Free Republic

The endorsement at least some people have been waiting for in the race for Alabama's U.S. Senate seat has arrived, with NBA great and former Auburn basketball player Charles Barkley telling NBC News, "if I lived here, I'd vote for Doug Jones." Barkley -- asked to weigh in on politics while in Auburn for the unveiling of a statue of him outside Auburn's basketball arena on the day of the annual Iron Bowl clash with Alabama in football -- told NBC's Vaughan Hillyard that Republican nominee Roy Moore should have been "disqualified" from the race long before recent allegations surfaced that he sexually assaulted teenage girls...

Can the descent of American political culture into ugly tribalism be halted? Alabama voters will give their answer when they decide whether to send Roy Moore to the U.S. Senate. Moore, 70, has built a long, disgraceful career out of smarmy religiosity spiked with tribal grievance. Having posed for years as the most pious of Christians, he now stands accused by nine women of un-Christian behavior: They claim convincingly that Moore, when he was in his 30s, aggressively pursued romantic or sexual relationships, including with teens barely half his age. Successful demagogues can use tribal enmities to blind their followers...

If you are a Bob Dole Republican, as I generally am, it is oh-so-difficult to be gung ho about where the GOP is headed these days, which seems like straight to hell. The party all too often has abandoned traditional Republican principles. The gargantuan tax bill, touted by President Donald Trump and passed by the House of Representatives, is being debated in the Senate. Only one aspect of the bill personifies Republican principles, and that is a pro-business tilt, which I can embrace, but only to a point. When the result is higher taxes on the middle class, they lose...

"...Many of the accusations surfaced after the release of a 2005 tape of Trump speaking graphically about kissing and groping women uninvited."

The Cornish Kern beat over 3,000 cheeses from 35 different countries at the annual World Cheese Awards cheese made by a small Cornish dairy has beaten all-comers to be named the best in the world. The Cornish Kern was crowned champion at the annual World Cheese Awards - beating rivals from France and Italy and other famous names. The buttery medium-hard cheese - noted for its deep aroma and caramel notes - has only been in production for a few years. But it managed to see off all competition from across the globe, topping 3,000 cheeses from 35 different countries...

The death of cult leader and convicted murderer Charles Manson resurfaces tales from his twisted family’s killing spree after nearly four decades. Manson orchestrated the brutal deaths of actress Sharon Tate and six other innocent people in the 1960s according to historical reports, which leave many wondering how he convinced followers, made up of a former Sunday school teacher, a church choir singer and a one-time homecoming princess, into committing such brutal acts. According to psychoanalyst Mark Smaller, past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, part of Manson’s power lay in the type of language he used. Notably, Manson was...

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster was unsparingly critical of President Donald Trump at a July dinner with Oracle CEO Safra Catz, according to a report BuzzFeed News published on Monday. McMaster called Trump an “idiot,” a “dope” and said he has the intelligence of a “kindergartner,” BuzzFeed reported, citing five unnamed sources with knowledge of McMaster’s and Catz’s conversation.

Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore may have been banned from his hometown mall for annoying teenage girls, amid growing allegations that he pursued teenage girls in his 30s, a new report says.

As we watch Roy Moore thumping his Bible to defend himself from accusations of child molestation, let me toss out a verbal hand grenade: To some degree, liberals practice the values that conservatives preach. This is complicated terrain with lots of exceptions, and the recent scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Al Franken underscore that liberals can be skunks as much as anyone else. Yet if one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it’s striking that conservatives champion “family values” even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast,...

<p>Welcome to the growing list of creepy guys in Hollywood and Washington who apparently think it’s OK — or funny — for men in power to sexually harass or assault women and men.</p> <p>We’ll see if the liberal media and his fellow Democrats treat the charges against Franken as seriously as they’ve been treating the ones against Republican Senate hopeful Roy Moore of Alabama.</p>

Roy Moore is the Steve Bannon project in a nutshell. For the former Trump operative, the Alabama Senate candidate’s tattered credibility is a feature, not a bug. If Moore had well-considered political and legal views, good judgment and a sterling reputation, he’d almost by definition be part of the establishment that Bannon so loathes. Since Moore has none of those things, he’s nearly an ideal representative of the Bannon insurgency. Events in Alabama make it clear that Bannon’s dime-store Leninism — burn everything down, including perhaps the Republican Senate majority — comes at a considerable cost. In this project, the...

Pope Francis on Thursday urged lawmakers to ensure that health care laws protect the “common good,” decrying the fact that in many places only the privileged can afford sophisticated medical treatments. The comments came as U.S. lawmakers in Washington, D.C., have been debating how to overhaul the nation’s health insurance laws. In a message to a medical association meeting at the Vatican, Francis expressed dismay at what he called a tendency toward growing inequality in health care. He said in wealthier countries, health care access risks being more dependent on people’s money than on their need for treatment. […] Without...

Gena Richardson says she was a high school senior working in the men’s department of Sears at the Gadsden Mall when a man approached her and introduced himself as Roy Moore. “He said, ‘You can just call me Roy,’ ” says Richardson, who says this first encounter happened in the fall of 1977, just before or after her 18th birthday, as Moore, then a 30-year-old local attorney, was gaining a reputation for pursuing young women at the mall in Gadsden, Ala. His overtures caused one store manager to tell new hires to “watch out for this guy,” another young woman...

Roy Moore, the GOP Senate candidate in Alabama, faces another woman accusing him of sexual misconduct. She says that in the early 1990s, he grabbed her buttocks during a meeting at his law office. Tina Johnson, who was 28 years old in 1991, told AL.com, that she went to Moore's law office in Gadsden, Alabama with her mother. "He kept commenting on my looks, telling me how pretty I was, how nice I looked," Johnson told the news outlet. "He was saying that my eyes were beautiful." She said she was at Moore's office to sign over custody of her...

I stumbled across this and had a wonderful laugh. This is an interview Tom Brokaw did with John Kerry just before the election in 2004 when he F-in' lost miserably to George W. Bush. Enjoy the historical laughs.

Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon is keeping the door open to ditching Roy Moore as the sexual-assault allegations against the Alabama Republican Senate candidate continue to pile up.

On Monday, a fifth woman came forward with allegations that Roy Moore sexually assaulted her when she was 16 years old and he was a prosecutor in Etowah County, Ala. The accusations to date are both plausible and disgusting. When Moore was in his early thirties, he allegedly sought out and sexually assaulted numerous teenage girls, including a 14-year-old. Moore has denied it, sort of, although his weird interview with Sean Hannity on Friday left the strong impression that the charges are most likely true. Yet it’s hard to understand why voters in Alabama are only just now realizing that...

Former CIA chief John Brennan thinks Donald Trump is being easily fooled by Vladimir Putin. Brennan and James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, were responding to Trump’s remarks in Asia where he said he believed Putin when the Russian leader stated he had not tried to interfere in the 2016 election in the US. […] Brennan utterly dismissed Trump’s assessment. “I don’t know why the ambiguity about this,” Brennan said. “Putin is committed to undermining our system, our democracy and our whole process. And to try paint it in any other way is, I think, astounding, and, in fact,...

WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said Monday that Roy S. Moore, the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, “should step aside” and that he believes the women who have accused Mr. Moore of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers. “I believe the women, yes,” Mr. McConnell said at a news conference in Louisville. Mr. McConnell also said that encouraging a write-in candidate to run in the Dec. 12 special election is “an option we’re looking at.” Mr. Moore, a judge who was twice removed from the state’s high court, first for refusing to remove the Ten Commandments from...

Women are reacting to the allegations that Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore had attempted sexual relations with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32 by posting images of themselves to Twitter of them when they were that age. On Thursday night, shortly after the Washington Post reported the claims against Moore, Catherine Lawson, a North Carolina lawyer, posted to Twitter a photo of herself at 14. “Can’t consent at 14. Not in Alabama. Not anywhere,” Lawson wrote, adding the hashtag “#MeAt14.”