Free Republic

HARRISBURG — When Republican state legislator Jim Gregory nominated his Democratic friend and colleague Mark Rozzi to be speaker of the Pennsylvania House this month, the move stunned close political observers and seemed to offer new hope for bipartisanship. As with the nation, politics in this critical swing state, the country’s fifth-most populous, have become bitterly divided in recent years along ideological, geographical and racial lines. Donald Trump won the state in 2016, and Joe Biden took it back in 2020. False claims over the legitimacy of the 2020 contest became prominent Pennsylvania GOP rallying cries in 2022 and reinforced...

Forget Fermat’s last theorem. The most vexing challenge in mathematics just might be the Monty Hall problem. Monty Hall — born Monte Halparin — presented nearly 5,000 episodes of Let’s Make a Deal, the US game show that inspired the puzzle. It is an onion of a conundrum; layer after layer, and guaranteed to make you cry. The puzzle is this: a contestant faces three doors. Behind one of them is a big prize such as a Cadillac. Each of the other two doors conceals a booby prize such as a goat.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says America will be glad if he's the president next time the nation is attacked. "If we are attacked, somebody attacks us, wouldn't you rather have Trump as president if we're attacked?" he said at a rally in Milford, N.H. "We'll beat the shit out of them." He added that America needs to stop "playing games." "We've become the policemen to the entire world," he said. "We take care of the world. They pay us peanuts."

Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would “certainly not give up” the possibility of running as a third-party candidate if he is not treated “fairly” by the GOP.

It’s about time we did the Monty Hall problem. Many of you will already know the answer, but read on anyway because it turns out to be an excellent example to demonstrate fundamental ideas in probability. Incidentally, I just did this yesterday to a group of surgical residents: you might be happy to know that none of them got the right answer. One even insisted—for a while—that I was wrong. Here’s the problem. Setup: Monty Hall shows you three doors, behind one of which is a prize, behind the other two is nothing. Monty knows which door hides the prize....

Barack Obama’s lefty admirers are agitating for a new New Deal. We’ll know that we’ve achieved that blessed state when the government destroys 6 million baby pigs—turning many of them into grease and fertilizer (anything but food)—to prop up the price of pork. Or when it plows under a quarter of the South’s cotton and slaughters pregnant cows. American agricultural policy remains perverse to this day, but nobody is calling for the willy-nilly destruction of American crops and livestock as a means of checking deflation and fostering economic recovery. New Deal nostalgics forget all the elements of Franklin Roosevelt’s program...

Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway By Jerome R. Corsi Human Events 6-14-6 Quietly but systematically, the Bush Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S. along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Tex., to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn. Once complete, the new road will allow containers from the Far East to enter the United States through the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, bypassing the Longshoreman's Union in the process. The Mexican trucks, without the involvement of the Teamsters Union, will drive...

Top conservative leaders have written President Bush telling him to drop his insistence on a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship for illegal aliens and instead support the 85 percent of congressional Republicans who want to tighten law enforcement first. Signers include William J. Bennett, Robert H. Bork, Ward Connerly, David A. Keene, Phyllis Schlafly and a number of think-tank academics and pundits. The immigration debate is the first major issue on which Mr. Bush finds himself opposing a majority of Republicans in Congress and depending on Democrats to deliver a victory. In their letter, the conservatives tell Mr....