Free Republic

CHICAGO -- Note to parents: All those hours your kids spend blazing a trail of destruction in video games may not be a complete waste of time, after all. A small private university in Chicago is offering hefty scholarship for players of one game in particular, League of Legends, which has become one of the most popular games for organized team competitions. Robert Morris University Illinois announced its new program this month and said it recognizes the growing legitimacy of what are known as "eSports." The school says it also wants to give credit to those with a competitive spirit...

If authentic, CNN’s memo explaining why Candy Crowley permitted President Obama to speak four minutes more than Mitt Romney during Tuesday’s presidential debate is devastating to that network: On why Obama got more time to speak, it should be noted that Candy and her commission producers tried to keep it even but that Obama went on longer largely because he speaks more slowly. We’re going to do a word count to see whether, as in Denver, Romney actually got more words in even if he talked for a shorter period of time. One of Crowley’s main jobs as moderator was...

Democrats were able to take their share of the news cycle not merely by nominating scandal-plagued Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., to run for reelection, but by picking perhaps the absolute most appropriate image they could in this political climate: a target. Have a look.

The Obama administration has aligned the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI with militant abortion advocates in a concerted effort to target peaceful pro-life activists as terrorists and to characterize their lawful, free-speech activities as “violence.” At least, say pro-life leaders, that is the reasonable conclusion they draw from a training program sponsored jointly by the DOJ, FBI, Planned Parenthood, and other pro-abortion groups this past August in Portland, Oregon. “On August 25, 2010, the FBI and the United States Department of Justice co-sponsored a training seminar with Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation and the Feminist Majority...

Hes done it again! Obama is UNBEATABLE! He beat Jim Thompson in a stunning upset in the Rose Garden on Friday morning, though no one actually saw Thompson, and there have been no confirmed sightings of him on either the White House grounds or anywhere in Washington D.C. None the less the President was shown holding his egg above his head in victory, a large grin upon his face. However, this did not prevent President from graciously thanking Mr. Thompson for his sportsmanship and for the ribald jokes told while on the playing field. "So, Jim, did that balloon popping...

This man was arrested for burglary and dealing drugs, but a judge let him out of jail on his own recognizance; and to make matters worse, he has a long criminal history. We found he's sat in the Utah County jail 28 times, including ten arrests in just the last two years. Sam Penrod discovered Michael Pino was already back on the streets, and he told the police about it! The police who arrested Pino Wednesday expected he would still be in the Utah County jail on what they consider to be a serious drug case. We thought he would...

Finding the University of Utah's ''Utes'' nickname, along with the nicknames of 17 other colleges, to be ''hostile or abusive,'' the NCAA today banned the use of American Indian mascots by sports teams during its postseason tournaments. The NCAA's executive committee decided this week the organization did not have the authority to bar Indian mascots by individual schools, committee chairman Walter Harrison said Friday, but by preventing those teams from participating in its playoffs, it effectively is forcing the names to be abandoned nationwide. The postseason ban begins Feb. 1, 2006. Said Harrison, the University of Hanford's president: ''As a...

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...

The Sunday talk show of president Chavez is back in the air after an interruption of a couple of months "for redesign". The show used to be an itinerant affair that lasted from 3 to 6 hours where Chavez occupied the front scene, only relieved on occasion by some video or some "guest" making some form of expose. Alo Presidente was of course a must see of the political class as most of the maneuvers of the regime were announced previously from its set. The new format? Well, the step to a formal TV show with Chavez as the host...

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....