Free Republic

Saturday morning American broadcast TV was once animation's home field. Filling a cereal bowl with artificially colored sugar pebbles and staring at the tube was every kid's weekend plan. Not any more: For the first time in 50-plus years, you won't find any animation on broadcast this morning. It's the end of an era. Yes, The CW, the final holdout in Saturday morning animation, ran its last batch of Vortexx cartoons last weekend. This week,where you once saw shows like Cubix, Sonic X, Dragon Ball Z and Kai, Digimon Fusion, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, you'll instead find "One Magnificent Morning," a block of live-action educational programming. It's the end of...

How to explain the liberal embrace of cultural movements that presage cultural collapse even as they claim to be on the right side of history? It can only be their complete ignorance and rejection of history's actual lessons. I'll use only three examples even though the entire liberal mindset follows the same upside down "logic". The examples are: homosexuality, Islam and immigration. I'm currently reading a review of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings and the authors, Blech & Doliner, take pains to highlight the homosexual subculture that accompanied this great artistic flowering. They neglect to mention that this flowering was coincident...

Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History by Richard J. Evans (Brandeis University Press) As everyone knows, the supreme court 
ruled six–three for Al Gore in the great dispute over the Florida recount in 2000. As everyone also knows, Gore emerged as the ultimate victor in that recount, and with his poetic and moving inauguration address he managed to unify a badly divided nation. For a long period, the Gore years continued the peace and prosperity established under President Clinton, punctuated by the successful prevention of an apparent terrorist plot in 2001, by the enactment of health care reform in 2003 (mocked...

A ballot issue in Florida this November will be "Amendment 2", a measure that would legalize medical marijuana in the state. Crist and his liberal ally, attorney John Morgan, are proponents of the ballot measure, while current GOP governor Rick Scott is against it. WFTV9 reports: Crist has changed parties and changed stances on gay marriage, abortion and medical marijuana. He said he will vote yes on Amendment 2. “I do support it,” Crist said. “Rick Scott opposes it; I don't know what else to tell you.” Critics think medical marijuana was pushed onto the ballot by Attorney John Morgan...

"Spanking Is Great for Sex" Once again, I’ve been accused of pedophilia. Well, to be technical, my sexual identity was called “somewhat pedophilic.” But we’re talking about one of the most loathsome things a person can be accused of, so why split hairs? I’m also regularly told that my sexuality is “repulsive,” “damaged,” and “abusive.” But all of those feel like Valentines compared with “pedophilic.” People say this to me so often because I’m kinky, and I’ve written about it. I have a spanking fetish...I’ve had submissive fantasies for as long as I can remember, and it’s part of my...

A new study from the American Journal of Political Science indicates that different political affiliations may actually correspond with different body odors. The researchers, led by Brown University political scientist Rose McDermott, found that conservatives and liberals smell dissimilar. While the difference is small, it is apparently significant enough that we subconsciously prefer the scent of those who vote like we do. "It appears nature stacks the deck to make politically similar partners more attractive to each other in unconscious ways," the researchers wrote.Previous research has found a number of other political view correlations with unknown degrees of biological and...

A lot of people assume the term “female misogynist” is an oxymoron. How can a woman be opposed to the fight to help women achieve equality? The sad fact of the matter is, as long as there has been feminism, there have been women who find it personally advantageous to reject feminism and instead argue for continuing social systems that perpetuate women’s inequality, male dominance, and even violence against women. (There were even plenty of women who were willing to argue against women’s suffrage back in the day.) Here is a list of nine women who have made a career...

Democrats have reversed the partisan imbalance on the federal appeals courts that long favored conservatives, a little-noticed shift with far-reaching consequences for the law and President Obama’s legacy. For the first time in more than a decade, judges appointed by Democratic presidents considerably outnumber judges appointed by Republican presidents. The Democrats’ advantage has only grown since late last year when they stripped Republicans of their ability to filibuster the president’s nominees. Democratic appointees who hear cases full time now hold a majority of seats on nine of the 13 United States Courts of Appeals. When Mr. Obama took office, only...

In light of the recent discussion on “The Future of Protestantism,” I thought I would post Machen’s take on church unity as he deals with this topic in his classic work, Christianity and Liberalism: We are not dealing here with delicate personal questions; we are not presuming to say whether such and such an individual man is a Christian or not. God only can decide such questions; no man can say with assurance whether the attitude of certain individual “liberals” toward Christ is saving faith or not. But one thing is perfectly plain—whether or not liberals are Christians, it is...

The DOJ division investigating Ferguson was exposed years ago at PJ Media, when all its new hires had leftist backgrounds. It’s not enough that the Justice Department is investigating the shooting of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, MO police officer. Now it’s opening up a “pattern and practice” investigation of the entire Ferguson police force. The big question: Is this Justice Department capable of conducting a fair and impartial investigation? The applicable federal law (42 U.S.C. §14141) makes it unlawful for any governmental authority “to engage in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers … that deprives...

I always thought it would be difficult to imagine a period in which the West would be more adrift than the 1970s. Being a child at the time, I was spared consciousness of most of that miserable decade. Thus far, however, the second decade of the 2000s seems likely to give the 10 years that spawned Watergate, stagflation, the Carter presidency, the Oil Crisis, Idi Amin, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Jim Jones, Pol Pot, the Red Brigades, and the Iranian Revolution (to name just a few of the star attractions) a serious run for its money as a byword for Western...

Detroit's Under-Funded Fire Departments Use a Soda Can For a Fire Alarm Where absent money leaves gaps, ingenuity fills in. Nowhere is that more true than in Detroit's fire departments, where, as Detroit Free Press reporter Tresa Baldas shows us, a soda can full of jangling coins and screws alerts the Motor City's long-suffering heroes when there's an emergency. The system is brilliantly simple: A soda can full of rattling metal is balanced on top of the fire department's printer at the end of the tray. When the printer spits out an emergency alert, the paper knocks over the can....

The argument against liberals ever being in charge of our lives can be reduced to a single word: Detroit. Detroit has fallen from its position as one of the greatest cities in America at the beginning of the 1950s to a perfect reminder of what liberal Democrats will do when given enough power and enough time to show who they really are. “The Motor City” had an unbroken succession of liberal Democrat mayors for more than 40 years and each of these men has contributed to the steady decline of their city. Acting in concert with greedy unions these mayors...

Wake Forest University kicked off the fall 2014 semester by instituting a campus-wide online system that has the potential to restrict free speech by allowing students and staff to anonymously file reports on any occurrences they deem biased or hateful. Known as the Bias Incident Report system , the online form does not specify the criteria for filing a report, nor does it explicitly define the word “bias.” Instead, students are pressured to submit a report anytime they believe they are encountering an incident of hate or bias — potentially opening the floodgates for students to report incidents without cause....

The establishment press is working mightily to shield President Barack Obama from blame for, or even association with, decisions he has made and actions he has taken — unilaterally and with dubious constitutional authority in many instances. One particularly egregious example is Libya. When Obama decided on his own to engage in "kinetic miliitary action" to topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the press was thrilled. Now, as will be seen after the jump, three stories from major establishment press outlets don't even contain Obama's name, or any direct reference to him. The press, in completely polar opposite treatment from that...

The fragile topsoil of freedom and enterprise can be clogged with the hardpan of regulations or blown away by the evil winds of “progressivism.” There are simple ways to draw from Subsoil (the combined application of the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity)… See here for more details: http://www.principia-scientific.org/chaos-and-subsoil-where-science-prospers.html Lawmaking and bureaucracy must incorporate Subsoil into the conception, design and government operations to preserve the American Way of Life as the Founders intended. Sworn Constitutional officers must honor the solemnity of their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution in spite of political agendas. Five important questions must be asked, truthfully...

Mike Dickinson, the unhinged Virginia Democrat who once sought the House seat formerly held by Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., issued a tweet Sunday asking God to kill everyone in the NRA with the Ebola virus. The tweet was sent after he issued another message saying he would lead a prayer asking God to murder everyone in the NRA during the debut of his alleged radio program. "Dear god (sic)," he began. "Please use Ebola to infect the @NRA and it's various members. For they are A (sic) true virus and true terrorists in America." He followed that up with another...

The toxic thinking and horrible consequences of Leftist ideology put into practice and, as explained in the video below this piece, Why the Left Hates America by Daniel J Flynn The foundational epistemological position of all ‪#‎Leftist‬ thought is Marxist dialectical materialism. Most of them may not have studied ‪#‎Marx‬, but that is the basis of everything they stand for. It is a form of secular monist philosophy, maintaining that a Heglian World Spirit is guiding history along in an upward progression [hence they call themselves “‪#‎progressives‬.”] Under that paradigm, an existing order continues until its “internal contradictions” come to...

Sheila Weller’s forthcoming tell-all ‘The News Sorority’ claims to offer up details on the scandalous and sometimes catty escapades of noteworthy newswomen, including how some apparently hold strong disdain for each other. Katie Couric cultivated an “American Girl identity” but she was also a bully with a “chip on her shoulder.” Diane Sawyer strived to be “America’s Aunt” but she rode her staff hard and used “staged humility” to disarm critics. Christiane Amanpour was fearless in the field and would remind her bosses, “Do you know that I’m the world’s best-known foreign correspondent?” And, when feeling threatened, these pioneering, primetime...

No term in the American lexicon has impacted the national debate over the past few years as has "white privilege." The term initially sprung up in that great cradle of pointless conversation, left-wing academia, and has gone on to dominate the American political discussion with increasing furor in the years of the Obama Administration. Liberals assert that the causation of so many of the social inequities in our nation stem from the inherent privilege that white Americans enjoy in our society, as a result of our history and racial discrimination. As is the case, however, with nearly all liberal-progressive talking...