Free Republic

Hide your kids. Hide your eyes. American traitor-turned-transgender activist Bradley Chelsea Manning will be featured in an upcoming edition of Vogue Magazine sporting a blonde crop and a red bathing suit. Manning tweeted out a photo from the spread, taken by famed photographer Annie Lebowitz, soon to land at a Walmart checkout line near you. So, while you’re standing there with your four-year-old holding a gallon of milk waiting for the old lady ahead of you to dig out her coupon book, here’s what you’ll be graced with, in all its pale, shaven-legged glory:

WASHINGTON (AP) — This year's Kennedy Center honorees will include two singers, a television writer, a dancer - and for the first time, a hip-hop artist. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday announced the recipients of the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors. They are: hip-hop artist LL Cool J, singers Gloria Estefan and Lionel Richie, television writer and producer Norman Lear and dancer Carmen de Lavallade. It's the 40th year of the awards, which honor people who have influenced American culture through the arts. The honorees will be celebrated at a gala on Dec. 3, featuring...

Since the election, former White House photographer Pete Souza has been flooding Instagram with postcards from the presidency of Barack Obama. The timing of each upload is deliberate, designed to contrast the former POTUS’s grace and poise with the current one’s flailing malice. Souza’s Instagram, which now has about 1.5 million followers, feels like a magic mirror swimming with images from a brighter past. After President Donald Trump gave a keynote speech at the Boy Scouts’ jamboree only to gloat about election night 2016, Souza unearthed a photo of Obama shaking the hand of an awed kid in uniform. “I...

Desktop Metal – remember the name. This Massachussetts company is preparing to turn manufacturing on its head, with a 3D metal printing system that's so much faster, safer and cheaper than existing systems that it's going to compete with traditional mass manufacturing processes. We've been hearing for years now about 3D printing and how it's going to revolutionize manufacturing. As yet, though, it's still on the periphery. Plenty of design studios and even home users run desktop printers, but the only affordable printing materials are cheap ABS plastics. And at the other end of the market, while organizations like NASA...

There’s general agreement that this is a golden age of television. But less apparent is the fact that it’s also a golden age of animation, spawned by the same subscription video-on-demand companies — such as Netflix and Amazon — that are ushering TV’s shining period. The rise of streaming services — which are ordering season after season of animated shows for children and adults — has created an urgent demand for original content, leading to a surge in jobs at all levels of production. For now, the deluge shows no signs of letting up. “There’s more animation work now than...

First lady Melania Trump's wax doppelganger was unveiled Thursday at Spain's Museo de Cera de Madrid. The wax museum recreated Trump's look from last year's Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where she took to the stage and spoke to party delegates in a rousing speech. The wax figure's debut was timed to the one-year anniversary of the convention. Trump's wax figure -- which stands next to an existing wax figure of her husband, President Donald Trump -- wears the same Roksanda dress with puffed sleeves she wore at the RNC. The wax figure also dons a pair of nude heels,...

Oh là là, our splendid First Lady knocked my socks off again with a very original dress! The red, white and blue must have impressed the French on Bastille Day. Voltaire, the ex-prisoner, would approve! Enjoy! More pics at the Google Image link above.

Following their EP 'Kiss The Misfits', the theatrical punk rock group Felix Hagan & The Family recently released electro-punk track ‘Delirium Tremendous’ which is the first taste of the band’s forthcoming album due later this year. And now there is a visual masterpiece to accompany it depicting the pits of addiction and a lost identity.

The presidency of Donald Trump has certainly been eventful so far. The day after Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States, millions of Americans took to the streets to make the Women’s March one of the biggest protests in the country’s history — and that energy has not yet subsided. Liberal opponents of Trump proudly declare themselves “The Resistance,” as if they were fighting the Nazi occupation of France. Constituents have been storming Republican town halls and Congressional offices to protest the Trump-led Republican Party’s new health care proposal, while so-called “antifa” protestors have more violently...

A $58 million film studio is in the works for Fayette County, just minutes from Pinewood Atlanta Studios. This week’s Atlanta Business Chronicle reports the 24-acre, six-stage complex in north Fayetteville would be called Cinema South Studios. The team behind the venture includes Alvin Williams, a film producer with more than 30 years of experience in the film industry; Jim Viviano of 5G Studio Collaborative, the architect behind the project; and Todd Brooks, president at Brooks Real Estate Development Inc. Winter Construction will build the studios once funding is in place. The partners plan to break ground this December with...

There’s no denying the first half of 2017 would have been very different had Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. In her current St. Louis gallery exhibition, artist Bunny Burson remembers the future that very nearly was, creating an artwork using the iridescent confetti that was primed to go off on election night this past November 8, had the country elected its first woman president. A longtime Clinton devotee, Burson was the executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities under President Bill Clinton’s administration. In the aftermath of the 2016 election,...

CinemaLive have announced their partnership with C-Major Entertainment to bring Carmen, the most beautiful opera by Georges Bizet, which will be filmed on the Lake in Bregenz, Austria and transmitted to 300 UK cinemas on Thursday 14th September. Seebühne (floating stage) is set on the water near the shores of Lake Constance in Austria and has a 7,000 seat open-air amphitheatre. The set has been designed by British artist Es Devlin who has designed sets for Adele, U2, Take That and Kanye West.

On a remote beach in Japan, sand sculptors from many countries came to create large, high quality sculptures of famous American patriotic scenes. Happy 4th of July, my FRiends! Check out the pics!

I think this is less a matter of Behar imputing her own morality to Jesus than channeling the broad secular sense of him as a supremely chill dude whose chief virtue is that he Does Not Judge. That’s a weird read on a religious figure who speaks many times of hell in the gospels but that’s our culture, for better or worse. She may not even be the most confused person here. Two other panelists press Jack Phillips, the baker, on the idea that he’s being judgey with gay couples, with one imagining that Christ might disapprove of their wedding...

The White House usually picks a photo of the day. On June 28, the image they chose showed two girls from Nigeria who were abducted in 2014 by Boko Haram but managed to escape: Joy Bishara and Lydia Pogu. They're flanked by President Donald Trump and his daughter, Ivanka Trump. The photo had been taken the day before. Trump is giving a thumbs up. The meeting was not publicized in advance. NPR's White House correspondent Tamara Keith says the administration didn't notify the press corps about it, it didn't appear on the White House daily schedule and it was not...

“When’s the last time an actor assasinated a President?” What an Odd thing to say…. How would anyone’s mind function in such a way as to make those wild connections between self and murder in history—and then apparenty fantasize about it in front of millions? Something like that is just too Out-Of-The-Blue, unless…. Unless…Is Dep A Time Traveler? See Photos At End:

One company sees 3D print technology evolving into a product lineup of affordable and scalable printers, with the “blade server” concept for volume manufacturing where printers on a rack will scale up or down to meet customers’ needs. Discussions of additive manufacturing invariably turn to prototyping for a good reason: economics. While it may make sense from a cost perspective to 3D print functional new parts with plastic or metal during the design process, additive manufacturing (AM) techniques cease where mass production begins. Few manufacturers are discussing replacing traditional production methods for parts with AM techniques, as it would simply...

One man took a stand against Dolce & Gabbana's ties to Donald Trump at the brand's fashion show in Milan this weekend. While all eyes were on Miley Cyrus' feud with the designers, Atlanta-based musician Raury protested D&G while walking the runway for the Italian design house. Near the end of the runway, Raury took off his D&G top ― revealing the phrases "Protest D&G," "Give me freedom," and "I am not your scapegoat" ― and raised a closed fist to the sky. He posted the powerful photo on Instagram and wrote about the emotional experience in the caption. "I...

Keep the faith, Deplorables!  We've turned the corner on the "Russian Collusion" lie, Comey has been outed as a leaker, and Steve Scalise is on the road to recovery!  Trump and his team are winning -- big time. To be honest, the Dems, Never-Trumpers, Fake News, and Deep State Keystone Cops have never run up against a cunning fighter like Trump. Why am I so confident? Well, one good reason is I know Trump at a deeper level because I read his books.  At the library last week I found his 2008 book, Never Give Up: How I Turned...

Miley Cyrus has made a strong statement against Italian fashion house, Dolce & Gabbana, and their politics. In an Instagram post on Saturday, the 24-year-old posted a photo of her younger brother, Braison, walking in his first ever runway show — for Dolce & Gabbana’s spring 2018 menswear collection that afternoon. After a long post of praise for the male member of the Cyrus clan, she adds a line about the brand’s much-buzzed about politics, noting that she is not one to support, no matter how happy she is that they chose Braison to represent them on the runway. Alongside...