Free Republic

Just 712 Democratic officials will decide whether Clinton or Sanders wins the nomination. Documents show that's what the party planned all along. This post originally appeared at In These Times. Since its launch, a specter has haunted Bernie Sanders’ run for the Democratic nomination. It’s not his age, though at 74 he would be the oldest president in American history. And it’s not that he’s an avowed socialist, the label that a mere eight years ago was used to smear Barack Obama as a sinister, alien threat to the American way of life. Rather, it has been the so-called superdelegates...

TEL AVIV – A top Islamic State-tied jihadist in the Gaza Strip claimed in an interview on Sunday that he “knows” that Omar Mateen, the Orlando club shooter, was a member of a terrorist organization. Abu al-Ayna al-Ansari, a Salafist movement senior official in the Gaza Strip, claimed he was told that Mateen was a member of one of the groups that fall under the jihadiya Salafiya franchise, meaning the network of loosely-based Salafist jihadist groups such as the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and the Al Nusra Front. Ansari made the claim in a pre-recorded interview to air in full tonight...

During an interview on Meet The Press, Sen. Bernie Sanders reacted to the horrific mass shooting in Orlando by calling for automatic weapons not to be sold in the US. During an interview on Meet The Press, Sen. Bernie Sanders reacted to the horrific mass shooting in Orlando by calling for automatic weapons not to be sold in the US. Video: (VIDEO-AT-LINK) Sanders was asked by Chuck Todd for his reaction to the attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, FL, and he said, “It’s horrific. It’s unthinkable, and just hopes go out to those who were shot that they...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/did-bernie-sanders-just-hand-trump-the-election

Contrary to those in the media and elsewhere who claimed he was “far more accepting” on LGBT issues than other GOP candidates, Donald Trump is proving that he very much will be a force against LGBT equality if elected president. And he’s doing it in a more insidious, under-the-radar way than any previous GOP presidential nominee. Though he rarely raises his positions against LGBT rights on the campaign trail, Trump is making pacts with anti-LGBT forces. Today, Trump spoke at the Road to the Majority summit in Washington, an event attended by Christian right activists and sponsored by the Faith...

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have yet to shore up their bases. Mrs. Clinton is looking to heal the primary wounds of rival Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders‘ and his progressive supporters, who have threatened to stay home in November. Donald Trump has had a tough time attracting the support of establishment conservatives who worry he’s too centrist. And each needs their bases to coalesce in order to win the presidency. An analysis completed by The Wall Street Journal suggested since 1992, every candidate who ended up winning the White House had a favorable rating of at least 80 points among...

About a week ago, a friend and enthusiastic Trump supporter invited me to go to a Donald Trump rally. As a Bernie Sanders supporter, my initial reaction was to reject, but after giving it some thought, I came to the conclusion that the millions of Trump voters deserved respect and had earned the right for their voices to be heard. With that in mind, here is my experience from the Donald Trump rally in San Diego, California on May 27, 2016: I was dropped off a few hundred feet away from the convention center. As I walked toward the venue,...

Hillary told Univision (the Mexican Cable TV Station) that we should be “building bridges, not walls.” Of course in reference to Donald Trump’s stand that we need to secure our borders with a ‘wall.’ So in preparation for the DNC Convention in Philadelphia, they are erecting a huge fence to keep out…Sanders supporters? Wait, isn’t a fence like a wall? If they can build one, why can’t we? “I think the idea of building walls as an answer to issues that confront our country is just not the right approach. We should be building bridges, we should be building understanding.”...

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama's offer to meet without precondition with leaders of renegade nations such as Cuba, North Korea and Iran touched off a war of words, with rival Hillary Rodham Clinton calling him naive and Obama linking her to President Bush's diplomacy. Older politicians in both parties questioned the wisdom of such a course, while Obama's supporters characterized it as a repudiation of Bush policies of refusing to engage with certain adversaries. It triggered a round of competing memos and statements Tuesday between the chief Democratic presidential rivals. Obama's team portrayed it as a bold stroke; Clinton supporters saw...

Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky. Oh Politico! You're going to have to wake up a lot earlier in the morning to sneak a fast one by your humble correspondent. And in this case, Politico tried to sneak a major story change by at 1:18 in the afternoon. What happened is that at 12:48 PM today, Politico published a story about Bernie Sanders staying in the race. That is big news since it means that Sanders will probably stick it out he until he goes to the Democrat convention in late July. However, if you now go to the story, you will see that...

Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren is constantly mentioned as a top choice for Hillary Clinton’s ticket as vice president, but few have bothered to examine whether she would be a disastrous for an already troubled candidate. A Clinton-Warren ticket could actually make winning over the Democratic far-left harder for Clinton. Some argue that Warren, a popular progressive, could boost Clinton’s appeal to former supporters of Bernie Sanders, but a closer examination suggests a Clinton-Warren ticket could actually make winning over the Democratic far-left much harder for Clinton. [SNIP] Moreover, many Sanders supporters are angry at Warren for not endorsing him — shocked...

There’s no strategist pulling the strings, and no collection of burn-it-all-down aides egging him on. At the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the campaign aides closest to him say, is Bernie Sanders. It was the Vermont senator who personally rewrote his campaign manager’s shorter statement after the chaos at the Nevada state party convention and blamed the political establishment for inciting the violence. He was the one who made the choice to go after Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz after his wife read him a transcript of her blasting him on television....

Bernie Sanders is blasting out mixed messages about his presidential campaign plans once the dust settles from Tuesday’s last major batch of primaries – on one hand vowing to fight to the convention, and on the other saying he’ll “assess” his options Wednesday, as he returns home to Burlington. The speculation is swirling as Sanders faces mounting pressure from senior Democrats to step aside and let likely nominee Hillary Clinton charge ahead in the general election battle against Donald Trump. President Obama reportedly is expected to get behind Clinton in a matter of days. But Sanders’ plans are the big...

The Six Day War Remembered A reflection on the "what-might-have-beens. " June 7, 2016 Joseph Puder    This May, Israel celebrated its 68th year of independent statehood. On June 5th, Israel commemorated the 49th anniversary of the Six Day War, in which it liberated the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old city, including the Western Wall.  The Etzion Bloc, Jewish property seized by Jordan’s Arab Legion and held for 19 years was also liberated.  The proverbial Israeli “David” of the pre-1967 years has been transformed by the international press and western academia into the post-1967 “Goliath.”  In the process, Israel...

Descendants of Israel Dov Frumkin, who purchased land near Old City of Jerusalem, celebrates campaign to redeem property. While the Jewish community in the neighborhood of Silwan (Shiloach) in eastern Jerusalem has elicited fierce criticism from the Israeli left and even the American government, descendants of the original owner of the “Kfar HaTeimanim” (Yemenite Village) area in Silwan celebrated the planned construction of an additional apartment building for the growing Jewish population. Yair Frumkin and his sister are direct descendants of Israel Dov Frumkin, who purchased the land the predominantly-Arab neighborhood of Silwan now sits back in 1882. The land...

I just heard this actual exchange between a reporter and a millennial-on-the-street somewhere in California, explaining his primary vote: Q “Who are you planning to vote for?”A “Hillary Clinton (b. 1947). I just feel she’s the most experienced…I like Bernie (b.1941), but I just feel he’s too old. But I like Trump (b.1946) personally I just don’t think he’s qualified to be President of America.”So there you have it, from the mouth of a millennial: Hillary – because she’s not too old and she’s got the most experience.” – Fox News So there it is: vote for the youngest candidate...

In the past few weeks, there have been a series of stories by Jewish writers about ‎what happened to them when they seemingly unleashed the fury of right-wing anti-‎Semites online by writing something deemed unfriendly toward or critical of ‎Donald Trump, or in one case, his wife, Melania. The toxic response from the angry ‎internet/social media mob, now commonly described as part of the alt-right ‎‎(alternative right) movement, has seemed to confirm what writers on the Left have ‎believed for a long time: that while the Left may be critical of Israel, or its settlement ‎policy, or of Prime Minister...

It is up to centrist Democrats, who still represent a majority of the party, to resist this attempt, and to ensure that support for Israel remains a point of bipartisan consensus. For many years now support for Israel has been a rare point of bipartisan consensus in an increasingly polarized political climate. Bernie Sanders apparently seems determined to undermine that consensus. Sanders has demonstrated a consistent bias against the nation-state of the Jewish people and surrounded himself with foreign-policy “experts” who often describe Israel as an apartheid state, and have repeatedly accused the IDF of committing war crimes. Sanders has...

If you want to understand Sen. Bernie Sanders, this is what you need to know: He is the quintessential modern identity-free man. He is a non-Jewish Jew and a non-American American. In Sanders' speeches and interviews, there is virtually no mention of his being a Jew (unless he's asked about it), and -- what's truly amazing for an American presidential candidate -- there are few mentions of America, except to lament American inequality, Wall Street corruption and other American evils. The term "non-Jewish Jew" is not mine. It is generally attributed to a Jewish historian, Isaac Deutscher, who wrote an...

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders criticized the Clinton Foundation for accepting donations from foreign governments in an interview aired Sunday, calling it a conflict of interest. "Do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of State and a foundation run by her husband collects many, many dollars from foreign governments — governments which are dictatorships? "Yeah, I do have a problem with that. Yeah, I do," Sanders said on CNN's "State of the Union." When host Jake Tapper asked if he thought it was a conflict of interest, Sanders said, "I do." Sanders and Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton,...