Free Republic

When a source – let’s call her Claude – contacted me when the federal election was called to tell me that she intended to vote 15 times in order to prove the weakness of the ballot security, I thought to myself that she was wrong and that she could not carry out this project. But Claude was confident in his plan: an acquaintance voted four times in the 2015 elections, then ten times in the 2019 elections. This person successfully cheated two elections in a row without ever being in any way bothered afterwards. “It’s easy. I explain to you…”...

Matt Drudge Logs Off The Drudge Report has become a conformist shadow of its formerly bratty, oppositional self. Why?It was the kind of story that would once have had Matt Drudge deploying font sizes that newspapers used to reserve for declarations of war. On Oct. 14, Twitter and Facebook blocked users from spreading a New York Post article alleging that Hunter Biden had brokered meetings between his father, then the vice president of the United States, and executives at a Ukrainian energy firm where the younger Biden held an $80,000-a-month sinecure. The Post’s article included photos of what appeared to...

Bernie Sanders By Peter Buttigieg St. Joseph’s High School South Bend, Indiana ... Fortunately for the political process, there remain a number of committed individuals who are steadfast enough in their beliefs to run for office to benefit their fellow Americans. Such people are willing to eschew political and personal comfort and convenience because they believe they can make a difference. One outstanding and inspiring example of such integrity is the country’s only Independent Congressman, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders. Sanders’ courage is evident in the first word he uses to describe himself: “Socialist”. In a country where Communism is still the...

The Democratic Party has become something both JFK and RFK would deplore—the party of war. I was a Democrat all my life. I came to Washington to serve President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. When the president was murdered and his brother struck off on his own, I joined his Senate campaign and staff as his legislative assistant and speechwriter, until his presidential campaign ended with his own assassination. I ran on a (losing) Democratic ticket in the New York state elections of 1970. When I was working to enact my own program of police reform in the...

The Obama administration quietly shipped $400 million stacked on wooden pallets in an unmarked plane to Iran in January — just as Tehran was releasing four Americans who had been detained there, according to a report. The huge cash load represented the first payment of a $1.7 € billion debt that Iran, at an international tribunal in The Hague, claimed it was owed over a failed 1979 arms deal signed before the fall of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal Tuesday night.

Why do our “best and brightest” fail when faced with a man like Putin? Or with charismatic fanatics? Or Iranian negotiators? Why do they misread our enemies so consistently, from Hitler and Stalin to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph?

... We’re accustomed to a narrative of Republican politics that pits the Tea Party against the establishment, the right against the center right. But that has always been an oversimplification, and in a wide-open presidential campaign, it’s likely to fit political reality more poorly than usual. A better framework is suggested by Henry Olsen, writing in The National Interest, who argues that Republican presidential campaigns are usually defined by four factions rather than two. One faction is centrist (think John McCain’s 2000 supporters, or Jon Huntsman’s rather smaller 2012 support), one is moderately conservative (think the typical Mitt Romney or...

Shakespeare was right when he wrote, “What’s past is prologue.” The Bard’s quote provides a solid road map for predicting how Obama will run his presidency if re-elected. During his 2008 campaign and subsequent four years in office there have been three iterations defining the man and his approach to governance. Obama 1.0 is the mythic figure and the now crumbling foundation for understanding how the president was presented by the media and perceived by the public. Candidate Obama circa 2008 was calm, collected and cool — smooth as silk. The mainstream media and much of America were captivated by...

Contemporary American politics makes a great deal more sense in light of the realization that Barack Obama's most devoted fans and fiercest critics are united by a shared delusion: the belief that Obama is really, really interesting. How this manifests among his supporters is apparent enough in the starry-eyed adulation he been able to inspire in so many people. How this manifests among his opponents was especially driven home recently by the now somewhat notorious Dinesh D'Souza article in Forbes, in which D'Souza argued that Obama's politics are the result of the anti-colonialist ideology of Obama's Kenyan father. As D'Souza...

There are legislative miles to go before the government will be emancipated from its health care myopia, but it is not too soon for a summing up. Whether all or nothing of the legislation becomes law, Barack Obama has refuted critics who call him a radical. He has shown himself to be a timid progressive. His timidity was displayed when he flinched from fighting for the boldness the nation needs -- a transition from the irrationality of employer-provided health insurance. His progressivism is an attitude of genteel regret about the persistence of politics. Employer-paid insurance is central to what David...

A university registrar offered bogus degrees in return for spanking sessions in a hotel, a court was told yesterday. Karl Woodgett, 37, former registrar at the University of Surrey and the University of Bath, already had a lucrative sideline selling degrees to African women when he came up with a way of satisfying his sexual desires at the same time.He told the women that his name was Dave and that he could offer them a degree in return for their help with a “pain management study”. The spanking sessions with two women from Cameroon were videotaped.

LET'S just agree that if you are looking for someone with whom to compare Barack Obama, the mid-20th-century British prime minister Clement Attlee does not come immediately to mind. Some might opt for FDR, some the Messiah, others the Antichrist or, harsher still, Jimmy Carter. Attlee? Not so much. To start with, there's the whole charisma thing. Attlee was the Labour leader who humiliated Winston Churchill in Britain's 1945 election, but that victory (one of the most sweeping in British history) was more dramatic than the victor. No Obama, the new prime minister was shy, understated, and physically unprepossessing. Balding,...

THE past is a foreign country, according to one of the most famous first lines of English literature. Now William Hague tells us that the future will be a foreign country, at least if the Labour Party wins the election. But for many people, it is the present that is the foreign country. That must be so, in the nature of things; all those who have reached middle or old age will inevitably feel that the country of their youth was different; "brought up in the culture and mores of one place, they are involuntary immigrants to another". I ...

January 1, 2001 As Zoroastrians Enter a New Era, Assimilation Becomes a Concern By GUSTAV NIEBUHR HOUSTON, Dec. 29 — The cities listed on name tags worn by men and women at a hotel here offer evidence that a highly international gathering is taking place. People have come from Toronto, Los Angeles, London, Bombay and Tehran, Iran. Yet they share a common bond as Zoroastrians, members of a monotheistic faith whose long history includes centuries of glory as the religion of classical-era Iran. The geographic diversity at the Seventh World Zoroastrian Congress indicates a new chapter in an ancient faith, ...

Religion and politics don’t mix. You’ve heard it a thousand times. You probably even believe it. Think of the civic peace that would occur if religious voices retreated from the political battlefield. No more heartland scolds. Unhindered state-funded abortion. An end to those dubious welfare schemes set up by faith-based charities. Down that road lies a godless utopia, surely? If the secularization of American politics continues, you may get your way. But be warned: that utopia already exists–in Western Europe, where political players almost never invoke the Almighty. And you know what? Politics there can be as dreary as hell. ...

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX TUESDAY JUNE 06 2000 21:43:07 ET XXXXX COLD-BLOODED: MIRAMAX/TALK BOOK PROJECT EXPLORES SEX LIVES OF TINA BROWN'S OWN 'FRIENDS' **Exclusive** "Why, Tina? Why?" demanded a supporter and close friend of TALK editoress Tina Brown after learning he was a subject in a project commissioned by Brown's new book imprint. Best-selling author Chris Buckley [son of William F. Buckley] expressed complete outrage that his sex life is being explored in a book being financed by DISNEY's TALK/MIRAMAX. "Tina appears to be throwing her friends out with the bath water," said a publishing source who worked with ...

Fareed Zakaria has a fascinating essay in The New Yorker on the state of conservatism today. He points out that the modern conservative movement began when William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review and gave it the mandate to “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” Zakaria then asks, what should conservatism do, "now that history is going its way?" He says that victory in the Cold War — and the triumph of free markets — leave conservatives with basically a social agenda, which, he says, they sometimes promote in exactly the wrong way: “When conservatives couch that case in fiery terms ...

I recently moved from Manhattan, which I assumed to be America's zenith of solipsism, materialism and arrogance, to California’s famed Silicon Valley. I have been surprised. Don’t get me wrong: people here are nice. But the flip side of this is a thin skin that makes you guard everything you say. People freak out if you are aggressive or sarcastic. Worse, they seem to have forgotten what sarcasm is and take you literally. And they are arrogant - indeed more arrogant than New Yorkers, though differently. New York arrogance is an investment banker who thinks he's better than the rest ...

The Republicans are the party of the rich and the Democrats of the working class, right? It's time to rethink that assumption. Running on the strongest economy in living memory, as the handpicked heir of a popular President, Al Gore is lagging alarmingly in the polls even though his campaign so far has been diligent, disciplined, and skillful. He has improved as an orator. The issues -- health care, the environment, guns -- run heavily in his favor. And the financial position of the Democratic National Committee is stronger than it's been for several election cycles. Yet Gore is tied ...

CONSERVATISM is doomed. True, in the Eastern bloc, in its conclusive demolition of the Berlin Wall, it won the battle of ideas. But in its own Western bloc, it's lost the battle of process, and that's likely to prove decisive. In the United States, George W. Bush is opposed to same-sex marriage. So is John McCain. But whichever one of them becomes president will have little say over whether or not, in Vermont and elsewhere, justices of the peace (and, indeed, clergy) find themselves uttering the words, 'I now pronounce you man and husband.' On almost any issue you care ...