Free Republic

We have discussed Rule 40 which says, I think, that a candidate must win a majority of delegates in 8 states to have his name put in nomination. You can't just win the state, right? Do I have this right? So Iowa would NOT count for Cruz, but Nev. would count for Trump? I forget, what were the splits in NH and SC?

Following an attack by Saracen pirates that damaged St. Peter’s in 846, Pope Leo IV ordered the construction of a wall to protect the holy basilica and its associated precincts. Completed in 852, the 39-foot-tall wall enclosed what was inaugurated Leonine City, an area covering the current Vatican territory and the Borgo district. The walls were continually expanded and modified until the reign of Pope Urban VIII in the 1640s.

The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth: (g) a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than ten years, at least five of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years: Provided, That any periods of honorable service in the Armed Forces...

The youth have always leaned left, hence the famous quote often mis-attributed to Winston Churchhil that if you're a conservative at 20 you have no heart, but if you're a liberal at 40 you have no brain. With a self-described Socialist capturing an enormous chunk of the youth demographic this election cycle, its a sad reminder of just how far-left this generation has become. 43% of today's millennials have a favorable view of socialism making it more favored than capitalism. So what's gone wrong with this generation? Over at The Federalist, Emily Ekins and Joy Pullmann have put together a...

New cars just aren’t what they used to be. No, we’re not getting all crotchety and decrying the evolution in styling and technological breakthroughs that have literally reinvented the automobile during the last quarter millennium. Rather, we’re bemoaning the fact that, unlike as in past model years, there’s a dearth of truly wretched cars on the market for us to openly and readily ridicule. We consulted J.D. Power for the latest results in the company’s initial quality and long-term reliability surveys and its scores for performance and design; rankings for resale value depreciation came from the automotive valuation experts at...

Scalia Defended Democracy: Liberals Subvert It "I write separately to call attention to this Court's threat to American democracy," wrote Justice Scalia in his dissent from last year's Supreme Court decision, where five unelected judges imposed same-sex marriage on all 320 million citizens. "This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves." Exactly. "A system of government that makes the...

Graham proposed a "disagreement hierarchy" in a 2008 essay "How to Disagree",[22] putting types of argument into a seven-point hierarchy and observing that "If moving up the disagreement hierarchy makes people less mean, that will make most of them happier." Although originally written as a simple list, Graham's hierarchy can be represented as a pyramid with the most convincing form of disagreement at the top, and the weakest at the bottom:

In Detroit, home of all things Democrat, we have State Senator Virgil Smith finally getting his comeuppance....well sort of. Smith, for those of you who don't recall, is the long-time Democrat politician from Detroit who, when confronted by his ex-wife regarding a naked woman that she found in his house when she stopped by shortly after the divorce, chose to beat her with his fists, chase her out of the house with an AR-15 rifle, fire several shots at her, and then fire several more into her brand new Mercedes. Cop report: Naked Smith fought ex-wife before shooting Felony city,...

A video which should be posted every day during "Black History Month" and weekly during the rest of the year. Hugh Fitzgerald, one time VP (emeritus?) at JihadWatch.org, occasionally mentioned an author by the name of Theodore Parker, who wrote "Historic Americans", in which Parker describes founding father, Ben Franklin, abolitionist extraordinaire, quoting the koran in defending his abolition petition to Congress. You can read it online here: http://tinyurl.com/aa96dnm Quote: Page 27:You see the young nation in its infancy. "Hercules in his cradle, "said Franklin; but with a legion of the mystic serpents about him. If the rising sun...

Mr. Obama’s six years of governance-through-executive-order make his a fragile legacy. Unilateral gambits can be reversed by the next President, and the other branches of government are finally reasserting their constitutional powers. As anarchic as politics can seem these days, the American system of government is still on track—sometimes.—Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2016

The Road to Seerfdom:

I have a question that no one seems interested in asking, and which Google seems to have cleverly sanitized (if that's possible): What did Marco Rubio and Chris Christie say about Barack Obama's election and about Obama in 2009? Remember Rush Limbaugh's famous "I hope he fails" line---he knew what Obama was. Well, what did Rubio and Christie say? I Googled this and nothing comes up except Rubio's recent comments. I find that odd. Surely Rubio was asked about this at the time. Surely he had some comments, but if he did, they are certainly buried now. National Review can...

If you enjoyed paying $1.59 a gallon for gas this past weekend, understand a few things. To the extent domestic production affects this, the oil industry is mostly gettings its resources on private lands. That's because Obama, while he's happy to take credit for the increased productivity and lower prices, is fighting new leases on federal lands wherever he can. That's how he can reassure his left-wing base he's an enemy of the oil industry while also taking credit for the low prices. But there is some oil being extracted on federal lands, and if that stopped all at once,...

A new theory says Earth is made of two planets, rather than just one. Apparently, our planet is the result of a collision that helped map the course of both Earth as we know it and the moon. According to new research from the University of California, Earth and a hypothesized early planet called Theia collided, and the two planets fused together 4.5 billion years ago. That impact also formed our moon, Science Alert explains. The initial working theory was that the Earth and Theia only side-swiped each other, sending the moon into orbit and then flying away into space....

Imagine your seventeen-year-old daughter fighting for her life in hand-to-hand combat with battle-hardened enemy soldiers. How long would she survive? Two minutes? One minute? There is a resurgent movement to push female military personnel into ever more intimate contact with hostile forces. The few arguments mustered in support of doing this focus narrowly on manpower issues or misplaced feminist vanity. In all the literature on this subject that I have collected over several years, not once have I found a proponent of women in combat who would speak honestly about the consequences of thrusting our daughters into man-against-woman festivals of...

Help! I'm doing research on improving our security at work. I'm trying to find an article posted here a couple of years ago. Someone put a lot of effort in to find out the difference in victim count when people waited for police to show up and end a mass shooting vs people on site taking action to end a shooting. I remember there being fewer victims when people didn't wait for the police. Thanks in advance!

Based on the initial investigation, detectives learned that a group of individuals were driving ATVs and had arrived at the location to get gas. At that time, a man driving a white Volvo, later identified as Macklin, pulled up to the gas station where he and the group began to argue. Macklin then pulled out a weapon and fired several shots at the group, striking three males ages 30, 31 and 32. One of the victims then pulled out a weapon and returned fire, striking Macklin in the head.

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."-Mark Twain Canada's leading newspapers, including The Globe and Mail and The National Post, recently gave sympathetic reviews to a book by A.J. Somerset that portrayed American gun culture as racist and paranoid. In his book, Arms: The Culture and Credo of the Gun, Somerset's approach to American gun culture is to search for what he calls "the Wellspring of Crazy." As he says, "This is the gun culture I am after in this book: the weird stuff." Somerset dissects movie dialogues and relates...

For several weeks, an 18th century replica ship has traveled across the Atlantic Ocean from France to the U.S. L'Hermione is an exact copy of the vessel sailed by the Marquis de Lafayette in 1780 to notify his friend, General George Washington, that the French king had agreed to provide troops and resources to the flailing Continental Army. This week, the boat is docked in the Washington, D.C. area, fittingly near Mount Vernon, and various French and American entities are feting the occasion. They have good reason. America's first and longest ally is France, despite occasional variances in political dispositions....

A GANG of migrant men sexually assaulted German women at a historic swimming bath, it has been claimed.Other migrants were caught "emptying their bowels" in the children's pool and masturbating in a hot tub, according to reports. They are thought to have been caught on CCTV before laughing at pool staff when challenged about their behaviour.