Free Republic

Sally Bedell Smith, dogged biographer and author of Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, out this week from Penguin Random House, has collected an exhaustive file of facts about the future king of England. Unlike his mother, Charles is not what you might call a beloved figure. And while Bedell Smith doesn't spare the touchy-feely, parapsychology loving, Dumbo-eared Charles, her portrait is also rich with sympathy, even affection. Bullied as a youth by his overbearing father (“Philip was the original alpha male,” Smith says), Charles spent his whole life seeking approval. Cowed by a sense of...

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center Pope Francis continues to argue for two interrelated points that, while seemingly humane, compromise Western nations and expose their citizens to danger. He reiterated his first point earlier this month when he said, “I appeal not to create walls but to build bridges.”  Francis has made this appeal frequently, both figuratively (when imploring Western nations not to close their doors against more incoming Muslim migrants), and literally—including by characterizing Donald Trump’s proposal to build a U.S.-Mexico wall as “not Christian.” Francis reiterated his second point a few...

In a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd on Wednesday, billionaire tech giant Peter Thiel defended his support of President-Elect Donald Trump and offered some characteristically esoteric opinions on everything from Meryl Streep to “Star Wars.” To a question noting that “President Obama had eight years without any ethical shadiness,” Thiel replied, “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

Phil Murphy, the Democratic front-runner in the 2017 race to replace Gov. Chris Christie, picked up the endorsements of New Jersey's Democratic U.S. Senators on Monday and vowed to disobey orders from a President Donald Trump that would violate the constitution or are "un-American." Murphy appeared at his campaign headquarters in downtown Newark to tout the endorsements of U.S. Sens. Cory Booker and Robert Menendez. "I will not take orders from an Administration that are unconstitutional or un-American," Murphy vowed.

“That’s not who we are,” Barack Obama often says when appealing to Americans to oppose illiberal policies such as torturing prisoners, barring immigrants on the basis of their religion, and denying entry to refugees. But now that Americans have elected a president who has called for precisely those policies, Obama’s confidence about who we are may seem misplaced. Questions about the defining values of our common nationality have haunted us before at critical moments in American history, and now they do again: In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, what does it mean to be an American? Will Trump and...

Celebrity chef and self-described “privileged Eastern liberal” Anthony Bourdain slammed his fellow leftist elites this week, arguing that their disdain for working-class Americans helped create “the upswell of rage and contempt” that propelled Donald Trump to the presidency. “The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now,” Bourdain said in an interview with Reason magazine. “I’ve spent a lot of time in gun-country, God-fearing America,” Bourdain...

What contracting Zika taught one traveler about traveling fearlessly I remember looking down at my polka-dotted legs as I lay by the pool of a small hostel in El Tunco, El Salvador. As I fought the urge to scratch, I counted the number of mosquito bites. Thirty-seven. I had thirty-seven bites on my legs, not to mention a few on my arms and the one driving me crazy on my back. I shrugged, sprayed my legs with more 99.9 percent DEET spray, and continued basking in the sun. A week after I tallied up my bites, on the last day...

A staff member at Ohio State University allegedly pleaded with Facebook friends to show a little sympathy for Abdul Razak Ali Artan, the Somali-born terrorist behind Monday's attack that left nine people hospitalized. The since-deleted post attributed to Stephanie Clemons Thompson, Ohio State University Assistant Director of Residence Life, urged people to "find compassion for his life" and to "come together." The message also warned readers "DO NOT SHARE THIS POST."

Gannett publication - Title and link only. http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/11/28/elections-staff-layout-recount-timeline/94539210/

Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who was involved in an international custody battle 16 years ago in Miami, is mourning the death of Fidel Castro, a man he compared to a "father." Elian was a photogenic five-year-old in 1999 when he was found floating on an inner tube off the Florida coast. Sixteen years later, he is recalling Fidel Castro as a man he likened to a father. In an interview on Cuban State TV Saturday, he said he wanted Fidel to be proud of him. Speaking in Spanish, he said, "He is a father who like my father, I...

Congresswoman Barbara Lee expressed her sympathies with those mourning Cuban president Fidel Castro. He died Friday at age 90.

We are all still reeling from the shock of the election results. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote yet we now must brace ourselves for a Trump Administration. The more I think about it and see the reactions from all sides, the more this feels like the aftermath of an attack ― a literal attack ― on our communities. The groups that those “deplorables” love to hate and feel threatened by are now under attack: LGBT people, people of color, women, Muslims, the disabled and many others. This election was a hate crime. Not physical but psychological, and one that...

Osi Imeokparia, the Clinton campaign's chief product officer (don't ask), was interviewed on NPR yesterday and asked how she would feel if Donald Trump won the election. If you listen at about the 12-minute mark, you can hear her start to sob hysterically. "If Donald Trump is the victor, how devastating will that be to you?" she is asked. "Fairly. As you can see, I am a woman of color. I also am a recent naturalized citizen of the United States. On all dimensions this campaign is very personal (sob!) ... (sob! sob! sob!) ... So to work on behalf...

Appearing on MSNBC’s MTP Daily today, NBC News’ justice correspondent Pete Williams refuted much of the reporting from Wall Street Journal and Fox News regarding a likely indictment regarding an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Fox’s Bret Baier later backed off slightly, saying the indictment comment was “inartfully answered.” Speaking to host Chuck Todd, Williams claimed that via his own law enforcement sources, there doesn’t actually appear to be much of an investigation, let alone one that will result in indictments. “There really isn’t one,” Williams answered Todd regarding the status of the investigation. “Few want to call it...

Actor Bryan Cranston says he will “definitely move” out of the United States if Republican Donald Trump wins the presidential election. “Absolutely,” Cranston told The Bestseller Experiment podcast when asked if he’d take an extended vacation to Vancouver if Trump wins. “I would definitely move. It’s not real to me that that would happen. I hope to God it won’t.” A constant critic of the GOP White House hopeful, Cranston has called Trump a “narcissist” who lacks the “qualities we want in a president.” In a promo for an upcoming appearance on BBC’s Newsnight, Cranston predicted Trump will lose the...

When you think about it, the world is full of unexplained phenomena. Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near? Why do I continue to eat ice-cream when I have a lactose intolerance? We may never know. Here’s another mystery I’ve been grappling with for a few years: what did we, the human race, do to deserve the excellence of Beyoncé? ..Here’s why: raw talent and an unstinting work ethic. It’s that simple. Nobody works harder than Bey. The muscular voice, the obvious care when it comes to choosing her collaborators, the fashion and the thighs: they’re all...

The refugees are arriving on a continent that since World War II has become home to a third of the world’s immigrants. Europe’s major countries, which once sent their huddled masses to the United States, now have foreign-born populations comparable to that of the United States. But only some European minds and fewer European hearts have adjusted to that reality. Even in the U.S., which John F. Kennedy called “a nation of immigrants,” immigration is a divisive issue—and always has been. In the 1750s Benjamin Franklin worried that too many Germans were coming to Pennsylvania. He said they had a...

Project Veritas’ latest series of videos captured a Hillary campaign operative admitting to inciting violence at Trump rallies. “It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfucker,” said Scott Foval, National Field Director at Americans United for Change. “One of the things we do is we stage very authentic grassroots protests right in their faces at their own events. Like, we infiltrate.” **** Shortly after the video’s release, Foval was canned.

In a recent speech to a group of conservatives, I made what I thought was a relatively uncontroversial point about the commonalities between Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter activists. I thought this was a simple idea, but the criticism was immediate and sharp: How dare I try to understand the “other side”? But as people, wouldn’t we all benefit from trying to empathize with people we disagree with?

Secretary of State John Kerry wants to keep the American people in the dark regarding the global jihadist terrorist threat we are facing. Referring to terrorism in remarks he made at the Edward M. Kennedy Center in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a country that has recently experienced its own encounter with Islamist terrorists, Kerry said, “Perhaps the media would do us all a service if they didn’t cover it quite as much. People wouldn’t know what’s going on.” Kerry was just reflecting his boss’s bizarro worldview. In an interview with Vox, for example, Obama agreed “absolutely” with the proposition posed by the...