Free Republic

Full title :Here's a fun picture of the librarian who rejected Melania's book donation because Dr. Seuss's poems are 'steeped in racist stereotypes' Yesterday, you probably heard the story of Liz Phipps Soeiro. She's the Cambridge, MA., elementary school librairian who rejected a donation of Dr. Seuss books given to the school by First Lady Melania Trump. As ridiculous as a library rejecting free books may sound to sane people, Soeiro had "reasons."

A Cambridge Public Schools librarian has explained why her class won't be keeping a donation of books donated by First Lady Melania Trump. In an open letter on the book review site, Horn Book, elementary school librarian Liz Phipps Soeiro explained that her school already has thousands of books and postured that there were schools in greater need of the donation. She also took the opportunity to criticize the policies of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Soeiro criticized the choice of donated books as well. "So, my school doesn’t have a NEED for these books. And then there’s the matter...

The strange and fascinating world of the British spy known as ‘Chris Whatsit’ was unravelling yesterday. Christopher Steele was once MI6’s top spy on Russian affairs and lived in the shadows until being unmasked as the alleged author of the ‘dirty dossier’ on Donald Trump. He was dubbed ‘Chris Whatsit’ by his late wife on their first date because she could not remember his name – but he revelled in being a man of mystery. Now the 52-year-old is hoping to return to anonymity after fleeing his £1.5million home in Surrey, telling his neighbour to look after his three cats....

Reflections on the anniversary of General Washington’s arrival at Cambridge, July, 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence... Having been unanimously selected by his fellow delegates in the Continental Congress as Commander-in-Chief, on June 15, 1775, George Washington of Virginia was commissioned a General on June 19 and sent off to assume command of the newly created Continental Army… which was then little more than a fiction, as those awaiting him outside Boston really belonged to their localities and their states. When General Washington arrived at Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 3, 1775, he took command of a collection of...

Cambridge police are telling people to avoid the areas of Berkshire Street and Vandine Street as firefighters battle a 10-alarm blaze in the city. The first call for the fire went out at about 2 p.m. The blaze is close to Kendall Square and the Kendall Square Cinema. In a tweet, the Cambridge Firefighters Local 30 said at seven to eight buildings are involved. ... Authorities say they have intentionally cut off power in the surrounding area.

There is a massive nine-alarm fire blazing in Cambridge near Berkshire and York Streets. Nine alarms are the most that can be called. Firefighters from communities well outside the area being called in. Cambridge police are asking that the public avoid the area. Multiple buildings are on fire, including a church. At least one building has reportedly collapsed. Fire companies from all corners are on-scene to assist, including from Boston, Newton, Waltham and Wakefield.

An influential seminary affiliated with The Episcopal Church has announced that it will no longer issue degrees starting next year, and is reporting a net loss of $7.9 million in assets since last year. The Episcopal Divinity School of Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced in July that they will stop granting degrees at the end of the 2016-2017 academic year. Last week, the divinity school sent out an update to supporters and members of its campus community wherein they noted that the net assets of the seminary had declined rapidly over the past couple of years. "At our meeting, we also accepted...

Uniting through Voice and Song In a time of political change, we celebrate the values that unite us at MIT Join us on Thursday, November 17, Lobby 10, 7pm Dear members of the MIT community, Last week's presidential election is sure to bring about changes, and in times of change it is important that our community remain connected and energized — dedicated to discovery, respect, and kindness, and open to excellence from everywhere in the world. As President Reif has emphasized, change in Washington will not change the values that unite us at MIT. I invite you to join me...

Renewable fuels developer Joule Unlimited Inc. said John Podesta, a veteran of two White House administrations, has joined its board of directors. Podesta was previously White House chief of staff under President Clinton, and more recently served as co-chair of President Obama’s transition. He is currently president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a think tank he founded in 2003. “I have seen and heard many proposals by renewable energy companies, and can unequivocally say that Joule has a technology and a system unlike any other, with industrial viability and a clear path to market within the next...

Cambridge police removed four people who identified themselves as members of Black Lives Matter/Cambridge from the front door of City Hall, where they had chained themselves early Wednesday. Two protesters, both women, used U-shaped bike locks to connect themselves to the door handles of the building around 6 a.m. The women were also linked to two other protestors, both men, with plastic tubing wrapped in red duct tape. Police cleared the protesters around 9:30 a.m. by removing the door handles. Police then slid a tarp-like material underneath the demonstrators and pulled them away from the entryway. Police surrounded the protestors...

The Very Rev. Katherine Ragsdale, lesbian cleric and then president and dean of Episcopal Divinity School, delivers 2009 'abortion is a blessing' address (National Organization for Women/Flickr) Via the Episcopal News Service, a press release revealing that the ultramegaliberal Episcopal Divinity School is winding things down: Episcopal Divinity School will cease to grant degrees at the end of the upcoming academic year, the seminary’s board of trustees decided July 21 on a 11-4 vote. During the next year, the board will explore options for EDS’s future, some of which were suggested by a specially convened Futures Task Force to...

Perhaps it is time to recall William Shatner to the Tonight Show in order to read alound, accompanied by bongos, leftwing novelist Gore Vidal's incoherent screed about the Henry Louis Gates arrest. Even Grampa Abe ranting aloud while spinning around on the church floor in "The Simpsons Movie" made more sense than Vidal. Perhaps it could be explained by one too many Ketel Ones but here is his seemingly endless essay from Truthdig which starts out from a far left position and then quickly plunges into utter incoherence: For those of us who had hoped that the Obama administration would...

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama must once again hit the pause button in his drive to overhaul health care to revisit the racially charged issue that stole the spotlight from his top legislative priority - the arrest of his Harvard professor friend. Obama, Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., will meet at the White House on Thursday, each one drinking his favorite beer, in a public attempt to move past the emotional event.

Gates in 1996 says affirmative action needed because of white racism, says without it they could never compete against "white girls and white boys"...., and tops it off with "trying to end the one ni**er syndrome." hopefully this story will get out....

The now-infamous Gates story has gone through the familiar media spin-cycle: incident, reaction, response, so on and so forth. Drowned out of this echo chamber has been an all-too-important (and legally controlling) aspect: the imbroglio between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley has more to do with the limits (or breadth) of the First Amendment than with race and social class. The issue is not how nasty the discourse between the two might have been, but whether what Professor Gates said--assuming, for argument's sake, the officer's version of events as fact--could by any stretch...

After dropping her young daughter with a baby sitter, Taquana Harris rushed to her hostess job at the fashionable Bowery Bar one night last February, her leopard-print evening gown sweeping elegantly through the dark, icy streets of the East Village. Then a strange woman crudely grabbed her by the arm and demanded to know what she had done with the drugs. Within seconds, Ms. Harris recalled, she found herself pinned to the steel grating of a bodega by two plainclothes officers engaged in a neighborhood drug sweep.

We’ve finally found the cop Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been looking for. Boston Police Officer Justin Barrett, the overachieving 36-year-old with two years on the force, was caught engaged in the kind of uber-stupidity we’ve come to expect from drunken teenage pop stars, not police officers. If you missed the Herald story yesterday, Barrett is the Boston cop who sent an electronic message to The Boston Globe - then forwarded it to his fellow National Guardsmen - calling the Harvard professor a “banana-eating jungle monkey.” He also said the paper’s reporting was “jungle monkey gibberish,” and wanted to “ax”...

A little tip for anyone who gets stopped by a police officer for a possible traffic violation. Be polite. Very polite. Even if you think you were wrongly stopped, do not under any circumstances start yelling at the police officer. Follow this advice and your chances of being given a traffic ticket, instead of just a warning, go way down. The same applies for any encounter with a police officer because the surest way to get yourself arrested is to act act arrogantly and aggressively when questioned. Whatever you do, do not act like the arrestee in the Henry Louis...

"Aaron Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for World Net Daily, writes today: The lawyer of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor at the center of the current national race controversy, was a mentor of both Barack and Michelle Obama and served on the president’s black advisory council.

She saw two guys she didn’t know, one of whom was black, breaking into a house so she decided to err on the side of caution and call the cops. Ergo, racism. As it turns out, she didn’t identify either Gates or his cab driver as black in the actual call to police, a fact the media paid some attention to after the tape was released as possibly exonerating her of any malign intent. But as a lefty friend said to me today, what would it prove if she had ID’d them by race? That’s a standard detail given in...