Free Republic

“Jingle Bells,” one of the most well-known Christmas carols in the world, is now being called racist. A Boston University theater professor claims the Christmas carol has a “problematic history” because it was originally performed to make fun of African Americans. “The legacy of ‘Jingle Bells’ is one where its blackface and racist origins have been subtly and systematically removed from its history,” Kyna Hamill, a BU theater historian, wrote in her “Theatre Survey” research paper on the story of “Jingle Bells.” “Although ‘One Horse Open Sleigh,’ for most of its singers and listeners, may have eluded its racialized past...

RUSH: One of the things we do on this program is make the complex understandable. I want to explain to you what zero-rating is. My guess is that a large majority of people have no idea. Let me just take a quick test. Mr. Snerdley, do you know what zero-rating is in the cable-online…? (interruption) Dawn, do you know what zero-rating is? (interruption) Brian, do you know what zero…? (interruption) I’m gonna give you a hint. Zero-rating, when I tell you what it is, you’re gonna say, “Why do they call it that?” and you’ll be entirely justified. Now, let...

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey Gov.-elect Phil Murphy is heading to Puerto Rico to survey the damage caused by Hurricane Maria. The Democrat on Friday is scheduled to meet with Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello. Murphy also will receive a briefing from emergency management and health officials. He’ll also stop at a shelter.

All main stock benchmarks closed at records on Friday with the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average extending their weekly winning streak to four as Republicans prepared to outline their final version of the tax bill. Stocks have been sensitive to developments from Capitol Hill on the tax bill and any news that is viewed as a step closer to enacting tax cuts tend to buoy market sentiment. The Dow rose 140 points, or 0.6%, to close at 24,648. The S&P 500 climbed 23 points, or 0.9%, to end at 2,675 while the Nasdaq Composite Index gained 80...

Hey boys and girls! Are you ready to play a fun new game called "Detect Liberal Bias?" Here's how it works... Just go online to any newspaper or magazine. In their seach engines, enter the term "Strzok." Do you see any search results? If so, then add "insurance" for "Strzok insurance." If you see no search results, congratulations! You have just detected strong liberal bias in the periodical you were searching. The reason that this is a strong indication of liberal bias is that the story line developed by the mainstream media is that while FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter...

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on Friday the Justice Department "will take seriously concerns that have been expressed" about bias within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but defended the agency against suggestions it was dysfunctional.

After news broke about an airport meeting between former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton in the midst of last year’s presidential campaign, the FBI scrambled to identify the source who leaked details about the encounter and discipline him or her, according to emails released on the FBI website on Friday. The internal emails show that on June 29, 2016, a senior spokeswoman for the Justice Department emailed her counterparts at the FBI to flag articles that were starting to appear about the meeting. In the email, the spokeswoman, Melanie Newman, described the encounter as “a casual,...

The FBI released a series of email documents Friday afternoon detailing the Department of Justice response to the fallout of the secret Phoenix tarmac meeting between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton in June 2016. The dates on the emails range from July 1-3, 2016. On July 5, 2016, FBI Director James Comey announced former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would not face criminal charges for mishandling classified information. A series of emails show one FBI official, whose name and email are redacted, fuming over leaks to the media about the meeting and what happened on the...

RUSH: Folks, this is funny. During the break, I checked the email. I’ve got an email from a friend that says, “Hey, Rush, I’m in D.C. I’m listening to you right now. I’m heading back to Israel in a few hours, would love your take on the tax bill’s prospects.” Now, want me to translate this for you? “Hey, Rush, I’m in the airport getting ready to fly to Israel. What the heck are you doing wasting our time on net neutrality? Don’t you know that the tax bill is gonna be presented in five –” This guy is very...

The jurors who acquitted Philip Brailsford of second-degree murder last week were told to judge him based on "how a reasonable officer would act, versus a regular person with no police training," as The Arizona Republic put it. That distinction was crucial, because a "regular person" would never get away with shooting an unarmed man who was crawling on the floor, sobbing, and begging for his life. Like other recent cases in which jurors failed to hold police officers accountable for the unnecessary use of deadly force, Brailsford's acquittal shows that cops benefit from a double standard. Unlike ordinary citizens,...

KQV radio, the historic local “all news/all the time” AM station that has been broadcasting for nearly a century, intends to go off the air at the end of the night Dec. 31. Station general manager and owner Robert W. Dickey Jr. said he delivered the news Friday morning to his staff of about 20 in the KQV office at Centre City Tower, Downtown. “Candidly, I think it’s a sad day for broadcasting,” Mr. Dickey told the Post-Gazette afterward. “It’s fair to say we’ve been trying to provide a community service. The bottom line is I just can’t sustain the...

Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe will appear next Tuesday before the House Intelligence Committee, where Republicans on the panel are likely to grill him about Justice Department official Bruce Ohr and FBI agent Peter Strzok. McCabe was originally scheduled to appear before the committee earlier this week, but the session was cancelled the night before the interview.

Dutch military police on Friday shot and wounded a man armed with a knife, who burst into their office at Amsterdam's busy Schiphol airport, police told AFP. "This afternoon a man came into the office of the Marechaussee (military police) here at Schiphol and threatened my colleagues with a knife," said police spokesman Dennis Muller. "He was shot in the leg and taken to hospital in Amsterdam." The incident triggered panic on the airport's vast plaza, which is criss-crossed by thousands of people every day making their way to and from the departures and arrivals halls.

I've spent my career as an advocate for economic justice, fighting for basic fairness for working families. It wasn't until this past year that I began fighting for my own life. It's that fight that led me to get arrested protesting the Republican tax plan in Washington, and that led me into debating it with Sen. Jeff Flake at 30,000 feet in the air on my way home. I never thought I'd be in this position. A year ago, I was healthy, taking morning runs on the California coast and looking forward to a new life with my newborn son,...

Full title: Gregg Jarrett: Did the FBI and the Justice Department, plot to clear Hillary Clinton, bring down Trump?There is strong circumstantial evidence that an insidious plot unprecedented in American history was hatched within the FBI and the Obama Justice Department to help elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. And when this apparent effort to improperly influence the election did not succeed, the suspected conspirators appear to have employed a fraudulent investigation of President Trump in an attempt to undo the election results and remove him as president. Such a Machiavellian scheme would move...

An Arizona jury has refused to award damages against former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio at a civil trial for bringing a since-dismissed criminal case against one of Sen. Jeff Flake's sons in the heat-exhaustion deaths of 21 dogs. Jurors deliberated nearly an hour before ruling late Thursday against Austin Flake and his then-wife Logan Brown in their malicious-prosecution lawsuit stemming from Arpaio's investigation into the heat-exhaustion deaths of 21 dogs at a kennel operated by Flake's in-laws. Flake and Brown, who were in college at the time, were caring for the dogs while the in-laws were out of town.

FULL TITLE: Laura Ingraham: Unless Investigated, Mueller’s ‘Irreparably Tainted’ Russia Probe ‘Will and Should’ Collapse Laura Ingraham ripped into the “irreparably tainted” Mueller investigation into Russian collusion with the claim that it is now an example of “how big government can end up becoming a threat to a representative democracy.” On her Thursday night edition of The Ingraham Angle, Fox News’s latest primetime star opened with a blistering breakdown of the gobsmacking corruption and conflict of interest that has fueled, not only Hillary Clinton’s exoneration over her email scandal, but Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into Russian collusion. Specifically, Ingraham...

Now we just need to get McCain and Cochran to the chamber.

RUSH: The first thing I do when I roll out of bed, literally the first thing I do, I grab my iPhone. I have a whole system of programs set up that informs me of things I’m interested in that happened overnight, after I went to bed or even before I went to bed that I didn’t know about. And today the first couple things I saw almost made me want to put up my hands in frustration and say, “Just what the hell are we doing? What is the point?” And it was the fact that two late-night comedy...

Yesterday President Trump met with all prior leadership of the Secret Service in the Oval Office. Today President Trump heads to FBI HQ to give them attaboys. Tonight President Trump heads to Camp David for the weekend. President Trump paused on the South Lawn for an impromptu presser while headed to Marine-One, prior to his departure to the FBI HQ at Quantico Virginia, to talk to the media pool.  Strong comments about FBI’s prior leadership