Free Republic

Now, this has occurred before with Bill Clinton, and it quite possibly could have been the same with Bush - the issue is how the MSM spins this and how it will report one way if you are affiliated with one party versus the other way when you have the “scarlet” R next to your name. From Flopping Aces: “Cheered wildly by U.S. troops,” begins Jennifer Democratic Operative Loven’s AP report on Obama’s surprise visit to Iraq on Tuesday. Quite a contrast to the silent treatment Marines gave Obama at his Camp LeJeune speech in late February. Just how did...

In June, the Obama campaign released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate to quell speculative charges that he might not be a natural-born citizen. But the image prompted more blog-based skepticism about the document's authenticity. And recently, author Jerome Corsi, whose book attacks Obama, said in a TV interview that the birth certificate the campaign has is "fake." We beg to differ. FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a...

Rumours of ‘Top Gun’ star, Tom Cruise’s alleged gay status have finally been smashed by a private detective who has been trying to find out if the movie star is secretly homosexual for six years. Former porn star Paul Barresi could not land his hand on any evidence suggesting the Hollywood superstar’s secret gay life ever since he has been digging around in Cruise’s private life since 2001. "Everything I've found, and everything I know, points to Tom being heterosexual, Contactmusic quoted Barresi, as saying. Barresi has now handed over his research to British author Andrew Morton, who has been...

BE HERE, OR BE NOWHERE!

"...imagine that Ann Coulter is seated in Smith's place. Anything to say to her?"...... Edwards, his right fist curled, feigned a punch and said: "No, there's absolutely nothing. Grow up." AUSTIN -- Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards feigned a punch Thursday when asked what he'd like to say to Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator who seemingly characterized his sexual orientation in remarks at a political confab last week. Edwards, appearing on Texas Monthly Talks, was asked by host Evan Smith to momentarily imagine that Coulter was seated in Smith's place. Anything to say to her? Edwards, his right fist curled,...

The distributor of conservative pundit Ann Coulter’s column, Universal Press Syndicate, has no plans to drop her column despite the flap she created with her recent "faggot” comment. Coulter used the gay slur in reference to Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards during a March 2 speech at the American Conservative Union’s Political Action Conference. So far three newspapers that carried her column have announced that they would stop running it, and the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign has launched a letter-writing effort demanding that Universal stop distributing the column. But in a statement, Universal’s president and editor Lee Salem...

BE HERE, OR BE NOWHERE!

BE HERE, OR BE NOWHERE!

America's most fiery conservative talk show host backing liberal Jerry Brown for California's attorney general? Yes, it's true. Michael Savage, the nation's third most listened-to radio host (and 4th most influential host according to NewsMax's Top 25 List), confirmed that he recently donated $5,600 -- the maxium allowable -- to Brown's campaign. Brown won the Democratic Party nod and is facing Republican State Sen. Chuck Poochigian of Fresno, Calif. "What can I say?," Savage told the San Francisco Chronicle. "I think he'd make a great attorney general compared to the other guy. By the way, who is the other guy?"...

When all the fanatical Christians disappear, will traffic finally improve? Wait, did I miss it? Did it happen three days ago, on 6-6-06, a.k.a. Tea Time with the Beast, a.k.a. the Great Day of Reckoning, a.k.a. the National Day of Slayer, all the world crashing down in a heap of hissing steam and belching smoke and balmy gusty breezes sometime around noon just after lunch but not before rush hour and hitting right around siesta? I might have been napping. Did the Apocalypse finally hit? Did the deep wish of roughly a half-billion zealous believers come to pass and were...

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV...

Think sex and drugs destroy America? Try naive chastity. Oh, and "Purity Balls" There are these things. These unholy events called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my God. But hey, free country. Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys,...

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over? Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe. Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime. Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known...

by Mark Finkelstein February 20, 2006 Things didn't work out well at the Olympics for Johnny Weir, the flamboyant American figure skater. Favored to take home a medal, he finished a disappointing fifth after a very rugged long program. But Johnny shouldn't feel too bad. When he hangs up the skates, there could be a promising second career for him . . . as a member of the liberal media. Interviewed on CBS' Early Show this morning, Weir explained that he knew he wasn't at his best on the day of the long program, and in particular wasn't "feeling pretty."...

NBC OLYMPICS HOME PAGE Complete Olympic Schedule (Presumably updated with Results) TV SCHEDULES usolympicteam.com Canada's CTV Olympics website CBC.CA - Torino 2006

TURIN, Italy - American Johnny Weir has been catching a few glances at the Winter Olympics. The Delaware resident was wearing a red warm-up jacket with “C-C-C-P” on it during a practice session today. Those are the Cyrillic initials for the former Soviet Union.

How to address a bitter, war-torn but still somehow giddy and deeply horny nation. My fellow Americans, we're not as royally screwed as everything Bush has done during his miserable term in office would have you believe.

What do the bitter neocon nominee and the amazing Oscar-bound film have in common? There is this theory, more of a truism really, tossed about like a fuzzy beach ball by the gurus and the masters and the mystics since Jesus was but a lint ball of possibility in the Great Belly Button of Time. . . .

I am a Gay Republican but I almost never chime in on political issues. I believe in small government, which the Bush administration has not been good at, as well as low taxes and the free market. I don't believe in manmade global warming and I think environmental activism is mostly a cover for people who want to make more rules to control our lives. Social issues don't get me very excited and I know I should be more grateful to my gay forefathers for all their sacrifices, but I've never encountered homophobia in my entire life so gay rights...

In many ways, the U.S. is now just as inhumane and brutal as any Third World regime. Oh well? "We do not torture." Remember it, write it in red crayon on the bathroom wall, tattoo it onto your acid tongue because those very words rang throughout the land like a bleak bell, like a low scream in the night, like a cheese grater rubbing against the teeth of common sense when Dubya mumbled them during a speech not long ago, and it was, at once, hilarious and nauseating and it took all the self-control in the world for everyone in...

The astonishing collapse of the Bumbling One surely means healthy change is imminent, right? Here's the good news: It really can't get much worse. We cannot afford any more wars. The environment has been sold to the bone. The national spirit has been beaten like an Alaskan baby seal and the GOP has worked our last nerve, passed through the karmic blood-brain barrier, reached saturation to the point where even moderate Repubs and gobs of intelligent Christians are finally saying, Oh my God, what have we done, and how did it all go so wrong, and how much Prozac and...

Yes, I know you were drunk. Must've been. Either drunk or on serious meds and/or you just didn't give much of a damn about anything anyway because you're just one of those people, one of those types who comes lurching around the city like a chunk of numbed pain in your big-ass mid-'80s burgundy car with the white top and chrome bumpers -- an old Cadillac? Monte Carlo? -- early last Sunday morning to wreak casual havoc. Is that about right? Do you remember any of it? Here is what I'm guessing: probably not. Let me tell you what happened,...

Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply should you cringe? Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost? And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob...

Apparently, it wasn't just "invade Iraq and Afghanistan in my name." A special report: Scene: White House private residence, night, not long ago. President Bush present in his most favoritest guns 'n' bunnies PJs. Laura asleep, knocked out by a combination of too much Good Housekeeping and excessive hair-spray fumes. Suddenly, a burst of black smoke. A deep, resonant voice speaks: "Psst! George! God here, taking a break from supervising the well-being of eight billion troubled souls along with infinite galaxies of unimaginable vastness to speak with you directly one more time because, well, you're special, aren't you, George? Yes...

Leather, techno, sex & war: more only-in-SF juice to make you proud. Take that, uptight neocons. It was the moment when we walked by a jam-packed S.F. City Hall and realized it was open to host a VIP techno dance party, while immediately outside its gilded doors upward of 50,000 revelers wandered and shimmied and flaunted their costumes and drank nasty Red Bull cocktails in the huge Civic Center plaza for the third annual Love Parade, everyone baring flesh and shaking their groove thangs to any one of 200 world-class (well, some of them) DJs spinning their wares on over...

At last, one scientist BushCo will definitely -- albeit resentfully -- listen to. Sometimes. So now we know. This is what it takes. This is how far the nation has to crumble and this is how many people have to die and this is how many tens of billions it has to cost and this is how far his dirt-low poll numbers have to fall before Bush will finally come out and say he agrees with one of those godforsaken gul-dang book-learned scientist types. You know the ones. Those informed and well-educated data-crunchers he normally despises like a kid hates...

Weep, won't you, as MTV and Fashion Week NY make sex and rock 'n' roll obsolete. When you've nowhere to turn and all seems bleak and desperate and warlike and Bush, it has been the all-American maxim lo this past multitude of years to exclaim, perhaps quietly, perhaps over a long, slow Martini, perhaps during a long tongue bath from a needful lover or whilst you sit in the tub sipping laudanum, feeling as though the world is trying to maul your spirit like the GOP molests joy, well, at least we still have rock 'n' roll. And models. At...

Sure a quake kit is a great thing -- if you can afford it. Too bad about everyone else. You are not ready. This is just a fair guess. You are not fully prepared for the monster life-slapping colon-rattling quake that is slated to devastate our fair state somewhere between the time you finish reading this sentence and about 2035 -- an epic disaster that will make Katrina look like a waterslide and that, if all predictions and all experts are to be believed, will look something like "The Day After Tomorrow" crossed with "28 Days Later" with a dash...

Can you hear that? That low scraping moan, that painful scream, that compressed hissing wail like the sound of an angry alligator caught in a vise? Why, it's the GOP, and they're screaming, "No, no it can't be, oh my God, please no, this damnable Katrina thing is just an unstoppable PR disaster for us!" After all (they wail), who woulda thought dissing all those poor black people and letting so many of them die in filth and misery in the Superdome while our pampered CEO president enjoyed yet another vacation would cause such an ugly backlash, such harsh criticism...

Stop criticizing! The rich man's CEO president is executing his job requirements perfectly. Everyone is slamming poor Dubya. Everyone is saying, oh my God, he's more inept than we ever imagined, he has no idea what's really going on, he's oblivious and in denialand he pretty much let all those poor black people die in filth and misery, and he basically ignored the massive Katrina disaster for days before finally being pressured into cutting his umpteenth vacation short and actually taking action. This is what they're saying. Kanye West was right, Bush doesn't care about black people, or the poor,...

Many argue that communism will never be possible because of "human nature". The essence of this false argument is the belief that a communist society would consist of an all-powerful central government that would tell everybody what to do--and would therefore undermine the creative initiative of individuals and the search for happiness. • This argument is based on two false assumptions: (1) It assumes that a communist society will look like the former Soviet Union, or the current China, North Korea, etc (ie: corrupt police states with a feudal-style ruling class) (2) It assumes that people will only work in...

What happens when habitual warmongering and BushCo lies become part of our daily diet? And then you read the appalling little story about how BushCo is now "taking steps" to further the investigation into why their original intelligence on Iraq was so painfully, treasonously, colon-clenchingly wrong, why they thought Saddam had giant Costco-sized warehouses stacked to the rafters with snarling nukes and nasty biotoxins and active warheads when, in fact, he had nothing but a couple Dumpsters full of rusty 20-year-old shell casings and a bucket of stale glue.

We kill millions of pets every year Who cares if a few get posh shelters and humane laws? OK. So I tend to think people who insist on calling themselves pet "guardians" instead of "owners" are exasperating and a bit wrongheaded, and that such uber-PC thinking does almost nothing to change or improve the behavior of the thousands of animal abusers in this country. And I tend to agree with fabulous dog writer Jon Katz that such semantic sidestepping does more harm to the animals than good, and leads to naive treatment, lack of decent training and an outright ignorance...

A new year, a Bush-gutted, storm-ravaged world and you in need of some juicy, heartfelt pledges -- This is the year. No, really. This is the it. This is the year you resolve to let it all hang out and lick the fingertips of the divine and stop holding back and stop quivering with unchecked anticipation/dread as you realize that, if you care a whit for self-definition and spiritual nuance and hot wet intelligence and deep karmic color in this tsunami-hammered, Bush-ravaged world, you are desperately needed right now. It's true. Alas, many are dejected. Many of the blue or...

Attention, liberal shoppers! Next year, screw those GOP-supportin' companies, and try buying blue Do you care much that greasy ol' Pizza Hut gave tens of thousands in PAC money to the GOP last year? How about the fact that Taco Bell stopped pumping out their happily toxic semirancid meatlike substances just long enough to write a fat check to the conservative Right? Isn't that weirdly fascinating, in a depressing and indigestible sort of way? Does it matter a whit that, say, Fruit of the Loom underwear gave nearly 100 percent of its corporate donations to tighty-whitey-wearing Republicans, nearly every one...

As the world swoons over France's soaring beauty of a bridge, S.F. gets slapped with an eyesore And did you hear the one about how those gul-dang baguette-sucking antiwar French just completed work on this astounding new bridge, a soaring, airy, delicate thing erected in southern France, and it's all over the international press and the French people are justifiably proud and even the venerable Le Monde has deemed the new Millau bridge a "work of art," and the amazing pictures are being featured everywhere, for good reason? And you look at the photos and see the breathtakingly elegant architecture...

Legal pot? Legal gay marriage? Universal health care? What's next, free porn and candy? Did you hear the screams? Did you feel the menacing chill? Did you see the black and ominous clouds, moving north? Did you sense, in other words, the very presence of Satan himself as he laughed maniacally and tossed around bucketfuls of ultrathin condoms and little travel-size packets of Astroglide like confetti while riding his Harley Softail up to Toronto or maybe Edmonton to join the ghastly and sodomitic celebrations? Because it's happened. Canada's high court just ruled that the government can, if it so desires,...

Did you hear the screams? Did you feel the menacing chill? Did you see the black and ominous clouds, moving north? Did you sense, in other words, the very presence of Satan himself as he laughed maniacally and tossed around bucketfuls of ultrathin condoms and little travel-size packets of Astroglide like confetti while riding his Harley Softail up to Toronto or maybe Edmonton to join the ghastly and sodomitic celebrations? Because it's happened. Canada's high court just ruled that the government can, if it so desires, redefine marriage to include gay couples, which it has declared it will do almost...

The odds are very good that you are on drugs. Right now. This minute. As I type this and as you read this and as false Texas dictators rise and sad empires crumble and as this mad bewildered world spins in its frantically careening orbit, there's a nearly 50/50 chance that some sort of devious synthetic chemical manufactured by some massive and largely heartless corporation is coursing through your bloodstream and humping your brain stem and molesting your karma and kicking the crap out of your libido and chattering the teeth of your very bones. Maybe it's regulating your blood...

This is what you won't see in the paper. This is what you won't see on CNN or on MSNBC or CBS News or on any major media Web site anywhere and especially no goddamn way ever in hell will you see it within a thousand miles of Fox News. You aren't supposed to see. You aren't supposed to know. You are to remain ignorant and shielded, and, if you're like most Americans, you have been very carefully conditioned to think Bush's nasty Iraq war is merely this ugly little firecracker-like thing happening way, way over there, carefully orchestrated and...

So, who are they? Who are the ones who have no problem watching a Monday Night Football game in which huge sweaty steroid pakced men in cute homoerotic tights smash each other as hard as possible hoping they break bodies, induce aneurysms and draw blood during out most violent, drug addled and corrupted national televised sporting spectatcle, but actually picked up the phone to complain to ABC about the 'racy' ad promoting 'Desperate Housewives' that led into the game? They are the same people that complained about 1.5 seconds of Janet Jackson's nipple, the same ones who complain about low...

It's a movement. It's a phenomenon. It's a Web site. Or maybe it's far more than that. No one can really be sure. No matter what it is, it's called sorryeverybody.com and it expresses, better than any outpouring so far, a sentiment that's omnipresent and palpable and still going strong, and every single Democrat and every single Kerry supporter and every single liberal of any stripe whatsoever probably felt it like a white-hot stab in the heart the minute Kerry's concession speech hit the airwaves and it undoubtedly went something like this: Dear world: We are so very, very sorry....

Oh dear God please not again. Oh dear God please don't let it be all convoluted and depressing and messy and stupid and please don't let it all embarrass us on an international level all over again even more than it already has and even more than it already is and even more than we've endured lo these past four debilitating and soul-crushing years. Hello? Please? Is it already too late? Why yes, yes it is. And lo and behold, it's apparently another completely tortuous and entirely knotted presidential election, still not finished and still not all ironed out and...

MONTREAL - A gay man who was called a "fifi" by a used car salesman has been awarded $1,000 by Quebec's Human Rights Tribunal. The man's name can't be revealed because of a publication ban. The man told the judge he felt dehumanized, humiliated and degraded by the comment, which happened in November 2001 at Roger Poirier Automobile in Sorel, about 70 kilometres northeast of Montreal. The salesman, Marcel Bardier, used "discriminatory words in regard to [the complainant], by revealing his sexual orientation in hurtful and vexatious terms," wrote Judge Michele Pauze in her decision, according to the Montreal Gazette....

MONTREAL - A gay man who was called a "fifi" by a used car salesman has been awarded $1,000 by Quebec's Human Rights Tribunal. The man's name can't be revealed because of a publication ban. The man told the judge he felt dehumanized, humiliated and degraded by the comment, which happened in November 2001 at Roger Poirier Automobile in Sorel, about 70 kilometres northeast of Montreal. The salesman, Marcel Bardier, used "discriminatory words in regard to [the complainant], by revealing his sexual orientation in hurtful and vexatious terms," wrote Judge Michele Pauze in her decision, according to the Montreal Gazette....

America's biggest Olympic hero yesterday accused George Bush of exploiting the Athens Games for his own political advantage in the run-up to the presidential election. Carl Lewis, who won nine Olympic gold medals in athletics in a record-breaking career, condemned Bush for using the presence of Iraqi and Afghan teams in Athens in a television advertisement to boost his chances of re-election.

America's biggest Olympic hero yesterday accused George Bush of exploiting the Athens Games for his own political advantage in the run-up to the presidential election. Carl Lewis, who won nine Olympic gold medals in athletics in a record-breaking career, condemned Bush for using the presence of Iraqi and Afghan teams in Athens in a television advertisement to boost his chances of re-election. Criticising Bush for linking his foreign policy with the two countries being allowed to compete here, Lewis said: 'I felt that was disingenuous. It is funny that we boycotted the 1980 Games [in Moscow] in support of Afghanistan,...

<p>WILLIAMSBURG - John Callaghan was so disgusted by the cover of a national gay and lesbian newsmagazine at a library that featured two men about to kiss, he said he ripped it off and took it home with him.</p> <p>Now he could face criminal charges. Library officials are deciding whether to alert law-enforcement officials, revoke Callaghan's library privileges or take other disciplinary action against him.</p>