Free Republic

For all the ink spilled about Trump being a loose cannon, there are no surprises here. Bad relations with Germany if he won were a fait accompli. This is the course Americans chose. Now we get the consequences, for better or worse.The last 70 years of peace in Europe were pretty boring. “The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I’ve experienced that in the last few days,” Merkel told a crowd at an election rally in Munich, southern Germany.“We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands,” she...

Face it: losers like socialism because it allows them access to money and goods that they would not be able to acquire through their own powers.  So it should surprise nobody that an academic study finds that poor upper body strength in males correlates with socialist views.  Amanda Prestigiacomo writes at the Daily Wire: An academic study from researchers at Brunel University London assessed 171 men, looking at their height, weight, overall physical strength and bicep circumference, along with their views on redistribution of wealth and income inequality. The study, published in the Evolution and Human Behavior journal, ​found that weaker men were more likely...

The pop star Ariana Grande has canceled the remaining dates of her "Dangerous Woman" tour following the murder of 22 fans (at the time of writing) and the injury of dozens more at her concert in Manchester. The Manchester Royal Infirmary reports that half the victims brought to the hospital overnight are children. The killer was a suicide bomber. Theresa May says the police believe they know his identity. The usual, predictable details will follow. [UPDATE: He's Salman Abedi, the Manchester-born son of Libyan refugees and another "known wolf".] As The Independent's headline has it: There's only one way Britain...

Trap closes.

Rich Lieberman is reporting that Michael Savage was confronted and physically attacked Tuesday night after eating dinner at Servino’s Restaurant in Tiburon, CA. A man began yelling at Savage and making fun of his last name (Weiner is his legal last name). The report says the mugger kicked Savage’s dog then threw the syndicated talker to the ground. Lieberman says Savage was bloodied but not hurt seriously and the dog is OK.

FBI Director James Comey asked Justice Department officials to publicly reject President Donald Trump's claims that former President Barack Obama ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower, The New York Times reported Sunday. A senior U.S. official confirmed the newspaper's reporting to NBC News. The Times reported that Comey requested that the Justice Department publicly rebut the president's allegations — which he posted on Twitter without evidence — because the claims are untrue and suggest that the FBI broke the law. Comey's appeal pits him against the president. But, The Times added, Comey is having difficulty knocking the story down because...

A major arm of Clinton influence is ending. Screen Shot taken by YC at 2017-01-14 at 9.10.26 PM This is a notice, required under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act), about pending layoffs. Clinton Global Initiative will be closing, that is the reason given for laying off 22 employees on 4/15/2017. 74 employees were previously let go at the end of December, according to other WARN filings. What foreign government would want to donate now to someone who will not be President, who will have no power? There have been questions raised about whether everything in the...

Milo Milburn, "Letting go of grudges". Weds Jan 11 at 8 PM Eastern EWTN Live Streaming PLAYER Click Here Photo, License Frame: 'Grudges Don't Hurt Them'"It happened 60 years ago. She's been dead for 10 years. She's not coming back. Get over it." My Aunt Mary held a grudge against my Mom, Betty. Mary blamed Betty due to her belief Betty had caused their parents to split up for a few months. Mary was in a faction in her own mind, with one parent in her mind against another. IT HAPPENED IN 1932!Betty died in 1989. Mary was holding it...

A professor who made an alarming statement on social media that “All I want for Christmas is white genocide” now is blaming everyone, except himself, for the criticism that erupted from the apparent inducement to violence. The statement came from Drexel University’s George Ciccariello-Maher and came to the public through Twitter, on Christmas Eve. Here is it: The College Fix reported there were a number of reactions, including that from Drexel officials who said they were seeking a meeting with Ciccariello-Maher because, while the professor certainly has the right “to freely express their thoughts and opinions in public debate,” his...

While speaking on the British radio show "Thought for the Day," the future King of Britain, Prince Charles, said that Christians should be more mindful of Islam and Muhammad during the holidays. . . . Whichever religious path we follow, the destination is the same – to value and respect the other person, accepting their right to live out their peaceful response to the love of God," he said.

In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He...

Retired Army intelligence officer Tony Shaffer alleged Monday that CIA Director John Brennan is playing political games via a secret CIA assessment stating Russia interfered with the election to support GOP President-elect Donald Trump......Shaffer claimed that the secret CIA assessment, obtained by The Washington Post.... is a product of Brennan’s loyalty to President Barack Obama, The Washington Examiner reports. “This is purely political, and I believe that John Brennan is a political animal,” Shaffer said. He added he has been talking with former CIA officials about the report. “Everything they are telling me is Brennan is doing this out of...

This is the 90th time we have named the person who had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year. So which is it this year: Better or worse? The challenge for Donald Trump is how profoundly the country disagrees about the answer.

A man who said he was investigating a conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of a pizza place fired an assault rifle inside the Washington, DC, restaurant on Sunday, injuring no one, police and news reports said. Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman Aquita Brown said police received a call Sunday afternoon about a male with a weapon on Connecticut Avenue, in an affluent neighborhood of the nation’s capital. Edgar Maddison Welch, 28, of Salisbury, North Carolina, walked in the front door of Comet Ping Pong and pointed a firearm in the direction of a restaurant employee,...

President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly considering seriously at least two men for the critical position of secretary of state. One, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, has divided the Trump team between those who think it is a good idea and those who think Romney's severe criticism of Trump during the campaign disqualifies him. The other is retired general and former CIA Director David Petraeus. A major problem for Petraeus is his mishandling of classified documents, which he reportedly leaked to his biographer-mistress, Paula Broadwell. After Trump hammered Hillary Clinton for her "extremely careless" handling of classified material when she was...

Oppressor and torturer of millions, murderer of thousands, and billionaire thief Fidel Castro is finally dead. This death of this evil Communist and avowed enemy of the United States who took a wealthy, relatively free country and transformed into a poverty-stricken totalitarian hellhole was reported on Cuban television about an hour ago. Castro reportedly died at 10:29 p.m. Friday. He was 90. Fidel handed his wee baby brother Raul the Cuban presidency in 2008. Fidel’s inactivation makes the despoiler of Zimbabwe, 92-year-old Robert Mugabe, the heavy favorite in the dictator death pool. But little Raul isn’t far behind. He is...

A Toronto television journalist is believed to be Canada's first anchor to don a Muslim head scarf at one of the city's major news broadcasters. Ginella Massa was asked to fill in on the anchor desk for CityNews' 11 p.m. broadcast last week and created a buzz after the broadcast ended and she Tweeted, "That's a wrap! Tonight wasn't just important for me. I don't think a woman in hijab has ever anchored a newscast in Canada." Massa, 29, said Friday that she became Canada's first hijab-wearing television news reporter in 2015 while reporting for CTV News in Kitchener, Ontario,...

Novelist Toni Morrison, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize, and the American Book Award, has written a short essay in the New Yorker magazine about the recent presidential election. In the piece, Morrison writes that the election of Donald Trump to the presidency is part of a reaction by white men to an increasingly multicultural society. “Under slave laws,” Morrison writes, “the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are ‘people of color' everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition...

Future First Lady Melania Trump and son Barron will not be moving to the White House after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, The Post has learned. The president-elect’s 46-year-old wife and their 10-year-old son are staying put at the family’s glitzy Trump Tower penthouse so that Barron can continue attending his Upper West Side private school, sources told The Post. “Melania is extremely close to Barron, and they have become closer during the campaign,” said a source close to Trump’s transition team. “The campaign has been difficult for Barron, and she is really hoping to keep disruption to a minimum.”...

Sources say the President-Elect held a long and meaningful texting discussion with Mrs. Clinton today. Texting from Trump Tower, the President-Elect is said to have conveyed his admiration for her strong performance in her hard-fought campaign leading up to election day. Repeating his respect and admiration for his erstwhile opponent, sources say the President-Elect surprisingly offered Mrs. Clinton a position in his upcoming administration. One source speaking only on condition of anonymity stated the position offered was a special assignment within the State Department. Sources say it is unknown if Mrs. Clinton or her husband would accept the offer as...