Free Republic

Regardless of who wins the election in November, here are 10 things that I think he or she should keep in mind: --The old media rules do not apply. Do we still have to emphasize this in an era of smartphones, Facebook and Twitter? You do not control the media, and the media does not control the message. Oh, I know that the Obama administration has made media manipulation an art form -- and that the media has been more than happy to comply. But everyone is the media now. We found out about Hillary Clinton's pneumonia because of a...

While we shouldn't live in the past, we can certainly learn from it. We are not the first humans to walk the Earth and yet too many, especially the young, suffer from the conceit that history is just a boring subject in school. PBS is rerunning episodes on its award-winning series "American Experience" on modern presidents and the challenges they faced. Each episode retraces what presidents believed to be good ideas at the time -- from Lyndon Johnson's program to wipe out poverty and defeat the communists in Vietnam, to George W. Bush's toppling of Saddam Hussein. In each episode,...

The primaries are over and Trump is the nominee, and instead of whining about it like a Millennial faced with having to get a job we need to step back and ask ourselves if we have learned anything from this bizarre turn of events. The GOP – our GOP – has nominated someone who is not a traditional conservative. He’s not even an untraditional conservative. Hell, there’s probably not even a “c” or a “v” in whatever he is. So we can either try to figure out what happened or keep rending our clothes and gnashing our teeth about how...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: So it was Saturday afternoon, and I was immersed in a project. I did not have the television on. I was not connected online to anything that was providing me a news feed, and I do not have news alerts that bop into me. I've not set those up 'cause I have weeded out all this harassment from notifications. So I get a text from a friend says, "Our country is cursed." I said, okay. Wrote back. "Why?" "It's just unbelievable. It just seems like the decks are so stacked against us." "What's going on?" was my...

Classes to help transgender individuals alter their vocalization are slated to be offered this fall at the University of Connecticut. The Transgender Voice and Communication Group offers “an opportunity to use new vocal and communication qualities in a safe and confidential environment” and includes “role playing” and other activities. This semester’s group launches Sept. 14 and runs through Nov. 30 at the public university, an online campus calendar and description states. The University of Connecticut did not respond to multiple requests from The College Fix seeking comment on how much it costs taxpayers to facilitate the group. The campus does...

Ted Cruz just flagged the beginning of the 2016 election cycle. With hats now officially being thrown into the ring, it’s a good time to look back at what went well in social marketing at the midterms and what could be improved upon for the 2016 cycle. Let’s start with the fact that Facebook says it saw 43 million unique individuals engage in political discourse during the midterms, despite the fact that the U.S. had its lowest midterm-election voter turnout since the early 1940s. Moreover, according to research by Pew, voters were three times more likely to track political candidates...

SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. — A history book used in school districts across the state is sparking controversy in Seminole County. A parent called 9 Investigates after finding out his son was learning too much about the Islamic religion in a public classroom. Ron Wagner read from part of his son's world history book, "There is no god, but God. Muhamad is the messenger of God." Raw: School district spokesman storms out of interview Raw: Full interview with school district Wagner is not reading the Five Pillars of Islam from the Quran, but rather his son's 10th-grade world history book from...

...[I]t's immediately apparent that Senate Republicans did an outstanding job of recruiting this cycle. Capito ran one of the best campaigns in a non-competitive race in the country. McConnell was, as usual, outstanding. Gillespie came from nowhere to almost upset the single most popular politician in Virginia. And Ernst is a rising national star. But, when you look at the totality of the campaign, it's clear that Cory Gardner was the single best candidate of the 2014 election.

Many pundits and campaign consultants are no doubt analyzing the election results across the country to try to decipher what lessons the Republican wave holds for candidates planning to run in 2016. But there are four easily seen lessons that both of the major political parties should take to heart: First, the manipulation of election rules and political trickery didn’t work. In Kansas, for example, the Democratic Party forced its U.S. Senate nominee to withdraw and refused to comply with a state law that required the party to name a replacement candidate for the ballot. Democrats were hoping that...

God knows Joan Rivers had much to atone for every Yom Kippur, considering her trenchant wit, off-color jokes and celebrity takedowns — though sidesplitting. Never deferential to fame and status, Rivers claimed, “I succeeded by saying what everyone else is thinking.” Hence, Liz Taylor was “so fat, she puts mayonnaise on aspirin” and “hamburgers on hot dogs,” and HBO-star Lena Dunham’s ever-present breasts “look like Michael J. Fox drew them and Stevie Wonder filled them in.” Alas, the trailblazing performer can’t Think Again and repent this year. Known for resilience and career rebirths springing from fearlessness, a legendary work ethic...

Not many people in Britain have followed the Hobby Lobby case, named after the American company that won an important battle for religious freedom against the bullying of the totalitarians - in this episode feminazis and supporters of state intervention in personal affairs. In this area the United States seems more progressive in the true, not socialist, sense, and less prepared to submit to cultural Marxism's oppressive demands. Hobby Lobby is a company owned by Christians. At issue was whether, according to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare, "closely held companies like Hobby Lobby could be...

Although he has studied the French far-right party National Front for nearly two decades, even sociologist Sylvain Crépon didn’t expect party leader Marine Le Pen's popularity among young voters to reach the heights it has. ... distrust in mainstream politicians and the ongoing struggle to find jobs has made Ms. Le Pen increasingly popular with young voters – to the extent that she could get as many or even more votes from this age group than President Nicolas Sarkozy in the April 22 election. A March poll of 18 to 22-year-olds by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) found...

Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog, It was almost exactly one year ago to the day that an entire nation was frozen out of its savings… overnight. Cypriots went to bed on Friday thinking everything was fine. By the next morning, they had no way to pay bills or buy food. It’s certainly a chilling reminder of how quickly things can change. And why. The entire crisis sprang from a mountain of debt. The government had accumulated too much debt. The banking system had accumulated too much debt. And banks had lost a lot of their customers’ money...

Gun Control I am for the right to have guns. I'm a gun owner. But nobody needs to own an AK-47. They say these assault rifles are great for hunting. You can't hunt game with an AK-47. And if you're a responsible gun owner, why wouldn't you go through a background check? The only people who don't want background checks are fugitives, tax dodgers and terrorists.

Well whaddya know: The topic of impeachment reared its head at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday. Jonathan Strong’s report here at NRO noted the wincing consternation of GOP-leadership aides at utterances of the “i-word” during the testimony of prominent legal experts. For the Republican establishment, it seems, history begins and ends in the 1990s: No matter how times have perilously changed, any talk of shutdowns or impeachment is bad, bad, bad. Yes, the Obama “uber-presidency,” as left-of-center law professor Jonathan Turley called it, has enveloped the nation in what he conceded is “the most serious constitutional crisis ....

The little known Chanukah story of how the Hasmonean revolt started, was actually because of a very brave woman! Sometimes it takes 'the shock factor' to do what 'rationalization' smothers. The background of the Chanukah story recalls the struggle for religious freedom from the Hellenistic Syrian-Greeks in the year, 165 B.C.E. Antiochus, who was the occupying King at those times, sought to crush our Jewish identity and passed decrees against the practice of Judaism. We were forbidden from studying the Torah, we were forbidden to keep the Shabbat (Sabbath) and we were forbidden from making a brit milah (circumcision). To...

Vice President Biden says that when one is confronted with a threat, he should “fire a warning shot.” That might be the answer you could expect from a white-gloved elitist with an entire security detail. For real people on the street, that is a good way to die when confronted with a real threat. I recently traveled to my hometown of Jefferson City, Mo., to speak at the Rally for Common Sense. After the event, I invited a group of friends to meet up at a favorite downtown haunt near the state Capitol building, where I lived most of my...

It’s been 35 years since 918 people, including 257 children, died on Nov. 18, 1978, at the Peoples Temple massacre in Jonestown. The mass murder inside the South American jungle commune in Guyana was engineered by Jim Jones, a murderous cult leader, and was the only time in American history a member of Congress, Leo Ryan, D-Calif., was killed in the line of official duty. Most of the victims were forced to commit suicide by drinking a fatal cocktail of poisoned punch spiked with a Valium tranquilizer. In the days that followed the slaughter of the innocents, Jonestown became a...

A Roman Catholic scholar and former philosophy and religion professor has released a new book that defends Mormonism as "one of the youngest branches on the Christian tree," and claims that Christians can learn from the Mormon religion. Stephen H. Webb, former 25 year professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College and author of the book, Mormon Christianity: What Other Christians Can Learn From the Latter-day Saints, told The Christian Post that, among other things, "Mormon theology teaches us to think of matter in new and creative ways." "Traditional theology teaches that matter is lifeless, without the soul it's...

Politics is in the eye of the beholder. Post-mortems about the Virginia gubernatorial race are gushing forth about why Republican Ken Cuccinelli lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a business-as-usual political retread from the Clinton crowd. They tell us more about who produces this punditry than about the reality of the situation. We're hearing that tea party activists killed Cuccinelli's candidacy with the government shutdown (according to The Wall Street Journal editorial page, they "stabbed him in the back") and that, once again, a socially conservative Republican candidate has shown he can't win women's votes. What I see is very different....