Free Republic

Three Dallas police officers were killed and seven others were wounded Thursday night during a demonstration protesting the police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana this week, according to Chief David O. Brown of the Dallas police.

Hillary Clinton, courting young voters and the broader Democratic base, has promised to one-up President Obama on climate change, vowing to produce a third of the nation's electricity from renewable sources by 2027, three years faster than Mr. Obama, while spending billions of dollars to transform the energy economy. A half-billion solar panels will be installed by 2020, she has promised, seven times the number today, and $60 billion will go to states and cities to develop more climate-friendly infrastructure, such as public transportation and energy-efficient buildings. She would put the United States on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions...

It's a paradox. The liberal media champion themselves as the most open-minded people on planet Earth who are devoted to the freedom of speech. How can intelligent people be so wrong? In reality, liberal elites have a nasty tendency to dismiss "conservative thought" as an oxymoron. They don't read conservative books or magazines, and they wouldn't lower themselves to watching conservatives on television. They have disdain for conservative talk radio. They're virtually illiterate on conservatives and conservatism. What happens in the event that the inclusive and tolerant elites identify some spark of conservative brain activity? They respond with journalistic censorship....

Let’s be clear. The global economy is not working for the majority of people in our country and the world. This is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite. We need real change... We need a president who will vigorously support international cooperation that brings the people of the world closer together, reduces hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war. We also need a president who respects the democratic rights of the people, and who will fight for an economy that protects the interests of working people, not just Wall Street, the drug companies...

Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump? I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe...

Takeout food? Yeah! That's just the ticket! It's about as good excuse as consumerism to explain the economic woes of Venezuela. A few weeks ago reporter Nicholas Casey of the New York Times almost completely avoided any mention of socialism and placed the blame for Venezuela's economic woes on a vague "consumerism" during an interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air as chronicled in Newsbusters by Clay Waters. Since that "consumerism" excuse seems to have been widely mocked, Casey went to bat with an even more laughable excuse, comparing Venezuela's economic woes to someone who has been ordering takeout food for years...

PEJA, Kosovo — FIRST, a three-part quiz: Which Islamic country celebrates as a national hero a 15th-century Christian who battled Muslim invaders? Which Islamic country is so pro-American it has a statue of Bill Clinton and a women’s clothing store named “Hillary” on Bill Klinton Boulevard? Which Islamic country has had more citizens go abroad to fight for the Islamic State per capita than any other in Europe? The answer to each question is Kosovo, in southeastern Europe — and therein lies a cautionary tale. Whenever there is a terrorist attack by Muslim extremists, we look to our enemies like...

Should she win the presidency, Hillary Clinton would quickly try to find common ground with Republicans on an immigration overhaul and infrastructure spending, risking the wrath of liberals who would like nothing more than to twist the knife in a wounded opposition party. In her first 100 days, she would also tap women to make up half of her cabinet in hopes of bringing a new tone and collaborative sensibility to Washington, while also looking past Wall Street to places like Silicon Valley for talent — perhaps wooing Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook, and maybe asking Tim Cook from Apple to...

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in an interview broadcast Sunday that two of the country’s most prominent newspapers are in an “all-out war” against Donald Trump. During a radio interview with John Catsimatidis, Gingrich blasted the news outlets, saying they are lying about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. “Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have been in an all-out war to try to redefine Donald Trump,” he said. Gingrich pointed to a Times article that portrayed Trump as often being inappropriate with women. The report relied on testimony from dozens of women who have interacted with...

NEW YORK – Ten years ago, the New York Times reported on a growing underground subculture in the black community known as Down Low, comprised largely of men who secretly engage in homosexual activity while living “straight” lives in public. It’s within that subtext that opposition researchers for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign began investigating rumors that Rev. Jeremiah Wright was running a “matchmaking service” for members of his Trinity United Church of Christ known as the Down Low Club, which included Barack Obama. Over the past several months, WND investigators have interviewed a number of members of the church...

In the aftermath of the Democratic National Convention, the party's nominee, Michael S. Dukakis, has expanded his lead among registered voters over Vice President Bush, the probable Republican nominee, according to a Gallup Poll... Fifty-five percent of the 948 registered voters interviewed in the poll said they preferred to see Mr. Dukakis win the 1988 Presidential election, while 38 percent said they preferred to see Mr. Bush win. The poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points... This represented a shift in Mr. Dukakis's lead from the 47 percent to 41 percent advantage he...

Mr. Obama calls himself a "night guy," and as president, he has come to consider the long, solitary hours after dark as essential as his time in the Oval Office. Almost every night that he is in the White House, Mr. Obama has dinner at 6:30 with his wife and daughters and then withdraws to the Treaty Room, his private office down the hall from his bedroom on the second floor of the White House residence. There, his closest aides say, he spends four or five hours largely by himself. He works on speeches. He reads the stack of briefing...

I heard this New York Times take on the Benghazi report mentioned on a noontime political discussion show on Fox News yesterday and found it so absurd that I had to check for myself. Here it is: The New York Times front-page article following the issuance of the report of the House Select Committee on Benghazi included the following paragraph. At a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday, Mr. Gowdy praised as heroes the Americans who died in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2012. They included Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and Sean Smith, a State Department information officer, who...

December 31, 2002 More Than Good Intentions: Holding Fast to Faith in Free Will By JOHN HORGAN When I woke this morning, I stared at the ceiling above my bed and wondered: to what extent will my rising really be an exercise of my free will? Let's say I got up right . . . now. Would my subjective decision be the cause? Or would computations unfolding in a subconscious neural netherworld actually set off the muscular twitches that slide me out of the bed, quietly, so as not to wake my wife, and propel me toward the door? One...

The following is a review of: "A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Coverup, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo" by John Crewsdon, Little, Brown & Co. Twelve years ago, Robert Gallo was chief of the laboratory for tumor-cell biology at the National Cancer Institute and one of the world's most celebrated scientists. In 1984 Margaret Heckler, secretary of health and human services, had hailed Gallo as the discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS and the inventor of the first test for the virus. Gallo had received virtually every major prize for medical research except the Nobel. Samuel Broder, director ...

Who’s even more powerful than the king? The person who gets to pick the king. And as of this morning that person is, quite possibly, FBI Director James Comey. Today’s Morning Joe reported breaking news from the New York Times: Attorney General Loretta Lynch has decided that she will accept the recommendation of the FBI regarding its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. If Comey recommends against an indictment of Hillary, that would lift a huge cloud that has been dragging her candidacy down. It would put Hillary in a very strong position to become the next president. But should Comey...

Eight Senate Republicans joined with 44 Democrats on a Republican-proposed compromise that would deny people on two different federal watch lists the ability to buy weapons unless they could successfully appeal that decision. Several other Republican senators showed some willingness to accept new restrictions on gun purchases if they could be structured in an acceptable way. A bipartisan companion measure also was introduced in the House.

Ted Cruz and John Kasich have a message for Donald J. Trump: They don’t care if they are not invited to speak at his convention. As Mr. Trump tries to plan a convention that will run as smoothly as possible, he said in an interview with The New York Times last week that he would not invite either Mr. Cruz or Mr. Kasich, both former rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, to speak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland unless they endorsed him. That is fine, both said on Monday. A spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz, Catherine Frazier, said the...

But it is the flow of people into the European Union that has had the greatest geopolitical impact, and helped to precipitate the British vote. Stabilizing Syria and permanently curbing the refugee flow could be one of the critical factors in determining whether Europe can steady itself politically. Before the refugee crisis, the European Union was already an unwieldy and unfinished entity. Its contradictions and imperfections were exacerbated by the economic crisis. Yet it was the onset of more than a million refugees marching through Greece and the Balkans toward Germany that may ultimately prove to be the most destabilizing...

House Democrats ended their 25-hour sit-in over gun control legislation on Thursday, a protest Speaker Paul D. Ryan labeled a high-profile stunt that undermined the basic institutions of government. Mr. Ryan said he was “not going to allow stunts like this to stop us from carrying out the people’s business.” He added, “This is about a publicity stunt and now a fund-raising scheme.” But on legislative business, it was Mr. Ryan who prevailed. He personally reclaimed control of the House, pounding his gavel and muscling through a major appropriations bill that included funding for combating the Zika virus, without debate.