Free Republic

When the House passed the GOP’s ObamaCare replacement, the AHCA last Thursday, there was no shortage of angry celebrities attacking the GOP in profanity-laced tweets, claiming the GOP “will pay” for it come election time. Looks like the anger has not died down in Hollywood yet. Actress and singer Bette Midler followed the rest of her ilk’s partisan and vile lead, tweeting that the GOP was “gassing their own people” by repealing ObamaCare. So the #homegrownAssads in the #FreedomCaucus want employers to not have to offer health care to employees. Like gassing their own people! — Bette Midler (@BetteMidler) May...

If Trump and his cronies really cared about children killed by noxious gases, they wouldn’t be trying to spew ever more CO2 into the atmosphere.The gas attack in Syria on April 4 consumed the world’s attention and galvanized the Trump White House, leading to the launch of 59 cruise missiles on a small airport from which the regime of Bashar al-Assad has been bombing the fundamentalist rebels in Idlib province. The pictures of suffering children, Trump said, had touched him. Yet the president and most of his party are committed to increasing the daily release of hundreds of thousands of...

A simple news segment about the media coverage of Syria spun wildly out of control during Sunday’s Reliable Sources on CNN. It started with Foreign Correspondent Lara Setrakian noting how little coverage the Syrian civil war received in the early years. But it ending with Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, going off the rails and declaring that “We need to understand the historical context of how a butcher like Assad actually has more in common with someone like Dick Cheney than he does with the average Syrian…” Scahill’s inane tirade derailed the whole segment from the moment he opened...

x is panicked y is destroyed z is in turmoil Hyperbole!!! It's the best thing ever!!!

Pope Francis startled many Catholics this week by likening Jesus' admonition to his apostles to go forth and preach the Gospel to Mohamed's call for Muslims to wage jihad against unbelievers, calling both "incitements to conquest." "In a way, beheading someone or blowing them up may be less intrusive than Jesus' command to 'love thy neighbor' or to 'turn the other cheek,'" Francis said. "The jihadi attacks the body, but the Christian missionary invades the soul. Even the most grievous injury to the flesh is transitory. But changing a person's soul persists beyond his temporary Earthly existence." Francis went on...

Donald Trump would be “a danger to the United States and to the world” if elected president, according to Indiana’s largest newspaper, The Indianapolis Star. In an editorial published on Thursday, the newspaper widely condemned the Republican front-runner’s “simplistic proposals,” arguing he is unfit to occupy the Oval Office. “Trump has demonstrated repeatedly during the months-long campaign that he is wholly unsuited to serve as president,” the editorial states. “He’s offered simplistic proposals on national security, job creation, immigration, international trade and foreign affairs. He has sounded off with appalling comments about women and others. He’s appealed to voters’ worst...

A day after the New Hampshire primary, Republican presidential hopefuls were set Wednesday to fan out across South Carolina and begin jockeying for the first-in-the-South primary that has a history of picking the eventual nominee. Billionaire businessman and reality TV star Donald Trump has the early edge in polling there and in other key states as the race turns to the South and West over the next six weeks. South Carolina has the potential to launch Mr. Trump into victories in a series of delegate-rich multistate primaries next month and turn his campaign into an unstoppable juggernaut toward the nomination.

Congresswoman Gwen Moore told a group of reporters that Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker is “tightening the noose, literally, around African Americans'” necks during a Monday conference call.The Milwaukee Democrat apparently isn’t a fan of the Wisconsin governor, and said that Walker disproportionately hurts blacks by opposing a higher “minimum wage, requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, and requiring drug testing for public aid recipients.”Additionally, she noted that Walker blocked the construction of a high-speed train connecting Madison and Milwaukee that “took away jobs from inner city Milwaukee.”[h/t: Mediaite, Fox]

Like a king cobra on speed, the CSX oil train cut through the falling snow and rolled along the tracks at 33 m.p.h.—transporting 3 million gallons of highly-flammable crude. But the convoy was a poor match for its cargo. At 1:20 p.m. Eastern time on February 16—35 miles outside of Charleston, West Virginia—the 109-car train derailed. Fireballs sliced through the cold air; a house was leveled in flames; hundreds of home owners lost electricity and drinking water; and a Kanawha River tributary oozed with oil. One man told the Los Angeles Times that the spill emanated heat like an “atomic...

A 13-track album of new music from Madonna has reportedly leaked onto the web. Oh No They Didn’t theorizes that the release could be the entirety of Madonna’s as-yet-unannounced thirteenth studio album, rumored to be titled either Unapologetic B**** or Iconic. Madonna’s camp has experienced a fury of unauthorized leaks in recent weeks, leading to the singer’s manager, Guy Oseary, to enlist the public’s help. “I would be grateful to any Madonna fans that can assist us in finding those responsible for the leak,” Oseary tweeted after a song called “Rebel Heart” hit the web late last month. “We appreciate...

With the walloping Republicans gave Democrats in the midterm elections, the GOP stands one Louisiana Senate runoff away from completely controlling Southern politics from the Carolinas to Texas. Only a handful of Democrats hold statewide office in the rest of the Old Confederacy. The results put Southern Republicans at the forefront in Washington — from Senate Majority Leader-in-waiting Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to a host of new committee chairmen. Those leaders and the rank-and-file behind them will set the Capitol Hill agenda and continue molding the GOP’s identity heading into 2016....

While we have seen so many incredible life-changing applications for 3D printing, there are still many concerns which remain on the table when dealing with the possible negative implications of the technology. Whether you believe that the ease in which practically anyone will eventually be able to fabricate a firearm is a good or bad thing, just the thought of 3D printed firearms will send shivers down the spines of law enforcement agencies around the world. There has been an incredibly fast progression of the technology behind the methods of manufacturing guns with 3D printers in the last two years...

The world finally knows how former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke views the 2008 financial crisis. “September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression,” said Bernanke in a document filed Aug. 22 with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, reports The Wall Street Journal. Of the 13 “most important financial institutions in the United States, 12 were at risk of failure within a period of a week or two.”

Glenn Greenwald wants to make this perfectly clear: He finds Megyn Kelly’s views “viscerally repellent.” But the crusading privacy journalist has plenty of complimentary things to say about how the Fox prime-time host conducts herself on air. “She has a lower tolerance for being fed incoherent tripe from her own side than the average cable news TV host,” Greenwald said in an email. “Most Fox and MSNBC hosts treat even Recognition has come from viewers — she often comes in a close second to ratings king Bill O’Reilly — and from the press, too. Kelly, 43, was the only woman...

Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, "we don't torture people"? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, "this government does not torture people"? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier. Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to call it "enhanced interrogation" and claiming that it had disrupted so many terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA...

Things are heating up on planet Earth. Average global temperatures shattered records this June ... for the second month in a row, according to a new report from the National Climactic Data Center. The NCDC, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, analyzed data from 2,000 weather stations scattered across the globe measuring both ocean and land temperatures and found that global average temperatures surpassed the previous record by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit. That makes June 2014 the warmest June since record keeping began in 1880. If this trend continues, 2014 could top 2010 as the warmest year recorded.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- I saw a promo the other day for Google (GOOG) Work. Sadly, I can't locate it or I would have inserted it here so you could see it for yourself. However, it might be fitting that you can't see the promo. Because Google's assault on Microsoft (MSFT) continues to fly under the radar. For whatever reason, it's the most under covered story in tech ... in finance ... and for the sake of extraneous ellipses ... the world. But it's real and it's happening. And Microsoft has no idea what to do in response. How could...

For all the attention that is placed on the nation’s estimated 300 million firearms, most guns rest in cases, drawers and safes. Few are holstered. Few get used to actually stop a threat. Even armed soldiers and police officers often go entire careers without firing a shot on duty, reported the St. Louis Dispatch.For many, self-defense is the leading argument for gun ownership rights. It’s also the primary motivation for keeping a firearm, now surpassing even hunting, according to a recent Pew survey.Data on the incidents of guns’ being used in self-defense vary widely from study to study. But only...

Sorry, no link...just saw this reported on local news....one of the Miami stations just giddily told viewers their hero is "slashing his salary".... No mention in the story about federal debt soaring and huge numbers of lost jobs during the clown's tenure....nope. Just talk about the clown and his "solidarity" with federal workers. I wanted to hurl an ashtray at the screen.