Free Republic

DES MOINES - Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will make a stop in Des Moines on Friday. It's the first time he'll be hosting a rally in the city since losing to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in the Iowa caucuses in February. Trump is advertising to his supporters to come to the rally and take a picture with him, but only if they knock doors for the campaign. The campaign says it's looking for "Bronze, Silver, and Gold door knockers" and the top three door knockers will have the opportunity to get a picture with Trump before Friday's rally. The...

Niall Ferguson says the Republican presidential nominee has emerged as a champion of the disgruntled lower classes, who – though poorer and less educated than the nation’s elite – are legion In his brilliant and prophetic 2011 book, Coming Apart, my friend Charles Murray identified the stark social division that is defining this year’s US presidential election. Murray’s book was unabashedly about “the state of white America”. The white population of the US, he argued, is more polarised than at any time in the past half century. On the one hand, there is a “cognitive elite”, who are educated at...

The only fitting way for the 2016 campaign to end, after all of the tumult and bizarreness that we've seen over the past 20 months, is for there to be some dramatic result on Election Day. An electoral college tie, maybe. Or a total blowout. Something interesting, anyway. It's got to happen, right? This, I suspect, is part of the reason that people have seized on a report from a Salt Lake City CBS affiliate about a new poll in the deep-red state of Utah. The surprising/exciting finding? Hillary Clinton has a 1-point lead in the state. Imagine that! Utah...

July 19, 2016 — Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore. “Now, that’s a pump!” Edo Bar-Zeev shouts to me over the din of the motors, grinning with undisguised awe at the scene before us. The reservoirs beneath us contain several feet of sand through which the...

The groups present detailed suggestions for tackling systemic racism. A collective of over 50 black activist organizations released a detailed policy platform on Monday outlining a plan to “advance black liberation” that includes education reform, reparations and abolition of the death penalty. “A Vision For Black Lives: Policy Demands For Black Power, Freedom, and Justice” has 40 policy priorities, six platform demands and a set of key solutions all aiming to end the “war on black people.” Spearheading the initiative is The Movement for Black Lives, a combination of grass-roots organizations advocating for black rights. “A Vision for Black Lives”...

The vice president tweeted a photo of himself performing the marriage Monday. The wedding took place at Biden’s residence in Washington, DC. (TWEET-AT-LINK) Vice President Joe Biden officiated a same-sex wedding Monday, marrying two White House staffers at the vice presidential residence in Washington, DC. Biden tweeted a photo of himself performing the wedding. Biden’s office said in a statement to BuzzFeed News the wedding between Brian Mosteller and Joe Mahshie took place Monday at 4 p.m. It was the first time Biden had performed a wedding and came after Mosteller and Mahshie asked him to officiate. The vice president...

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump will make his third stop in Maine when he holds a town hall meeting in Portland on Thursday. The real estate mogul and television personality is continuing to target the Pine Tree State as his campaign attempts to find a favorable path in the Electoral College map. So far, national pundits have predicted a difficult road because his rival Hillary Clinton has shown appeal in voting blocs that traditionally turn out in presidential elections. However, Trump is still hoping to court disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters who flocked to the Vermont senator’s criticism of foreign trade...

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein The Democrat Party wants Americans to believe that Hillary Clinton, and her running mate Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, are progressives who favor progress towards better conditions in the government and society. However, as Mark Twain stated, “Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.” Why is it that intelligent and kind-hearted people can succumb to the deceptive practices of politicians and drink their proverbial “Kool-Aid”? To many Americans, this may seem like madness, but I recall a time when I, too, succumbed...

One of the arguments pushed by conservatives in the wake of Khizr Khan‘s powerful attacks against Donald Trump is that there has been great media and political hypocrisy in how he was treated versus Gold Star mother Patricia Smith. Smith’s son Sean died in Benghazi, and during the RNC two weeks ago, she declared that Hillary Clinton is to blame for her son’s death. Now, Clinton has not publicly made comments close to what Trump said about Khan. But as Smith pointed out on CNN today, Clinton has basically called her a liar. She told Brooke Baldwin that while no...

This might be an idea whose time has come: Nearly two-thirds of Americans are in favor of free college for everyone, and about three-quarters think at least some people should be eligible for free college, a new survey shows. As the labor market increasingly benefits the better educated, and as college education and earnings potential become more tightly linked, people are coming around to an idea that seemed radical until very recently. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders touted the idea as a central plank of his primary platform, and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton recently announced her own version, which includes a...

Donald Trump’s fan base looks different from what you might imagine. Some characterize Trump supporters as caucasian men, likely living on a farm in rural Wyoming. However, Trump support is quite diverse. Despite some of the comments we have heard from Trump and the media’s response, women and minorities do not always shy away from the candidate. Trump has support from individuals of every demographic. Trump does not lead in the polls with any of these groups. Women and minorities are not his strong suit, but many still plan to cast a ballot for him in November. A pre-convention poll...

Sorting through the Wikileaked Democratic National Committee emails I ran across an unexpected subject line: “Trump on to something.” Indeed? The May 10, 2016 email was from DNC press secretary Mark Paustenbach to communications director Luis Miranda. Attached were the results of the May 10 Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll of battleground states Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The excerpted portion of the poll in the email read: From Florida section: “Republicans’ weakness among minority voters is well known. But the reason this race is so close overall is Clinton’s historic weakness among white men. In Florida, she is getting just...

Bernie Sanders's former campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, says Democrats shouldn't underestimate Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. “I certainly think she can win, yes," Weaver told Politico for a podcast published Monday, of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. "But it’s going to be much closer than many people think,” Weaver continued. “I think some people on the Democratic side who think that, you know, Trump is such a buffoon that it’s already won — but I think he’s a very dangerous opponent and I think he certainly has the ability to win as well," he said. Trump received a bounce in polling...

BLM argued that police violence and killings against Black people in the U.S. are connected to the decades-long Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Activists from the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. joined a protest in the Palestinian village of Bilin near Ramallah city in the West Bank in an effort to put an international spotlight on the Israeli oppression, occupation and “genocide” of Palestinians. "Today, delegates from the Movement for Black Lives join organizers and activists in Bil'in, a territory in occupied Palestine where resistors are engaged in nonviolent protest,” the Black Lives Matter movement said in a statement...

The optics advancement may solve an approaching data bottleneck by helping to boost computing power and information transfer rates tenfold BUFFALO, N.Y. — Like a whirlpool, a new light-based communication tool carries data in a swift, circular motion. Described in a study published today (July 28, 2016) by the journal Science, the optics advancement could become a central component of next generation computers designed to handle society’s growing demand for information sharing. It may also be a salve to those fretting over the predicted end of Moore’s Law, the idea that researchers will find new ways to continue making computers...

The end of the Democratic National Convention marks the start of critical post-convention polling, where surveyors expect to get a more reliable assessment of how voters view Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and who they will vote for in November. Here is what to watch for in the upcoming polls. Polling is sooner — In previous years, pollsters needed about two weeks to measure the impact of political conventions on the presidential candidates, but the time frame has been cut in half, Suffolk University polling director David Paleologos told the Washington Examiner. "Because of the compact nature of the news...

Authorities said a suspected burglar is dead after an Alabama homeowner tied him to a tree after catching the man breaking into his home. Washington County Sheriff Richard Stringer said 68-year-old Nathanial Johnson caught 31-year-old Cleveland Jones Gully breaking into the back door of his home, about 60 miles north of Mobile, on Friday just before midnight, AL.com reported. Johnson, who told deputies his home had been robbed previously, had set up a trap that night in an effort to stop any more burglaries from taking place at his mobile home....

Earlier this week, Trump said something inappropriate about Gold Star mother Ghazala Khan. Her son, Army Captain Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq back in 2004, but was silent when she and her husband, Khizr, briefly spoke at the Democratic National Convention. Khizr torched Trump in his address, which prompted the unseemly response from the Republican nominee. Khizr said that Trump knows nothing of sacrifice, lacks empathy, and is ignorant of the U.S. Constitution. Okay—so Trump’s remarks, which arguably were touching upon the whole Islamic submission of women angle, was terrible. Yet, let’s not forget that Hillary Clinton also criticized...

Anybody who knows anything about politics in Florida knows to count on high-profile statewide races to be close. Barack Obama won Florida by less than three percentage points in 2008 and less than one in 2012. Rick Scott won by one percentage point in 2014 and just over that in 2010. That said, an awful lot of veteran Florida political pros for months have quietly been questioning whether Donald Trump can even come close here considering how he has antagonized nonwhite voters who make up 30 percent of the electorate. It's been a few weeks since the last credible Florida...

General election polls of the nation and battleground states consistently show Republican nominee Donald Trump besting Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton among independent voters. This lead among independent/non-party affiliated voters for Trump is also found in polls where Clinton leads overall. For example, in the most recent poll of national voters from Public Policy Polling, Clinton leads Trump 46 percent to 41 percent. Among independent voters, however, Trump leads 42 percent to 35 percent. In another recent national poll from CNN/ORC, Trump leads Clinton 44 percent to 39 percent. This poll has Trump leading Clinton by 18 percent among independents, 46...