Free Republic

by Tyler Durden Jul 18, 2016 Howard Kunstler I was in the streets of Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic Convention. It was only a few months after Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot to death. The “establishment,” as we called it back then, was all set to nominate Vice-president Hubert Humphrey who had started out in Washington as a Midwestern progressive firebrand but was now was broadly perceived by America’s hippie youth as a stooge and a sell-out to the evil forces running the Vietnam War. I wasn’t exactly a protester, more like a proto-journalist, there to...

Donald Trump’s idea to build a wall along the southern border of the U.S. has been called everything from controversial to harebrained, but—to the likely dismay of some of the oil majors—it’s now officially part of the Republican Party’s platform. As it turns out, the idea has been on the GOP table for a while, and Trump was just the man to voice it loudly and persistently enough. Trump’s wall is on the agenda, should he become president. A wall stopping people and vehicles from illegally crossing into the U.S. may appear to be a simple and effective solution to...

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol airs his concerns about Donald Trump being the Republican nominee one last time before the Republican National Convention. "It would be a wise thing to do at this convention," he said, "to talk about the kinds of people he would have --reassure people who your Secretary of State is going to be, reassure us that his Attorney General is not going to go after his personal enemies." "Instead, if it going to be this ridiculous personality show, with his wonderful family, the three wives -- that's what he wants to do though. He doesn't want...

Voters tend to think House Speaker Paul Ryan is just making a political move with his call to (block presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton) from receiving intelligence briefings following the FBI's conclusion that she was “extremely careless” with classified information during her time as secretary of State. But voters trust her Republican rival Donald Trump slightly more when it comes to handling the nation's secrets.

Donald Trump remains within striking distance of Hillary Clinton as the Republican National Convention kicks off in Cleveland. A national Morning Consult survey taken over the past weekend shows the bellicose businessman trailing the former secretary of State in a head-to-head matchup, 41 percent to 39 percent. In our previous survey, Trump was just one point behind Clinton. One-fifth of voters remain undecided. The presumptive Republican nominee leads his Democratic counterpart among independents by 11 points, 38 percent to 27 percent. Clinton boasts a large advantage among young voters: 47 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 back her, compared...

In an interview with Spiegle, Donald Trump advisor Mike Flynn explains why the presumptive Republican Party presidential candidate admires authoritarian leaders and considers the US foreign policy of recent years to be a disaster.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who Donald Trump formally introduced as his running mate on Saturday morning, lauded the presumptive GOP nominee as a strong leader who will bring his brand of "no-nonsense leadership" to Washington D.C., saying that he accepted Trump's offer because the stakes "could not be higher." "Elections are about choices, and I also joined this ticket because the choice could not be more clear, the stakes could not be higher," Pence said in a brief speech, following a lengthy introduction from Trump broadcast from the New York Hilton Saturday morning. "Americans can choose a leader who will...

Senior Obama administration officials took a series of decisions beginning in late 2013 that ranged from the reckless to the illegal in an effort to keep insurers participating in health insurance exchanges. A report issued last week jointly by the House Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce committees explores how the administration came to unlawfully funnel $7 billion in unappropriated money to insurers through a single ObamaCare program.

The latest terror attack in France has claimed at least 84 lives, ten of them children. The killer was Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel,  a Tunisian living in France. No one wants to see any more ISIS-inspired attacks, but they are going to happen. With each attack people are reminded of what a weak and feckless man is our current President. With each attack confidence in him and in Hillary Clinton further erodes. And why would it be any other way? Barack Obama is running out the clock. He set an agenda of first destroying ISIS, then downshifting to degrade and defeat and...

Donald Trump hit two home runs this week. The first, immediately following the horrific terrorist truck attack in Nice, was his statement in a media interview wherein he said that if elected, he would ask Congress for a declaration of war to combat global terrorism. The second was the inspired selection of Indiana governor Mike Pence to join the GOP ticket. Before getting to Pence, let me linger a moment on Trump's declaration-of-war pronouncement. For well over a year, I have argued for a Washington wake-up call whereby the president and Congress enact a formal declaration of war against ISIS...

In the book, Byrne describes her as “distant, cold, dishonest, and a habitual liar.” When asked about this, he told American Thinker, “Americans need to know that Mrs. Clinton is not a leader. She displays a holier-than-thou attitude, ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ When I heard her say Bill Clinton would work with her on the economy, my first thoughts, ‘what steps will she take to protect young women working at the White House from him?’ Her pattern is deflection, deception, and lies.” A word Mr. Byrne forgot to mention regarding Hillary was 'incompetent'. Take, for example, the reset...

The way we think of left and right is a relic of the Cold War. Reality is catching up I wouldn’t be the first to observe that Donald Trump never uses the words “freedom” or “liberty”. In the United States, a Republican presidential candidate who avoids those terms – someone who doesn’t gloss every speech with talk of shining cities on hills – is like a baker who doesn’t use flour. Trump also rarely talks about “left” and “right” and those movements’ foot soldiers, “liberals” and “conservatives”. Odd, isn’t it? Left and right are the defining concepts of American...

There are those who still refuse to identify this war on Islamic terror, despite the increasing threats to the safety of the Western public. No matter how many times the Islamic State or Al Qaeda declares the nature of this war of conquest, nothing will convince these leftists that Western nations (and Israel) are engaged in a jihadist war. In fact, a lunatic former Manhattan prosecutor and longtime defense attorney, Scott Fenstermaker, stated of 9/11 that America “got what it deserved” because of past injustices.

The rise of Donald Trump baffled many Republicans. His appeal to the part of the Republican Party that GOP leaders treat with kitchen gloves and a face mask — the voters that poke and prod candidates to death with their ever more stringent question: "Is he a conservative? A true conservative?" — seemed inexplicable. And how could a campaign run on the same nationalist themes that animated the unsuccessful Pat Buchanan campaign 20 years ago suddenly have so much force and life? Instead of talking about the interest of job-creators, the presumptive Republican nominee is talking about interest in jobs,...

Washington (AFP) - The United States will welcome 10,000 Syrian refugees this fiscal year as promised by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry announced Tuesday. Washington has been criticized by some activists for moving too slowly to settle those fleeing the conflict, while Obama's opponents warn their number may include terrorists. But Kerry said the United States is now on course to admit 10,000 vulnerable refugees, chosen from UN camps and vetted by US security and intelligence agencies. "It's also representing six-fold increase over what we did the year before," Kerry said, referring to the US fiscal year,...

Two of out three Americans say Hillary Clinton is not honest and trustworthy, according to a recent poll by CBS News/The New York Times. Taken in the wake of FBI director James Comey’s criticism of her conduct over the handling of her emails, the poll numbers represent a new high (or low) for the former Secretary of State. The survey reveals that a strong majority of Americans say she did something wrong as it relates to the emails and her private server. Fully 69 percent of the American people think that her use of a private email server was either...

"Bad for our country" You’ve probably seen the liberal rejoinder to this argument over the past several days. It’s not racist to say black lives matter, so goes the argument, because the statement isn’t intended to imply that other lives don’t matter. It’s simply intended to emphasize the value of black lives at a time when too many are being treated like they don’t matter. And I would offer qualified agreement with the statement, too. Pointing out that black lives matter is not inherently racist if it’s based on the notion that people think otherwise. The problem with Black Lives...

May sound like Capt'n obvious here, but apparently the NeverTrumpers are blind to it. At this point, barring divine intervention, the only way to stop Hillary from destroying the USA is to elect Trump. If Hillary wins, the American experiment with Liberty is over. This may very well be our last election. Don't blow it. Come hell or high water, I'm supporting Trump. Most people I know are determined to do likewise. Who's with us?

Oklahoma’s governor, Mary Fallin, said Donald Trump was “trying to campaign as a racial healer”, as the presumptive Republican nominee tried to paint himself as a unifying force in a country feeling fractured over race, violence and policing. “I think that has been part of his message, if you watched what he said this week,” Fallin told CNN on Sunday, alluding to police shootings of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, and the murder of five officers in Dallas, Texas. “He talked about how devastating this was for Dallas, how we have to respect our law enforcement and we...

Donald Trump is a vulgar clown posing as a conservative, unmoored to any coherent ideology. He has generated unprecedented opposition and the contempt of people across the political spectrum. He is unbound to any principle other than his own appetite for adulation. And those very factors that make him so appalling also make him America’s only hope. Now we need to suck it up and pull the lever for this jerk. I don’t need to hear why Trump sucks again. I know why he’s terrible. I’ve written about it at length. But the Hillary Clinton charade of July 5th –...