Free Republic

Glenn Beck, who has been in South Carolina campaigning for Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz this week, called in to his eponymous radio program Tuesday to talk about the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. What he said garnered a strong reaction from the media, which he is now calling “outrageous.”Beck’s radio show co-host Pat Gray could not wrap his mind around why God would allow Scalia to have passed away in a moment when the U.S. is so divided politically. Beck, hoping to provide an answer, called into The Glenn Beck Radio Program from the road to explain his...

'Unless I win, I would consider this a big, fat, beautiful--and, by the way, a very expensive--waste of time' Heading into the final days before Iowa's caucuses, Republican front-runner Donald Trump warned supporters that his months of headline-grabbing antics could be for naught if they do not show up Monday night. "You have to get out there and caucus, or we've all wasted our time," Trump said on a tarmac, speaking to supporters who stood in a cold airplane hangar for hours to see the former Apprentice star. It was a rare suggestion from the billionaire that he might not...

Iowa isn't the only state where Ted Cruz has managed to surpass Donald Trump in state-level polls of Republican voters. The Texas senator is edging Trump in California, too, according to a new poll.Cruz leads the outspoken billionaire 25 percent to 23 percent in the latest NBC Bay Area Field Poll of GOP voters in the Golden State. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is third with 13 percent support, while retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson rounds out the top four at 9 percent.According to the poll, Cruz has risen 19 percentage points since October 2015, when he stood at 6 percent support...

During a National Security Council meeting held at the Pentagon on Dec. 14, President Barack Obama told top military officials and other officials he wanted to see a better job of having the so-called "narrative" of the war on ISIS communicated to the American people, a senior defense official told CNN. In a recent interview the President described some of his frustrations about the messaging regarding the administration's moves against ISIS.

s part of his effort to turn things around after his recent pathetic speeches on fighting terrorism, the president met with columnists from multiple outlets. The ground rules said no one could quote him directly — but one of his claims is appalling even when paraphrased. Obama, the Times reported online, “indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments. Republicans were telling Americans that he is not doing anything when he is doing a...

The FBI has taken heat for failing to immediately classify the San Bernardino shootings as terrorism, but a new report shows that FBI reluctance could have been due to external pressure from the White House. A source told Jack Murphy of SOFREP that the FBI instantly believed the shooting, which left 14 dead, to be a clear act of terrorism. The White House, however, didn't feel the same way and quickly moved in to squash the terror classification. This source added that as soon as the shooting took place, Obama convened a meeting with the National Security Council and the...

The elder Mr. Farook forced his family to move out of their home in 2006, Ms. Farook said in court papers, but he continued to harass her. “My husband is mentally ill and is on medication but is also an alcoholic and drinks with the medicine,” she said. The marriage was formally dissolved this year. Around Christmas one year, Mr. Venegas recalled, the father asked where he could buy a goat; he especially wanted a pregnant animal, saying that goat fetus was a delicacy. Mr. Venegas helped him get two. They ate one, and the family kept the other alive...

...The proportion of Republican voters favoring Mr. Carson rose to 23 percent from 6 percent in the previous CBS News poll, which was taken just before the first televised Republican debate in early August. Over that same period, Mr. Trump made modest gains, to 27 percent from 24 percent.

As part of announcing his 2016 presidential candidacy, Jeb Bush released a video entitled "Making a Difference." The video spotlights how Bush's work as governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007 affected four people: a low-income student, a low-skilled worker, a mother whose child is disabled and a woman who was the victim of domestic violence. "My core beliefs start with the premise that the most vulnerable in our society should be in the front of the line, not the back," Bush says in the video. "The barriers right now on people rising up is the great challenge of our...

Full title..."Not how they roll: Pentagon asks media to scrap old footage of ISIS columns" ISIS may be on the move, but not the way you see on television, claims the Pentagon. Footage of the menacing, black-clad terrorist army rolling across the desert in long convoys predates U.S.-led air strikes that have forced the jihadists to travel more discreetly, say senior State Department and Pentagon officials. They have asked television networks to stop using stock footage that makes the terror army seem more mobile - and more formidable - than they say it actually is. “One Toyota speeding down the...

While there's been a lot of talk about the "Francis Effect," it's worth pondering, on the Holy Father's seventy-eighth birthday, the Francis Filtration. About a year ago, I suggested to one of the top editors of a major American newspaper that his journal's coverage of things papal left something to be desired, as it seemed based on the assumption that Pope Francis was some kind of radical wild-man, eager to toss into the garbage bin of history all those aspects of Catholic faith and practice that mainstream western culture finds distasteful. My friend replied, in so many words, look, you...

Furious Dish Network, Inc., customers are dropping the service, demanding refunds and besieging Dish with angry calls and emails after Fox News was dropped over a contract dispute. On Dec. 21, fans of the immensely popular Fox News, among the 14 million Dish subscribers, awoke to find out that their favorite network had been blacked out, Mediaite reports. To date, 178,000 complaint calls were made through a toll-free line Fox set up, and 140,000 emails have deluged Dish, but the dispute remains ongoing, Variety reports. The squabble involves "carriage fees" paid by providers to networks for programming. Dish claims that...

From the moment liberal blogger Ezra Klein launched Vox as an "explanatory journalism" project, it has exemplified the prevailing conceits of the modern American Left. Sometimes useful, frequently ideological, and more than occasionally embarrassing, the work of Vox's self-stylized wonks is required reading among those news consumers whose unshakable faith in their own intellectual superiority is a boundless source of smug satisfaction.  Klein's latest dispatch serves up a delicious premise to these eager members of the so-called "reality-based community:" President Obama's health care law has been a big success in the real world (Vox has offered countless variations on this same argument), yet it remains unpopular in many quarters...

President Barack Obama met with over a dozen prominent columnists and magazine writers Wednesday afternoon before calling for an escalation of the war against the Islamic State, or ISIS, in a primetime address that same night. The group, which met in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in an off-the-record session, included New York Times columnists David Brooks, Tom Friedman and Frank Bruni and editorial writer Carol Giacomo; The Washington Post's David Ignatius, Eugene Robinson and Ruth Marcus; The New Yorker's Dexter Filkins and George Packer; The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg and Peter Beinart; The New Republic's Julia Ioffe; Columbia...

On Aug. 27, I appeared on the Fox News program "The O'Reilly Factor" to discuss President Obama's legacy. Another guest, conservative author Jane Hammond Cook, began by claiming that Obama would be ranked among the bottom 15 or 20 of presidents. In response, I made the following points: You cannot judge a president's legacy during his term because evaluations change drastically over time. Harry Truman's approval ratings sank to 22 percent during his last year in office — about half of Obama's current ratings. Truman was reviled in his time, but scholars toady generally regard him as a near-great president....

Wholesale retailer Costco announced Tuesday evening that they have reversed a decision to remove conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s bestselling book from stores, following an outcry from thousands of angry customers. “Costco is not a book store. Our book shelf space is very limited,” a statement posted on Facebook said. “We exercise discipline in the best utilization of that limited space based solely on what our members are buying. We can’t carry every title that our members are interested in reading. We are constantly monitoring book sales, and make decisions to pull books off the shelves frequently based on sales volume...

I gave up on NC Spin several months back. For those of you not familiar with this program, it is WRAL commisar Jim Goodmon’s attempted knockoff of the McLaughlin Group. Except Jim’s version involves Democrat hacks Tom Campbell and Chris Fitzsimon doing their best Baghdad Bob impression — regurgitating state-run media propaganda while John Hood and some other token Republican / conservative sit quietly off to the side. Somebody urged me to watch this weekend’s installation of the show. Apparently, Chris “The Mad Blinker” had a pretty hysterical meltdown toward the end of the show. (The fun starts at about...

If the Bergdahl uproar feels creepily reminiscent of the Benghazi uproar, or the Syrian "red line" uproar, or the choose-your-own- Obama -foreign-adventure uproar, it's because they all have a common denominator. This is what happens when political hacks formally take over foreign policy. It's the "formal" point that bears some meditation. Barack Obama isn't the first president to make foreign-policy decisions on the basis of domestic political calculations. He does, however, win the distinction of being the first president to utterly disregard—to treat with contempt—the institutions and procedures that were designed to help the commander in chief insulate the serious...

WASHINGTON/KABUL (Reuters) - The frantic search for Bowe Bergdahl began the moment his comrades discovered he was no longer inside the fragile outpost in a rock-strewn valley in one of the most hostile corners of Afghanistan. Exactly why Bergdahl left is subject to intense scrutiny. But accounts by two Taliban sources as well as several U.S. officials and fellow soldiers raise doubt over media reports that he had sought to join the Taliban, and over suggestions that the deaths later that year of six soldiers in his battalion were related to the search for him. His dramatic release on May...

On ABC’s hit series “Scandal,” President Fitzgerald Grant is often seen sneaking out of the White House for a clandestine meeting with the covert agents of B-613 or a secret rendezvous with Olivia Pope, but nothing could be further from the truth. The real president isn’t sneaking anywhere. President Obama explained earlier this week what it’s like to try and break out of the White House bubble. “Every once in a while, I’m able to sneak off… I’m sort of like the circus bear that kind of breaks the chain, and I start taking off, and everybody starts whispering, the...