Free Republic

Farting, breaking wind, cutting the cheese, or gas. The English language has numerous words for flatulence and this is even before we devolve into the subcategories that make up the genre. Whatever you call it, farting is a taboo act, but it is also a source of fascination. It’s not for nothing that there is a popular children’s book series called Fart Squad or that the preview of the most recent installment of the Alvin and the Chipmunks dynasty led with the punchline, “Sorry, pizza toots.” Today farting is something for which we perfunctorily ask forgiveness, but in the past...

CNN's Charles Blow: Trump 'Bigotry' Is 'Urinating on' Blacks, 'Telling to Dance in the Rain' By Brad Wilmouth | August 24, 2016 | 2:30 PM EDT Appearing as a panel member on Wednesday's New Day, liberal CNN political commentator and New York Times columnist Charles Blow ranted about Donald Trump's recent appeals to black voters as being "the most horrible type of bigotry," as he hyperbolically asserted that "It is the kind of bigotry that says, 'I will knock you down while I pretend to pick you up.' It says that 'I am not talking to you, I'm talking to...

His campaign started out stuffed with money. By last July, Jeb Bush had raised $103 million for his super PAC, Right to Rise, an astonishing sum that seemed to foretell the most lavishly funded campaign in American history. No super PAC had ever raised so much cash so early in an election cycle. In fact, Right to Rise alone outraised all the super PACs combined at the same stage in the 2012 elections. Now, after primary elections in just three states, Bush is out. He finished sixth in the Iowa caucus, fourth in the New Hampshire primary, and now, fourth...

Kurdish fighters seized control Tuesday of a key border town from the Islamic State (ISIS) group, cutting a major supply line in the biggest setback yet for the jihadists in Syria. From across the frontier in Turkey, the Kurds and allied Syrian rebels could be seen raising their banners in place of the black ISIS flag and taking up positions at the Tal Abyad border post, reports AFP. Fighters with the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia waved their yellow banner as Turkish troops looked on from the other side of the frontier.

New York Times op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow says he’s “fuming” after his son was allegedly stopped by a Yale University police officer at gunpoint Saturday night because he apparently fit the description of a possible burglary suspect. “So, my son, a 3rd year chem major at Yale was just accosted — at GUN POINT — by a Yale policeman bc he ‘fit the description’ of a suspect,’” Blow tweeted on Saturday. “He was let go when they realized he was a college student and not a criminal.”

Hamas TV song: "Fire your rockets, make them explode...victory is from Allah...O Martyrdom-seeker, O blaze, hurry, blow up Tel-Aviv"

President Obama in an interview released Sunday said that using marijuana was not that different from smoking cigarettes nor any more dangerous than drinking alcohol. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life,” Obama said as part of an extensive profile published by the New Yorker on Sunday. “I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

In 2009, the gap between the share of Republicans and Democrats who believed in evolution was just 10 percentage points, 54 percent and 64 percent, respectively. Last year, that gap widened to a whopping 24 points because as the percentage of Democrats who believed in evolution inched up to 67 percent, the percentage of Republicans believing so plummeted to 43 percent. Now, more Republicans believe that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time” than believe in evolution. This sad news comes via a survey released this week by the Pew Research...

The latest case of black-mob violence in Chicago is far from the worst. We’ll get to that one in a minute. But when a mob of black people rushed into three Chicago-area Sports Authority stores this week and rushed out dragging entire racks of winter clothing, the local CBS affiliate dubbed that “unbelievable.” CNN said the videos were “shocking.” Not really: “That crime was only unbelievable or shocking to the reporters who spend all their time ignoring and denying black mob violence,” said one Chicago cop, who would rather keep his job than be identified as a source of stories...

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” so disturbed the American power structure that the F.B.I. started spying on him in what The Washington Post called “one of its biggest surveillance operations in history.” The speech even moved the head of the agency’s domestic intelligence division to label King “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro and national security.” Of course, King wasn’t dangerous to the country but to the status quo. King demanded that America answer for her sins, that she be rustled from her...

Early voting is a new phenomenon that is has great implications on the final election outcome. Despite this, I don’t much enjoy blogging it. The numbers get updated sporadically, there is an inherent uncertainty in what the requests or submissions actually mean and the sample sizes are really small. This makes drawing conclusions not much better than just plain old guess work until a critical mass of votes have accumulated. And by that time someone else has already done a better job analyzing the data than I could so I just leave it to them. One of the only reasons...

President Barack Obama’s love of golf hit a milestone today as he marked his 100th time on the links. His Father’s Day achievement was reached at the Beverly Country Club in his hometown, the windy city. Mark Knoller, CBS radio correspondent and chronicler of all things presidential, pointed out the quiet occasion to the traveling press. Like 15 of the 18 presidents since Theodore Roosevelt, Obama has used golf as a way to unwind outdoors, but away from the prying eyes of press and onlookers. And despite the fact that he had never golfed before taking office, his love of...

How can we explain “acquired savants” — people with extraordinary talent who’ve miraculously developed artistic, musical, or mathematical abilities as a result of a brain injury, or temporarily from a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) session — since they weren’t born with the talent and didn’t learn it later? For example, how is it that somebody like Derek Amato (video below), who’d never demonstrated any musical talent before hitting his head at the bottom of a pool, could suddenly handle jazz and classical pieces of astounding complexity without training? Darold A. Treffert, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of...

URGENT: Five people described as anarchists were arrested Monday in a Cleveland-area park for allegedly trying to blow up a bridge, sources tell Fox News.

The inimitable, quintessentially monikered CHARLES M. BLOW That didn't take long. As we’ve gotten around to casting votes to select a Republican presidential nominee, the antiblack rhetoric has taken center stage. You just have to love (and despise) this kind of predictability. On Sunday, Rick “The Rooster” Santorum, campaigning in Iowa, said what sounded like “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” At first, he offered a nondenial that suggested that the comment might have been out...

...But one person I never thought would fall into this valley was Barack Obama, the charismatic candidate who electrified the electorate in 2008 and whom many saw as the fulfillment of the dream of the even-more-electrifying Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Yet here Obama is, down in the valley, struggling to connect with the American people and failing, increasingly coming across as dispassionate to some and outright revolting to others...

WEST CHESTER, Ohio (The Blaze/AP) — Briefcases with handwritten signs attached were left at the front door of U.S. House Speaker John Boehner’s Ohio office, bringing out a bomb squad. Investigators in the Cincinnati suburb of West Chester tell multiple media outlets that the bomb squad blew the cases apart on Sunday and found they contained only papers. No one was hurt. WCPO-TV captured the bomb squad robot removing the briefcases and exploding them:

JULIA Gillard admits Australia is a long way from consensus on climate change - and says the debate may become ever tougher for Labor - as new polling reveals her behind Tony Abbott as preferred prime minister for the first time. ..... Ms Gillard said today the polling was a result of her plan to put a price on carbon, and that while it was a tough reform "it may get even tougher, before it gets easier". “I believe that once carbon pricing is in place people will see how the system works and the benefits of it,” the Prime...

The signing of the Hamas Fatah unity deal in Cairo is a setback for peace and an advancement for terror, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told reporters in London on Wednesday. “What happened today in Cairo is a tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism,” Netanyahu said. “Three days ago terrorism was dealt a resounding defeat with the elimination of Osama Bin Laden. Today in Cairo it had a victory,” said Netanyahu. He charged that in signing this deal, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had “embraced” an organization that had condemned American action against Bin Laden, who it...

San Francisco - The US Supreme Court has granted a whopping victory to AT&T, the US Chamber of Commerce, and supportive corporations, by reversing previous court decisions that had prevented corporations from requiring individual arbitration of customers' complaint. By issuing its 5-4 decision on Wednesday, the Court has essentially stripped away individuals' rights to band together in class-action lawsuits should a corporation choose to include an arbitration requirement in its contracts or