Free Republic

Europe is in chaos. Over the last year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has allowed over one million Muslim migrants to come to Germany. Many of these refugees are young, uneducated males, with no skills, no understanding of German, and no plans on assimilating. As terrorist attacks and sexual assaults by these Muslim newcomers become more common throughout Europe, many Germans are regretting inviting these people to their country. Now there are multiple reports of German biker clubs roaming the streets of German cities, attacking Muslim immigrants. Two Pakistani men were recently hospitalized after getting attacked by a group of 20...

The Vatican announced this week that Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich has been selected to be Pope Francis’ successor after the 79-year-old pontiff hits the age of retirement next year. Cupich told worshipers yesterday that he was “so very grateful and humbled by the news that he would be given the opportunity to wreak havoc upon the Church while wearing white.” Cupich, 67, will receive his “white hat” in Rome on December 18, 2017, the day after Pope Francis turns 80. Cupich’s succession to the papacy also means he will have his choice of who will succeed him in the future....

CNN’s most senior political journalists could barely contain their outrage on Friday morning after Republican nominee Donald Trump used an event that they expected to be about Birtherism to showcase his support from veterans, Medal of Honor winners, retired flag officers, and Medal of Honor winners.

Top CNN employees are frustrated. They breathlessly went live to Donald Trump’s news conference at his new hotel in Washington D.C., only to wait helplessly as veterans stood up to explain why they support Trump as commander-in-chief. “It’s hard to imagine this as anything other than a political rick-roll,” anchor Jake Tapper said wryly as CNN cut away from the broadcast of the Trump event and asked him to comment. The Trump campaign signaled that the Republican presidential nominee would address the birther controversy, but the first 20 minutes of the event featured veterans telling the media why they supported...

Minneapolis — Target cut its profit and comparable-store sales outlook amid stiffer competition and its own stumbles in areas like grocery sales. The discounter’s second-quarter net income fell nearly 10%, though that was better than what most had expected. Sales at stores open at least a year fell 1.1%, reversing seven straight quarters of gains. Target shares were down more than 6% in mid-morning trading Wednesday. The quarter underscores challenges that Target and other retailers face from Amazon.com and shoppers who remain cautious about spending.

Apple disrupted the music industry; Uber disrupted the taxi cartels; Amazon disrupted the mega-bookstores. Global competition has been disrupting American manufacturing for decades. The inundation of low-skill immigrants unintentionally produced by the 1965 immigration act has disrupted many communities and big metro areas. Over history, America has mostly been built by disruption. Certainly the Loyalists in the American Revolution thought so. So did the farmers who cheered for William Jennings Bryan's free silver as industrialization was disrupting the farm economy. It's not clear that this disruptive convention will help him. Trump's managers have disrupted the traditions in place for 30...

The driver of an SUV plowed through a group of protesters during a “Black Lives Matters” march in southern Illinois on Sunday, July 10.According to Carbondale police, at around 10 p.m., officers began to monitor demonstrators who began marching along Washington Street in Carbondale.Police say they continued marching throughout the downtown streets, briefly assembled in front of the Carbondale Police Department, before returning to the Town Square Pavilion.According to police, as they were returning to the pavilion, a vehicle tried to drive through the demonstrators in the 200 block of East Main Street while they were blocking traffic.You can see...

How Bad Is Hillary?… She Just Read "Sigh" From Her TelePrompter

Those questions apparently did not occur to Cristina Alesci and Laurie Frankel. Also, in addition to the $145 million being funneled to the Clinton Foundation before the CFIUS approval, why was a Kremlin-backed bank bankrolling a $500,000 speech in Moscow for Bill Clinton while his wife led the Russian reset? As even the progressive New Yorker magazine put it, “But there is a bigger question: Why was Bill Clinton taking any money from a bank linked to the Kremlin while his wife was Secretary of State?” Shockingly, CNN Money fact-checkers Alesci and Frankel make no mention of the Kremlin-backed $500,000...

Kimbo Slice has reportedly died at the age of 42, though no reports have been confirmed. The MMA fighter — whose real name is Kevin Ferguson — was hospitalized in Florida Monday due to a “dire” medical situation, TMZ reported, and several sources on Twitter now claim he has died of heart failure.

“It used to be that only locals knew all the cut-through routes, but Google Maps and Waze are letting everyone know,” When population growth began to overwhelm a set of major intersections in his district, there was an increase of 45,000 cars a day on some residential streets, as app-armed commuters fought their way to nearby Interstate 85. In response, the city is posting signs to restrict left or right turns at key intersections. ____________________________ When the traffic on Timothy Connor’s quiet Maryland street suddenly jumped by several hundred cars an hour, he knew who was partly to blame: the...

The latest auction in California's cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gases fell sharply below expectations, as buyers purchased just 2% of the carbon credits whose sale funds a variety of state programs -- notably, the proposed high-speed rail project. The quarterly auction, conducted May 18 and announced Wednesday, will provide just $10 million for state programs, including $2.5 million for the bullet train. The rail authority had been expecting about $150 million. Whatever prompted the lack of buyers, the auction is a stark example of the uncertainty and risk of relying on actively-traded carbon credits to build the bullet train. The...

Pope Francis said today that he would set up a commission to study whether or not he can find more ways to confuse and frustrate the living crap out of people, revealing an openness to re-examining the church’s long-held insistence on not speaking off-the-cuff. His move was hailed as a breakthrough by those in the media who have clamored for years to be given more stuff to speculate on, and who cite research showing that a pope whose speeches were scripted and thought out produced nothing for the media to report on, and therefore, pointless. But the idea will face...

Judge Wayne Salvant signed an order Wednesday reaffirming the probation terms he imposed on Ethan Couch in April. The judge canceled a hearing on the matter scheduled for May 16. Salvant had ordered that Couch spend 180 days in jail for each of the four people he killed in 2013 when he rammed a pickup truck into a crowd of people helping a motorist. The sentences were to be served consecutively.

... The Republican party is an imperfect vehicle and it has, of course, made mistakes. But the idea that it hasn’t effectively and consistently opposed President Obama’s agenda is little more than a dangerous and ignorant fiction. Had the GOP not been standing in the way — both from 2008, when it was in the minority everywhere, and from 2010, when it regained the House — the United States would look dramatically different than it does today. Without the GOP manning the barricades, Obamacare could well have been single payer, and, at the very least, the law would have included...

The axe fell once again on Glenn Beck’s crumbling media empire Thursday as employees in the New York and Washington offices of The Blaze, Beck’s multi-media online operation, along with business staffers in Los Angeles and the documentary unit in Columbus, Ohio, were told their jobs are on the chopping block, according to multiple sources who spoke The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a scientific marvel reportedly funded by the Koch brothers, Ted Cruz and John Kasich announced at a press conference Tuesday that they have fused into a single candidate, in what is being seen as a last-ditch effort to deny Donald Trump the Republican nomination. The new candidate, named Jed Crusich, reportedly came into being by merging the bodies and essences—and voting bases, as the plan certainly goes—of the two former candidates Cruz and Kasich. Also fused are their delegate counts, bringing Crusich to 707—within striking distance of Trump’s 845. Crusich, whom Donald Trump has already dubbed “Cheatin’ Jed”...

The $15 minimum wage hike in California has sent financially troubled UC Berkeley into decision making mode, and "the people who clean buildings, who work in food services or health clinics,” says Todd Stenhouse, will be the ones without a job. Stenhouse, a spokesman for the American Federation of StateChancellor, also said “There’s a very clear need for those front-line services. But the question is whether there really is a need to hemorrhage resources on executives.” Nicholas Dirks sent a memo to employees Monday informing them of the job reductions and said they will amount to “a modest reduction of...

British Hollywood actor Jude Law’s do-gooder visit to the so-called jungle migrant camp in Calais ended in violence after a number of the party were ambushed and deprived of their mobile phones by the migrants they had gone to support. Jude Law and other celebrities including Dad’s Army reboot actor Toby Jones, musician Tom Odell, and comedian Shappi Khorsandi visited Calais last week in an effort to raise the profile of the migrant slums before they were demolished by the French authorities. The group used their trip as an opportunity to call on the British government to throw open the...

Just last week, a years-long tradition came to a screeching halt. "You want me to put it on Fox News," I asked my wife. "No," she replied. "I'm done with Fox News." My job is to monitor the mainstream media, which is something that eats up about 14 hours of a day that begins at 6 a.m. when the cable morning shows begin. Lying next to me, my good sport of a wife suffers through about an hour of "Morning Joe," whatever they call that left-wing garbage fire on CNN, and the rest. Out of habit, before I head to...