Free Republic

At Sidwell Friends, the high school of Chelsea Clinton and the Obama children, college counselors find themselves besieged by Ivy-obsessed families. ============================================================== Updated at 2:47 p.m. ET on June 6, 2018. The motto of Sidwell Friends School, the hyperselective “Harvard of Washington’s private schools,” is simple and lofty. “Eluceat omnibus lux”—Latin for “Let the light shine out from all.” But bright lights sometimes illuminate the worst in people. Last month, shocking behavior by parents may have led two of the school’s three college counselors to leave their jobs. School officials have repeatedly warned parents, who represent the pinnacle of elite...

Democrats have become increasingly cognizant of the anger, but too often they’ve drawn the wrong conclusions. The answer certainly isn’t socialism. Middle-class voters currently presume that elites already control the government—so why would they want to give the bureaucracy any more power? Rather, Democrats need to become the party of justice. They need to demand accountability from bad actors—and point out where Republicans would give them a pass. They don’t need to castigate entire industries, as some might recommend. But when people make decisions that affect innocent bystanders—beating the drums for an ill-conceived war, making complicated financial instruments—they should be...

Sometime around A.D. 60, in the age of Emperor Nero, a Roman court insider named Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical Latin novel, “The Satyricon,” about moral corruption in Imperial Rome. The novel’s general landscape was Rome’s transition from an agrarian republic to a globalized multicultural superpower. The novel survives only in a series of extended fragments. But there are enough chapters for critics to agree that the high-living Petronius, nicknamed the “Judge of Elegance,” was a brilliant cynic. He often mocked the cultural consequences of the sudden and disruptive influx of money and strangers from elsewhere in the Mediterranean region...

This week, the Met Gala took place in New York City. The event has always been a showpiece for celebrities seeking to make a splash, from Rihanna in her Pope costume to Katy Perry dressed as a chandelier. This year’s event was designed in homage to Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” According to Sontag, “camp” is the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” In reality, camp according to Sontag is something else: a deliberate attempt to tear down boundaries. “Camp taste,” Sontag wrote, “turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment.” “[H]igh culture,”...

In this Easter season, I have been thinking about the importance of redemption. Over the years, by virtue of circulation in political circles, I have known personally some people involved in public scandals. The world watches as the media follows them relentlessly for days, weeks, or even months and then evaporates, leaving behind a scene of complete and utter self-inflicted personal destruction. Some of these folks are often distraught to the point of suicide. What the cameras don’t show is what happens after the hoopla dies down. Sometimes these folks turn inward and become bitter and permanently broken, but not...

While I still have 2 plus feet of snow in the north-facing front yard, and it’s likely to snow again today, I have seen signs that we are headed into spring, or mud season such as it is around here. So let’s focus on a different aesthetic altogether today, art.Genre is irrelevant. Be it lens: brush:Valley Evening Brent Cottonloom: needle:or wood:Give us your best art. Or artist. And by the way, congrats to Abenaki for breeding the best Alpaca Art Wool in North America!Art: it will rock your weltanschauung.Posted from: MOTUS A.D.

Prosecutors say that [Mark] Riddell worked closely with [Rick] Singer, [founder of the Edge College & Career Network, also known as The Key — a for-profit college counseling and preparation company offering families help in getting students into competitive colleges and universities]. In conversations recorded by investigators, Singer called Riddell his “best test-taker.” The Bradenton Herald’s review of the federal complaint document revealed that Riddell earned at least $240,000 from his involvement in the scheme and Proctored [or corrected] at least 16 exams for students. “I would really appreciate the opportunity to Proctor the test because I’m applying to grad...

I don’t know why this little story made me smile so bigly. Maybe I’m world weary in general or, more likely, just tired of condescending elitists. In any event, how bad can things be when a class of middle school art students stage a Paint-Like-Bob-Ross flash mob? The class donned baby blue button down shirts and curly wigs and followed along with a soothing Bob Ross instructional video on how to paint happy little trees.  The schtick was the idea of their Madison Middle School art teacher Brady Sloane.Her pre-Advanced Placement eighth-grade students had been stressing about projects and...

CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” snuck another anti-Trump message into the popular show’s credits on Thursday night, taking aim at press secretary Sarah Sanders’ appearance and Christian faith. “God told me he hasn't spoken to Sarah Sanders since she was fourteen years old and praying for her skin to clear up. I have no reason to doubt Him,” an on-screen message during the show’s closing credits said.

DAVOS, Switzerland - From centre-stage in Davos last year, President Donald Trump told the world’s corporate bosses that America is a great place to invest. It hasn’t quite turned out that way. Foreign direct investment to the United States fell in 2018, and companies gathered at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps this year say they are worried Trump’s trade war with China will dampen the global economy and business investments even further. One key complaint here this week: Companies increasingly reliant on consumers in China have had to lower their earnings outlooks as the world’s second-largest economy...

It was no coincidence that Donald Trump scheduled a trip to Britain to promote one of his golf courses in Scotland, on June 23, 2016. That was the day of the Brexit referendum in which 52 percent of the electorate --17.4 million voters, more than any party has ever won in a general election -- voted for the UK to leave the European Union. Candidate Trump's earlier endorsement of Brexit was criticized by elevated opinion as an unfriendly interference in another nation's internal affairs, although few, if any, had similarly criticized then-President Barack Obama for having urged Britons to vote...

Rep. Dan Crenshaw questioned Monday whether the trip to Puerto Rico by congressional Democrats was a good decision amid the deadlock on border security. About 30 lawmakers traveled to Puerto Rico -- with their families and lobbyists -- for a winter retreat over the weekend despite the partial government shutdown. "It sounds like they had a lot of fun. They've also been talking a lot about the plight that federal workers see themselves in," Crenshaw said on The Story. "They're not wrong about that, but if we're gonna talk about that then I don't know if these excursions to Puerto...

President Trump is working around the clock during the government shutdown trying to negotiate with Pelosi and Schumer to secure border wall funding. The Democrats however, are partying at a beach resort in Puerto Rico on day 22 of the government shutdown. The Democrats don’t care about the 800,000 federal workers who are currently not receiving a paycheck. Democrat Senator Bob Menendez was spotted hanging out with a bikini-clad “colleague” on the beach in Puerto Rico three weeks into the shutdown without a care in the world. The Hispanic Caucus of liberal Democrats is holding their retreat at a posh...

Historian Victor Davis Hanson said there has been no consequences for the wrongdoing by elites in society and warned that republics and successful states fall apart when the elites fall out of touch with the people. "We have a whole bunch... here at home, that feel they can dictate to people and they're never subject to the ramifications of their own ideology and policy," he said of elites. "And it's like the emperor has no clothes and then they're surprised that Trump won or surprised that people are rioting in Paris. What did they think was going to happen?" "We...

RUSH: All right. Will somebody explain something to me? Somebody explain to me how we have, apparently, for years and years and years been trying to get a criminal justice or prison reform bill, and it happened with bipartisan support, 87 votes in the Senate. Now it goes over to the House where it’s gonna pass. It’s not a big issue as far as the general public is concerned. Some special interests have made a big deal about it. It happens. It didn’t take much effort to get it passed. It didn’t take much debate whatsoever. It’s an important issue...

Paris was in lockdown early on Saturday with 'thousands' of French security forces braced to meet renewed rioting by "yellow vest" protesters in the capital and other cities in a fourth weekend of confrontation..... The Eiffel Tower and other tourist landmarks were shut, shops were boarded up to avoid looting and street furniture removed to avoid metal bars from being used as projectiles. About 89,000 police were deployed across the country.

Veteran leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office as Mexican president on Saturday, vowing to see off a “rapacious” elite in a country struggling with corruption, chronic poverty and gang violence on the doorstep of the United States. Backed by a gigantic Mexican flag, the 65-year-old took the oath of office in the lower house of Congress, pledging to bring about a “radical” rebirth of Mexico to overturn what he called a disastrous legacy of decades of “neo-liberal” governments. “The government will no longer be a committee at the service of a rapacious minority,” said the new president, who is...

A former Obama administration diplomat both praised and criticized President Trump's foreign policy during a forum Thursday at the University of Minnesota... blah, blah, blah ...blah, blah, blah ... the university's Humphrey School of Public Affairs for the forum titled: "The Shrinking International Relevance of Donald Trump," FOX 9 of Minneapolis reported....blah, blah, blah, simper, whinge, blah, blah, blah, sniff, blah, blah blah (I am paraphrasing here)

McCONNELLS MILL, Pa. -- Darcelle Slappy says Democrats and Republicans who live in places like this part of Western Pennsylvania are a lot closer than how they're portrayed on TV. "Unlike Washington, we are all just a few notches from each other in either direction," Slappy says. "We have much more that draws us together than divides us." In fact, she says the divide in this country isn't Republican versus Democrat: "The real division is between the elites and us." If you watch TV news or read most mainstream media, you would believe our country is in meltdown. In a...

I've been listening to crazy people saying things like, "someone isn't entitled to the presumption of innocence," or an accusation that is not only unproven but unprovable is "corroborated" in growing alarm. What goes through my mind is that this is the way you un-make civilization. Part of the problem is that our civilization – arguably, at least in terms of keeping the most people alive and in relative comfort – is not normal in the history of the world. This strange idea that each individual has rights, that the rights are inherent to them, that they deserve to be...