Free Republic

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) said he was just "acting foolish, and joking" with "a friend" in response to a video he characterized as the latest hit piece meant to destroy his political career. The 26-year-old congressman, who has been ensnared in a string of controversies in recent weeks, released a statement Wednesday appearing to confirm the authenticity of a short clip showing him naked in bed atop another man, getting physical and making noises.

Airplane Classic Scenes

In the years since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar hung up his playing shoes, the NBA’s all-time leading scorer has collected a host of titles, including filmmaker, author and cultural ambassador. He’s been a vocal advocate for African-Americans, and this weekend penned an essay for Time Magazine on the shooting deaths of two NYPD officers on Saturday. Some have linked the shooting to the protests that sprung up after grand juries failed to prosecute the officers who killed Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Abdul-Jabbar disagrees, saying the suggestion the killer was acting in solidarity with the protests is false and a danger to...

Aww, screw it. I mean, really. You just gotta love this thing. You just gotta love the fact that some semitruck company somewhere called International Truck and Engine Corp. is now coming out with what they claim is the world's largest production pickup, called the CXT, all 9 feet high and 8 feet wide, a whopping 21 feet long and 14,500 pounds and 18 million excruciating earthly groans of it. And in most states that don't give a crap for their roads or the environment or any human life that might be existing in the various passenger cars surrounding it,...

I have a good friend who believes, gloomily, bitterly, resignedly, that not only are we in for four more years of painful and cheerless BushCo-branded tyranny and misprision and aww-shucks dumb-guy shtick, but also that we are actually at the beginning of a long, brutal, fear-based Republican juggernaut that will last a good 16 more years, at least. Because this is how long it will take for the current horrific conservative cycle to play itself out, and this would resemble a more typical and historically proven 20-year pendulum swing, in this case one toward neoconservative right-wing hate and homophobia and...

This is the great thing about rabid fundamentalism. You really just don't have to give a damn. Take the environment. I mean, isn't it just a little pointless to care so damn deeply about the air and the soil and the water and the stupid little disposable animals on this silly spinning ball of expendable rock when the Second Coming is imminent and a blood-soaked fire-breathin' Jesus who looks remarkably like Mel Gibson will return very soon to smite the heathens and the gays and the vegetarians and the Francophiles, and who will rescue all those who worship patriarchy and...

I am searching for a few good things. Things to counteract, to dissolve the simmering dread, to deflect the waves of nausea and karmic pain induced by the incessantly depressing media maelstrom and the appallingly hateful gloat of the GOP convention and by the most tyrannical administration and least articulate American president in 100 years. You know how it is. And you say to yourself, these things, these radiant gems that live outside the mass-media miasma, I need them because they provide some balm, soften the fact that the nation feels massively off track and blinded and war torn and...