Free Republic

A Bench presser farts while trying to show off for his friends.

The prime time program shuffle resulting from the Bill O'Reilly departure from Fox News Channel is seriously flawed, and will fail quickly with a massive loss of viewers of "The Five".....now slated for the 9:00PM time slot. The show is boring, with only one member of "The Five" worth her salt {KG), and, it is not Dana Perino, who is terrible. The three males are losers with little substance. Bob Beckel and Juan Williams are not dummies...but 100% empty suits!!! The winning line up would be: - Martha McCallum at 7:00PM - Tucker Carlson at 8:00PM - Jesse Watters at...

Agility is a good thing, no doubt, and the Agile Manifesto isn’t unreasonable. Compared to a straw-man practice called “Waterfall”, Agile is notably superior. Yet, so much of Agile as-practiced is deeply harmful, and I don’t really think that the Agile/Waterfall dichotomy is useful in the first place. There’s a variety of Agile, called Scrum, that I’ve seen actually kill a company. By “kill”, I don’t mean “the culture wasn’t as good afterward”. Rather, I mean that its stock dropped by almost 90 percent in less than two years.

On Thursday, the U.S. military dropped a MOAB (Mother Of All Bombs) on an ISIS tunnel complex in Nangahar Province in Afghanistan. Shortly after that, USA Today posted a breathtakingly ignorant graphic purporting to show that the MOAB contained over 70 percent of the destructive force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. This epic fail occurred even though the following comparison was known early on: The MOAB has the force of 11 tons of TNT. For comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 had the force of 15 thousand tons of TNT. The destructive force of the...

A driver who used wooden logs and chicken wire to reinforce his vehicle’s suspension was ticketed and had his car impounded by police following a traffic stop in west Quebec. The MRC des Collines police said they pulled the 1999 Toyota Tercel over on Sunday at about 10:45 p.m. on route du Carrefour in Val-des-Monts after noticing the car didn’t have working brake lights. After pulling the car over, they discovered that the 28-year-old driver had no proof of insurance and an open beer in the front seat, police said. A closer inspection of the car also revealed that three...

What was billed as a showdown between the leaders of the United States and China over trade and North Korea ended with little sign of confrontation Friday — or of concrete progress in resolving their differences. President Donald Trump had predicted a "very difficult" meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. After their first face-to-face at the Mar-a-Lago resort, he trumpeted they had developed an "outstanding" relationship. U.S. officials said the two sides agreed to increase cooperation on trying to get North Korea's to abandon its nuclear weapons program, and China acknowledged the need for more balanced trade with the U.S....

Zooming from one end of America to another, "Supertrain" is a vision of railroading of the future. The super-train, equipped with restaurants, pools, spas, theaters, etc., delivers passengers to wherever they're going. In "Love Boat"-type style, each week's guest passengers have their problems to resolve before the end of their trip.

Thursday was a good night to be a medical drama on the broadcast networks. Both “Grey’s Anatomy” (2.0 rating among adults 18-49) and “Chicago Med” (1.4) improved on last week’s... “Kicking and Screaming” dipped a tenth to 0.6 for FOX, while “Masterchef Junior” was steady at 1.1.

Jocelyn Bamford, a white hard hat perched over red hair that curls down around her shoulders, has her hands on her hips. Behind safety glasses, her eyes flash. On the shop floor in the bustling Automatic Coating Inc. plant owned by her family, she has to shout to be heard above the squirt of compressed air nozzles, honks from forklifts, the clang of steel as it’s dipped in baths, and the hum of exhaust fans. Bamford might be shouting regardless of the noise since the hydro bill for her Toronto-based company has her mad as hell. Once boasting one of...

An Austal-built Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and crew are stranded in Singapore because of a change in training standards propelled by a series of recent engineering breakdowns throughout the LCS fleet. The USS Coronado, built in Mobile nearly five years ago, deployed to the Pacific Rim in June last year to relieve the LCS Fort Worth. The Coronado and its crew were supposed to arrive back in the home port of San Diego by Thanksgiving but could now end up being abroad for an indefinite period as they wait for a relief crew to be trained to the new Naval...

Amy Schumer’s highly anticipated stand-up special for Netflix is getting overwhelmingly negative reviews from users who are tuning in and rating it. “Amy Schumer: The Leather Special” hit Netflix last week, and as the streaming service’s subscribers are starting to watching it, less-than-stellar reviews have been pouring in. “I made it 10 minutes into this and shut it off,” one viewer review read. The user gave the special one-star out of five. Another viewer added, “SO BAD!! I did stay and watch the whole show in hopes that it would get better, and it didn’t.” Yet another one-star user review...

Another Oscars Gaffe: In Memoriam Video Included Photo of Living Woman Leading Australian producer, Jan Chapman was “devastated” by another mistake in the Oscars telecast. In addition to the best picture gaffe, during the show’s In Memoriam segment, a photo of a living woman was mistakenly used.

It took two years and two tries for “Doubt” to make the CBS lineup – but now the show has been canceled after just two weeks. The Eye network has pulled the plug on the show effective immediately; next week, CBS will air a repeat of “Bull” in the show’s Wednesday 10 p.m. (ET) time slot. The second season of “Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders” will then slide into the spot permanently on Wednesday, March 8, following a two-hour “Survivor” premiere.

BALTIMORE –The hail of tweets, executive orders and announcements from the White House in President Trump’s first two weeks in office drew a uniform reaction from House Democrats: opposition and outrage. But in the age of Trump, when news moves at a stunning pace and can change on a dime, Democrats are searching for the most effective way to push back. The topic dominated discussion as House Democrats opened their annual retreat here Monday. Unlike their counterparts in the Senate, Democrats in the lower chamber don’t have many legislative ways to fight against the White House and congressional Republicans. They...

DILLON, S.C. (WBTW) – A truck trailer full of beer caught fire on Interstate 95 southbound near mile-marker 198 in Dillon, S.C. midday Sunday. Chief Charlie Bailey with the Dillon County Fire Station One said that when firefighters arrived on scene the trailer was fully engulfed in flames.

Actual Title: Box Office: ‘Hidden Figures’ Soars (Again) as Ben Affleck’s ‘Live by Night,’ ‘Monster Trucks’ Tank

In September 1963, two months before his death, John F. Kennedy mused aloud to his old friend the journalist Charles Bartlett about the prospects for the 1968 presidential election, in which, he presciently worried, his brother Robert might run against Lyndon Johnson. “He gave me the feeling he wasn’t pleased,” Bartlett would recall years later. “He wanted a record of his own. I sensed that he wanted the Kennedy administration to be Jack, and Bobby was going to turn it into a succession thing. Jack didn’t want a dynasty, although I am sure his father would have wanted that.” By...

John F. Kerry was late to his own party. Staffers, journalists and other officials were gathered in the ornate Benjamin Franklin salon at the State Department on Dec. 14 for early Christmas festivities. But the secretary of State was nowhere to be seen. Kerry was on the telephone to various world leaders, trying to find out about a major diplomatic meeting — from which the United States had been excluded. The gathering, which sought to broker a resolution to the devastating Syrian conflict, took place six days later in Moscow and involved the foreign ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey.

**SNIP** Why such political carnage? Faced with the economy’s potential collapse as he took office, Mr. Obama devoted his presidency to the economic recovery, starting with restoring the financial sector. But he never made wage stagnation and growing inequality central to his economic mission, even though most Americans struggled financially for the whole of his term. At the same time, Mr. Obama declined to really spend time and capital explaining his initiatives in an effective way. He believed that positive changes on the ground, especially from economic policies and the Affordable Care Act, would succeed, vindicating his judgment and marginalizing...

BERLIN (AP) - Germany: Suspect in Berlin truck attack was under covert surveillance for several months this year