Free Republic

Here are a few facts about America. The unemployment rate among those with a high school education is 3.9 percent. The poorest quintile of Americans have seen their post-tax incomes increase 80 percent since 1979, according to Congressional Budget Office data, and post-tax and transfer income for that quintile has skyrocketed 32 percent since 2000. The upper-middle class in America constituted 13 percent of the population in 1979; as of 2014, it constituted 30 percent. According to Pew Research from 2015, when it comes to standard of living, "The U.S. stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world....

Let me tell you a story. A prominent democrat decides to run for president, but loses the nomination to a younger, more charismatic guy, who wins the election that November. Eight years later, this same democrat runs for president again, this time getting the nomination, but loses in November to a republican who is viscerally hated by the left. There are protests across the country, there are protests at the new republican president's inauguration, and continue throughout the first two years of his presidency. In the following mid-terms, democrat gains are shallower than historically expected, and the republicans actually GAIN...

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) The media keeps hyping, and Mueller just keeps winding it down. – The White House announced yesterday that President Donald Trump (I never tire of typing those three glorious words) has returned his answers to the questions that had been submitted to him by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Speaking with Jonathan Swain at Axios, presidential attorney Rudy Giuliani basically said he thinks this will be the extent of the President’s direct interactions with Mueller and his merry, diminishing band of Clinton/Obama hacks. Guiliani said he thinks that, while it is “possible” that...

Standing on a beach near the concertina wire-topped fence that divides the U.S. and Mexico, DHS Secretary Kristjen Nielsen fought back against assertions that Central American migrants bound for the United States as part of a caravan were docile women and children fleeing violence. Instead, saying she wanted to “set the record straight,” she said most of the thousands of caravan members are adult or teenage males leaving behind their home countries for economic reasons or to be reunited with family members already living here. “Wanting a job is not a basis for asylum under U.S. law,” Nielsen told reporters...

Facts are a difficult thing to challenge! Gov.-elect Brian Kemp quashed Stacey Abrams’ claim that there was widespread voter suppression in the Georgia election by showing there was a historic turnout at the polls. Gov.-elect Brian Kemp: “We saw the ‘easy to vote’ part — we had 1.4 million more voters in this election than we did in the last governor’s race. A historic turnout,” Kemp explained. “We have a million more people on the rolls because I pushed for and implemented online voter registration where people could register to vote 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If...

Democrats took control of the House by flipping seats in the nation’s suburbs, which have long been political battlegrounds. But those victories rested on more than just the votes of college-educated white voters, whose shift away from Donald Trump and the Republican Party has drawn wide attention. People of color were also a large component of the Democrats’ victories in the suburbs—increasingly diverse communities that no longer fit the stereotype of racial homogeneity. They are more likely to live in the suburbs than in urban areas, and no matter where they live, they tend to vote Democratic. In the AP...

In the Claremont Review of Books, we have described our current political scene as a cold civil war. A cold civil war is better than a hot civil war, but it is not a good situation for a country to be in. Underlying our cold civil war is the fact that America is torn increasingly between two rival constitutions, two cultures, two ways of life. One vision is based on the original Constitution as amended. This is the Constitution grounded in the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. It has...

Remember Kaitlin Bennett from Kent State? She’s the girl who graduated earlier this year and posed with an AR-10 to make a point about the school’s anti-gun policy. Well, the school, and I’m sure many Communist gun grabbers would have liked for Kaitlin to disappear silently into the night after graduation. They are not going to be seeing that though, as she has won her first round in a suit against the university over its gun policies that allow a non-student to open carry but not students. ... She and the group she founded and ran while on campus, Liberty...

President Donald Trump defended his daughter’s use of a private email address for some government business on Tuesday, despite excoriating his opponent Hillary Clinton for using a private server as Secretary of State. “There was no deleting like Hillary Clinton did,” Trump said. “There was no servers in the basement, like Hillary Clinton had, you’re talking about all fake news.” The president commented to reporters as he left the White House for his Thanksgiving weekend at his Mar-a-lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. The Washington Post reported on Monday that Ivanka Trump used her private email to conduct some government...

President Donald Trump reacted to an order from a federal judge on Tuesday to halt enforcement of his order to deny asylum to the migrant caravan crossing into the United States illegally at the Southern border. “This was an Obama judge, and I’ll tell you what, it’s not going to happen like this anymore,” Trump said, about the judge’s ruling on the migrant caravan. U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar of San Francisco, appointed by former President Barack Obama, issued a restraining order of the Trump administration’s effort to deny asylum to migrants trying to cross the southern border illegally. The...

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving so I hope everybody has their meal prep well underway. My only advice is to keep it traditional - what’s traditional for you and your family that is. I know people whose traditions include dishes as ‘diverse’ as lasagna, sauerkraut, pirogues, lobster, tamales, shrimp etouffee, latkes, samosas and dal along with the standard turkey with dressing. Of course there are some who quash the turkey altogether, replacing it with a regal pork or beef roast.  Americans are openminded that way. However even we open armed, openminded and open-borders Americans must draw the line somewhere when it comes...

Fifty-one years ago this month, the 173rd Airborne Brigade (Separate) fought in close quarters and uphill through deep foliage to take Hill 875 in what became known as the Battle of Dak To. The 173rd Airborne Brigade had already seen action before moving inland to South Vietnam’s Central Highlands in early November of 1967. This support included a role in Operation Junction City in the spring, as well as a search-and destroy (S&D) mission in the vicinity of Tuy Ho on the south-central coast. The 173rd was assigned to Dak To after intelligence reports indicated that North Vietnamese Army (NVA)...

In his first nearly three years in office, America has much to be thankful for in having Donald Trump as their President as opposed to Hillary Clinton. Trump has been on a mission to implement policies and platforms he campaigned on like no other President possibly in our lifetime. From domestic policy to foreign affairs, the administration has been firing off his agenda efficiently and effectively – despite being hamstrung at every turn by the liberal media, by judicial activists, and by a Democrat party that once stood for something, but now exclusively exist to resist the progress President Trump...

When Republicans have stated that Democrats will go to any lengths to win elections – they aren’t kidding. According to Fox News, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office is charging nine people in connection with an alleged voter fraud scheme. During the 2016 and 2018 elections, Skid Row homeless were offered cash and cigarettes in order to obtain fraudulent signatures.

"If a rebrand will help the activist cause, who really cares about rigour in the scientific discipline?" ..... "One of the more distinguishing aspects of the global warming frenzy is the playful manner in which its adherents approach language. Whenever they feel the need to rearrange the terms of debate, counter the emergence of “inconvenient” facts, or simply put a whole new banner on the crusade, neither shame nor consistency offers any brake to their innovations."

McLean Police District – Detectives from our Major Crimes Bureau are investigating a suspicious man and woman that approached a young girl in the Pine Spring Neighborhood in the Falls Church area of Fairfax County. The preliminary investigation shows a girl was walking home from elementary school with her adult brother yesterday afternoon around 3:45. They were approached by a man and a woman at the intersection of Pine Spring Road and Meadow View Road. The pair offered a treat to the girl and motioned her towards them. The brother moved his sister away from the pair. The siblings made...

A young Manhattan man allegedly stole $1million from a Silicon Valley executive by hacking into his phone and stealing his cryptocurrency. Nicholas Truglia, 27, faces 21 felony counts after he allegedly went on a hacking spree that targeted six victims. Authorities said Truglia successfully hacked into six victims' phones, but was only able to steal money from Robert Ross.

A federal judge dismissed charges Tuesday against two doctors and six others involved in the genital mutilation of nine girls at a Detroit clinic, and also declared a US law banning the practice unconstitutional. US District Judge Bernard Friedman dismissed mutilation and conspiracy charges against Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, who performed the surgery, and Dr. Fakhruddin Attar, who allowed his clinic in Livonia, Michigan, to be used for the procedure. The same charges were dismissed against Attar's wife, Farida, and Tahera Shafiq, who assisted in the procedure, as well as four women who tricked their daughters into going to the suburban...

"It's a mean nasty world out there" US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo On Close US-Saudi Relationship Continuing After Khashoggi Murder 11/20/2018 In an announcement clearly designed to happen during the Thanksgiving Week, President Trump has stressed the important economic relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia and Iran as a security threat in saying the US relationship with Saudis will continue in spite of the brutal murder of Saudi Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul October 2nd.... President Trump says he has submitted written answers to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's questions.... The "New York Times" reports that...

**SNIP** “While I was reading this letter that was kind of released today, my main concern was that there is no vision, there is no common value, there is no goal that is really articulated in this letter aside from we need to change,” she said. “I do think that we got sent to Congress [with] a mandate to change how government works, to change what government even looks like. But if we are not on the same page about changing the systems and the values and how we’re going to adapt as a party for the future, then what...