Free Republic

Nate Silver fared terribly in Thursday's UK election: In his pre-election forecast, he gave 278 seats to Conservatives and 267 to Labour. Shortly after midnight, he was forecasting 272 seats for Conservatives and 271 for Labour. But when the sun rose in London on Friday, Conservatives had an expected 329 seats, against Labour's 233. The fault, Silver claimed, was with the polling: "It’s becoming increasingly clear that pre-election polls underestimated how well Conservatives would do and overestimated Labour’s result," the statistician guru wrote in the wee hours of the morning. (He also overestimated the Liberal Democrats' result by roughly 20...

Thursday on Fox News Radio’s “The Alan Colmes Show,” while discussing the Baltimore riots in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death while in police custody, the former national chairman of the New Black Panther Party and current national president of Black Lawyers for Justice, Malik Zulu Shabazz, said the rioters were acting in “self-defense” from police “occupiers” and the “police,” who he claimed are “the people who are attacking us,” “might need to get hurt.”

Members of Congress take the same oath and thus collectively have the same authority to interpret the Constitution. All Congress needs to do to express an opinion on the Constitution is for each house to vote to adopt a joint resolution on the subject. Republicans should seriously consider passing a resolution stating that the judicial branch has no authority to tell the states how they can define marriage.

In a bizarre move, a Huffington Post blogger is wishing women a “Happy Mother’s Day!” – by calling for an end to mothers’ “unwanted” babies. In a May 6 Huffington Post piece, blogger Kristine Holmgren argued for “No More Angry Mothers; Embracing Accessible Abortion and Affordable Contraception.” In it, she announced that before “safe, affordable, accessible abortion” existed, most mothers were “angry mothers.” To prevent future “angry mothers,” Holmgren declared that women should “protect our liberties,” including “our birthright” to abortion this Mother’s Day. Kristine Holmgren, a self-described “Feminist [Presbyterian] theologian and produced playwright” stressed a “deep commitment to the...

Despite his socially-conservative bona fides, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has officially lost the support of Iowa’s influential talk radio host Steve Deace — a dramatic shift from their supportive relationship in the 2008 Republican Party primaries. Deace has been described as a “hitmaker” and “one of the most powerful Republicans you’ve never heard of” because his stumping for Huckabee was seen as a substantial contributor to the former governor’s 2008 Iowa caucus victory. But, in 2016, Deace is not thrilled with Huckabee’s support for entitlement programs. As MMfA first reported, during the May 6 edition of the Steve Deace...

Stevenson College is part of the University of California, Santa Cruz. UC Santa Cruz has the reputation of being the most far-Left tax-supported university in the United States. On the faculty are Angela Davis and Bettina Aptheker, both of whom were openly Communists in the 1960’s. They have, of course, mellowed. That’s what happens when you bet heavily on the wrong horse, which drops dead in the final stretch. The students accused the school of being insensitive — that beloved catch phrase of the Left whenever “fascist” is just not plausible — because it served tacos and re-fried beans just...

Real estate magnate and potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump minced no words in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News in which he dissected just how much of a “disaster” the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill that would fast-track President Barack Obama’s secret Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal is for America. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/05/08/exclusive-donald-trump-disaster-trade-deal-empowers-americas-enemies-another-sign-country-is-going-to-hell/

 Obama's Three Hundred and Twenty-Eighth Week in OfficeNews and Notes:   Obama: 'By Hook or By Crook' I'm Going to Be a Successful President  5/7/2015Obama and Israel, Year 7Rumor: Obama to back Palestinian state at Security Council – payback for Israel’s right-wing cabinetObama Congratulates Netanyahu on New Israeli Government 'Obama looks forward to working with Prime Minister Netanyahu,' the White House said, in a businesslike statement.Obama ´looks forward´ to working with NetanyahuIt's 3am and nobody's thereTop Iran Commander: ‘We Welcome War With The United States’By an overwhelming 98-1 margin the Senate has passed a bill which purports to give Congress a say...

Evangelicals could learn to reap the success of their ideological opponents, notably the LGBT community. But when you think your orders come from God, evolution can be tough.So now that Mike Huckabee has thrown in, we have three or arguably four Republican candidates elbowing one another to win the collective heart of the evangelical right. In addition to Huck, thereÂ’s Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and maybe Rand Paul, whose links to the constituency are more tenuous but who clearly is in there pitching. What they all understand, of course, is that the evangelical presence looms large in the Iowa caucuses,...

It is almost beyond my comprehension that Bill O’Reilly could co-author a book about Jesus Christ and then say this: Reverend [Franklin] Graham reflects the Christian view that you don’t demean other people unnecessarily. Jesus would not have sponsored that [Draw Muhammad] event.

Black Panther leaders are planning ways to make the chaos last and spread across the nation. Two leaders of the New Black Panther Party, Chief of Staff Michelle Williams and King Samir Shabazz, are calling Baltimore rioters for even more violence against whites. (SNIP) During an appearance on Shabazz’s radio show, Williams regularly made fun of “crackers” and black conservatives. Agreeing with her, Shabazz went a step further and made a terrifying threat: he called on blacks to firebomb nurseries so that they can kill as many white babies as possible. Shabazz added that this was a good suggestion because...

In a little-noticed brief filed last summer, lawyers for the House of Representatives claimed that an SEC investigation of congressional insider trading should be blocked on principle, because lawmakers and their staff are constitutionally protected from such inquiries given the nature of their work. The legal team led by Kerry W. Kircher, who was appointed House General Counsel by Speaker John Boehner in 2011, claimed that the insider trading probe violated the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branch. In 2012, members of Congress patted themselves on the back for passing the STOCK Act, a bill meant to...

We usually hate it when media speculate about whether a celebrity has had a nip or tuck, but it must be said: The Hamburglar has definitely had some work done. McDonald's on Wednesday brought the burger-stealing character back for a new advertising campaign for the first time in over a decade — and he looks nothing like the short, chubby, red-haired cartoon that we here at The Salt grew up with. Instead, he's now a tall, slim, stubble-faced dude sporting a fedora, trench coat and skinny-jeans. And it turns out he's also a suburban dad — a back story revealed...

President Obama's campaign mastermind suffered a humiliating end to his political career today as the British Labour party he was paid almost $500,000 to help to victory plunged to a catastrophic defeat. David Axelrod had been touted as the man to get Labour's Ed Miliband into - and the Conservative prime minister David Cameron out of - Downing Street. Instead he slunk out of Britain early, as his former Obama campaign colleague Jim Messina, who advised the winning Conservatives, crowed over a victory which had 'stunned the world'. Axelrod had already vowed that he was 'done with campaigns' after complaining...

Attorneys for the Paterno estate have been fighting tooth-and-nail for months to subpoena the Pepper Hamilton law firm for an undisclosed number of documents gathered during Freeh's investigation into the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal. Pepper Hamilton (which acquired Freeh’s law firm through a merger in 2012) fought just as hard to keep those documents out of Centre County court, appealing several of Judge John Leete's decisions that overturned the firm's objections. But Leete refused to put the case on hold for those appeals, and now he's issued an order directing Pepper Hamiltion to turn over the documents within...

et’s be clear: The great freak-out over Pamela Geller’s “draw Muhammad” contest isn’t about love for Islam or for robust and respectful religious pluralism. Indeed, many of those expressing anguish over blasphemy against Islam show no such concern over even the most vile attacks on the Christian faith. Beyond that, they’re among the leaders in movements designed to banish religious liberty — including Muslim religious liberty — to the margins of American life. Instead, the fury against Pamela Geller is motivated mostly by fear — by the understanding that there are indeed many, many Muslims who believe that blasphemy should...

The Conservatives have emerged as the dominant force in English politics after a string of surprising wins in key constituencies. Significant gains in the marginal "killing fields" helped the party to a comfortable majority. In a night of upheaval, seats previously considered Labour and Lib Dem strongholds turned blue as results trickled in. Several high-profile names including Ed Balls and Vince Cable lost their seats. Failure to win key marginals, combined with Labour losses in Scotland, prompted Ed Miliband to stand down. Meanwhile, Nick Clegg resigned as Liberal Democrat leader after his party suffered heavy losses and UKIP leader Nigel...

On an April night in 1960, Guy Carawan stood before a group of black students in Raleigh, N.C., and sang a little-known folk song. With that single stroke, he created an anthem that would echo into history, sung at the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965, in apartheid-era South Africa, in international demonstrations in support of the Tiananmen Square protesters, at the dismantled Berlin Wall and beyond. The song was “We Shall Overcome.” Mr. Carawan, a white folk singer and folklorist who died on Saturday at 87, did not write “We Shall Overcome,” nor did he claim to. The song, variously a...

About two years ago, Kristen Welch, a mommy blogger and author, wrote an article Raising Grateful Kids in an Entitled World. The post (linked here: http://wearethatfamily.com/2013/03/raising-grateful-kids-in-an-entitled-world/) was extremely well written and it received a lot of attention as it struck a chord with many readers. In today's ProScoutSports LLC blog (www.proscoutsports.com), we will explore some of the aspects in Kristen's article as they relate to youth sports. In a world that consistently tells our children that they are entitled to everything they want, exactly when they want it, how can we parents best propagate a spirit of selflessness and gratitude...

May 8, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- Nations and cultures are fragile things. I was reflecting on this some time ago, reading through the work of that great Russian novelist and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who saw with rare clarity of vision what the nihilist secularism of the Soviet state had done to millions of people. Signs of this fragility are everywhere, especially in the former Eastern Bloc, to which I’ve had the privilege of traveling a number of times. These visits are always deeply moving, especially as the scars of history’s destructive rampage are still so visible there. It always forces me...