Free Republic

A local official in Virginia has subpoenaed the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the SPLC Task Force on Hate in the Public Sphere for the criteria it uses to designate other organizations as “hate groups.” The subpoenas were filed February 28th in Loudoun County Circuit Court. They request "all written criteria, guidelines, bylaws or rules used by Southern Poverty Law Center to designate organizations or groups as 'hate groups' from the inception of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the present date."

A Jihad Watch reader attended the Georgetown University presentation on “Islamophobia” last week and kindly sent in this report. I wrote about this presentation here before it happened, saying that it would not be a true academic inquiry, amassing the facts and training the student to make an informed judgment, but an exercise in propaganda, attempting to manipulate attendees into holding certain opinions and skewing the presentation to ensure that those opinions would be the only ones anyone could come away with. This report shows that that was indeed what it was, with professors Daniel Varisco and John Esposito openly...

Tim Cook To Conservative Think Tank: 'You Should Get Out Of This Stock' Kyle RussellFeb. 28, 2014, 8:29 PM Tim Cook, Apple's famously calm and collected CEO, had a rare outburst toward a representative of a conservative think tank at its annual shareholder meeting. The National Center for Public Policy Research put forth a proposal to Apple shareholders that would force the company to disclose information about its programs to act more sustainably by using green energy and materials with smaller environmental impacts. The proposal was rejected by the vast majority of Apple shareholders, receiving approval from only 2.95% of...

Actress Maria Conchita Alonso loses acting job for supporting tea party January 19, 2014 by Michael Dorstewitz When a famed Cuban-born singer/songwriter/actress openly supported a California tea party gubernatorial candidate, the San Francisco Latino community responded much as one might expect — with derision instead of acceptance. Maria Conchita Alonso appeared with Assemblyman Tim Donnelly in a campaign ad promoting his bid for the GOP nomination. She added a Spanish translation and a little humor to Donnelly’s spiel, saying: Donnelly’s conservative views include a strong opposition to illegal immigration. He was once associated with the Minuteman Project, a group that...

Today, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument in the case of Wagner v. Jones. Our friend Peter Berkowitz discussed the case in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (it’s behind a pay wall). Teresa Wagner accuses the University of Iowa College of Law of violating her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights by refusing to hire her for its legal analysis, writing, and research program due to her strong pro-life views and activism. Her accusation is strongly supported by a comparison of her qualifications for the position and those of the two individuals selected by the law school. Wagner...

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) — A famed actress is facing backlash in San Francisco’s Latino community, after she voiced support for a conservative candidate for California governor. Maria Conchita Alonso starred in a campaign ad for Assemblyman Tim Donnelly of San Bernardino County, a Tea Party favorite who is seeking the Republican nomination. Donnelly has voiced strong views against illegal immigration and was once involved with the Minutemen Project, a group that patrolled the border with Mexico to catch immigrants coming across. “Politicians and big government are killing our prosperity, pushing welfare costs through the roof and driving our schools...

In addition to my career as a PhD chemist, I am one of a select few who enjoy the privilege of moderating content on reddit.com’s science forum. The science forum is a small part of reddit, but it nonetheless enjoys over 4 million subscribers. By comparison, that’s roughly twice the circulation of The New York Times. The forum, known as /r/science, provides a digital space for discussions about recent, peer-reviewed scientific publications. This puts us (along with /r/AskScience) on the front line of the science-public interface. On our little page, scientists and nonscientists can connect through discussions on everything from...

Blacklisting, 2013 version.

"Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson has been suspended indefinitely by A&E Networks following controversial remarks about homosexuality, Variety reported Wednesday.

I went to a lecture recently presented by the Smithsonian. The subject of the talk was Jack Kerouac’s Francophone roots, and I was expecting lots of intellectual wanna-be Beatniks. Instead I was surrounded by a roomful of typical old lib academics. It felt as though I were living inside of NPR. You know the type: the women are skeletal from not eating meat and from biking too much and have salt and pepper hair which they cut when they decided they hated men and also decided to look like one. They prefer the unkempt, “natural” look to actually bothering to...

Students at Eastern Michigan University pursuing teaching degrees are not happy with a union promoted boycott of their services. The Washtenaw County Education Association, which is an affiliate of the Michigan Education Association, sent letters to each of the eight districts its members represent urging them not to accept student teachers from EMU because of the university affiliation with the Education Achievement Authority, MLive reported. Gov. Rick Snyder started the EAA, which is a special borderless district the state's most severely under-performing schools are placed in. Six of the eight districts in Washtenaw County support locking student teachers from EMU...

ALCON - FYI, the Air Force servers are back to not letting me log in to FR due to its "political and activist" nature. I thought we were through with this crap...

The Los Angeles Times is giving the cold shoulder to global warming skeptics. Paul Thornton, editor of the paper’s letters section, recently wrote a letter of his own, stating flatly that he won't publish some letters from those skeptical of man’s role in our planet’s warming climate. In Thornton’s eyes, those people are often wrong -- and he doesn’t print obviously wrong statements.

This week, actor James Woods took to Twitter to criticize President Obama amid the government slimdown and also said he now expects to struggle to find work in left-leaning Los Angeles. So is Woods on target, or just paranoid? According to Mell Flynn, President of the Hollywood Congress of Republicans, discrimination against Republicans in Hollywood indeed runs rampant. … Early last year, Kelsey Grammer scooped a Golden Globe for his performance in the Starz series “Boss,” and at the after-party boasted to us that being a Republican was “easy” for him “because [he] was such a revolutionary” and refused to...

James Woods, the award-winning actor and outspoken conservative, has taken his unbridled bashing of President Obama on Twitter and elevated it to an art form. Woods’ latest post smacks Obama over the closure of national parks and memorial sites in Washington during the government shutdown.

LINK:http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-hollywood-helped-hitler-595684?goback=%2Egde_38303_member_262328248 The Chilling History of How Hollywood Helped Hitler In devastating detail, an excerpt from a controversial new book reveals how the big studios, desperate to protect German business, let Nazis censor scripts, remove credits from Jews, get movies stopped and even force one MGM executive to divorce his Jewish wife. This story first appeared in the Aug. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. The 1930s are celebrated as one of Hollywood's golden ages, but in an exclusive excerpt from his controversial new book, The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler (Harvard University Press, on sale Sept. 9), Harvard post-doctoral...

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, is working on an initiative that would blacklist Hizbullah’s so-called “military wing” while leaving the EU open to talking with its political faction, EU diplomats said on Wednesday. EU ambassadors are set to discuss on Thursday the issue of adding Hizbullah to its list of terrorist groups. Counter-terrorist experts from the bloc's 28 member states twice failed last month to reach a unanimous decision to blacklist the Lebanese Shiite group. Two EU diplomats told Reuters on Wednesday that the proposal by Ashton suggests including a statement the EU "should continue dialogue with...

A small group of EU countries has again blocked Britain’s bid to blacklist Lebanese group Hezbollah. Diplomatic sources said Austria and the Czech republic led opposition at a meeting of EU countries’ counterterrorism specialists in Brussels on Wednesday (19 June). Ireland, Italy and Poland also voiced concerns. Objections center around shaky evidence that Hezbollah bombed a bus containing Jewish tourists in Bulgaria last year. …

The artist assigned to illustrate author Orson Scott Card's upcoming Superman series for DC Comics is leaving the gig in the wake of protests regarding Card's views on gay issues.

Richard Collins, a screenwriter during the McCarthy era who was blacklisted for several years before he cooperated with the Communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, died Thursday in Ventura. The onetime Communist Party member was 98 and the last of the group of left-leaning writers and directors known as the Hollywood 19, 10 of whom went to prison for refusing to name names before the committee.