Free Republic

To sum it up, the knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task—and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at that task. This includes political judgment.But as a psychologist who has studied human behavior—including voter behavior—for decades, I think there is something deeper going on. The problem isn’t that voters are too uninformed. It is that they don’t know just how uninformed they are.

Should she win the presidency, Hillary Clinton would quickly try to find common ground with Republicans on an immigration overhaul and infrastructure spending, risking the wrath of liberals who would like nothing more than to twist the knife in a wounded opposition party. In her first 100 days, she would also tap women to make up half of her cabinet in hopes of bringing a new tone and collaborative sensibility to Washington, while also looking past Wall Street to places like Silicon Valley for talent — perhaps wooing Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook, and maybe asking Tim Cook from Apple to...

Last year, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was serious about making one last bid for the White House. Only after realizing that Jeb Bush had already secured pledges from most of the top Republican donors did he decide to sit out the 2016 election. Of course, as it turned out, Bush – even with a reported $100 million war chest – could barely make a blip on the electoral radar. In the year of Donald Trump, the former Florida governor was just another victim. Since then, Romney has become one of Trump’s biggest and most outspoken detractors. When the primary...

Did Donald Trump violate IRS rules, by using a charity's money to buy himself a signed football helmet? Four years ago, at a charity fundraiser in Palm Beach, Donald Trump got into a bidding war at the evening's live auction. The items up for sale: A Denver Broncos helmet, autographed by then-star quarterback Tim Tebow, and a Tebow jersey. Trump won, eventually, with a bid of $12,000. Afterward, he posed with the helmet. His purchase made gossip-column news: a flourish of generosity, by a mogul with money to burn. "The Donald giveth, and The Donald payeth," wrote the Palm Beach...

WASHINGTON -- I see that CNN is calling upon the good offices of Mr. Potato Head to refute Donald Trump's evisceration of Hillary Clinton in his speech last Wednesday. Mr. Potato Head is very indignant that Peter Schweizer has written a book, "Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich," demonstrating that a pattern of corruption exists in the relationship between The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton State Department. He says that pattern of corruption does not establish the Clintons' guilt. Well, an author can only do so much....

Donald Trump is not a professor, but for years he will be yielding insights to every student of economics. His Tuesday address on trade did a masterful job of combining antiquated fallacies with misinformation and ignorance to create an encyclopedia of error. Instructors have never had so much free help constructing their lesson plans. The vision Trump conjures is one of alluring simplicity. He promises to achieve "economic independence" by abandoning globalization, instead using American workers to produce American goods. This change, he said, would "create massive numbers of jobs" and "make America wealthy again." It's a scam, skillfully pitched...

In May, under pressure from the news media, Donald Trump made good on a pledge he made four months earlier: He gave $1 million to a nonprofit group helping veterans’ families. Before that, however, when was the last time that Trump gave any of his own money to a charity? If Trump stands by his promises, such donations should be occurring all the time. In the past 15 years, Trump has promised to donate earnings from a wide variety of his money-making enterprises: “The Apprentice.” Trump Vodka. Trump University. A book. Another book. If he honored all those pledges, Trump’s...

"CNN Host Tries Desperately to Get Corey Lewandowski to Trash Donald Trump – FAILS (VIDEO)" ormer Donald Trump Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski made his first appearance on CNN on Friday as its latest paid contributor. CNN host Erin Burnett tried her hardest to get Corey to trash his former employer and the Trump family. Corey refused saying it was an “honor” to work for Mr. Trump as his campaign manager for the past year. At the end of the interview Corey defended Donald Trump for saying Hillary’s home server was likely breached by foreign hackers. Burnett kept saying that there...

WASHINGTON – Conservative columnist George Will told PJM he has officially left the Republican Party and urged conservatives not to support presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump even if it leads to a Democratic victory in the 2016 presidential election.

Those questions apparently did not occur to Cristina Alesci and Laurie Frankel. Also, in addition to the $145 million being funneled to the Clinton Foundation before the CFIUS approval, why was a Kremlin-backed bank bankrolling a $500,000 speech in Moscow for Bill Clinton while his wife led the Russian reset? As even the progressive New Yorker magazine put it, “But there is a bigger question: Why was Bill Clinton taking any money from a bank linked to the Kremlin while his wife was Secretary of State?” Shockingly, CNN Money fact-checkers Alesci and Frankel make no mention of the Kremlin-backed $500,000...

Wednesday on his radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh questioned CNN’s David Gergen for his assertion that Breitbart editor at large Peter Schweizer’s book “Clinton Cash” had been discredited following a speech in which presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had widely cited the book. Limbaugh pointed out that other major media outlets had used it in their reporting and that it was possible Gergen was making the assumption that it had been discredited without actually having any evidence to back it up.

“I was really surprised he leaned as heavily as he did upon the Schweizer book, Clinton Cash—that book has been basically discredited,” Gergen said. “Other news organizations have looked at it and said he has no evidence, he has no evidence that shows money given by donors to the Clinton Foundation then resulted in actions by the State Department that favored those donors.” Gergen also claimed later on CNN that the speech was “slanderous” and again claimed that the book has been “widely discredited.” Gergen’s claim couldn’t be further from the truth and proves he clearly has not read the...

Over the last year, in at least a dozen states, Clinton has dedicated hours and hours to events so small that members of the media often match or outnumber the attendees. In a primary election where Sanders and Trump continually draw thousands, Clinton has only matched her largest crowd - the campaign's Roosevelt Island launch rally crowd of 5,000 - once. Though she continues to call out Trump during her rallies - where the capacity rarely exceeds 1,500 - Clinton has notably spent more time engaging voters in intimate, issue-oriented exchanges.

In a quest to uncover the real Trump, Slate's Seth Stevenson interviewed several former Apprentice crew members about their onetime boss. One crew member told Stevenson about the time Trump hit on his 28-year-old then-girlfriend, who was a production assistant on the show: "He made a comment about her, knowing that he was mic'd and that we'd all hear it. He said, 'Who's that hot little girl running around?'" He went on, "He was always very open about describing women by their breast size."

House Speaker Paul Ryan told a room of Republican donors and elites in Park City, Utah last weekend that he endorsed Donald Trump to keep the Republican Party together. That explanation implied that if the highest ranking Republican didn't support the top of the ticket and went against the legitimate winner of the primary electoral process that the Republican Party would limp forward as a divided party with no chance of electoral success. The Speaker suggested that he put party above personal preference for the sake of unity. Just days later, party unity appears even more fragile. Since wrapping up...

Donald Trump, the most prominent Republican right now, suggested on national TV on Monday that President Obama is possibly complicit in Sunday's horrific terror attack in Orlando. And maybe, Trump hinted, the president is even somehow involved. On Fox & Friends, the presumptive GOP presidential candidate said, "He doesn't get it or he gets it better than anybody understands—it's one or the other and either one is unacceptable." "Look," he continued, "we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind. And the something else in mind—you know, people can't believe...

The furor over Trump’s assaults on the impartiality of a Latino judge had just begun to subside when he lobbed two tweets Friday morning responding to Warren, who had lambasted him as a "thin-skinned, racist bully" in a speech the previous evening. "Pocahontas is at it again!" Trump wrote in one. "Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth." [Snip] The response to the Pocahontas remarks have been mixed and in many cases muted - a sign of how jittery GOP leaders are still trying to find their comfort level with his rhetoric. [Snip]...

ABC reporter Tom Llamas selectively reported on Donald Trump’s response to Hillary Clinton’s tweet calling on him to “delete” his Twitter account, shielding ABC’s audience from hearing about Clinton’s deleted emails.

If there is a trophy for bad behavior, Bernie Sanders's supporters appear hellbent on taking it from Donald Trump's. The latest ugly episode involves threatening phone calls to New York Times reporter Amy Chozick and at least one harassing, profanity-laced message directed at NPR's Tamara Keith on Tuesday.

There’s no strategist pulling the strings, and no collection of burn-it-all-down aides egging him on. At the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the campaign aides closest to him say, is Bernie Sanders. It was the Vermont senator who personally rewrote his campaign manager’s shorter statement after the chaos at the Nevada state party convention and blamed the political establishment for inciting the violence. He was the one who made the choice to go after Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz after his wife read him a transcript of her blasting him on television....