Free Republic

Governor Kristi Noem (R-SD) said Monday on NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” that her alleged meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was not removed from her book because it was “untrue.” Vargas said, “You write about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. You’ve been question several times on last couple of days because you’ve issued a retraction. You said that it shouldn’t have been in the book, this passage, that it was a mistake. Why shouldn’t that have been in the book? Is that untrue?” Noem said, “No. What I said is that when this was pointed out that...

In defending House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pro-abortion stances, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough suggested Tuesday that Jesus Christ was not against abortion. The MSNBC host accused pro-life activists of “dragging the politics of abortion up into the altar of the church,” noting that the Southern Baptist Church, to which he says he belongs, was “effectively pro-choice until 1980.” “This wasn’t about Jesus. It was about politics. That was the rise of the moral majority in 1980, bringing abortion politics into the pews of Republican-leaning churches,” he said. Scarborough then claimed that Jesus “never once mentioned” abortion in the gospels, though most religions...

Former President Donald Trump is rejecting pleas from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to postpone a campaign-style rally this weekend some 200 miles from the Miami suburb where an international search-and-rescue mission is excavating bodies from the site of a collapsed seaside condominium. DeSantis’s office has "made a direct plea” to the former president’s team, calling on it to postpone the Saturday event in Sarasota. One Florida Republican bluntly said Trump and his team need to “read the room.” “The governor is getting tested here as to how far he's going to be pushed before he breaks ranks with President Trump....

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas attempted to walk back controversial statements made during a recent address to the European Union parliament in Brussels, claiming on Saturday that he opposed "any attack on any religion", after having accused Israel of “poisoning Palestinian wells”. "Palestine is the cradle of the three monotheistic faiths. We stand strongly against any attack on any religion," Abbas said in a statement. The tacit acknowledgement of Judaism's roots in the Land of Israel, comes in stark contrast to Palestinian Authority propaganda which has for decades attempted to diminish the Jewish people's ancient history in Israel. In apparently...

New Orleans-area filming on a "Roots" remake, slated to air on three A&E networks in 2016, is expected to begin in mid-August. An open call for background actors was issued Tuesday (July 21) by Caballero Casting. The project, to be simulcast on History, A&E and Lifetime, was announced in April. The four-night, eight-hour project will film here through December. Filming will also take place in Africa, an A&E spokesman said Wednesday. Laurence Fishburne will portray Alex Haley in the "Roots" remake, based on Haley's novel "Roots: The Saga of an American Family" as well as new historical scholarship, according to...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told President Obama on Saturday he was making “untrue” claims about his opponents — including herself. The feud between Obama and the left continued Saturday, when Warren and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) called on the president to immediately declassify the negotiating terms of a pending trade deal with a host of nations known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In an effort to push through trade legislation that would help finalize the deal, Obama has blasted critics on the left, saying they are “wrong” and “don’t know what they’re talking about.” Liberal critics of the trade deal have...

After nearly a week on the defensive, CNN's John King reports tonight that Newt Gingrich's claim about offering witnesses to ABC News in his defense — to rebut the network's interview with his second wife, Marianne Gingrich — was not true. "Tonight, after persistent questioning by our staff, the Gingrich campaign concedes now Speaker Gingrich was wrong — both in his debate answer, and in our interview yesterday," King said on tonight's edition of John King USA. "Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond says the only people the Gingrich campaign offered to ABC were his two daughters from his first marriage." An...

From the horrible ideas department comes the news from George Lucas that he's buying "the film rights to dead actors." You know, so he can resurrect them virtually for upcoming movies.

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Senate minority leader John Boehner a few days ago, and could not get Boehner to commit to a rapid legislative agenda to repeal and reverse the democrat’s leftist legislative cramdown after the midterms in November. Boehner hemmed and hawed, sounding every bit like the establishment inside-the-beltway career politicians that got us into the dire economic mess that we’re in now. To make matters worse, Bill Kristol related to Hewitt on yesterday’s podcast that he asked a “high-ranking GOP leader” what their plans were, what they intended to do should the GOP take control of one or both...

Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Representative Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) are suing the Democratic National Committee (DNC) over the Committee's pledge not to seat Florida delegates at the party's presidential nominating convention after the Florida moved the state’s presidential primary to January 29, 2008. "For the DNC to say the fourth largest contingent of Democrats in the nation that their votes will not matter in next year's presidential primary is not only shocking and ironic, but we believe is illegal,” said Hastings. “This harkens back to the days when the Ku Klux Klan ran the Democratic Party in the south.” Howard...

What a mess: A Feb. 9 front-page article about the Pentagon inspector general's report regarding the office of former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith incorrectly attributed quotations to that report. References to Feith's office producing "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" and that the office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda" were from a report issued by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in Oct. 2004. Similarly, the quotes stating that Feith's office drew on "both reliable and unreliable reporting" to produce a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq "that was much stronger than that assessed...

Earlier this month, gamer named Mitchell S. with the online screenname "Kuja105" who posts on a few online videogame forums (including GameFaqs.com and MetalGearSolid.org) committed suicide. On January 2 he posted a message in both forums detailing his intent to end his own life, citing overwhelming complications with school and finances. A very brief period of initial disbelief was followed by a barrage of replies from fellow forum members pleading that he not take his life, trying to talk him out of it. For days, no word was heard from Mitchell. Fearing the worst, members and administration from metalgearsolid.org began...

Homeowners who decorate their yards with life-sized plastic deer are complaining the sculptures are being damaged by those stalking real deer during Duluth's special season for bowhunters. "My decorative doe, Felicity, had an arrow sticking out of her hind quarter," Orval Pussywillow of Hunter's Park complained yesterday. "This has got to stop. We paid good money for our beautiful deer." Pussywillow said his four plastic pink flamingos and a lawn ornament depicting the posterior of a fat woman bending over were unmolested.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. Olaudah Equiano wrote with vivid detail of life as human cargo -- the foul smells aboard the slave ship that brought him from West Africa to the New World in the 18th century, the anguished cries of women, the despair of those headed to a life of bondage. The best-selling autobiography he later published is now a key text for scholars studying slavery and its roots in Africa, one of the few first-person accounts by a slave of the brutal cross-Atlantic trip known as the Middle Passage. But part of Equiano's tale may be more fiction than...

First it was the Los Angeles Times who published the “Koran flushing story”, after the Newsweek story had been discredited. In an apparent attempt to help Newsweek find some of its lost credibility (and to take their own swipes at the US Military), now the rest of our leftist mainstream press has decided to print additional “Koran mishandling” stories. Hey! If a story is fake continue to print it, or other similar ones, so that maybe some of the uneducated will begin to believe them. Relying on a 2002 FBI report, notably one which merely referred to “allegations from detainees”,...

Newsweek has blood on its hands. Sixteen Afghans have been killed and about 100 injured since violent anti-US protest erupted on Wednesday over a report in Newsweek magazine that U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba may have desecrated the Koran. Newsweek reported in its May 9 edition that military investigators had confirmed allegations by FBI agents on detainee abuse, including an incident in which at least one Koran was thrown into a toilet. Video footage of angry bearded mullahs brandishing posters saying "death to America'' and "punish the culprits'' was shown today on the Pakistani television. The footage...

Protests were planned across Pakistan Friday as Muslim anger over the alleged desecration of the Koran by the U.S. military spread outwards from Afghanistan, where at least seven people have been killed in violent clashes with security forces. The Pentagon said Thursday there is no evidence to support an allegation that a copy of the Islamic text had been flushed down a toilet "in an attempt to rattle suspects" held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba. The brief item, citing an unnamed source, was published in Newsweek magazine. General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,...

In an effort to increase its ranks for coming wars, the U.S. military is recruiting - and paying - children as young as 14 years old for future combat duty. By Tim Schmitt Colin Hadley spends most of his days after school skateboarding or playing Halo II on his new X-Box with friends. He sleeps until noon or later on weekends and rarely, if ever, does any schoolwork outside the classroom, where he pulls down solid C's and a few D's - just enough to get by. He's the typical 15-year-old American boy: cocksure in demeanor, certain the world revolves...

Just when you though the left couldn't get any more self righteous! As an advanced degree holding individual with a smugness inducing IQ (for whatever it's worth), I find myself further disappointed with the left... but not surprised. Election Results by Average IQ

Putin: Ally or Terrorist? by William F. Jasper Counting Vladimir Putin as an ally against terrorism ignores his career in the murderous KGB/FSB and his ongoing support for terrorist regimes and organizations. ‘‘Lena Goncharuk, aged 38, said that she was the only one to survive out of a group of six who were ordered out of the cellar where they had been hiding and shot at point blank range. Resting in her hospital bed, her voice barely rising above a whisper, she said she had survived only by pretending to be dead." So reported Paul Wood from the Chechen border...