Free Republic

Imagine Shakespeare walking into his local pub and there is his ole friend and competitor Ben Johnson. They have a few drinks while discussing who is the better poet. Drinks are flowing and the conversation gets heated so they decide to have a poetry rap/slam contest to determine the winner. Word play as sword play and an insult competition... like a Dean Martin Roast among poets. Here is what it might have looked like if it happened today in England. Note: Both Harry Baker and Soweto are Oxford students. Harry Baker is also a Christian and does Ted Talks. Some...

Rev. Robert Sirico: The Church’s ‘anemic response’ to COVID-19 hurts everyone The political response to COVID-19 has created an economic downturn unprecedented since the Great Depression. However, the Church’s “anemic response” has deprived the poor of spiritual solace and the Church of its vocation and vitality, said Acton Institute President and Co-founder Rev. Robert Sirico on a nationally syndicated radio interview.“If we sit back and look at the big message of the Church, it’s, ‘We’re closed. We’ll let you know when we open again.’ And I think that’s very dangerous,” Rev. Sirico said on the June 26 episode of The...

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 20, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Are you now, or were you ever, willing to attend a same-sex “wedding”? That seems to be the question lighting up the Republican presidential field, as GOP hopefuls who may one day have their finger on the nuclear button are asked the query over and over again.So far, the Republican hopefuls' answers are yes, no, I have (sort of), and...unclear.The media began by asking Florida's U.S. senator, Marco Rubio, if he would attend a homosexual 'wedding' ceremony, especially if he were invited by a relative or close friend.“If there’s somebody that I love...

A publication of the international socialist movement has explicitly stated it is promoting abortion and gay “marriage” as part of a multi-pronged campaign to “replace global capitalism” with Marxism. The admission came on Monday in an article entitled "How Can We Change the World?" by Todd Chretien in the Socialist Worker, which is published by the International Socialist Organization. The ISO proudly “stands in the tradition of revolutionary socialists Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, and Leon Trotsky.” The article was putatively about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. However, it hailed the socially liberal views of...

In a remarkable moment in last night's edition of The Ed Show on MSNBC, Ed Schultz got carried away and made a small government case against mandatory health care insurance. Perhaps channeling his former line of work as a Rush Limbaugh impersonator on the Right, Schultz said: The bill makes the insurance mandatory for all Americans. This mandate is one of the most unAmerican things, I think, the Senate has ever done. This isn't the same thing as mandating for car insurance or home owners insurance. I mean, there's nothing more personal than your body...Forcing people, by the way,...

Does Ed Schultz read my blog? I have long held MSNBC host Ed Schultz's erratic behavior stems from his political and professional status, envy at those whose careers surpass his. As David Swindle noted in the roll-out of this series, "Ben’s posts on Schultz are collected and all future articles will be collected here under the series name 'Genius Envy' a play on a well-known Freudian term." I came up with the name "Genius Envy" to highlight the way much of Ed's incendiary rhetoric seems to be rooted in his offended masculinity. I was gratified to see my thesis...

This series of posts is dedicated to the proposition that 90 percent of everything Ed Schultz, the host of MSNBC's The Ed Show, does is motivated by envy (and the same could be said of the Left). Schultz has raged against his more successful colleagues Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Glenn Beck. The folks at Politico give an indication of who Schultz's next target may be: Bret Baier of Fox News' "Special Report." A side-by-side comparison with Ed's direct competitor is damning:

Suggesting someone beat up a U.S. senator is not "hate speech" according to this man. Three full days after he wondered why no one had punched Joe Lieberman ("Traitor Joe," as he calls him), Ed Schultz of MSNBC's The Ed Show insisted no one on the Left had ever defamed the distinguished senator from Connecticut. Last night, Schultz asked former Republican Congressman Ernest Istook about Democratic infighting over the health care bill. Istook, now a Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, replied things had gotten so bad that "if conservatives said the things about liberals that liberals are saying...

Sen. Joe Lieberman opposes the current health care bill, so MSNBC's Ed Schultz has a solution: punch him out. On last night's episode of The Ed Show, Schultz asked Democratic Senator and way-too-frequent guest Sherrod Brown, D-OH: What is the feeling towards Joe Lieberman? I mean how do you, you know, go into a room without punching the guy out after what he's done to the progressive movement in this country? I mean, that's how I think a lot of people feel. What attitude, what attitude — is he still just a beloved, friendly, fraternal senator, or is he...

MSNBC is at it again, editing its transcripts to make Ed Schultz sound less crazy. Leftists complained -- falsely -- for years that Republicans questioned the patriotism of anyone who opposed them. On Monday's edition of The Ed Show, Schultz called Joe Liberman a "traitor" yet again -- so MSNBC changed this into a jovial reference to a grocer's chain. Schultz said Lieberman was one of the senators "cheating on the American public" by opposing a public option. After accusing the senator of economic adultery and playing a video clip of Lieberman saying the bill will not pass, Schultz...

The Left's most recent blood libel has been dispelled. The Associated Press reported today a Kentucky census worker found killed in a national park committed suicide. On September 12th, 51-year-old Bill Sparkman was found naked with a rope around his neck in Daniel Boone National Park, bound with duct tape, with the word "Fed" scrawled on his body. (He was not "hanging," as the media often reported.) The Left, at a loss over the town hall uprisings across the country, found another useful corpse and blamed conservatives for the murder. But according to the AP: Authorities said Sparkman alone...

Lou Dobbs has come closer to death in the last year than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Barack Obama is not the only one giving a shout out. On Monday’s edition of MSNBC's The Ed Show Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel hailed the godfather of community organizers: The great community organizer Saul Alinsky talked about organized people vs. organized money. We are seeing the mugging of the common good everyday. How can the Left continue to claim anyone- seeking to understand its motives or modus by reading Alinsky’s writings is paranoid?The show also represented the continuation of Katrina's self-contradiction tour on the issue of the filibuster. Now that Republicans are filibustering socialism, she is in...

Well, someone is certainly "obsessed." Last night, Ed Schultz on MSNBC's The Ed Show, fell into a trap set by the object of his Genius Envy, Rush Limbaugh. In his Psycho Talk segment, Ed mocked Rush for saying on his radio program last Friday: The media tweak of the day: Hitler put people in jail to lower the unemployment numbers. Another media tweak: that's how Dachau started. Ed either missed the words "media tweak," or was too busy cribbing from the George Soros-funded Media Matters‘ earlier hit piece on the show. Everyone else took his words as a tip-off...

The left-wing media wouldn't know a class act if he anchored for them for 30 years. Lou Dobbs's departure from CNN has turned into a cause for celebration -- at CNN. Network president Jonathan Klein dismissively called Lou's program "advocacy journalism" in an otherwise respectful tribute. But Politico.com quotes an anonymous network source:"I think it's safe to say that he won't be missed among the rank-and-file employees at the network," said a CNN staffer. "The Dobbs show has existed in its own little universe for the last several years, in many ways cut off from the rest of the editorial...

Some readers have asked if -- with the release of topless photos and now a solo sex tape -- conservatives, or Christians, or conservative Christians, should consider former Miss California Carrie Prejean a role model. The question strikes me as off-base, a hybrid of the cult of hero worship and the 24/7 media's information overload. The underlying issue in the Prejean case is not -- or at least, it has never been for me -- one of the pageant (near-)winner’s character or admirability. It's a simple matter of the Left's aggressive politicization of every aspect of life, including beauty...

Deep down, it's all about Ed. What's more pathetic than a less talented individual taunting a more successful person with his achievements? If that man flaunts an award that isn't exactly his. Last night on MSNBC's The Ed Show, Ed Schultz mocked a two-year-old clip of Bill O'Reilly in his “Psycho Talk” segment. Bill’s guest happened to be Ed Schultz, then a nationally syndicated radio talk shot host. In an example of genius envy, Ed pathetically blew up the tiny shot of a Peabody Award situated on a shelf behind him during the interview, circled it like a coach...

It looks like the leftist partisans who violated Joe the Plumber’s privacy, rifled through Linda Tripp’s confidential records, and spent weeks literally navel-gazing at Bristol Palin’s real and imagined pregnancies have hit a new low: leaking an underage pornographic video to smear Carrie Prejean. By now, the media have ensured millions of people who never learned the names of Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett, or Anita Dunn have heard that the former Miss California once made a solo sex tape -- or, as the seasoned gatekeepers of reliable journalism often report it, simply a “sex tape.” Prejean told Sean Hannity...

Now Lou Dobbs really is Mr. Independent.The last of CNN's original news anchors just announced he is leaving the network he joined in 1980, and this evening's episode of "Lou Dobbs Tonight" will be its final broadcast. Dobbs revealed his motives in a straight-forward statement at the program's opening: Over the past six months, it's become increasingly clear that strong winds of change have begun buffeting this country and affecting all of us. And some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem...

Ken Hamidi, after a bloody SEIU brawl As the nation waits to see when or if SEIU members involved in a physical confrontation with Kenneth Gladney outside a health care town hall meeting in August will ever be prosecuted, another allegation of union violence has cropped up. A California state worker went to the hospital bloodied and bruised Thursday night as a result of a beating administered in an SEIU union hall. Kourosh Kenneth "Ken" Hamidi says four or five members of the Service Employees International Union local 1000 assaulted him as he entered their Sacramento meeting with a...