Free Republic

It’s over. The Democratic Party’s first debate just ended, and my main takeaway is how sad it is that the party of JFK has been reduced to five elderly white people arguing over who can out nut-job each other. For all his problems, Kennedy was a tax-cutting anti-communist who loved and defended this country whose values have no place in today’s Democratic Party. I don’t know what country those candidates were talking about, but it sounds awful. It has a rigged system that keeps down minorities, women, gays, men, aliens, animals, trees, anything living and most things dead. But somehow...

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Frontrunner Clinton prepares to debate surging Sanders Hillary Clinton faces heavy pressure during the first Democratic presidential debate Tuesday to outperform primary rivals cutting into her lead and perhaps keep her biggest potential challenger on the sidelines. Vice President Biden, still mulling a bid, is not expected to be on stage in Las Vegas. But he’ll surely be watching as the former secretary of state spars in person for the first time with her 2016 Democratic opponents. And those candidates have not been shy about casting Clinton as a calculating candidate swaying with the political winds. Most recently, Clinton has...

RUSH: I'm telling you, Snerdley, do not discount this. We've been making this mistake now since the early nineties. The left will go out, the Democrats, somebody will say something just totally outrageous, like all these clowns that predicted the end of the earth in ten years if we didn't clean up the oceans, or name your prediction. Twenty years ago, or 40 years ago, if we didn't fix global warming in 20 years we weren't gonna be able to inhabit the East Coast, all of these things. Or take this food's gonna kill you, that food's gonna save you,...

Here's an exchange from Bernie Sanders's appearance on "Meet the Press" on Sunday: CHUCK TODD: Are you a capitalist? @BernieSanders: No. I'm a Democratic Socialist. And, in those five words, Sanders showed why — no matter how much energy there is for him on the liberal left — he isn't getting elected president. Why? Because Democrat or Republican (or independent), capitalism remains a pretty popular concept — especially when compared to socialism. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey showed that 50 percent of people had a favorable view of capitalism, while 40 percent had an unfavorable one. Of socialism, just...

Trump says people will turn off tomorrow's Democratic primary debate – because he's not in it! 'I think people are going to turn it on for a couple of minutes and then fall asleep,' Trump told a Fox News audience Claimed 'a person at CNN' said that 'we have to put Donald Trump in this debate. We're going to die with it' First two GOP debates drew 24 million and 23 million viewers, largely on the strength of Trump's participation Hammered Obama for '60 Minutes' appearance: 'I watched his performance last night and I thought it was terrible' Tuesday's first...

Star Parker appeared on CNN the morning after the Democratic candidate debate to discuss just how much liberals care about black lives. The other guest was Patti Solis Doyle, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager. And Star didn’t waste time getting to the bottom line. “Well, we had five, white, wealthy liberals trying to convince us — to one-up each other — that black lives matter so much to them that they’re going to do more of the same: big government. They’re going to have more policy to trap them in poor communities. They’re going to have more policies to trap...

The latest New Hampshire poll shows a far more engaged electorate continuing to be a thorn in the side of the 2015/16 GOPe scheme to anoint Jeb Bush. In addition, the ruse candidates, Fiorina and Rubio have exhausted their media-fueled surge and remain static alongside Jeb Bush at 8%.John Kasich’s ground game and almost exclusive attention to New Hampshire has garnered him a position just above Jeb, Carly and Marco. However, the vulgarians are determined to Make America Great Again!Gravis Marketing, a nonpartisan research firm, conducted a random survey of 1,035 registered voters in New Hampshire regarding the presidential election...

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...