Free Republic

Pope Francis had strong words for world leaders’ priorities, including United States president-elect Donald Trump last week. During a speech the pontiff decried politicians who promote corporate profits above the common good. “The ‘distraction’ or delay in implementing global agreements on the environment shows that politics has become submissive to a technology and economy which seek profit above all else,” he said. Humans are not “owners and masters of nature, authorized to plunder it without any consideration of its hidden potential and laws of development.” Pope Francis called for “an ecological conversion capable of supporting and promoting sustainable development.” The...

It will be some time before Donald Trump announces a nominee to fill the vacancy left by Antonin Scalia, according to transition insiders. But two names continue to emerge to the top of the president elect's list of potential Supreme Court justices. Judges Diane Sykes and William Pryor are among the top contenders, according to multiple sources familiar with the process. CNN's Donald Trump Supreme Court nominee shortlist The Supreme Court vacancy is "actively being discussed," but there is no timetable at the moment, Trump transition aide Jason Miller told reporters Thursday. "The President-elect, he had previously put out a...

The hardest thing about explaining very close election defeats is that you can talk yourself into believing any number of factors, large or small, could have made the crucial difference. Hillary Clinton’s defeat came down to 100,000 votes in three states out of nearly 130 million cast nationally. That’s a deficit so tiny that the search for a single culprit will probably take political detectives down the dark road to madness. It is understandable that within the ranks of the Clinton campaign’s own high command, it is an article of faith that FBI director James Comey cost HRC the presidency...

By leaving it for Congress to dismantle, the Chief Justice ultimately set the stage for a better solution I’m not going to lie to you. I was as mad as anyone at Chief Justice Roberts when he - not once but twice - saved ObamaCare by engaging in legal gymnastics to avoid finding it unconstitutional - which it clearly was. First he pretended individual mandate fine was a tax, even after the Obama Administration had explicitly said it was not while trying to sell it to the public. Then he ignored clear language about who had to run the exchanges...

An Outline of What Increasingly Exhibits the Hallmarks of an Election Conspiracy Unlike the effect of Russian interference on the 2016 presidential campaign, the effect—in votes—of the now-infamous “Comey Letter” is knowable. While various media outlets downplayed the effect at the time, the hard data is unmistakable: according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll taken immediately after FBI Director Comey’s end-of-October announcement that the FBI would be reviewing additional evidence in the Clinton email-server case, one-third of likely voters reported that the revelation made them “much less likely” to vote for Clinton. In an election Clinton lost by just 77,143 combined...

President Barack Obama doesn’t expect he’ll “suddenly just vanish” once Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20. He also doesn’t expect to keep quiet if his successor’s administration impedes on the “core values” of the United States. Remarking on Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims, Obama on Monday’s The Daily Show told Trevor Noah that he will “have to say something” if Trump follows through on his campaign promise, or insists on a registry of all Muslims currently living the United States. “If I thought a Muslim registry was being set up that violates the Constitution, violates who we are, and...

One way to look at the election of Donald Trump is that it is a repudiation of the cult of political correctness that thrives — metastasizes might be a better word — on college and university campuses. One particularly egregious example, the bogus prosecution of Duke University lacrosse players in 2006 and 2007, seems to have had particular reverberations in producing election results this year, a decade later. For a definitive account of the disgraceful behavior of Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, Duke President Richard Brodhead and dozens of members of the Duke faculty, see KC Johnson and Stuart...

Only a few weeks ago Hillary Clinton’s campaign was denouncing Donald Trump as un-American for saying the election might be “rigged.” We criticized Mr. Trump at the time. But now that Mrs. Clinton has lost, her campaign is claiming the election really was rigged, albeit for Mr. Trump by Russian meddling, and it wants the Electoral College to stage what amounts to a coup. That’s the only way to interpret the extraordinary statement Monday by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta endorsing a special intelligence briefing for electors a week before they cast their ballots for President on Dec. 19. He...

I’ve started to rewatch Trump rallies from the month before he was elected president. I’ve seen some of them before, but that was always with the presumption he was unlikely to win. Now I watch them trying to figure out how he did it, and how the Democrats can rebuild their economic message out of this mess....

John Bolton calls BS on the MSM All this talk of the Russians hacking U.S. institutions in order to influence the recent election is difficult to believe. It appears to be true that somebody hacked the Democratic National Committee and exposed emails demonstrating the dirty tricks the DNC was involved in but nobody seems able to come up with actual evidence that the Russian government did much of anything. All we keep hearing from the mainstream media is that unnamed sources in the intelligence community say it happened. Nobody goes on the record. This is exactly how intelligence agencies disseminate...

The Sunday Talk Shows are filled with various left-wing punditry using two media reports from the Washington Post and New York Times claiming anonymous, albeit transparently political, “intelligence officials” who state the Russian government “hacked the U.S. election“.

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter. Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s...

New York Fed president backs gradual interest-rate hikes Without mentioning President-elect Donald Trump by name, Federal Reserve officials on Monday warned that the incoming administration’s fiscal policy must be intelligently designed to spur the economy while maintaining a rainy-day fund to help the economy withstand another downturn. “Smart” government spending and tax reform could help the economy grow, said Chicago Fed President Charles Evans in a speech to the Executives Club of Chicago, according to Reuters.

After one of the most politically divisive elections in recent history, voters are generally in agreement about what should be at the top of Donald Trump's and the new Congress' agenda once they are sworn in next year, according to the first post-election IBD/TIPP poll. The poll asked the public to name which of seven agenda items should be the highest, second-highest and third-highest priorities for the new administration. Infrastructure spending came out on top, with 23% saying it should be Trump's top-most agenda, followed by "drain the swamp" (18%), lowering taxes (16%), and repealing ObamaCare, at 13%. However, when...

U.S. President Barack Obama ordered intelligence agencies to review cyber attacks and foreign intervention into the 2016 election and deliver a report before he leaves office on Jan. 20, homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco said on Friday. Monaco told reporters the results of the report would be shared with lawmakers and others. "The president has directed the intelligence community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process ... and to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders, to include the Congress," Monaco said during an event hosted by the...

There’s no way to watch this clip and not detect the taste of sour grapes, just as there’s no way to watch the recent media/left hand-wringing over “fake news” and not see an attempt to explain away Trump’s shocking upset as some sort of grand scam. It must be a comfort to believe that a key reason you lost 300+ electoral votes to a guy who got caught on tape talking about grabbing women by the p***y was because someone in Macedonia wrote a story on Facebook about you eating babies or whatever. I agree that “fake news” has...

Vice President Joseph R. Biden said Thursday that President-elect Donald Trump won the election by diverting the media’s attention away from serious issues to scandals and outrageous rhetoric. “When a guy talks about grabbing a woman’s private parts, when a guy says some of the incredibly outrageous things that were said, it sucks up all the oxygen in the air,” Mr. Biden said in an address at the New York University School of Law. “There wasn’t much of a discussion of issues, even in the debates.”

WILLIAMS: ... fake news played a role in the election and continues to find a wide audience. A BuzzFeed news study of of Donald Trump's own tweets where they followed back news stories to their root source found more of them came from Breitbart originally than any other single source.

Now that the elections are over, there is much talk of trade and jobs. Predictably, the highest priorities are being given to negotiating new trade arrangements and tax policies that will bring back jobs to America. It is true that businesses in America are overtaxed and overregulated. Anything that can be done to alleviate these burdens will be most welcome and stimulate the business climate. Such measures will indeed create jobs and open up opportunities, but they alone will not make America great. America faces a grave moral crisis that needs to be addressed. As Charles Murray and so many...

....He’s going to lose because he’s offered no compelling vision about why he should be president. (I don’t think “making America great again” is such a vision.) What’s most remarkable to me about Trump’s campaign is how negative it’s been.... ... Trump will be done in by his own vulgarity. He will lose because he couldn’t see past the limitations of his own height — his own flawed character.