Free Republic

The latest New York Times bestseller list has Ted Cruz's A Time for Truth at number 8. Just above him is former President Jimmy Carter's A Full Life, coming in at 7. The strange thing, however, is that Cruz sold almost 60 percent more copies of his book last week than Carter. According to Bookscan, which tracks the number of books sold, Cruz sold 8,814 last week. Carter sold only 5,147. The New York Times list does not indicate either author's books were purchased in bulk orders. Cruz was left off the list the first week his book came out...

The principal of an innovative West Harlem public school killed herself the day after her students took the state Common Core exams — which were later tossed out because she cheated ... Jeanene Worrell-Breeden, 49, of Teachers College Community School, jumped in front of a B train in the 135th Street station ... She was pulled out from under the train and taken to Harlem Hospital, where she died eight days later. The city Medical Examiner’s Office ruled it a suicide. The leap came at 9:20 a.m., less than 24 hours after her 47 third-graders wrapped up three days sweating...

Dear Jim..OK, the GOP now has its candidate. McCain isn't the first choice of the majority of us on FR, and even now, there are spirited, yet for the most part, civil exchanges on the threads as to whether or not some will support the GOP nominee. One of the more unfortunate, and unpleasant events on FR was the mass banishment and/or leaving of a great many Freepers who were supporters of Rudy Guliani for the nomination. I'm posting this to see if you'd be open to the idea of inviting them to return, and see how others might feel...

We've got some real challenges facing us. FR was established to fight against government corruption, overstepping, and abuse and to fight for a return to the limited constitutional government as envisioned and set forth by our founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and other founding documents. One of the biggest cases of government corruption, overstepping and abuse that I know of is its disgraceful headlong slide into a socialist hell. Our founders never intended for abortion to be the law of the land. And they never intended the Supreme Court to be a legislative body. They...

For generations, working- and middle-class opponents of anti-discrimination laws have argued that more affluent whites support such laws without having to bear any of the costs. Now, the Democratic loyalty of better-off white liberals will be tested by two recent developments: the June 25 Supreme Court decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s issuance of a new rule on July 8, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.” Such a development has potential political ramifications. It may drive some middle-income and other whites into the arms of...

On Wednesday Governor Cuomo’s New York Wage Board set a new minimum wage for New York City’s 200,000 fast food workers. City establishments will now be required to offer employees at least $15 per hour by the end of 2018. The move also makes it cost effective for companies to fire humans and hire robots. Momentum Machines has developed a robot that can put out one burger every 10 seconds.

How much pull does Hillary Clinton have with the press? Politico's Dylan Beyers noticed a subtile, but monumental change to an article in the New York Times this morning that altered the entire thrust of the piece. The State Department's inspector general is requesting a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton's outside email accounts because he suspects that hundreds of classified documents were stored on the server. Without explanation or notice, the Times changed the focus of the article. The New York Times made small but significant changes to an exclusive reportabout a potential criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton's State Department...

Good Tuesday morning from Washington. Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio is expected to join the ever-growing field for the Republican nomination, a field that, despite its numbers, has been increasingly overshadowed by Donald J. Trump. Such a development, however, suits at least one other candidate just fine. As Mr. Trump surges in the polls and Republican leaders call for him to drop out of the race after his comments about Senator John McCain’s war record, there is one candidate who hopes Mr. Trump continues to thrive: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mrs. Clinton has denounced Mr. Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants,...

There was a brief time this year when it almost seemed like the nation’s biggest newspapers, including the Gray Lady, were going to be giving Hillary Clinton the same level of required scrutiny which should apply to every candidate for elected office. It came when they actually covered the email server story and went into a fair amount of depth on it. Of course, it would have been embarrassing in the extreme to not do so, since everyone else on the planet was talking about it. But all good things must come to an end, as they say, and New...

Education remains separate and unequal nearly everywhere in the United States, but Confederate-flag-waving Southerners aren’t responsible for the most racially divided schools. That title goes to New York, where 64 percent of black students attend schools with few, if any, white students, according to a recent report by the Civil Rights Project. In fact, the Northeast is the only region where the percentage of black students in extremely segregated schools — those where at least 90 percent of students are minorities — is higher than it was in the 1960s. Schools in the South, on the other hand, saw the...

PHOENIX—Bernie Sanders is unaccustomed to being heckled by protesters. The self-identified democratic socialist was caught off guard here Saturday when African-American and Latino activists jeered him at Netroots Nation. Sanders’ inability to control the audience – he tried to shut them up and then he tried to yell over them – underscores his broader struggle to expand his appeal and highlights why his summer surge is unlikely to last. The huge crowds Sanders draws are overwhelmingly white, and polling consistently shows that virtually all of his support comes from whites. After Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two contests on...

No wonder he doesn’t think there’s a problem. The police have been laboring to keep Mayor de Blasio in a bum-free bubble — clearing nuisance-causing vagrants from his view at Gracie Mansion and as he travels in the city. On Wednesday, two hours before de Blasio was due to walk through Washington Square Park, cops arrived en masse to clear out the quality-of-life-ruining bums who drink from paper bags, sprawl on benches and pee in public. “They had to clear all the homeless out before he got there,” for a Ramadan fast-breaking dinner at the NYU Islamic Center, said one...

Tony Hsieh could buy a private island if he wanted to. The Zappos CEO has a reported net worth of $840 million. But Hsieh chooses to live in a Las Vegas trailer park he owns, according to a recent profile in The New York Times. The trailer park is "crammed with shiny silver Airstreams that are rented out to visiting computer coders," according to David Gelles at The Times. Hsieh lives in a trailer in the community he calls "Llamapolis" with his pet alpaca. The trailer park is part of Hsieh's $350 million investment into making Las Vegas a metropolitan...

It’s time to draft Al Gore: If Democrats want to win, it’s clear neither Hillary nor Sanders is the way The presidential election is still sixteen months away, but this much is clear: Hillary Clinton is a vulnerable candidate. Since announcing her candidacy in April, Clinton’s stature has steadily slipped. Things got even worse this week. We learned, first, that Bernie Sanders eclipsed Clinton in small, individual donations, which is an indicator of popular support among likely voters. Second, and more problematic, the newest AP poll revealed significant weaknesses among Democrats on a host of issues, including trust, character, and...

Bill Cosby is a lousy husband and a possible sex addict. But is he a rapist? I have my doubts. Is Cosby, 78, so diabolically creepy that he secretly slipped Quaaludes into the mouths of his alleged victims, as even President Obama suggests? Perhaps. But I’m starting to think that Cosby’s “crimes’’ were not rapes, but high-pressure seductions.

Hip-hop mogul and animal-rights advocate Russell Simmons is comparing New York's horse-drawn carriages to slavery and the Holocaust. Simmons spoke Thursday at an event organized by horse carriage opponents. The Wall Street Journal reports that he likened horse carriages to slavery, ethnic cleansing and "people who put people in ovens."

In a disturbing piece published in NY Mag, Michael Sonmore said that he's okay with his wife having sex with random men because he's a feminist. The article is titled, "What Open Marriage Taught One Man About Feminism" and details Sonmore's "open" relationship with his wife. It begins with this paragraph (emphasis mine): "As I write this, my children are asleep in their room, Loretta Lynn is on the stereo, and my wife is out on a date with a man named Paulo. It’s her second date this week; her fourth this month so far. If it goes like the...

... the disturbing challenge of your book is your rejection of the American dream. My ancestors chose to come here. For them, America was the antidote to the crushing restrictiveness of European life, to the pogroms. For them, the American dream was an uplifting spiritual creed that offered dignity, the chance to rise ... Your definition of “white” is complicated. But you write “ ‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining).” In what is bound to be the...

New York Times columnist David Brooks was slammed on Twitter Friday after he wrote a column — in the form of a letter to The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates — about Coates’ new book about the African-American experience and white privilege. Brooks’ “Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White” compliments Coates’ “searing contribution to the public education,” but then switches gears to criticize the book, “Between the World and Me.” ... Salon, which has made a sport of Brooks bashing, wrote a review of Brook’s column, and opined that “the Times columnist displays more white privilege in one column than some white...

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is proposing new incentives to encourage corporations to share profits with workers. Her plan is to give businesses that offer employees a share of profits a two-year tax credit equal to at least 15 percent of their profit-sharing payments. The plan would exclude high-income workers and firms where only a small percentage of employees benefit. …