Free Republic

A well-intentioned article by Noah Rothman in Commentary Magazine offers that Donald Trump’s supporters are the right wing’s version of Obama’s vacuous “Hope and Change” acolytes. Says Rothman: “Trump is the right’s Obama, insofar as his policy preferences are ill-defined, pliable, and reflective of whatever the audience immediately before him wants them to be.” Such comparisons short-change Trump’s supporters.

GREENVILLE, S.C.—As Donald Trump studied the crosstabs of a recent poll, his favorite hobby since he started leading in all of them, he was pleased, he said, to see that GOP primary voters perceive him as better equipped than his rivals to handle the economy, national security and even social issues. But one nugget in the survey nagged at the New York billionaire. “The only thing I did badly on was: Is he a nice person? I was last in terms of niceness,” he said. Campaigning deep in the Bible Belt yesterday, the businessman spun this as an asset, not...

Hillary Clinton is taking aim at the Republican presidential front-runner, proclaiming Friday that “the party of Lincoln has become the party of Trump.” In a fiery speech to the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) annual summer meeting in Minneapolis, Clinton told a cheering audience that the rest of the GOP presidential field is Donald Trump "without the pizzazz or the hair." Coming a day after a Trump speech where he had audience member pull his hair to prove it's his own, Clinton said, "A lot of people have said a lot of things about my hair over the years. So I...

Democratic leaders are increasingly frustrated by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s failure to put to rest questions about her State Department email practices and ease growing doubts among voters about her honesty and trustworthiness. On top of that, many say, her repeated jokes and dismissive remarks on the email controversy suggest that she is not treating it seriously enough. Interviews with more than 75 Democratic governors, lawmakers, candidates and party members have laid bare a widespread bewilderment that Mrs. Clinton has allowed a cloud to settle over her candidacy — by using a private email server in the first place, since it...

During a news conference at the DNC in Minneapolis, MN, Hillary Clinton again reiterated that she did not send or receive material marked 'classified' on her private and unsecured email server. Nice word play you did there, Hillary, but whether or not classified information is marked as such or not is NOT the question or issue. The question is, "Did you send or receive CLASSIFIED INFORMATION (MARKED OR NOT) ON YOUR UNCLASSIFIED SERVER???" As Secretary of State, Hillary of ALL PEOPLE should be well aware of what information is classified or unclassified, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR NOT IT WAS MARKED.

Townhall Media and Hot Air commissioned a national poll from Survey Monkey, with whom NBC News has partnered this election cycle. Our colleague Ed Morrissey offers a full demographic breakdown of the 1,783 respondents HERE, as well as an explanation of the organization's methodology. The partisan sample was D+10. Results, starting on the Republican side: (1) In accordance with other national polling, Donald Trump leads the primary battle among self-identified Republican voters, with 29 percent support. Ben Carson is in second place (10.45 percent), followed by Jeb Bush (9.59 percent), Marco Rubio (6.40 percent), and Carly Fiorina (5.97 percent). John...

Trump's teleprompter challenge trips up White House By Susan Crabtree • 8/26/15 3:53 PM White House press secretary Josh Earnest got a little tongue-tied Wednesday after being asked what he thought of Donald Trump's suggestion that teleprompters ought to be outlawed. Veteran CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller asked him if such a uniform ban would affect the president "adversely." Since the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama has been known for his reliance on tele-prompters to deliver speeches and often rambles without one. "I don't have any … well … that's a tough one to respond to," Earnest admitted amid some...

Trump's teleprompter challenge trips up White House By Susan Crabtree • 8/26/15 3:53 PM White House press secretary Josh Earnest got a little tongue-tied Wednesday after being asked what he thought of Donald Trump's suggestion that teleprompters ought to be outlawed. Veteran CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller asked him if such a uniform ban would affect the president "adversely." Since the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama has been known for his reliance on tele-prompters to deliver speeches and often rambles without one. "I don't have any … well … that's a tough one to respond to," Earnest admitted amid some...

The Camp of the Saints (Le Camp des Saints) is a 1973 French apocalyptic novel by Jean Raspail. The novel depicts a hypothetical setting whereby Third World mass immigration to France and the West leads to the destruction of Western civilization. Almost forty years after publication the book returned to the bestseller list in 2011. Granted the countries of orgin might be a little different but it is quite prescient for something written over 40 years ago.

"One can't believe impossible things," Alice objected. "I daresay you haven't had much practice," the Red Queen replied. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." You may be reading this sometime after breakfast, and six is a pretty large number of impossible things. But looking at developments in the 2016 campaign, I can see two impossible things -- impossible in the sense that almost every pundit (including me) ruled them out -- that might happen in the weeks and months...

Early this week, Mary Sanchez of the Kansas City Star launched the typically mindless attack of a typically mindless liberal against Presidential Candidate Donald Trump. Coach is Right Staff Writer Jerry Todd answered Ms. Sanchez with facts, the simplest of weapons yet feared more than any other by envoys of the left. Here is Jerry’s response to Mary Sanchez. Dear Mary, Your highly emotional diatribe against Donald Trump missed a few points. The mockers call Trump bombastic, a showman, stupid, racist, etc. I’ll admit, both Obama and Trump are somewhat egomaniacal. Obama destroys everything in his path to accomplish his...

In a challenging field of competitors, Fox News Channel’s Andrew Napolitano has a strong entry for the most laughable legal analysis of the Indiana religious-freedom law. In an April Fool’s Day op-ed that he evidently means to be taken seriously, Napolitano argues that state Religious Freedom Restoration Act laws are unconstitutional. Napolitano’s core claim is that the Supreme Court, in its 1997 ruling in Boerne v. Flores, ruled that the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act is unconstitutional. In Boerne the Court ruled that Congress lacked the constitutional power to apply the federal RFRA against the states. Napolitano accurately summarizes...

Does Hillary Clinton have a serious legal problem because she may have transmitted classified information on her private e-mail server? After talking with a half-dozen knowledgeable lawyers, I think this “scandal” is overstated. Using the server was a self-inflicted wound by Clinton, but it’s not something a prosecutor would take to court. “It’s common” that people end up using unclassified systems to transmit classified information, said Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel who’s now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where he often represents defendants suspected of misusing classified information. There are always these back channels,” Smith explained. “It’s...

Presidential candidate Donald Trump describes why he is not threatened by rival Jeb Bush on MSNBC's Morning Joe. DONALD TRUMP: If you look at the polls, he's not really second anymore. He's fourth and fifth in a lot of the polls. I've always assumed that he was going to be a primary competitor. I guess that's why I'm hitting him harder than others. You know, I like him. He's a nice person. He is a low energy person.

Have Republicans Grown Tired of Supporting the Rule of Law? by MONA CHAREN August 28, 2015 Among a very long list of harms inflicted upon the United States by Barack Obama and his party, perhaps the worst was Caesarism. Obama relished the worship of millions in 2008. From his star turn at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was treated not as a political candidate but as a savior. Progressives fell into a swoon, typified by Newsweek editor Evan Thomas’s 2008 comment that “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above — above the world, he’s sort...

On Tuesday Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump held a press conference during a campaign stop in Dubuque, Iowa. During the press conference Trump was heckled and interrupted by Univision reporter, Jorge Ramos Jorge Ramos refused to wait his turn and refused to quit talking. Trump had Ramos escorted from the room for his outburst. Now we know that Ramos had been stalking Trump for weeks. He even spoke about “hunting” Trump in an earlier interview.

2016 GOP frontrunner and billionaire Donald Trump already won his war with the Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly. She’s exposed as having a point of view, rather than being a purely impartial arbiter of news. Now he’s just having fun as a larger war between him and the network’s powers-that-be looms. In exposing Kelly, he’s employed at least parts of an unwritten playbook for political warfare his former, longtime aide–legendary GOP trickster Roger Stone–has laid out mostly informally over the years called “Stone’s Rules.” Stone hasn’t actually published the “Rules” anywhere, though some appear littered throughout his Twitter account and...

2016 GOP frontrunner and billionaire Donald Trump already won his war with the Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly. She’s exposed as having a point of view, rather than being a purely impartial arbiter of news. Now he’s just having fun as a larger war between him and the network’s powers-that-be looms. But what Trump has done in a truly special manner is expose that fallacy. It’s not that Trump’s war with Kelly isn’t petty—it is, and it is probably counterproductive to be fighting with a television personality for weeks on end as he’s soaring in the polls. He could be...

It appears that both Kate Steinle and Alison Parker were selected for death for being joyful, lovely American women living blessed lives. At the time of her murder, Kate Steinle’s brother said he believed that Francisco Sanchez chose Kate because she was so happy. Friends and family are describing Alison Parker, who was killed yesterday by a "gay" black man named Vester Flanagan, as overjoyed to be living her dream. Kate Steinle and Alison Parker were not killed by guns. They were killed by goaded men.

The chattering class insists that the 14th amendment automatically grants citizenship to children of illegal aliens. They do this by relying on the public's ignorance of the 14th amendment and the obscurity of the meaning of "under the jurisdiction thereof. The author of the 14th amendment was very clear when he proposed it, however: "This amendment, which I have offered is simply declaratory ... that every person born within the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not of course include persons born...