Free Republic

Of nearly 460 people who voted, about 38 percent cast a peanut for Trump. Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon, came in second with about 24 percent of the peanuts. Nearly all candidates - even Joe Biden, who has not announced whether he’ll run - found fans at the fair. Lincoln Chafee, the former U.S. senator and governor of Rhode Island, was “still looking for his first vote,” noted guest announcer Gary Black, the state’s agriculture commissioner. For that matter, so were Republicans Georgia Pataki and Jim Gilmore. For Democrats, Hillary Clinton ended the day with 64 legumes stacked up in...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Four male Johnson & Wales University students have been arrested in connection with a reported sexual assault and alleged drugging of two female students at the university. The police have charged Mohammed Alsaqer, a 20-year-old sophomore, and Yazeed Alasiri, a 23-year-old senior, both from Saudi Arabia, with assaulting the women at the young men’s residence in Pawtucket after meeting the women at a nightclub in Providence on Thursday night. Late Tuesday night, Pawtucket police charged two more Johnson & Wales students — Mohammed Aljohani, 20, and Tareq Alharbi, 22 — with first-degree sexual assault.

A man who tips the scale at close to 800 pounds says he has nowhere to go after being kicked out of a hospital weight loss program for ordering pizza. Now he rides in the back of an SUV while his father drives the roads of Rhode Island, looking for someone who can help. Steven Assanti, 33, said his eating addiction has led him to this place, living in the back of his dad's SUV with nowhere else to go. For the past 80 days, Assanti was getting the help he needed in a Rhode Island hospital where he lost 20 pounds. But...

PPP's newest North Carolina poll finds that Donald Trump is holding his ground- at least compared to where he was in the state six weeks ago. Trump leads with 26% to 21% for Ben Carson, 12% for Carly Fiorina, 10% for Marco Rubio, 9% for Ted Cruz, 6% for Mike Huckabee, 5% for Jeb Bush, 4% for John Kasich, and 2% for Chris Christie. Rounding out the field are Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal at 1%, and Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, and Rand Paul all at less than 1%. Trump's 26% is almost identical to his 24% standing...

Bill Cosby lost yet another honorary degree Monday, this time from Brown University. It was the first time the Rhode Island institution ever rescinded an honorary degree, a top official told the Brown Daily Herald, the university’s newspaper. It was the third honorary degree stripped from Cosby in recent weeks amid an ongoing scandal that he drugged and sexually assaulted more than 50 women.

Mayors from eighteen U.S. cities signed a letter to President Obama saying they are willing to take even more refugees than what has been proposed by the administration. “We will welcome the Syrian families to make homes and new lives in our cities,” wrote the mayors, all of whom are part of the Cities United for Immigration Action coalition. “Indeed, we are writing to say that we stand ready to work with your Administration to do much more and to urge you to increase still further the number of Syrian refugees the United States will accept for resettlement.” “This is...

Top White House officials have reportedly been holding private meetings with lawmakers this week to boost support for the president’s foreign policy strategy, although the outreach effort appears to have left some lawmakers confused and upset. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) described a meeting with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and National Security Adviser Susan Rice earlier this week as “one of the most bizarre I've attended on Foreign Relations on foreign policy in our country.” “I know several of us were involved in a very bizarre discussion last night. This continues a very bizarre discussion,” Corker added, according...

Two Labor Day Polls Portend ‘Splodey Heads For The Anti-Trump Advocates…. Earlier today Gallup released a poll showing that Trump is the most heavily favored candidate (63% Approval Rating) amid Republicans. A devastating defeat for the establishment GOP (GOPe) who are seeking to push their preferred candidate Jeb Bush. Such substantive favorable opinion of candidate Trump puts the RNC/GOPe in a difficult position as they plot to begin their collective assault against the unpalatable frontrunner. But tonight the news for the Vichy Republican crowd is infinite degrees worse. As they plot the best course of Trump’s annihilation – national polls...

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...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — One of the darkest chapters of Rhode Island history involved the state’s pre-eminence in the slave trade, beginning in the 1700s. More than half of the slaving voyages from the United States left from ports in Providence, Newport and Bristol — so many, and so contrary to the popular image of slavery as primarily a scourge of the South, that Rhode Island has been called “the Deep North.” That history will soon become more prominent as the Episcopal diocese here, which was steeped in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, establishes a museum dedicated to telling that story, the...

BUSH: changed Rating from No Action to VERY HARMFULCARSON: from No Action to VERY GOODCHRISTIE: from No Action to GOODCRUZ: from No Action to VERY GOODFIORINA: from Unhelpful to VERY HARMFULJINDAL: from No Action to VERY GOODPERRY: from No Action to UNHELPFULRUBIO: from No Action to VERY HARMFULTRUMP: from No Action to EXCELLENTIn addition, the following candidates stuck with the positions (and Ratings) that they had previously staked out. (Santorum and Paul deserve special recognition for taking strong stands long before Trump stirred the media's interest this past week.)EXCELLENT: SantorumVERY GOOD: Paul1st STEPS: GrahamNO POSITION: Chaffee, WalkerUNHELPFUL: Biden, Clinton, Sanders,...

The summer has not been kind to Hillary Clinton. The drip-drip-drip of revelations about her possible misuse and mishandling of classified information threatens to become a deluge in the fall. They have taken a serious toll on her reputation — and even more notably, her treatment by liberal media figures who surely would rather she be elected even if the Risen Christ were to be the Republican nominee. Democrats are worried — so worried five donors who raised millions for President Obama as well as Obama’s chief Florida strategist have both sworn off Hillary and joined an effort to draft...

In an ideal world, the law would shield people from aggression by others, allowing them to peacefully use their lives, liberties, and property as they desire. In our actual world, however, many people cannot resist the urge to turn the law into a sword – into a weapon they can use against anyone who doesn’t live or act in “the right” way. Examples of such legal plunder and coercive busybodyism pop up constantly. Here’s one that recently came to my attention. The Perfect Puppy is a family owned business in Rhode Island. It sells healthy, well cared-for puppies. Pet stores...

Dear Democrats: It’s too late to start over. As in, there’s no replacing Hillary Rodham Clinton as your party’s front-runner for the presidential nomination. Not with Vice President Biden — even if he runs. Not with former vice president Al Gore. (I mean, come on.) Not with your ideal rich-person-with-no-record-and-a-fresh-faced-appeal. This may come as a shock to some of you. After all, you argue, it’s only August! The Iowa caucuses won’t be until February! That’s, like, four political lifetimes. Sure. But modern presidential politics isn’t as simple as announcing that you’ve decided to run and watching yourself soar to the...

There is a haunting familiarity to the arguments defending Planned Parenthood’s sale of body parts from aborted babies for medical research: an echo of another era of medical innovation amid moral ambiguity. Then, as now, the response of cultural leaders — especially religious leaders — is a story about the corruption, and potential renewal, of Western civilization. Today we’re told there is no other way to achieve the research results we desire, because fetal tissue is a “uniquely rich source” of stem cells, which provide invaluable clues to human development. Second, we’re led to believe that research on aborted babies...

Forget the Twitter blog for emoji responses to how millennials feel about student debt. As the New York Daily News’ Alejandro Alba notes, the condescending approach didn’t generate much respect from Hillary Clinton’s target audience. The beleagured Democrat tried to shift attention to policy from the e-mail scandal, focusing on her $350 billion proposal to overhaul higher-education finances, which is in a shambles largely due to federal government intervention in the first place.Mission not accomplished: While some users thought the question was “relatable,” others believed the question was offensive and condescending.Many users began to reply to the tweet with...

URI Oceanography Professors John King (second from right) and Arthur Spivack (right) watch as core samples are collected at Salty Brine State Beach following the explosion in July. Credit: Chris Deacutis ============================================================================================================================================= When an explosion beneath the sand at Salty Brine State Beach in Narragansett injured a visiting vacationer, state and local police and the bomb squad found no evidence of what may have caused the blast. So state officials turned to scientists at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography for answers. It didn't take long before they had solved the mystery. Janet Coit, director of the...

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley is keeping pressure on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to increase the number of Democratic presidential debates. "We're making a big mistake, as Democrats, if we try to limit debate and have an undemocratic process," O'Malley said Monday on MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports." "Shame on us as a party if the DNC tries to limit debate and prevents us from being able to put forward a better path for our people that will make the economy work for all of us again," he said. O'Malley — who trails front-runner Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders...

Imagine if the Koch brothers had financed a group that was regularly disrupting and shutting down events of candidates that they opposed. Does anybody doubt that the Koch connection would come up in the first paragraph, if not the first sentence, of most news stories about such disruptions? Yet somehow, complete silence from the MSM on the connection of George Soros to #BlackLivesMatter even though he is the providing most of the finances to that organization. Also mysterious is how the MSM also fails to note that Hillary Clinton, whom Soros supports, has not had her events disrupted by #SorosMoneyMatters (also...

Yesterday afternoon at Netroots Nation in Providence, RI, I attempted to ask the embattled Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) about his campaign, specifically his record as the deciding vote for Obamacare. Ohio voters passted an amendment to their constitution outlawing the Democrats' health care law by a wide margin in 2011: Ohioans overwhelmingly rejected the healthcare mandate provisions of Obamacare. They did this by handily passing an amendment to the state’s constitution that reads, in part, as follows: No federal, state, or local law or rule shall compel, directly or indirectly, any person, employer, or health care provider to participate in...