Free Republic

I miss him already. Say what you like, President Barack Hussein Obama is supremely intelligent, witty, humane, reasonable, elegant, a great writer, a model father, a good husband, a decent human being. He has empathy and humor. He is sane and calm. He gave us eight years free of scandal and drama: no interns, no corruption, no jobs handed out to outrageously unqualified people (a hallmark of the George W. Bush years—remember "Heckuva job, Brownie"?). Although it's unfashionable these days to care about dignity and decorum—we're all vulgarians now, living inside a perpetual reality-TV show - Obama brought seriousness and...

ROME (AP) - Terrorism will only continue and even increase throughout the Middle East until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved, the Vatican's former foreign minister said in an interview published Thursday. Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran called the failure to resolve the conflict "the mother of all crises." "Once this is solved, the Middle East would change. Until then, it is very probable that terrorism will continue and widen," Tauran said in an interview from New York, where he is visiting, with the Turin newspaper La Stampa. Tauran said terrorism cannot be defeated by violence but by "understanding why some people resort...