Free Republic

Former President Barack Obama wished his social media followers a happy holiday on Monday with a festive but oh so adorable photo. Indeed, Obama's 2018 Christmas greeting featured a sweet moment under the mistletow with his wife and former first lady, Michelle Obama. "Enjoy the holiday season with the ones you love," Obama wrote in a short-but-sweet holiday greeting shared on both Instagram and Twitter. "Michelle and I wish you a very Merry Christmas!" Alongside his message of holiday cheer, the former president shared an adorable photo of himself planting a kiss on Michelle's cheek as the two stand beneath...

If you were elected president after decades of politicians doing nothing about the millions of illegals pouring into our country every year, committing crimes, dealing drugs, driving drunk, molesting children and killing Americans like Kate Steinle, and your central campaign promise -- repeated every day -- was to build a wall, wouldn't you have spent the entirety of your transition period working on getting it done? Wouldn't you have been building prototypes, developing relationships with key congressional allies and talking to military leaders about using the Seabees or the Army Corps of Engineers to build the wall? Wouldn't you skip...

For a man facing daily attacks for his activism and liberal vision of the world, George Soros was in a curiously buoyant mood on a sunswept afternoon in Marrakesh. He had just visited South Africa, home to his first philanthropic foray in the late 1970s, when he funded black students under apartheid. This time he learnt that Soros-backed investigative media and civil society groups had helped thwart an allegedly corrupt nuclear power plant contract with Russia. “It was a tremendous boost to reinforce my belief that we are doing something right,” says Mr Soros. “We haven’t stopped having a beneficial...

Top House Democrats on Sunday raised the prospect of impeachment or almost-certain prison time for President Donald Trump if it’s proved that he directed illegal hush-money payments to women, adding to the legal pressure on the president over the Russia investigation and other scandals. “There’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict him, that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the incoming chairman of the House intelligence committee. “The bigger pardon question may come...

The final votes are being counted from the 2018 election. They confirm that the Democrats crushed Republicans. Let's start in the seat count. Republican Rep. David Valadao of California's 21st District conceded on Thursday to Democrat T.J. Cox. Cox's victory combined with other election results means that Democrats have picked up a net gain of 40 seats. As has oft been repeated, this is the largest Democratic House gain since 1974. It's a larger gain than Democrats had in the wave elections of both 1982 and 2006. We can go back even further and see how unusual it is that...

Of all the places in Washington, Beto O’Rourke chose to run to the Lincoln Memorial. Jogging through an early winter storm in the capital the week following his loss in the race for U.S. Senate, O’Rourke found himself, gimpy knee and all, running up the steps of the majestic monument to the 16th president. There, he wrote in a Medium post, he paused to read the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Suddenly, his knee stopped hurting—as if Honest Abe’s words had a special healing power (but “maybe it just needed to fully warm up,” he wrote).

Co-hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough tied the knot in a secret wedding ceremony officiated by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) over the weekend, Vanity Fair reported on Sunday. The celebrity morning television hosts held an intimate ceremony attended by a handful of people on Saturday in Washington's National Archives, the first time a wedding has been held there, according to the magazine. They reportedly chose the quiet post-Thanksgiving date to keep the wedding under wraps. “We wanted it to be really small and simple and not what you expected from Mika and Joe,” Brzezinski told Vanity...

Today my wife and I were sitting in close proximity to three gay men discussing President Trump. They were all over the place about the attempts to impeach him and were holding out hope that his business dealings would be found to conflict with his official duties. While they hoped that would result in his impeachment, they certainly didn't know what the succession to office entailed. They didn't know who would replace him under the 25th amendment but I got the impression they assumed there would be a special election.The conversation then took a remarkable turn when they conceded that...

By now, we should all be familiar with Corner Store Caroline, the latest in a long line of white people crying to authorities over imagined transgressions by black people. Caroline (real name Theresa Klein) called the police ― or, at least, appeared to ― on 9-year-old Jeremiah Harvey, accusing him of sexual assault. After surveillance footage corroborated all of the witness accounts detailing that the boy had merely brushed Klein with a bookbag as they walked out of a small New York market, Klein offered an “apology,” saying “I was wrong.” She told ABC 7, “Young man, I don’t know...

Doctor Who is about to do battle with a new deadly enemy...racism. Sunday’s episode centres around Rosa Parks who refused to give up her seat in the “colored section” of an Alabama bus to a white passenger. The outcry over her 1955 arrest spark­­ed the start of the civil rights movement. In her latest adventure, Time Lord Jodie Whittaker lands in America’s Deep South as an evil alien tries to disrupt the historic confrontation. She and her team have to ensure the pivotal moment is not sabotaged. Sidekicks Ryan Sinclair and Yasmin Khan face discrimination as they are refused entry...

On 9 October, the Vatican issued a report summarizing the Synod’s first round of small group discussions, which focused on Part One (paragraphs 1 to 72) of the Synod’s working document, the Instrumentum Laboris [IL].  As in past synods, bishop-delegates, Synod auditors, and invited observers divide into language-based discussion groups when the Synod is not meeting in general assembly. In Synod-2018 there are fourteen such groups, or Circoli Minori in Synod-speak: four for English speakers, three for French, one for German, two for Spanish, three for Italian, and one for Portuguese. (Once upon a time, there would be “circle” using...

A new state recommended social studies and history curriculum is being introduced in public schools around California that blatantly promotes a bias perspective on the policy achievements of governor candidate Gavin Newsom. Dubbing him “Champion for People’s Rights,” the first grade textbook teaches kids about “respecting the rights” of others by pointing to Newsom’s advocacy for same-sex marriage, while mayor of San Francisco. The text doesn’t even try to be objective and fails to mention that marriages for same-sex couples were not an established right at the time, but a brand new concept and only legal in a select number...

It's coal people like miner Steve Knotts, 62, who make West Virginia Trump Country. So it was no surprise that President Donald Trump picked the state to announce his plan rolling back Obama-era pollution controls on coal-fired power plants. Trump left one thing out of his remarks, though: northern West Virginia coal country will be ground zero for increased deaths and illnesses from the rollback on regulation of harmful emission from the nation's coal power plants. An analysis done by his own Environmental Protection Agency concludes that the plan would lead to a greater number of people here dying prematurely,...

For the clusters of onlookers, besuited power players and three former presidents who had all traveled to Washington National Cathedral, the muggy day was a historic opportunity to memorialize the life of Senator John McCain, who was remembered as a deeply patriotic war hero, a former Republican presidential candidate and a scrappy, humanly flawed, ultimately idealistic lawmaker. For President Trump, it was Saturday. In the many discussions about how to mark his life that Mr. McCain had with his staff and family before he died, he had made clear he did not want Mr. Trump to participate in anything they...

Lena Dunham has shared an emotional message alongside naked pictures nine months after her hysterectomy. The 32-year-old, who had the operation in December after suffering for years with endometriosis, said the occasion felt bittersweet. She explained that the date was particularly poignant as nine months is the length of time a woman carries a baby before birth – and ‘I won’t ever do it the way I planned to.’

At seven years old, Abdul El-Sayed sat in the eye of Hurricane Andrew, the most destructive hurricane in US history until Katrina. Living near Miami, El-Sayed drank juice while swaddled under mattresses between his father and stepmother, who was holding El-Sayed’s newborn baby brother just home from the hospital. The 1992 storm had taken an unexpected turn southward, and the El-Sayeds could not be evacuated. The wind made an awful rattling sound on the screens. The front door blew in. The wind and the rain whipped into the house, “as if the ocean was coming at you”. El-Sayed’s father, Mohamed,...

It is truly a confounding time to be alive, to be an American. We are watching as a president of the United States openly lies, fabricates and exaggerates while two-fifths of the population cheers him for it. He spurns our allies and embraces our adversaries and people shrug. He, his congressional allies and his propaganda arm are waging open warfare on the Federal Bureau of Investigation in an effort to tarnish it before its inquiry into connections between the Trump campaign, family and associates and Russia can be made public. He is a racist who disparages black and brown people,...

Thursday on ABC’s “The View,” co-host Whoopi Goldberg discussed her concerns over President Donald Trump picking a Supreme Court nominee Advocating for abortion rights Goldberg said, “Get out of my vagina.” Goldberg said, “Here’s the piss-off for me. I’m the person that does believe that just because someone is appointed doesn’t mean —and I believe I have said that a lot about the Supreme Court — that you never know a person on the Supreme Court is going to vote because sometimes, you know, things change. They wake up. They see things. I don’t like hearing, again, that I’m trying...

Market Street transformed into a rainbow-colored celebration Sunday as 50,000 marchers — and about twice as many spectators — gathered for the 48th annual LGBT Pride Parade in San Francisco. Depending on where you were on the route, the gathering may have resembled a protest or a party. The dress code for the event: anything goes.

The idea that Donald Trump might fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller and in so doing spark some kind of constitutional crisis has been gaining traction for months now. Political junkies, especially on the liberal side of the spectrum, have breathlessly discussed the scenario in neighborhood bars and on approximately 1,000 different podcasts. Protests against the firing have been preemptively organized by progressive advocacy groups. Even though Trump's 2016 campaign was marked by a contempt for the rule of law and bursts of actual violence, and even though he abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey last year (prompting Mueller's appointment), sacking...