Free Republic

Economist Gary Shilling predicts that not only will President Donald Trump win the seemingly endless trade war with China, but in the long run the U.S. will be better off. “People say nobody wins trade wars. Yeah, in the short-run you don’t, but in the long-run…the U.S. will be better off,” Shilling recently told Business Insider. “When you’ve got plenty of supply in the world, and I think you do. It’s the buyer that has the upper hand not the seller. The buyer has the ultimate power and who’s the buyer? U.S. is the buyer, China is the seller,” he...

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the important case Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, which centered on the question of whether or not students have the privacy right to sex-segregated bathrooms and locker rooms. Boys were shocked to find a girl changing with them and teenage girl Alexis Lightcap was terrified to a find a boy in her restroom. These violations of privacy were justified in the name of transgender inclusion. While the Supreme Court did not take up Lightcap's case, it may consider similar ones coming down the pike. "Students struggling with their beliefs...

Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country. But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered...

National Public Radio (NPR) interviewed Wen on Tuesday on All Things Considered and asked her about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold an Indiana law that mandates babies killed from abortion be buried or cremated. “What do you see as the implications of this ruling?” host Ari Shapiro asked. “Well, we’re very concerned about this Supreme Court ruling because, once again, it stigmatizes abortion care,” Wen, who is a physician, said. “And I’m also deeply concerned about the fact that there are 15 cases that are one step away from the Supreme Court.”

Jill Biden called the women who accused her husband of inappropriately touching them courageous and vowed that the former vice president would not touch people without their permission in the future. “It took a lot of courage for women to step forward and say, you know, ‘You’re in my space,’” she told “The Daily Show” Wednesday. “Joe heard that and it just won’t happen again. He heard what they were saying,” she said.

...in 2020 unless Democrats impeach.[snip]Allan Lichtman, a political historian, said Democrats only have a shot at the White House if they begin impeachment proceedings against Trump, calling the decision both “constitutionally” and “politically” right in the wake of special counsel (Robert Mueller’s) investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. “It’s a false dichotomy to say Democrats have a choice between doing what is right and what is constitutional and what is politically right. Impeachment is also politically right,” Lichtman told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on Wednesday.

RUSH: Now, let me go back to another point I want to make about Mueller. I watched it again when I got home last night without the presence of timely pressure. I was watching Mueller at 11 o’clock yesterday — and I’ve gotta watch it, digest it, do a whole bunch of stuff to get ready to talk about it an hour later. I went home yesterday; I looked at it without any kind of pressure attached to it. Obviously, I had a little more time to start-stop it, replay various things that caused red flags, and basically absorb it....

Last week, 12 members of the Nevada state Senate voted to commit political suicide for their state and step the nation closer to an electoral transformation. They did it along partisan lines and with almost no one watching. If Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) signs the legislation, making Nevada a signatory to the National Popular Vote compact, the state will have resigned itself into presidential oblivion. Just a few years ago, not many would have thought that a scheme to amend the Constitution without actually amending the Constitution, cooked up by the inventor of rub-off instant lottery ticket technology, would be...

Without pension reform, progressive income tax amendment guarantees tax hikes on Illinois’ middle class. ( Full title). The current progressive income tax proposal would fail to pay down the state's unfunded liability while damaging Illinois' economy. On May 20, Democrats in the Illinois House Revenue & Finance Committee approved Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s prized progressive tax constitutional amendment. While the Senate had previously passed a new income tax structure – already different from the governor’s original proposal – the House Committee also passed the amendment without putting in income tax rates. ... progressive tax proponents need to face that without pension...

RUSH: Well, it turns out that Mueller actually mentioned the golf club dispute in a footnote in the Mueller report, and it is the golf club that I played. It’s in Sterling, Virginia. It’s down near Dulles, not far from Dulles/Reston area. In a footnote in the Mueller report, pages 80 and 81: “In October 2011, Mueller wrote a letter to the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, resigning his family’s membership, explaining, ‘we live in the District and find that we are unable to make full use of the club,’ according to footnote 529 in the redacted report....

Many of us believe some kinds of sugar are somehow healthier. High-fructose corn syrup has been a scapegoat for American obesity for the past decade and a half, so you might be surprised to learn that sugar and honey both have more fructose than high-fructose corn syrup. Let’s break down the numbers here. Despite its misleading name, the most commonly used form of HFCS only has 42 percent fructose in comparison to table sugar’s 50 percent. Honey, the beloved natural sweetener, has 49 percent. Standard corn syrup doesn’t have any fructose because it’s 100 percent glucose, which explains how HFCS...

PSALM 56 For the director of music. To the tune of “A Dove on Distant Oaks.” Of David. A miktam. When the Philistines had seized him in Gath. 1 Be merciful to me, my God, for my enemies are in hot pursuit; all day long they press their attack. 2 My adversaries pursue me all day long; in their pride many are attacking me. 3 When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. 4 In God, whose word I praise— in God I trust and am not afraid. What can mere mortals do to me? 5 All day...

Robert Mueller has a long and sordid history of illicitly targeting innocent people that is a stain upon the legacy of American jurisprudence. He lacks the judgment and credibility to lead the prosecution of anyone.

Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) on Thursday vetoed a bill which would have pledged the state’s six electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote for President of the United States. “Once effective, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact could diminish the role of smaller states like Nevada in national electoral contests and force Nevada’s electors to side with whoever wins the nationwide popular vote, rather than the candidate Nevadans choose,” a statement via Sisolak reads. “I recognize that many of my fellow Nevadans may disagree on this point and I appreciate the legislature’s thoughtful consideration of this important...

AKWESASNE, Que. -- A funeral will be held Saturday for the last of the Mohawk code talkers from the Second World War, Louis Levi Oakes, who died peacefully on Tuesday surrounded by family at age 94. Oakes was the last surviving member of a group that used the Mohawk language to help relay encrypted secure messages to Allied forces during the Second World War -- one of 33 native languages used by U.S. troops to share vital information. "Levi was one of Akwesasne's most respected elders and the remaining survivor of the World War II Mohawk Code Talkers," the Akwesasne...

An Uber driver in Los Angeles who said he was Palestinian kicked two Jewish women out of his car after learning they were coming from an Israel Independence Day celebration. The incident occurred on May 19, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal reported. The driver, named Mustafa, asked the women where they were coming from after they sat in the back seat. The women were reluctant to say, but then told the driver after he did not start the car. Mustafa then ordered the passengers out of his vehicle. “He started laughing and he looked us dead in the eye and...

Donald Trump has confirmed that a warship named after his Republican nemesis, the late Arizona senator John McCain, was intentionally hidden from his view during his visit to a naval base in Japan this week. The president confirmed that the ship had been intentionally hidden, saying someone had taken measures “because they thought I didn’t like [McCain]”. The Wall Street Journal cited an email dated 15 May from an official at the US Indo-Pacific Command to US navy and air force officials which said the USS John McCain “needs to be out of sight” during Trump’s Memorial Day visit to...

The next time President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet will likely be at the G-20 summit in Japan next month. The leaders of the world’s two largest economies will no doubt aim to resolve their long-simmering trade dispute that has the U.S. and China going tit-for-tat on tariffs. If they fail to reach an agreement, there’s a good chance Trump will follow through on his threat to place additional 25% tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods. A new report by Citi estimates the impact of additional tariffs on virtually all Chinese imports would be far...

As I mentioned on the radio yesterday, May 24th 2019 marks the bicentennial of Queen Victoria. So it would seem appropriate to have a bit of cinematic Victoriana for our Saturday movie date. Her Majesty was an important and consequential figure in almost every corner of the world, and once upon a time the biopics reflected that. But she was to a degree unknown and unknowable, which offers great opportunities to the contemporary biographical sensibility. And so the most notable films of the last two decades belong to a sub-genre of their own: the Queen-Empress and the men who caught...

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David J. Garrow, an authority on Martin Luther King Jr., offered his explosive story on King to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and reportedly to other U.S. publications before it was published in Great Britain. The AJC turned down Garrow’s offer. The piece, which reveals new sexual allegations against the civil rights icon, was published in Standpoint, a United Kingdom-based cultural and political magazine.It was also offered to The Atlantic and The Washington Post, according to Standpoint.The AJC declined to run the piece because it was based on information that would in some cases be impossible to independently verify,...