Free Republic

We once sang about hoping to die before we got old, but quite a few of my fellow baby boomers have begun to sound like a cross between 1960s sitcom crank Granny Clampett and the 1980s SNL Church Lady when it comes to our kids' generation. I've heard some in my age group lament that the millennials refuse to grow up. I've eavesdropped few remarks like, "Back when I was my son's age, I had a decent job and a mortgage. But you can't get a mortgage on a barista's salary. Come to think of it, back when I was...

FORT HOOD — The past few days have featured harrowing testimony from witnesses and victims who described the gruesome, blood-soaked scene inside the medical processing center where Maj. Nidal Hasan killed 13. Yesterday columnist Ken Herman sat in the courtroom and described the scene in today’s Statesman: In a day of often harrowing testimony — “It was squirting across the room,” victim Mick Engnehl testified when asked how he knew he was bleeding — I found the most disturbing moments to be the silent ones, when prosecutors, in advance of offering them as evidence, handed Hasan small containers holding bullets...

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu accidentally let the "cat out of the bag" when he said two months ago that, “The crumbling of the UN force on the Golan Heights underscores the fact that Israel cannot depend on international forces for its security. They can be part of the arrangements. They cannot be the basic foundation of Israel’s security.” Netanyahu's lawyer-like parsing of the words "cannot depend," "basic foundation," and "can be part of" cannot hide the fact that the words "can be part of" really only mean US troops will almost certainly "be part of" any "peace" deal in Judea...

Middle East peace talks could "collapse" due to continuing Israeli settlement expansion, a senior Palestinian Authority (PA) official warned Tuesday, on the eve of the scheduled resumption of the fragile process. "Settlement expansion goes against the U.S. administration's pledges and threatens to cause the negotiations' collapse," Yasser Abed Rabbo told AFP. The comments came after Israeli authorities approved the construction of a total of more than 2,000 homes in Jerusalem and the Biblical Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria, in the days leading up to Wednesday's scheduled new round of direct talks between the Israel and the PA. .......

The 26-page document in Arabic, recovered by The Associated Press in a building that had been occupied by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu, strongly suggests the group now possesses the SA-7 surface-to-air missile, known to the Pentagon as the Grail, according to terrorism specialists. It confirms that the al-Qaeda cell is actively training its fighters to use these weapons, also called man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS, which likely came from the arms depots of late Libya dictator Muammar Gaddafi. "The existence of what apparently constitutes a 'Dummies Guide to MANPADS' is strong circumstantial evidence of al-Qaeda in the...

Jesse Jackson hasn't yet declared Zurich the new Selma, but from some of the news coverage you'd think Oprah Winfrey was the next Rosa Parks. The former TV-talk superstar experienced what New York's Daily News calls "a disturbing racial incident" last month at "the posh Trois Pommes boutique" in Switzerland's largest city. In Winfrey's account, she wanted to examine a Tom Ford handbag and asked the clerk to retrieve it from its glass display case. "She says, 'No, it's too expensive,' " Winfrey told "Entertainment Tonight." "She said, 'No, no, no you want to see this one because that one...

William Ackman has resigned from J.C. Penney Co.'s board as part of a deal to resolve an unusually public battle between the activist investor and the struggling department store operator. J.C. Penney's rose in premarket trading Tuesday. The announcement follows statements Ackman made last week saying he'd lost confidence in Penney's board and that its Chairman Thomas Engibous should be replaced. Ackman and the retailer's board also were bickering over how quickly the company should replace CEO Mike Ullman. Ackman's investment firm, Pershing Square Capital Management, has a nearly 18 percent stake in Penney. Penney's board also made it clear...

FBI agents and other officials protected James "Whitey" Bulger as he roamed free for decades. Is there a statute of limitations on corrupting the system?Occasionally, there is more eloquence in a single word than in a string of finely crafted statements. Today was one of those moments as James “Whitey” Bulger stood and listened while that one word — guilty — was repeated 31 times in federal court in Boston: guilty of multiple counts of racketeering, extortion, drug dealing and, most importantly, guilty of 11 murders. A jury sat for 35 days of testimony, listened to 72 witnesses, heard about...

There's a new biography of Charles Manson out this month -- which seems like the last thing America needs, in light of the reams of print that have already been devoted to the wannabe pop star who led his "family" to commit nine murders in the summer of 1969, terrifying Los Angeles. And yet Manson: The Life of Times and Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn is riveting, a thoroughly researched biography that manages to be a breezy page-turner. Even those who've already read extensively about the Manson murders and their aftermath may find new insight into the pint-sized West Virginia-born...

Fifty years from now, when college students read about the history of America’s criminal-justice system, August 12, 2013 may turn out to be one of those watershed moments: a day when America took a hard look at the human costs of its criminal-justice policies — and began to reverse course. This morning, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin delivered her decision in Floyd, et. al. vs. the City of New York, in which she blasted the NYPD’s practice of stopping-and-frisking people and ordered the appointment of an independent monitor. Meanwhile, in California, Attorney General Eric Holder an