Free Republic

If you've ever shopped with a significant other, you know the feeling of so-not-wanting-to-be-there that can be equated with some sort of legal torture. And let's be honest, it goes both ways — sometimes there's nothing worse than a partner nagging about how tired, hungry or bored they are when you're trying to get your retail therapy on. It's not an uncommon desire to wish your beau could just be temporarily locked in a box somewhere while you do your thing, as long as they're entertained with something. Looks like China's way ahead of us on this one.....

It didn’t take long for Barron Trump to hit the headlines again, as folks are very interested in the young first son who is making his home in the White House. Yes, he’s the first boy since the days when President John F. Kennedy’s small son ran through the halls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but that’s been a saturated headline for a while now. However, Barron is facing a situation that’s a little bit different than the late John-John Kennedy experienced in the White House as a small child. Barron’s father, President Donald Trump, is under fire when it comes...

Fox News host Sean Hannity hit Fox News chief anchor and managing editor Shepard Smith this week in response to his criticism of President Trump, calling Smith "so anti-Trump." “Shep is a friend, I like him, but he’s so anti-Trump," said Hannity, a staunch supporter of the president. "He went off on a rant last week. That's fine, but [the opinion is] different." Smith hit Trump last week, slamming the Trump administration for its "constant flip-flopping between narratives" on the Donald Trump Jr. meeting that took place in June 2016. “They tell us there’s nothing to this, that nothing came...

The 2016 election laid bare multiple divisions in American society, but one of the biggest is geographical. In major cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, people are generally doing well (if not equally so), while many places situated far from urban business centers aren’t. Remarkably, faith in the American dream runs highest in locales where social mobility is lowest. U.S. companies, which for the past eight months have been struggling to navigate choppy political waters, should see that as an opportunity—even a call to action. Add Geography To Your Diversity Goals Many business leaders I’ve spoken to have...

The Iraqi government said it will be investigating a video apparently showing Iraqi troops throwing captured ISIS fighters off a high ledge and killing them, just days after Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, declared victory over ISIS in the city of Mosul. The unverified video shows men in uniform throwing a man off a ledge and then shooting him. According to the BBC, the Iraqi government said that if the video is authentic, those responsible will be brought to justice. “In the final weeks of the battle for west Mosul, the pervasive attitude that I have observed among armed forces...

I first heard the term “basic income” in the socialist magazine Dissent in 2005. I was a 15-year-old leftist with a taste for weird, radical plans to restructure society: say, having the government buy up majority stakes in every company and then distribute them equally to every American; converting all companies into worker cooperatives; trying a planned economy where the planning is done by decentralized worker and consumer councils rather than a government bureaucracy. Basic income, wherein the government gives everyone enough cash to live on with no strings attached, struck me as an idea in that mold: another never-going-to-happen...

President Donald Trump has pledged his support to revitalize the coal mining industry and create more jobs through deregulation. Billionaire serial entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, argues that the U.S. government should take a different approach. “Coal mining is not the nicest of jobs, and coal mining disappeared in Britain many decades ago, and pretty much every single one of those coal miners went into jobs which were far more pleasant, far less dangerous, far better for their health, and I doubt that there’s one coal miner that looks back thinking, ‘God, I wish I...

Joshua Yaffa, a New Yorker correspondent reporting from Moscow and a New America fellow, has been writing for months about Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Russia scandal, which seems to get more interesting by the day. Recently, he wrote about the frustration many Russia journalists feel over the American media’s coverage of the Russia story, which they think has overstated Putin’s direct influence on various aspects of Russian society, and makes the men and women in the Kremlin appear to be much smarter than they actually are. Yaffa and I discussed these subjects recently by Skype. During the course...

Carl Bernstein depicted the contentious nature of politics as being in the middle of a "cold civil war" as President Trump pushes back against what he calls "fake news" and various news outlets are perceived as espousing different "truths." Appearing on CNN's "Reliable Sources" on Sunday, alongside Leonard Downie, former executive editor and vice president of the Washington Post, Bernstein compared the current media climate to that of the Watergate era. He stressed the importance of anonymous sources and said "quote 'leaks' which really are not leaks" are instead "mostly reporters trying very hard to get truthful information and put...

“OUTRAGEOUS” Probation & Gag Order for muslim migrant rapists of 5-year-old girl in Idaho

The monthly bills are due again, and it seems you are getting further and further behind. You’ve scrimped and cut costs as much as you possibly can, there’s no change left in the couch cushions or the car seats, and it looks like another month of Ramen noodles and raising/lowering the thermostat to cut down on energy bills. How about turning things around and looking at this from the income side instead of only cutting expenses? You may already be working two jobs to make ends meet, but there are legitimate ways to make side money online that don’t involve...

President Donald Trump may not be in the White House had former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin not blazed the trail for him. This week, Bernie Quigley observed that Palin “was prelude and harbinger” to Trump’s arrival. He wrote in The Hill that he was reading William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning when Palin appeared on the national stage. And he said then that “it was possible to see the rise of new political archetypes and forms and they are now upon us.” “It was not President Donald Trump that brought the age, although he turned the key....

Seems Obama used federal asset forfeiture to give his darlings a little party pad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPXYcLbqs4Q

It’s true that the first day of your period is usually the absolute worst. It’s different for everyone, but cramps, fatigue, and irritability are pretty common, and for some women, they can be crippling. That’s what the women of Culture Machine say, at least, in a new video announcing the company’s plan to give women the first day of their period off. Culture Machine is a digital media company in Mumbai, which makes this all the more progressive. In rural parts of India, women are often sent out to menstruation huts to wait our their period. The huts are very...

A couple weeks ago I came across an old article about Journolist which I found striking. In particular, I was struck by the ways in which some of the debates taking place among left-leaning journalists back in 2008 still seem to encompass the ways the left-wing media operates today. For those who don’t remember it, Journolist was just a listserv created by Ezra Klein. The list was invitation only and was mostly made up of progressive journalists. In theory, the list was a kind of digital water cooler where like-minded people could talk to others in the field. That may...

Women Will Shower With Men in Army as Part of ‘Transgender Equality Training: Obama Is Happy

The race to create A.I. and robotic technology that will change the way we work and live is dominating countless industries. But the chaos and disruption these ground-breaking fields are set to have on numerous areas of the economy, the job market, the banking system and the transportation industry have also incited fear. Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma has previously warned that society could see decades of "pain" thanks to new technologies. While Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that humans need to merge with machines to become a sort of cyborg if we want to stay relevant. But forgetting...

Businesses in Bar Harbor, Maine are turning to locals to make up for a shortage of foreign guest workers that normally fill summer jobs in the bustling seaside resort town. Because the H-2B visa program has already reached its annual quota, Bar Harbor’s hotels, restaurants and shops can’t bring in any more foreign workers for the rest of the busy summer tourist season. Like hundreds of similar coastal resort towns, Bar Harbor has for many years depended on the H-2B visas for temporary workers. The program allows non-agricultural companies to bring in foreign labor if they are unable to find...

Not on the face of it, no. With the national news media missing out on the dynamics of middle-American populism, critics have challenged them to pay more attention to voters outside of the Acela media bubble and the urban enclaves. CNN responded by hiring Salena Zito as a contributor after her singular focus on Rust Belt disaffection and frustration got missed until it was too late for others to catch up. If HuffPost’s editors want to spend some time traveling those same roads in order to learn something about life outside the bubbles in order to improve their reporting, then...

Now here’s an interesting result. Three presidents, three metrics — and in each case the biggest problem for each man was different than it was for the other two. See Also: Union files grievance over ‘goat crews’ clearing brush on university campus The silver lining for Trump is that, for all the criticism he draws in the media about pushing bad policy or doing a poor job as president, that’s not what sticks out to his critics. Overwhelmingly anti-Trumpers are anti mainly because they disdain Trump the man, not Trump the ideologue or Trump the C-in-C. For definitional purposes, “personality”...