Free Republic

At his 2005 Senate confirmation hearing to be chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts famously invoked America's national pastime in describing his view of the judicial role in our constitutional order: "Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire." If only! Unfortunately, Roberts' actual career on the high court has been one extensive repudiation of his lofty...

(CNN) -- In her race to defeat Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, Alison Lundergan Grimes has barnstormed Kentucky, talking up her support for raising the minimum wage and criticizing the GOP's so-called war on women. But the restaurant owned by Grimes' family doesn't always practice what she preaches, and Kentucky Republicans have been happy to point that out. .... But minimum wage isn't the only issue dogging Grimes' family business. Hugh Jass Burgers -- say it out loud to get the joke -- has menu items like "Charlotte's Rack, sure to be voted biggest rack" named after Grimes' mom and...

A pair of actresses are claiming that criticisms of how Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) is handling the ongoing wildfires in the city are stemming from her being a “black woman in America.” Longtime actresses Yvette Nicole Brown and Kym Whitley, who recently co-starred in the series Act Your Age, took to TMZ on Saturday to denounce the flack that Bass has caught, including a recall petition that has received more than 100,000 signatures:

I was not going to write any more election post-mortems based on the current data. California is still counting votes, and it will take months for the whole picture of the electorate to come into focus.But that hasn’t stopped chatter from strategists and politicians about the ways Democrats should change their candidates and messaging. There has been heavy emphasis on appealing to young men specifically, with many advising that the left should go about manufacturing its own Joe Rogan. One articulation of this viewpoint comes from Richard Reeves, who writes in an op-ed in The Boston Globe that Democrats shouldn’t...

Hillary Clinton blamed the fact that female voters abandoned her as her 2016 presidential campaign came to a close on her not being “perfect” in a recent interview. “They left me because they just couldn’t take a risk on me because, as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect,” the former secretary of state told the New York Times in an interview conducted in February and published Saturday. Hillary Clinton blamed the fact that female voters abandoned her as her 2016 presidential campaign came to a close on her not being “perfect” in a recent interview. “They left me because...

Governor Kathy Hochul announced that a $2.3 billion tax-funded grant in redevelopment contracts for JFK International Airport has been awarded exclusively to minority and women-owned business enterprises (MWBE). MWBE stands for Minority/Women-Owned Business Enterprise. It’s a certification issued by the state that gives developmental benefits to businesses that are primarily owned and operated by a woman or a person who is at least 25% African American, Asian, Hispanic, or Native American. If the business is publicly traded, the stock must also be at least 51% minority-owned. The move, which marks the largest participation of MWBE firms in any public-private partnership...

The Department of Veterans Affairs office dedicated to rooting out racism and harassment is itself a “hostile, toxic work environment with a permissive culture of rampant gossiping and innuendo,” where multiple layers of top officials participated in and covered up sexual harassment, an internal agency review concluded.At one point, a senior manager fired a mid-level manager because both men wanted to sexually harass the same employee. When a complaint was filed, a political appointee sat on it, apparently partly for racial reasons.

The case arose before Bruen, when New York required a showing of special need to get a license to carry a gun for self-defense. The petitioner had argued that she needed a gun because she and her husband would often carry substantial sums of cash for business, but the New York licensing authorities responded that she "failed to explain why her stated self-defense needs were not already adequately and independently addressed by her husband's recent acquisition of an unrestricted concealed carry license."

Tucker Carlson was blindsided by his firing from Fox News and learned of it on Monday morning shortly before it was announced, sources tell DailyMail.com. Even some of his closest staff were unaware that his show had been axed, reading about it for the first time on Twitter. 'No one I know was told about it beforehand. We were blindsided,’ one senior staffer who works closely with Tucker’s show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, told DailyMail.com. Another insider revealed he still has no idea why he was let go so suddenly, and that many staffers are now questioning whether it's part of...

Fox News boss Rupert Murdoch personally pushed out star host Tucker Carlson according to a new report from The Los Angeles Times. Murdoch made the move reportedly over a lawsuit filed by former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg “Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” the network said in a statement. “We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.” Grossberg booked guests for “Tucker Carlson Tonight” before she was fired earlier this year. She filed a complaint in a New York federal court on March...

A Loyola University professor is claiming that organized pantries are rooted in “racist and sexist social structures,” and that the new so-called “pantry porn” trend, in which people show off their “neatly aligned glass spice jars tagged with printed white labels” and “wicker baskets filled with packages of pasta, crackers and snacks,” has become a status symbol for white women. Associate professor Jenna Drenten wrote an op-ed for the website, the Conversation, in which she reacted to what she calls “pantry porn,” a phenomenon where “obsessively organized kitchens” have become “a new status symbol” on social media.

CNN — Tiger Woods handed Justin Thomas a tampon after outdriving his playing partner in an apparent prank that some on social media are saying has sexist overtones. Thomas immediately discarded the tampon before the two men laughed and hugged as they walked off the tee on the ninth hole at the Genesis International on Thursday. Woods’ reasons for handing Thomas a tampon are currently unclear.

At what point does affirmative action become apartheid? Bloomberg Law breaks down the numbers for Biden’s judicial appointments. Of the 97 judges confirmed by the Senate in the last two years, three quarters of them are women, and nearly half of the appointees — including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — are women of color. And while most presidents pick from a pool of existing judges, government attorneys and lawyers in private practice, Biden has cast a wider net. About one-third of Biden’s confirmed judges have experience as public defenders and a dozen are former civil rights lawyers, according...

There's no silver cloud for which the identity-politics crowd can't detect a downbeat lining! Take the news of black women being appointed to some of the country's most prestigious positions. You'd think that would be cause for unqualified celebration in liberal circles. But not so fast! On Mehdi Hasan's MSNBC show today, guest host Melissa Murray led a segment on "the glass cliff." The notion is that women, particularly women of color, tend only to be appointed to prestigious positions at institutions that are in crisis, and thereby are being "set up to fail."Get the rest of the story and...

The world is at risk of creating a generation of "racist and sexist robots", researchers have warned - after an experiment found a robot making alarming choices. The device was operating a popular internet-based artificial intelligence system, but consistently chose men over women and white people over other races. It also made stereotypical assumptions about people’s jobs based on their race and sex – identifying women as 'homemakers', black men as 'criminals' and Latino men as 'janitors'. The researchers from Johns Hopkins University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and University of Washington presented their work at the 2022 Conference on...

Members of the progressive "Squad" have quickly responded to news of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's retirement by calling for a Black woman to take his place. "It is past time for a Black woman to be named to the Supreme Court," Rep. Cori Bush, R-Mo., tweeted on Wednesday.

Former IGN journalist Alana Pierce, during an interview with The Serfs, shared her experience in the entertainment industry, in which she criticized the Chinese company Tencent, which is an investor in such well-known titles as League of Legends, Path of Exile, Black Desert, as well as Epic Games and even Ubisoft. Alana said she had a friend who suggested Tencent make the film, but the company agreed to do so on the condition that there were “no blacks” and “big boobs”. Alana added that Tencent demanded the same when developing games, for example, they say to increase the chest of...

On this morning's Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade absolutely unloaded on Kamala Harris. Kilmeade was commenting on a New York Times article containing this line: "Ms. Harris has privately told her allies that the news coverage of her would be different if she were any of her 48 predecessors, whom she has described as all white and male." Get the rest of the story and view the video here. Riposted Kilmeade: "To me, this is a lack of performance. This is a lack of interest. This is laziness. And this is a complaint-a-holic who just wants to be anointed...

​White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday that racism and sexism are at the root of negative critiques of Vice President Kamala Harris — and ​argued that the lack of news conferences by President Biden is a problem for the media rather than the American public. During a livestreamed event hosted by Politico’s Women Rule Exchange, Politico senior editor Anita Kumar asked Psaki if she felt Harris was receiving more criticism because she is the first woman and first woman of color to serve as vice president. “Yes,” Psaki answered, before adding: “Criticism from the outside, absolutely.

Some are hailing him a progressive “Fairy Godfather” of sorts — but others think he’s just plain desecrating Disney classics. A concerned dad is stirring the pot online after releasing a series of TikTok clips that show him editing out “gender stereotypes” in his daughter’s Disney Princess books. The father — who goes by @dcaspers on the platform — uploaded the “woke” makeovers last year, but they’ve recently gone viral, racking up millions of views. “Changing tomorrow starts today,” reads the caption to one of the director’s cuts, which currently boasts nearly 3 million views.