Free Republic

When Homer Simpson looks in the mirror, he sees ripped chest muscles and arms like the trunks of beech trees. When Hillary Clinton looks in the mirror, she sees America’s sweetheart. She thinks: America adores me. She thinks: America already chose me to be president once! She thinks: Everyone is comparing me with Donald Trump and realizing I’m a better choice. She is hoping for a call that will never come: an earnest, sobbing plea from the Democratic party to be their standard bearer in 2020. How else to explain Clinton’s latest media blitzkrieg? You’d think she’d be in Jimmy...

It’s a slow, didactic film about a minor episode. Billed as being based on “a crazy, outrageous incredible true story” about how a black cop infiltrated the KKK, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman would be more accurately described as the story of how a black cop in 1970s Colorado Springs spoke to the Klan on the phone. He pretended to be a white supremacist . . . on the phone. That isn’t infiltration, that’s prank-calling. A poster for the movie shows a black guy wearing a Klan hood. Great starting point for a comedy, but it didn’t happen. The cop who actually...

They should hand out awards for hypocrisy, preening, and lack of self-awareness. On Golden Globes night, Hollywood preened in front of its black mirror as usual, but the degree to which it was blind to what was obvious to all observers was stranger than ever. It was like that time the pear-shaped Homer Simpson looked at his reflection and saw a torso rippling with musculature. What was the most crystalline moment of self-unawareness?

Hollywood is in a tizzy about what to do about next year’s Oscars. If the ceremony goes on as planned, everything about it is going to remind us of the Pervnado that has left Tinseltown reeling... The next Academy Awards needs a big, bold statement. A true Hollywood ending to rescue them all. And one obvious solution presents itself: It’s time to cancel the Oscars... Instead of holding the Oscars, Hollywood should declare March 4, 2018, a day of atonement and announce that every guilty person in the industry, including every perverted male filmmaker preying on women and potted plants,...

Mother, an exercise in torture porn, may be the vilest movie ever released by a major Hollywood studio. Ordinarily when a filmmaker goes trampling all over your senses with an eye toward maximizing disgust, it’s for the purpose of producing some cheap scares. In Mother, though, the aim is a macabre pastiche of people’s most cherished and deeply held beliefs. Deliberately grotesque and nauseating, and seemingly engineered to outrage Christians, especially Catholics, Mother represents a stain on the reputation of Paramount Pictures, which once produced Going My Way. It may be the most vile and contemptible motion picture ever released...

To believe, in the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan was going to blow up the world may have been merely peculiar. To believe so today is a symptom of raging Reagan Derangement Syndrome. And yet here we are, with The Reagan Show, a new documentary rehashing the paranoid style of Reaganography, set for limited theatrical release on June 30 and video-on-demand release shortly thereafter. The continuing popularity of President Reagan is a source of profound irritation and unease to liberals. To assuage their pain, they have gone back to their initial rationalization for how Reagan became so beloved: He cheated. Though...

It’s magic: What can’t his nefarious powers not do? As a Nazi, President Trump has proved lackluster. The brownshirts and concentration camps that Hollywood types warned us to expect haven’t materialized. As an authoritarian, too, Trump is falling short of expectations: When judges defy his executive orders, he doesn’t send in the goon squads. He simply sends out a couple of tweets. Liberals these days, especially showbiz types, are subtly altering the way they frame Trump. They can’t plausibly identify anything he’s actually done as an outrage to the Republic. So they’re internalizing the supposed Trump threat, claiming injury to...

FULL TITLE: Farewell, old friend: Touching moment Air Force dog handler hugs his dead K-9 draped in an American flag moments before he was laid to rest A heartbreaking photo shows the moment an Air Force sergeant had to say goodbye to his K9 partner. Air Force sergeant Kyle Smith, from Gastonia, North Carolina, said that having to put Bodza down was one of the hardest things that he has ever done. He was euthanized on Thursday, and a military canine trainer draped a flag over his body. A photo shows Smith giving Bodza one final hug as he was...

Tech startups love millennials. Tasty, tasty millennials who get underpaid, overworked, churned up and turned into nourishment for venture capitalists. Millennials are the Soylent Green of the tech world. As each batch gets mashed up, there’s a long line of new hires eager to be made into the next meal for the execs and their billionaire backers, as tech survivor Dan Lyons shows in a scathingly funny new book, “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble” (Hachette Books). Lyons became a strange kind of celebrity a decade ago when he began posting nutty but funny insights as “Fake Steve Jobs.”...

Increasing water scarcity is driving innovations in water production technologies, according to analysis by Frost & Sullivan that finds accelerated movement towards wastewater reuse and advanced water recycling technologies. Innovations in Water Production and Its Impact on Key Sectors finds that advancements in technologies, chemicals and processes are addressing the three most difficult challenges in water production. These are: â—¾the removal of nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus compounds in open body water sources â—¾sustainable desalination â—¾the removal of emerging chemical compounds from drinking water The report says the water production space as a whole is shifting toward renewable energy-based solutions to...

Inequality has risen. Jobs are going overseas. The more the stock market rises, the more the working class feels crushed by globalization. And all of this has occurred exactly as Democrats have engineered it. Stuff happens, they say. The truth hurts. Take it from Larry Summers, once one of President Obama's leading economic advisers: "One of the challenges in our society is that the truth is kind of an equalizer," Summers reportedly said in a candid moment in 2009. "One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to...

The Christmas Eve showing of “It’s a Wonderful Life” may be intended to make you believe in the importance of even an ordinary person’s life, but underneath that, what are the film’s secret hidden messages, the ones that become apparent only after two or three eggnogs? Let’s mull over some of the wackier possibilities. It’s a salute to atheism. It’s “the least religious but most humanist film you could ever see,” said David Wilson in The Guardian, because it suggests people should fix their problems on Earth rather than waiting for God to help out. Regarding Jimmy Stewart’s character George...

So Stephen Colbert turns out to be just as much of an a-hole as "Stephen Colbert." Viewers have noticed. After an initial burst of interest spurred by CBS's big-bucks saturation advertising campaign for "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," the show's ratings have tanked and it is now running third in late night behind NBC's Jimmy Fallon and ABC's Jimmy Kimmel, who rarely has managed second place before. The reason? A survey by the Hollywood Reporter found that conservative viewers are turning off Colbert in droves. Nearly twice as many Republicans are watching Kimmel as Colbert, who has turned "Late...

Sarah Palin is going rogue. The Democrats are going rottweiler. Liberals in the media make heinous personal attacks, dress up quibbles and debating as “fact-checking” and compare her to such noxious harridans as Evita Peron and Madonna. Newsweek went with a cover photo of a picture of her in running shorts to degrade her to the level of a spokesmodel and Stephen Colbert broke character to call her book “a steaming pile of s - - -.” They called her a “deeply disturbed person” (Andrew Sullivan) “unhinged” (ibid), a “delusional fantasist” (ibid; Andrew’s been a busy lad) and even —...

I never thought Donald Trump would run for president. If he did run, I didn’t think he would gain any support, and if he did gain any support, I didn’t think it would last. I thought all polls would show him being crushed by Hillary Clinton. Fall is upon us, and Trump is leading in Iowa, leading in New Hampshire, leading all Republicans nationally. He has roughly double the combined support of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. In a general election match up against Hillary Clinton, he’s only 2.8 points behind, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average late last week,...

When is America going to get serious about the problem of white kids getting suspended from school for nothing? By now you’ve heard the story of Ahmed Mohamed, crowned by the Daily Beast “The Muslim Hero America Has Been Waiting For” after the 14-year-old brought to school a beeping, strange-looking homemade concealed device that turned out to be a clock. School officials, thinking, as 95% of Americans would, that it kinda looked like a bomb, hauled him out of class. Police put him in handcuffs and, even after the confusion passed, the boy was suspended from school. That earned Mohamed...

I’m not sure if I’ll see Jurassic World but if I do, it will likely be for the reasons summed up by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith:

So Brian Williams goes out (for six months) humiliated and derided. Jon Stewart goes out (permanently, one hopes) the same day, but on a giant Comedy Homecoming King float, with a 21-gun salute from the media, his path strewn with roses and teardrops. Why? Brian Williams lied about his personal exploits a few times. Jon Stewart was unabashedly and habitually dishonest. Though Stewart has often claimed he does a “fake news show,” “The Daily Show” isn’t that. It’s a real news show punctuated with puns, jokes, asides and the occasional moment of staged sanctimony. It contains real, unstaged sound bites...

In a survey of the “Craziest Politicians of 2014,” GQ had difficulty locating any Democrats. Seventeen out of 20 on the list were Republicans, with the only liberals being Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson and America’s reigning nabob of nuttiness, Joe Biden. In a note appended to the story, GQ defensively said it wasn’t guilty of “standard liberal-media bias,” it just couldn’t find any loony Democrats to speak of. Let’s give GQ a little help, shall we? Here are 16 more Democrats to the list of the most cra-cra political figures.

Damn Americans. They just don’t see the wisdom of surrendering to experts the power they need to remake the country into a progressive paradise.Sighing with regret, liberals like Jonathan Gruber admit that they’re forced to hoodwink the citizens. For their own good.Gruber, the MIT economist who (in the words of The New York Times) “put together the basic principles of” ObamaCare and helped Congress “draft the specifics of the legislation” is one of a long line of liberals driven by the belief that the stupidity of the American people is so insurmountable that persuasion is futile. Liberalism: the place where...