Free Republic

Facebook is mining its data of users' posts to find out how users feel about certain candidates or issues and sharing that data with ABC News and BuzzFeed for use in their 2016 reporting, the social-networking site will announce on Friday. The data will be gathered from the posts of Facebook users in the United States 18 and older, classifying sentiments about a politician or issue as positive, negative or neutral. The data can also be broken down into sentiments by gender and location, making it possible to see how Facebook users in the key primary states of Iowa or...

American attitudes to gay marriage have been turned on their head in the space of a single generation. After a US Supreme Court decision this month, 30 of America’s 50 states will have gay marriage laws, which is testament to the sudden shift in attitudes towards same-sex unions in the US. Two decades ago barely a quarter of Americans believed members of the LGBT community should enjoy equal marriage rights; now nearly two-thirds accept gay marriage. This quantum leap cannot be explained by what sociologists call generational shift – that is older, conservative folk dying off and younger, more liberal...

Rock legend Neil Young told radio host Howard Stern on Tuesday that the "free world" ought to fight climate change rather than the Islamic State, or ISIS. Visiting the Howard Stern Show for a long-awaited interview, Young slammed both Democrats and Republicans for ignoring the plight of the planet, suggesting that environmental damage from the "carbon footprint" of the U.S. military was a greater threat than Islamic terror in the Mideast. The relevant portion of the interview (excerpted by Canada's Sun News) begins at 50:14 in the video below: (VIDEO-AT-LINK)YOUNG: The things that we don't know, you know, we can...

Gwyneth Paltrow has won numerous awards for her acting, but speaking apparently came with some difficulty Thursday with President Barack Obama standing beside her. "You're so handsome that I can't speak properly," the actress, singer and food writer gushed after introducing Obama to several hundred supporters seated on white fold-out chairs in the lush backyard of her home in the movie star haven of Brentwood, a neighborhood in Los Angeles. In a not-so-subtle reference to her "conscious uncoupling" earlier this year from husband Chris Martin, Paltrow said it was a "profound honor" to have Obama in the home she shares...

Last night Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow hosted a fundraiser for President Obama and the Democrats at her ritzy home in Brentwood, California. Paltrow is worth $140 million dollars and was raised in a rich, privileged family before making her way to the big screen. But that didn't stop her from classifying herself as a "working mother" concerned about equal pay for women, an issue Obama has been dishonestly harping on.

A new report reveals some of the intense family drama behind pro-abortion activist Jane Fonda’s parents. The report describes how Fonda’s father was cold and a bully, as well as a shameless womaniser and Jane always blamed her manic depressive mother Frances for their break-up. The report also indicates Fonda’s mother Frances had nine abortions before Jane was born and committed suicide. Here’s more: janefondaAlways outspoken, Jane Fonda is making headlines once more after she returned to the subject of her tragic mother at the weekend, in a speech at a fundraising event in Beverly Hills for a rape victims’...

National Geographic Channel has announced the cast for Killing Jesus, its third adaptation -- after Killing Lincoln and Killing Kennedy -- of a bestselling historical thriller by Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and historian Martin Dugard, and American actor Haaz Sleiman, who's originally from Lebanon, has snagged the title role. Born in the United Arab Emirates but raised in Lebanon, Sleiman moved to the U.S. when he was 21 and currently lives in Los Angeles. He's best known for playing a Syrian immigrant in the 2008 indie film The Visitor. He's also appeared in Showtime's Nurse Jackie (as a gay...

The six-strikes Copyright Alert System has been active for one and a half years now and warnings are being sent out at an increasing rate. The program will double in size this year, according to its executive director, in the hope that it will eventually change people's norms toward piracy. February last year, five U.S. Internet providers started sending Copyright Alerts to customers who use BitTorrent to pirate movies, TV-shows and music.These efforts are part of the Copyright Alert System, an anti-piracy plan that aims to educate the public. Through a series of warnings suspected pirates are informed that their...

... I think Sam and I and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie and everyone who is basically making the same point, I think we all feel frustrated because I think we feel like the people who are arguing with us are not listening. We’re liberals! We’re liberals. We’re not crazy tea-baggers, y’know, and so it’s kind of hard to be making this case — based on facts, based on polling, I think based on what everybody really knows… I mean, do the people arguing with us, would they really open a lesbian art gallery in Ramallah? [Laughs] Or Karachi?...

Ben Affleck, the Oscar-winning actor and director, has launched a ferocious defence of Islam, after becoming involved in a heated argument when he appeared on an American chat show. Affleck, the star of Good Will Hunting and director of Argo, appeared on HBO’s television show Real Time with Bill Maher to promote his latest film, Gone Girl. But instead of talking about the film, the 42-year-old found himself in a furious discussion with both Maher and Sam Harris, the author of a series of books on religion. Maher, an outspoken atheist and critic of Islam, said last week in his...

[Norman Lear wryly titled his memoir Even This I Get to Experience (out Oct. 14, Penguin) as a wink to his belief that even the bad times in his life were worthwhile because they made the living interesting. And over the course of 92 years, Lear has led as interesting a life as anyone in Hollywood. Born in 1922 in Connecticut, Lear lived with relatives for a time while his father spent three years in jail from 1931 to 1934 for a dodgy get-rich-quick scheme...] [All in the Family: Season 2 Carroll O'Connor's insecurities and fears drove him to great...

Women have been warned in a Planned Parenthood Action Fund email [1] that Alaska Republican Dan Sullivan, who is running for the U.S. Senate, and three other GOPs could “affect their sex lives.”The warning came from Lena Dunham, the creator and start of the HBO series Girls. In the email Dunham urged women to remember Thom Tillis, who’s challenging Sen. Kay Hagan (D) in North Carolina, “stuck a bunch of abortion restrictions into a bill that was supposed to be about motorcycle safety.”She also wrote that Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa running for the Senate who made hog...

An American worth less than $1.55 billion could not land on this year's "The Forbes 400," the annual ranking for the richest people in America. The cut-off increase from last year's $1.3 billion disqualified 113 poor billionaires for this year's list. Bill Gates once again lorded over his fellow wealthy Americans for the 21st consecutive year with a healthy $81 billion, up $9 billion from 2013. He outpaced Warren Buffet ($67 billion), Larry Ellison ($50 billion) and the Koch brothers' Charles and David (each worth $42 billion) to round out the top five. Michael Bloomberg ($35 billion) managed to slide...

Can you imagine the reputation of a literary figure surviving the disclosure that he worked (however briefly and ineffectually) for Hitler's Abwehr? Yet Ernest Hemingway worked for Stalin’s KGB and nobody (among the “smart set”) seems to bat an eye. According to KGB defector Alexander Vassiliev "the 42-year-old Hemingway was recruited by the KGB under the cover name "Argo" in 1941, and cooperated with Soviet agents whom he met in Havana and London. This comes from a book published in 2009 by Yale Univ. Press (not exactly a branch of the John Birch Society.)"Castro's revolution," Hemingway wrote in 1960, “is...

NEW YORK - Over three hundred thousand activists walked through Manhattan on Sunday, warning that climate change is destroying the Earth - in stride with demonstrators around the world who urged policymakers to take quick action. Starting along Central Park West, most came on foot, others with bicycles and walkers, and some even in wheelchairs. Many wore costumes and marched to drumbeats. One woman played the accordion. But their message was not entertaining: "We're going to lose our planet in the next generation if things continue this way," said Bert Garskof, 81, as a family member pushed his wheelchair through...

WHEN Willie Nelson invites you to get high with him on his bus, you go. The man is the patron saint of pot, after all, and I’m the poster girl for bad pot trips. It seemed like a match made in hash heaven. When Nelson sang at the 9:30 club in D.C. one recent night, I ventured onto the Honeysuckle Rose, as his tour bus and home-away-from-home is called. I was feeling pretty shy about meeting him. The 81-year-old Redheaded Stranger is an icon, one of America’s top songwriters and, as Rolling Stone said, “a hippie’s hippie and a redneck’s...

"I feel a moral obligation to speak out at this key moment in human history — it is a moment for action," says the actor in addressing climate change Leonardo DiCaprio has been tapped by the United Nations to be honored with the title of Messenger of Peace, and the actor has been asked to speak on Sept. 23 at the U.N. Climate Summit to address the topic of climate change, the international organization announced on Tuesday

James Vanderbilt's Truth, the high-profile movie chronicling the scandal that derailed Dan Rather's career, has gotten the greenlight to begin shooting this fall. Brett Ratner's RatPac Entertainment and Echo Lake Entertainment will finance the movie, starring Robert Redford as the iconic news anchor and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, Rather's producer. At the same time, FilmNation has come aboard to represent international rights and will pre-sell the project to foreign buyers at the Toronto Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday night (based on the cast, it's sure to whet appetites). Mythology Entertainment is the driving force behind Truth, which was...

Michael Chapman at our sister site CNSNews.com reported that Hollywood director Rob Reiner unleashed another anti-Tea Party rant in an interview with Larry King. He compared the Tea Party to the terrorist group Hamas, because apparently both groups are extreme and cannot be negotiated with, and the only solution is to make them go away or “eliminate” them. In Israel, “[Y]ou can’t negotiate with that, you have to say either Hamas goes away and the Palestinian authority takes over all that region and deal with some kind of honest broker here, and create the two-state solution,” said Reiner. The Palestinians...

Hollywood’s enemies of American freedom are busy undermining the life we have built and hope to keep. These social parasites, who have the wherewithal to live anywhere after they complete the destruction of America, are opening their checkbooks to the Democrats who will carry out the end game for America if we let them. People like Leonardo DiCaprio, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Barbra Streisand, whose personal lives have nothing whatsoever in common with our own, are pouring out their “One percenter” fortunes to force us to live as they deign we should live. In an effort to save Democrat...