Free Republic

Before there was Jill Stein, there was Ralph Nader. Before there was Nader, there was Ross Perot. None won. All argued that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party were basically the same, and the only way to make real change was to ditch them both. Each was blamed for siphoning off enough votes to throw the presidential elections. These days, the difference between the parties is starker than it’s ever been in modern times. Yet here comes Howard Schultz, a billionaire who feels that he might be the answer to American politics, and that he’d run for president as...

Next time there’s a viral story, I’ll wait for more facts to emerge. ... If the Covington Catholic incident was a test, it’s one I failed—along with most others. Will we learn from it, or will we continue to roam social media, looking for the next outrage fix? Next time a story like this surfaces, I’ll try to sit it out until more facts have emerged. I’ll remind myself that the truth is sometimes unknowable, and I’ll stick to discussing the news with people I know in real life, instead of with strangers whom I’ve never met. I’ll get my...

A professor recently claimed that the way President Donald Trump formulates his sentences raises concern that he may be unfit to fulfill his duties as president of the United States—all just months after he defended "Black English" as an "alternate form" of the language. John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, pointed out how Trump’s grammatical and spelling mistakes disqualify him from serving as commander-in-chief, in an op-ed for The Atlantic. McWhorter further stated that Trump’s informal style "betray[s] his lack of fitness for the presidency."

Mika Brzezinski framed it as a "worry," but her statement can also be seen as giving advice [unintentionally, one would hope] to America's enemies, encouraging them to seize the current moment to act against us. On today's Morning Joe, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic imagined America's adversaries being confused by Trump's unpredictable behavior. [snip] MIKA BRZEZINSKI: I would take it a step further and worry we look weak, and that this is the moment that anybody with ill will has to act, or to get further than they have been able to get in the past, as it pertains to...

A far-fetched online fund-raiser shows the lengths to which Americans will go to circumvent the country’s broken systems.

The Real Roots of American Rage <...>America has always been an angry nation. We are a country born of revolution. Combat—on battlefields, in newspapers, at the ballot box—has been with us from the start. American history is punctuated by episodes in which aggrieved parties have settled their differences not through conversation, but with guns. And yet our political system was cleverly designed to maximize the beneficial effects of anger. The Bill of Rights guarantees that we can argue with one another in the public square, through a free press, and in open court. The separation of powers forces our representatives...

John Dingell knows a thing or two about how Congress works. First elected to the US House of Representatives at age 29 in a 1955 special election, Dingell left office in January 2015, nearly 60 years later. The last president he served with, Barack Obama, was born six years after Dingell entered office. His tenure was the longest in the history of the House or Senate, outlasting stalwarts like Strom Thurmond and Ted Kennedy by more than a decade. So his call to abolish the Senate, announced in an Atlantic excerpt from his new memoir, is pretty notable. He pairs...

<p>With the race between North Carolina Republican Governor Pat McCrory and Democrat Roy Cooper down to a razor-thin margin, Republicans filed claims of voter fraud with county boards of election around the state. The GOP was aiming to delegitimize Cooper’s lead and to legitimize years of effort to overhaul voting laws to make them more restrictive, claiming serious fraud.</p>

Former Infowars editor and author Jerome Corsi has told CNN he will reject a plea deal that has been offered to him by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. “They can put me in prison the rest of my life. I am not going to sign a lie,” Corsi said in a phone call with CNN. When asked what would happen now that he is refusing the plea deal, Corsi responded: “I don’t know.” According to The Atlantic staff writer, Natasha Bertrand, Corsi told her he would not accept Mueller’s plea deal on one count of perjury because it would require him...

Now, scientists have identified one more way that climate shapes suicide—and, worryingly, they have projected that it will only become more pronounced as suicide rates rise in a rapidly warming world. The finding has anxious implications for a world whose climate is rapidly changing. The authors project that roughly 14,000 people—and as many as 26,000—could die by suicide in the United States by 2050 if humanity does not reduce its emissions of greenhouse-gas pollution.

The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee was overheard Wednesday discussing Democrats’ plans to investigate and try to impeach Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. New York Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler took a series of phone calls while riding the Acela train from New York to Washington, D.C., not knowing that the The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway was also on the train and within earshot. Nadler is set to take over as judiciary chairman as a result of Democrats flipping the House in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Nadler claimed in one call that “there’s a real indication that Kavanaugh committed perjury,” claiming...

GQ columnist Julia Ioffe is apologizing after claiming that President Trump "has radicalized so many more people than ISIS ever did" during a segment on CNN’s “The Lead.” The commentary comes two days after a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue that left 11 people dead, which prompted Ioffe to blame the president in a controversial tweet. "And a word to my fellow American Jews: This president makes this possible," Ioffe wrote shortly after the shooting on Saturday. "Here. Where you live. I hope the embassy move over there [in Israel], where you don’t live was worth it." On Monday,...

The Atlantic published an article on Saturday that said Trump-supporting Jewish people should no longer be welcome at synagogues following the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Franklin Foer, a Jewish staff writer for The Atlantic, suggested in the article that Jewish Americans who support Trump are complicit in anti-Semitic acts. The article was published the same day 11 people were killed by a shooter at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Over at the Institute for Family Studies, Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociologist at the University of Utah, has found that Americans who have only ever slept with their spouses are most likely to report being in a “very happy” marriage. Meanwhile, the lowest odds of marital happiness—about 13 percentage points lower than the one-partner women—belong to women who have had six to 10 sexual partners in their lives. For men, there’s still a dip in marital satisfaction after one partner, but it’s never as low as it gets for women,... (Skip) In an earlier analysis, Wolfinger found that women with zero...

...According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.” (snip) If age and race do not predict support for political correctness, what does? Income and education....

Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor for The Atlantic and senior political analyst at CNN, recently issued a bleak tweet: “Today felt very much like an update of the 1850s: 2 very distinct parts of US that no longer care to even fake that they respect or value the other. Like Trump, #Kavanaugh built his strategy on rallying 1 side of that divide vs the other. Seams are unraveling-not just on #SCOTUS” Slappy acknowledges there’s a national schism but says that she and her neighbors see Washington as divided, not their communities. James Butler, a local mayor and vice president of...

Hoisted by their own boofing petard, Democrats woke up this morning to the realization that they lost their slim hope of capturing the Senate, and their chances of winning the House are dimming. One month ago, Atlantic monthly ran a story, "Kavanaugh Has a Strong Chance of Confirmation — and of Becoming an Election Rallying Cry." A month later, this is true but the rally is for him, not against him. The piece by Emma Green, "On the left, Kavanaugh has become a symbol of anti-Trump resistance. Activist groups recently completed a 'Rise Up for Roe Tour,' a campaign of...

A hardline adviser speaks out against the president's lovey-dovey diplomacy with Kim Jong Un. On Wednesday—just after Donald Trump gushed about falling “in love” with North Korea’s dictator and ahead of another trip by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Pyongyang to prepare for a second summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un—Lindsey Graham delivered a stark message to the U.S. president: End the lovefest. “I’m telling President Trump, ‘Enough with I love you,’” said the Republican senator, a close ally of Trump’s who had spoken to the president right before joining Jeffrey Goldberg on stage at The Atlantic Festival....

The White House’s expected victory in getting Brett Kavanaugh confirmed to the Supreme Court is in part a product of an unusual approach by President Trump: restraint. While the president has a tendency to lash out when he doesn’t get what he wants immediately, he approached allegations of sexual misconduct against his nominee with unusual calmness. Rather than go on the offensive, the White House allowed the allegations to play out within tightly circumscribed grounds. For example, the president publicly greenlit an FBI probe but secretly set limits that made sure it would be fast and shallow. Only as Kavanaugh’s...

As the Senate awaits the results of the FBI investigation into the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Jeff Flake, one of the lawmakers who spurred the inquiry, criticized the judge Tuesday for his recent appearance in the upper chamber. Speaking with Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center, and Democratic Senator Chris Coons at The Atlantic Festival on Tuesday morning, Flake called the judge’s interactions with lawmakers “sharp and partisan.” “We can’t have that on the Court,” said the Arizona senator, who didn’t elaborate on which interactions he was referring to.