Free Republic

December 27, 2014 KNEEPAD ALERT: FOODIE OBAMA IS HIPPEST PRESIDENT EVER! By John Hinderaker By any reasonable standard, the Obama administration has been a train wreck. But that doesn’t prevent our state media from fawning over him as though he were the reincarnation of George Washington. Here, it is CBS, telling us that Obama is a “foodie” who eats at the trendiest restaurants, is “far hipper” than other presidents; in particular, “so much cooler than President Bush.” Actually, if you watch to the end you will get a clue as to why President Bush generally chose not to dine out...

If you’re in New York right now trying to get somewhere, good luck. The streets are full of idiots screaming “I Can’t Breathe”. There are lots of signs about white supremacism, imperialism and justice. Justice being the thing that happens when a court does something, not when a lynch mob demands something. Hipsters are lying down stiffly in Grand Central Station. NYPD cops are collecting overtime thanks to the morons screaming at them. The Revolutionary Communist Party and its splinter group, the Really Revolutionary Communist Party are out in force with signs. It’s hard to pick the ten biggest idiots...

It's a video, so no body of thread. #BlackLivesMatter ? Not to white hipsters of course when African Christians are being mass murdered by Muslims.

A caffeinated gang of annoying white hipsters in Seattle did their level best to ruin Christmas this year by surrounding the city’s annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, chanting and making a bunch of little kids cry. The young, well-heeled, largely white crowd of demonstrators was protesting in response to Monday’s announcement that a grand jury in Missouri had refused to indict white police officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black male, on Aug. 9. Friday’s incident in Seattle occurred at Westlake Mall, according to local NBC affiliate KING-TV. Westlake Mall is some 2,119 miles away from Ferguson, Mo.,...

Ditch Brooklyn, millennials. The real place to be is Des Moines, a city with a blossoming culture scene, thriving start-ups, and urban beauty.(VIDEO-AT-LINK) DES MOINES, Iowa—This is too nice a place to spawn a war cry. But if the city had one, it would be the sentiment heard across a downtown populated by baristas, tech start-up founders, musicians, and nonprofit professionals alike: "It's Des Moines against the world." Young people here know what you think of this city. It doesn't need repeating. But ambitious minds are in the process of building a new Des Moines, a tech hub in Silicon...

A study from the Texas Association of Realtors shows international buyers pumped more than $11 billion dollars into the Texas economy between March of 2013 and 2014. One Austin Realtor says people from outside of the U.S. are looking for a secure investment. “An international client can come into the Austin market, get a great value for what they’re buying and almost be insured that there’s profitability in that and that’s unique to the world as a whole,” said J Kuper, owner of Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty.

How do we make sense of the fact that America’s most progressive cities, the ones that cherish diversity, are losing African Americans? And that the most conservative places are doing the opposite? Between 2000 and 2010, cities like Austin, Chicago, Washington D.C., San Francisco—places that vote majority Democrat, consider themselves socially and culturally progressive, and boast racial diversity—all lost unprecedented numbers of African Americans. San Francisco, for instance, saw a staggering 20.4 percent loss in its African American population between 2000 and 2010. Chicago and Washington D.C. also experienced double-digit losses. During that same decade, the only three major cities...

If you of a certain age, you may remember the great American heyday of kids’ breakfast cereals. It was a glorious time — a time when supermarket aisles as long as basketball courts teemed with boxes of sugary goodness and when we were all free to buy Count Chocula cereal every day of the year.Those days are long gone. Still, since 2010, Americans have at least been able to look forward to seasonal distribution of Count Chocula cereal — and Franken-Berry, and Boo-Berry — during the September and October run-up to Halloween.Now, even this tradition is imperiled because some hipster...

Is Burning Man a huge art installation, a social experiment, or simply a giant rave? The people who get behind the first two concepts are the ones who believe strongly in bringing their children to the Burn. They pack up their Suburbans, slather on sunscreen, and outfit their kids in tiny wildebeest costumes. “This will always be a family-friendly event,” Burning Man employee Jim Graham stated on NPR recently. Based on their principle of radical inclusion, Burning Man officials “enthusiastically welcome children of all ages to Black Rock City.” Since the festival is an experiment in freedom and creative expression,...

Urban Outfitters Pinpoints Hairroin Salons With Free Hypodermic Pens Urban Outfitters has teamed up with the NYC Hairroin Salon in glamorizing drug use at a time when heroin has devastated the city. Pinpointing Hairroin Salons in their stores that give away free hypodermic needle pens, it’s clear that Urban Outfitters has failed to learn their lesson. After previously pulling shot glasses designed as prescription medication bottles from its shelves after an uproar, the teen-focused store has actually teamed up with a hair salon with the name Hairroin in its latest New York City location. The so-called cutting edge salon glamorizes...

Corporate America can learn a lot from a chicken burrito. As many companies struggle to boost prices without alienating consumers, they may want to study Mexican-food chain Chipotle, which has managed to do both. Companies including Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc (CMG.N), Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and PepsiCo (PEP.N) have shown they're able to take advantage of quality, trendiness, and, in the case of Pepsi's snack foods, market dominance, to maintain high prices or even raise them faster than the inflation rate, now at about 2.1 percent in the U.S. Chipotle raised chicken-dish prices by 5 percent this year after leaving them...

While New Yorkers like to think of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as the epicenter of the American hipster, it's hardly the only place in the country where vegan, handlebar-mustachioed trustafarians ride their single-speeds to nanobreweries inside organic farm-to-table restaurants inside abandoned artist lofts tricked out with rooftop gardens where they grow only kale. Pretty much any US city, short of maybe Birmingham, AL, has some elements/neighborhoods of hipster culture at this point (you really just need a fixed-gear bike shop, right?), but these 10 cities are vying for the title of hipster-est. Behind Williamsburg, of course....

The feminist film critics can exhale now. Someone has finally concocted their dream movie: an "abortion comedy." Because apparently nothing sounds funnier than an unplanned one-night stand and a courageous destruction of God's most beautiful and most innocent creation. It's called "Obvious Child." Feminist lingo sells this monstrosity. Former "Saturday Night Live" cast member Jenny Slate plays Donna Stern, a standup comedian who "is forced to face the uncomfortable realities of independent womanhood for the first time." A "drunken hookup -- and epic lapse in prophylactic judgment -- turns out to be the beginning of a hilarious and totally unplanned...

It’s interesting that the director of the richest oeuvre of black films in the history of the medium doesn’t understand what the Civil Rights revolution was for. In his expletive-laced comments about the gentrification of Fort Greene during an interview at the Pratt Institute, Spike Lee seemed to think that what we Overcame for was to be grouchy bigots. Basically, black people are getting paid more money than they’ve ever seen in their lives for their houses, and a once sketchy neighborhood is now quiet and pleasant. And this is a bad thing… why? Lee seems to think it’s somehow...

It’s shear madness! Brooklyn’s hipster beard craze has grown so popular that men in New York are rushing to doctors for “facial hair transplants” — surgery that helps make beards look thicker and less patchy, sources said. Stubble-challenged guys are forking over up to $8,500 for the beard-boosting procedure, which has spiked in popularity in recent months, plastic surgeons told The Post. “Brooklyn is probably the nucleus of the trend, it’s the hipster ‘look’ guys want. If you have a spotty beard, and you let it grow out, it looks sloppy, ” said Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, a Midtown-based plastic surgeon....

The tech-bus protest isn’t just a San Francisco thing anymore. This week, the anti-gentrification act of blocking a private shuttle full of high-paid tech workers spread to Seattle, where a handful of buses carrying Microsoft employees were stopped by demonstrators. The protest was chronicled by local Tweeps and community websites.

"In the John Waters-esque sector of northwest Baltimore -- equal parts kitschy, sketchy, artsy and weird -- Gerry Mak and Sarah Magida sauntered through a small ethnic market stocked with Japanese eggplant, mint chutney and fresh turmeric. After gathering ingredients for that evening's dinner, they walked to the cash register and awaited their moments of truth." Those are two "hipsters", and the punchline is that they pay for their foodie porn with foodie stamps, which sounds like it should be a terrible thing, except it's in Salon.com, which means they're going to try and tell you how it's a good...

Hall & Oates has never won a Grammy but the No. 1 selling duo of all time has won something else: hipster respect. Putting aside those shoulder pads for a moment, Daryl Hall and John Oates looked like hand-picked opposites: The lanky blond Hall called himself the "more flamboyant" one, while the shorter dark-haired Oates — with his distinctive 'stache — embraced his role as "worker bee." But their union came from no design, except by the music gods: The Temple University students met in an elevator, both trying to duck a gunfight that had broken out at the Adelphi...

Here’s another reason to be annoyed at hipsters: They’re driving up the price of beer. A recent study has found that the price of low- and mid-range beers has been climbing at U.S. bars and restaurants. And the guy who oversaw the study for Massachusetts-based research firm Restaurant Sciences said he thinks the popularity of Pabst Blue Ribbon could be the cause. “While all the attention has been on craft beers, the price of mainstay brands in the mid-price tier have risen more dramatically,” Research Sciences President Chuck Ellis said. …

Where are today’s rebels?  Where is the counterculture? Ear-budded hipsters, with their sheep-like devotion to Apple products and the Obama administration, sit in on the April 20 “Day of Pot” in Denver, content and satisfied with their free birth control and legalized maryjane.  Meanwhile SWAT teams descend on Watertown, Massachusetts, trampling Fourth Amendment rights in search of a “person of interest”– while a Saudi National is quietly sent back to his homeland.These hipsters champion the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado while the war on Big Tobacco rages on.  Since 1997 the FDA inherited control over the $365.5 billion global...