Free Republic

We're standing in line for coffee when out of nowhere, I get honked. The lady behind us reached up, wrapped me up in her grubby paw and squeezed. "Your man bun is so soft," she says to the man to whose head I'm affixed with a black elastic hair tie. "I've never touched one before." An innocent compliment to most, but to me this violent assault is just another example of the indignities of my existence. I'm just a bun, after all. I didn't choose to be tied to a man. Women gawk and stare. Sometimes they'll shout: "Nice man...

Meghan Markle has finally found her Prince Charming - but it has come at a huge cost, with the American actress forced to give up on many of her passions. Prince Harry's fiancee had to make the heartbreaking decision to leave behind her beagle Bogart after moving to the UK to start her new life, as the pet is thought to be too old to fly overseas. The 36-year-old has also given up on her career as an actress so she can take up full royal commitments in Britain, bringing an end to her run as Rachel Zane in the...

Can the descent of American political culture into ugly tribalism be halted? Alabama voters will give their answer when they decide whether to send Roy Moore to the U.S. Senate. Moore, 70, has built a long, disgraceful career out of smarmy religiosity spiked with tribal grievance. Having posed for years as the most pious of Christians, he now stands accused by nine women of un-Christian behavior: They claim convincingly that Moore, when he was in his 30s, aggressively pursued romantic or sexual relationships, including with teens barely half his age. Successful demagogues can use tribal enmities to blind their followers...

BWAHAHAHA! Happy Birthday @hillaryclinton Not even saying "dear." That is cold. Here is my birthday greeting sent to her Twitter: HILLARY! UNCENSORED debuted on her 60th birthday in 2007 at Harvard. She did not RSVP.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was moved to near tears while speaking about Sen. John McCain early Friday morning after the Republican "skinny repeal" of Obamacare failed on the Senate floor. Schumer choked up as he turned his attention to McCain, who recently received a diagnosis of brain cancer. "And let's turn the page in another way," Schumer said. "All of us were so inspired by the speech and the life of the senator from Arizona. And he asked us to go back to regular order, to bring back the Senate that some of us who've been here a while...

<p>Actress Rosie O'Donnell certainly knows how to push conservatives' buttons. And now she is drawing their ire by pushing her own button: one that makes President Trump jump off a cliff.</p> <p>"Push Trump Off A Cliff Again," O'Donnell tweeted Saturday in an apparent play on Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan. The tweet links to a game in which the player can, as O'Donnell says, make the president jump off a cliff, again and again.</p>

(snip) Obama’s look — and presence, in general — sent the Internet into a tizzy. (snip)

For a minute there, things were looking up for President Donald Trump. By late last week, his approval rating was hovering around 40 percent, which isn't great but marked an improvement for the former reality TV star. But then Trump spent the holiday weekend railing against the press and blasting off tweetstorms—and the president's approval rating took a plunge. Gallup's tracking poll pegged Trump's approval at just 37 percent to start off July, while disapproval stood at 57 percent. Last week, Gallup found the president's approval rating had briefly climbed to 40 percent before the fall-off back into the 30s....

Dolly Kyle on legacy of twice-failed Dem candidate Her rise to power was once seen as inevitable, her victory in the run for the presidency a foregone conclusion. Yet today, Hillary Clinton is nothing but a source of anger, embarrassment and frustration for many Democrats who blame the former first lady for wasting enormous sums of money on an incompetent 2016 presidential campaign. It was, after all, the second time she’s tried and come up short. Yet to hear her, it was not her fault; it was sexism, the Russians and even the Democratic Party’s national leadership. One observer who...

Warner Bros. is developing a movie about Michael Brown's death, according to a Hollywood trade publication. The studio has acquired the rights to the memoir written by Lezley McSpadden, Brown’s mother, according to Tracking Board. The memoir is titled “Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil.”

After comedian Kathy Griffin's attorney referenced bands like Municipal Waste and GWAR as other public figures who have created "disturbing imagery" involving President Trump, both bands have come to Griffin's defense. Check out exactly what they said below! Comedian Kathy Griffin recently made headlines around the world after the comedian posted a picture of herself holding a bloodied decapited Donald Trump head. Since then, she's been fired from her position as co-host of CNN's annual New Year's Eve program along with being slammed from the Trump family. Griffin was also slammed by her former co-host of CNN's New Year's Eve...

The Northern Illinois Conference on the evening of June 4 commissioned an openly transgender individual as a provisional deacon. The United Methodist Church has ordained transgender clergy before. However, the Rev. M Barclay is the first openly “non-binary trans person” to become a United Methodist deacon, according to Reconciling Ministries Network. Non-binary means Barclay identifies as neither male nor female but as gender neutral. Barclay — who uses singular they pronouns — serves as director of communications at Reconciling Ministries Network. The unofficial United Methodist group, based in Chicago, advocates for full inclusion of LGBTQ people in all aspects of...

This is my 10th year living in Dubai and my 9th Ramadan. I will admit in the beginning I didn’t really understand it. To me, it was simply a month of not being allowed to eat or drink in daylight hours, or dance at night. And ashamedly, I saw it as a month of disruption to normal day-to-day living. It was only in 2012 when I began to work with and befriend a number of Muslim colleagues, I started to gain a deeper understanding of the holy month. Now I appreciate it is a deeply spiritual time of piety, reflection,...

Mother’s Day is a joyous observance for most of the 85 percent of women who have borne a child by age 40. But not so much for women who have neither procreated nor adopted, who find Mother’s Day a painful reminder of their childlessness. Perhaps they squandered years on a relationship that resulted in neither marriage nor children. Perhaps they were so career-driven they had no room in their lives for a husband and offspring. Or perhaps they wed and tried to have children, but their wombs were barren. For women of faith despairing on this Mother’s Day that they...

Does California’s non-discrimination law on sexual orientation override a Catholic hospital’s freedom of religious expression? A new lawsuit from the ACLU claims yes, filed on behalf of a patient denied an elective hysterectomy as part of a surgical transition from female to male. Despite having arranged an emergency referral to another hospital which did conduct the operation, the transgender patient and the ACLU want Catholic hospitals forced to perform these surgeries in the future: More than seven months after a Dignity Health hospital refused a hysterectomy to a Sacramento-area transgender patient, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit...

C-SPAN released a survey Friday that asked historians to rank past presidents and former-President Obama was voted the country's 12th best, right behind Woodrow Wilson and in front of James Monroe. Historians were asked to essentially grade the presidents on items like “public persuasion” and “moral authority.” Politico reported that Obama rated high in the category of “equal justice for all,” but received low marks for his relationship with Congress.

No more backwards hats for Barack Obama. The former president and wife Michelle Obama returned home to their new $4.3 million home in Washington, D.C. on Thursday night after enjoying a post-presidency vacation in Palm Springs and the British Virgin Islands. The former first couple, who spent the past 10 days on Virgin billionaire Richard Branson’s private island, flew out from Tortuga island by helicopter on Thursday before boarding Branson’s jet headed for Washington. Later, their motorcade was seen pulling up to their nine-bedroom mansion in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood, where a neighbor had posted a welcome home sign, according to...

Fox News contributor reacts to sanctions placed on Iran

(CNN)Arguing that Americans still subscribe to his vision of progressive change, President Barack Obama asserted in an interview recently he could have succeeded in this year's election if he was eligible to run. "I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it," Obama told his former senior adviser David Axelrod in an interview for the "The Axe Files" podcast, produced by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN.

It is this solution, brilliant at the time, that leads us to Brearley’s legacy on climate change. Because over the course of the last 200 plus years, the electoral college, which provides for stronger voting power per person in more rural and less populated states, has elected four U.S. presidents who clearly lost the popular vote (1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016). Two of those elections have occurred during the period in which we have known about the causes and impacts of carbon dioxide emissions and climate change and in both cases, the impacts of those elections have very likely had...