Free Republic

Tuesday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said in the 2018 midterm elections, Republican House members will be held accountable for their “terrible” vote on the proposed House Republican health care legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare.

Paul Dionne, Inclusive Success Coordinator for Beloit College’s Office for Academic Diversity and Inclusiveness, gave a speech entitled, “Working Against Whiteness” as part of a “Love Made Public” lecture series. The lecture series started during the fall, but resumed this semester. To help define “whiteness,” Dionne instructed the student attendees to chant “imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy,” a phrase originating from feminist and self-avowed socialist bell hooks, who spells her name with all lowercase letters. “Working against whiteness for me is interrogating myself and who I am and where I come from and all of my privileges,” said the school...

Long time passing for media and elites accustomed to special treatmentTrump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 24, 2017.(Alex Brandon/AP)Susan and I have had three dogs during our 40 years of marriage. The third at the very ripe old age of 17 died in December, so just before Christmas we bought from the Austin Humane Society our fourth, Greeley. With bits of blueberry biscuit we’re training him not to bark or pull toward dogs or deer as we listen to The World and Everything in It during our morning 2-mile walks.One day during the last weekend of...

Inside Higher Ed reported that Canadian universities and colleges are experiencing a surge and spike in applications to their higher education institutions, with some staffers claiming that it is due to U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies. This "Trump effect" will allow Canadian universities and colleges to make money with more expensive tuition charged to international students, a model that American universities heavily rely on for their budgets. Other staffers say that the rise in international student applications is on par with recent trends. American universities, as the article pointed out, are seeing a decline in their international student applications, while...

Trump’s falsehoods are eroding public trust, at home and abroad. If President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We’re not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods. The latest example is Mr. Trump’s refusal to back off his Saturday morning tweet of three weeks ago that he had “found out that [Barack] Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump...

More store closings are coming to Staples. A shopper departs a Staples store September 29, 2005 in Mount Prospect, Illinois. (Credit: Tim Boyle/Getty Images) On Thursday, the office supply store reported a $548 million loss and a 3% drop in sales in the fiscal fourth quarter that ended in January. Those results prompted Staples to say it would close 70 more stores, or 4.5% of its 1,600 remaining locations, during the current fiscal year. It closed 48 stores last year and has shuttered about 350 stores over the last five years. The retailer tried to merge with rival Office Depot,...

The National Rifle Association spent a record amount to support Donald Trump's winning presidential campaign — upward of $30 million. While this investment looks wise now, recall that not long ago it was the height of insanity. Trump's campaign seemed doomed — but the NRA doubled down on its risky bet anyway, which threatened to marginalize it and undermine it politically. I believe this bet testifies to the NRA's desperation. This sounds odd, I realize, when you consider how the gun lobby is racking up legislative victories — expanding "campus carry" and permitless concealed-carry gun laws at the state level,...

After years of huge losses and store closings, the future is officially in doubt for Sears and Kmart. Sears Holdings, the holding company for the two iconic retail brands, warned investors late Tuesday that it can’t promise it will stay in business. It included the language in its annual report while insisting it might still turn things around. “Our historical operating results indicate substantial doubt exists related to the company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” said the statement. Sears Holdings said it can’t be sure it can raise the cash it needs through loans and debt financing. The...

A federal court jury on Tuesday awarded more than $100 million in damages to two gravel mining families that accused Sacramento County government officials of putting them out of business for the benefit of the rival Teichert Construction company. After a day and a half of deliberations, the U.S. District Court panel in Sacramento awarded $75 million in compensatory damages to Joe and Yvette Hardesty and $30 million to the Jay Schneider family. R

The defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is long past overdue. No president, including Ronald Reagan, has seriously pushed an immediate winding down of this corrupt and outdated waste of taxpayer funds. Who would have ever imagined that Donald Trump would be the first to do it? His first budget proposal takes that step, not just to save of ton of taxpayer money ($450 million is a lot of money) but also to establish a principle about our leftist media. It's simply not appropriate for the federal government to fund Democrat propaganda badly disguised as news. Is it any...

Cheerios cereal brand is under fire for sending out billions of potentially disease-spreading seeds in an attempt to help save bees from extinction. The brand recently announced that it would mail out free wildflower seeds as part of its "Save the Bees" campaign. The seeds, once planted, were meant to provide more nectar for the declining bee population. As of Friday, Cheerios had sent out 1.5 billion seeds, according to General Mills, which owns the cereal brand. There's one problem with Cheerios' charitable effort, however: some of the wildflower species included in the packet of seeds can do serious...

Determining one's own sex or that of another used to be a simple matter. First, there was the matter of appearance, whether a person looked like a male or looked like a female. If appearance produced some uncertainties, one could determine sex by examining a person's birth certificate. If appearance and a birth certificate produced uncertainties, the ultimate, absolute proof of sex was a person's chromosomes; XX marked a female, and XY marked a male. Case closed. But those old-fashioned simple methods of identifying sex have changed. In fact, relying on those old tried-and-true methods of sex identification qualifies one...

Media suspensions have always fascinated me. In four decades of broadcasting, I’ve seen people benched for offenses large and small, and I’ve usually found the suspensions are not so much a sincere reflection of an employer’s genuinely wounded sensibilities, but rather a positioning statement designed to send a message to the general public. So against that backdrop, I watched with interest the dispatching this week of two conservative TV figures with fervent fan bases. The first was Tomi Lahren, who exploded onto the media landscape last year from her outpost at TheBlaze, Glenn Beck’s multimedia empire. Sharp, rapid-fire conservatism from...

"Devastating!" shouts Chuck Schumer. Even Republicans are unhappy. Big spending "conservative" congressman Hal Rogers calls President Donald Trump's proposed budget cuts "draconian, careless and counterproductive." But Trump's cuts are good! Why do politicians always assume that government spending helps people? It always has unintended consequences. Foreign aid is attached to idealistic notions like ending global poverty and making friends abroad. Politicians also thought that by rewarding countries that behave well, America could steer the whole world toward responsible practices like holding elections and allowing companies (especially U.S. companies) to operate without interference. The young nation of Israel could be propped...

If FBI agents have time to track down Tom Brady's stolen Super Bowl jerseys, why can't they bring back AWOL convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur? It is time for one of the agency's most wanted women in the world to pay her dues. And President Trump is just the man to force this militant and unrepentant escapee to face justice. Forty years ago this week, a New Jersey jury convicted Joanne D. Chesimard -- aka Assata Shakur -- on first-degree murder, assault and other charges in the 1973 traffic stop execution of state trooper Werner Foerster and wounding of trooper James...

As habitually practiced since only the mid-1990s, by doing absolutely nothing, with almost no accountability accruing to them (using the “no-debate stealth filibuster”), the minority in the U.S. Senate can easily and nearly always either stop every legislative effort from even coming to the floor, or far more insidiously, sabotage it by requiring a “dirt and ice cream” result. Unlike the 60-vote rule for debate cloture to get to a final vote (which gives the minority the power to extend and even perpetuate debate), this more recent application of the 60-vote rule gave the minority the power of continuous...

The White House press secretary has always been a spin artist. Spinning is not lying, Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers once said, but rather "marshaling the facts in service of an argument."

Chuck Barris, who hosted “The Gong Show” and created “The Dating Game” and “The Newlywed Game,” died Tuesday of natural causes in Palisades, N.Y., his publicist confirmed. He was 87. His autobiography, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” was made into a film directed by George Clooney and starred Sam Rockwell as Barris. In the book (subtitled “An Unauthorized Autobiography”), he claimed to have worked for the CIA as an assassin during the 1960s and ’70s, a claim which the CIA denied.

Britain banned laptops from cabins of flights from six countries in middles eastItems such as laptops, iPads, Kindles and Nintendo 3DS game consoles bannedComes amid fears terrorists have developed bombs that can be hidden insideGovernment denies it is linked to US decision - but have not clarified the reason Britain last night took the dramatic step of banning laptops from the cabins of UK-bound flights from six countries, amid fears terrorists have perfected a new type of airline bomb. The move, which is likely to spark travel chaos at affected airports, was imposed just hours after a similar ban...

The secret is out, living with your parents is more common than you might think. A study by rental website Abodo showed that millennials are more likely to be living at home than on their own. The national average is 34.1 percent. San Francisco ranks 28th in the nation, with 31.5 percent of its millennials living at home. Of those, 9.2 percent of the millennials living there are unemployed, while of those who work, the median monthly income is $2,813. "We found that Millennials aren't living at home simply because of high rent prices across the country,” said Sam Radbil,...