...

It’s never been exactly cozy between American Muslims and African Americans. But with Ferguson—and Gaza—that’s changing.The Muslim-American community of which I’m part hasn’t been great in standing up with and for African Americans. A lack of empathy and racism are the main culprits. What makes this especially astonishing is that 30 percent of the Muslim-American population is African-American. You would think that there would be natural alliances, but that hasn’t been the case. At least not up until now. The shooting of Michael Brown and the heavy-handed response by the police that followed has struck a nerve among Muslims. It...

“You go to all of these damn courts, and there’s no white people,” one defendant, slated to appear before a municipal court in St. Louis County, recently said. “In Dellwood, Ferguson, basically, in North County, if you’re black, they’re going to stop you,” the resident said according to a new report on policing in the area. For residents of Ferguson, Missouri, and surrounding municipalities in St. Louis County, it’s not surprising that racial tensions have boiled over. In a town of 21,000, two-thirds of the residents are African-American, and many reports have highlighted a fraught relationship between Ferguson's residents and...

America’s wealth is concentrating in fewer hands, and while the rich are getting super rich, the once vital middle class is nearing extinction. [SNIP] But today, after decades of expanding property ownership, the middle orders—what might be seen as the inheritors of Jefferson’s yeoman class—now appear in a secular retreat. Homeownership, which peaked in 2002 at nearly 70 percent, has dropped, according to the U.S. Census, to 65 percent in 2013, the lowest in almost two decade. Although some of this may be seen as a correction for the abuses of the housing bubble, rising costs, stagnant incomes and a...