Free Republic

Several players from Ole Miss made a trip to Michigan to visit with Jim Harbaugh and the Wolverine football program this past weekend. After the events of the last few weeks – Matt Luke hired as coach, the NCAA sanctions handed down, players stating that they wanted to transfer, etc – I wanted to dig into what all is happening. As I was putting information together for this story, it was announced that Lee Tyner is resigning from his post. On December 7th, I read an article by Brad Logan at Gridiron now, titled “Ole Miss Must Defend Itself –...

The Sig Sauer P239 is a compact semi-automatic pistol that holds seven .40 caliber rounds in the magazine. The .40 caliber bullet recovered from Kate Steinle's body was a hollowpoint design. It appears to have entered her body while tumbling after ricocheting off Pier 14's paved surface. The Sig Sauer pistol was stolen from a federal Bureau of Land Management ranger in San Francisco on June 27, 2015, four days before the homicide.  His vehicle was locked.The gun was out of sight, in a holster in a backpack. The rear passenger window had been smashed in. The pistol was...

Morning Joe opened today’s show by insisting that Steve Bannon had insulted Alabama when he suggested that University of Alabama alum Joe Scarborough, unlike Bannon, couldn’t get into Georgetown or Harvard. If that was an insult to Alabama, it was something of a three-rail bank shot. But a bit later, Morning Joe aired a clip of Roy Moore foe Charles Barkley insulting Alabamians in the most explicit terms. Said Barkley: “At some point, we’ve got to stop looking like idiots to the nation.” Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

A terrorist set off a bomb in New York’s subway Monday morning, and the worst thing he did was blow up his own crotch. That may be why you don’t see the cries and arguments that you usually see in the wake of terrorist attacks. There have been no loud calls for new security measures, no angry attacks on the intelligence community, no bills proposing more surveillance, no new legislation to curb immigration, and no new country we're supposed to invade. This relative silence doesn’t reflect a lack of vigilance, in our mind. It reflects a proper proportion of vigilance....

NFL Network has suspended the analysts Marshall Faulk, Heath Evans and Ike Taylor “pending an investigation” into allegations of sexual harassment and assault, the network announced late Monday. The allegations were made in a lawsuit by a former NFL Network employee, Jami Cantor, who sued NFL Enterprises, the league’s media arm that operates the network, in Los Angeles Superior Court in October, alleging age and sex discrimination, sexual harassment and hostile work environment, and wrongful termination, among other complaints. Eric Weinberger, the president of the Bill Simmons Media Group and a former NFL Network executive, was suspended by the media...

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg helped kick off the second anniversary of the Paris climate change accord on Tuesday by announcing a new agreement by 237 firms vowing to support the former New York mayor's push to get companies to disclose climate-related financial data. "Climate change poses both economic risks and opportunities," Bloomberg said in a statement as chairman of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures. "But right now, companies don’t have the data they need to accurately measure the risks and evaluate the opportunities." He said the lack of climate-related financial data "prevents" the private sector from making investments that...

Republicans are supposed to be the party that cuts the job-killing capital gains tax, not raises it. But because of a quirk in the Senate-passed tax bill, the tax on capital gains may go up -- and for some types of long-held assets, fairly substantially. Most members of Congress don't even know of this stealth capital gains hike. Here's the story: At the start of the year, Republicans promised to reverse the near-60 percent rise in the capital gains tax under former President Barack Obama -- a hike that helped bring investment rates to historic lows. The GOP plan was...

A year removed from our newspaper's endorsement of Donald Trump for president, the most frequent question I get in emails and letters are from Trump critics asking whether I regret the endorsement. I find it an odd question. It's reflective of a similar theme often directed at Trump supporters in columns from many of our nation's leading op-ed writers, especially after a presidential tweet-storm or inflammatory comment or action. "Will President Trump's supporters finally desert him?" they ask. Through the years, it became an accepted tenet of American politics that promises made and personas adopted by presidential candidates to win...

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) is going to resign…in the coming weeks. The Left is trying to reclaim the high ground (was there any?) with this move. Franken is expendable. His replacement will be a Democrat and in the meantime, they can redirect pressure on President Trump and the Republicans. Right now, the high target is Roy Moore, the Alabama Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, who has serious allegations of sexual molestation and assault against him. His alleged victims are teenage girls. What comes of that depends on how Moore does tomorrow in Alabama’s special election. While the polls in that...

“Our record as journalists in covering this Trump story and the Russian story is pretty good,” legendary reporter Carl Bernstein told CNN’s Brian Stelter over the weekend. Pretty good? If there’s a major news story over the past 70 years that American media has botched more often because of bias and wishful thinking, I’d love to hear about it. This week alone, four big scoops were run by major news organizations — written by top reporters and presumably churned through layers of scrupulous editing — that turned out to be completely wrong: Reuters, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and others...

Bill Staehle, who served with Alabama Senate candidate Judge Roy Moore in Vietnam, stood onstage Monday night during a rally in Midland City, Alabama, delivering a rousing character testimony of his war buddy and defending him from what he saw as incoming political fire. “I looked into his eyes. Last time I had seen him he was wearing jungle fatigues,” he said. “And I tell you, people of Alabama, he’s the same guy.” “He’s honorable, disciplined, morally straight, highly principled — the same qualities we would hope to have in all of our elected officials but don’t,” he said, prompting...

I feel for Jonah Goldberg and the rest of the #NeverTrumpers at Conservatism Inc. The awful truth is that their Resistance to the leftward ratchet has failed, and the world has moved on. So last week Jonah’s G-File is “Against One-Thingism,” complaining that we are becoming like our lefty friends for whom politics is everything, what with Republican and Trump support for Roy Moore, candidate for United States Senator in Alabama and all. Okay, Jonah, so what is Baldrick’s cunning plan for dishing the left? Let’s do the Eisenhower thing and make the problem bigger. What do you do when...

The family of the alleged ISIS-inspired Port Authority bomber said they were “heartbroken” by the attack on Monday and blasted law enforcement agencies for what they claimed were heavy-handed tactics by investigators. “We are heartbroken by the violence that was targeted at our city today and by the allegations being made against a member of our family,” said the statement read by Albert Fox Cahn, the Legal Director for the NY Chapter Council for Islamic Relations. “But we’re also outraged by the behavior of the law enforcement officials who held children as small as 4 years old out in the...

It’s a wonder that President Trump devotes so much time to discrediting the press, when the press does so much to discredit itself. The media’s errors over the last week haven’t been marginal or coincidental, but involved blockbuster reports on one of the most dominating stories of the last year — Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. And they all slanted one way — namely, toward lurid conclusions about the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russians. Every media outlet makes mistakes. It’s easier than ever to run with fragmentary or dubious information in a frenzied news cycle that never stops. But...

LOS ANGELES — Jimmy Kimmel held his baby son as he returned to his late-night son from a week off for the boy’s heart surgery. Kimmel was crying from the first moment of his monologue Monday night as he pleaded with Congress to restore and improve children’s health coverage, a cause he has championed since his son Billy was born with a heart defect in April..

Jurors took just three hours on Monday to rule against a controversial blogger who claimed he was fired from a tenured professorship at Florida Atlantic University in retaliation for his conspiracy theorist blogging about the Sandy Hook massacre. James Tracy alleged that FAU violated his First Amendment rights to free speech. He wanted to be reinstated to his former position, with back pay and an unspecified amount of damages. FAU officials say they never censored Tracy or prevented him from expressing his opinions. They say he was fired after repeatedly and intentionally refusing to file mandatory disclosure forms that require...

Following President Trump’s historic declaration recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, West Bank and Gazan Arabs took to the streets in rage. They burned U.S. and Israeli flags. They cursed America, Israel and the Yahuds (Jews). Their imams cited verses from the Koran and the Hadiths about the usurpers and interlopers and the “descendants of apes and pigs.” In other words, it was business as usual for the Palestinians. Nothing had changed. At the State Department too, it was business as usual. In a transparent effort to placate the Arab bloc, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the process...

The final hours before Alabama voters headed to the polls to decide a special Senate election saw dueling robocalls from President Trump and former President Barack Obama, along with wildly disparate poll results showing everything from decisive wins for each candidate to a race that remains too close to call. One Alabama Republican described the battle on the ground between GOP nominee Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones as a “total shitshow.” On Monday, a Fox News poll showed Jones unexpectedly leading by 10 points. An Emerson College survey released the same day had Moore up by 9 points. Jones...

<p>"Mr. Trump continues to exhibit paranoia about American intelligence agencies," wrote the NeverTrump conservative Max Boot in the New York Times a week or so before the president took office.</p> <p>"Consumed by his paranoia about the deep state, Donald Trump has disappeared into the fog of his own conspiracy theories," declared the Times' Maureen Dowd.</p>

PARIS -- The Russian Defense Ministry and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi made separate announcements last week that the Islamic State had been defeated. Of course, this doesn't mean that these terrorists won't be popping up elsewhere like bomb-toting, head-chopping Whac-A-Moles. Last month, the BBC reported a deal that allowed some ISIS fighters to escape the Syrian city of Raqqa -- the Islamic State's former "caliphate" -- under the nose of Western and Kurdish officials, ostensibly to facilitate a declaration of "mission accomplished." The question is where these fighters will pop up next. Are we supposed to believe that they're...