Free Republic

Floyd Corkins, a volunteer for the last six months at the D.C. Center for the LGBT Community, marched into the Family Research Center with a gun and serious ammunition, denounced FRC's policy positions and shot a security guard in the arm before being subdued. Another hate crime, but this time against, perhaps, the pre-eminent pro-family organization in America. CBS gave the story 20 seconds. NBC spent 17 seconds. Imagine a volunteer for the Family Research Council marching into some gay group's headquarters with a gun, and after shouting his opposition to the homosexual agenda, opened fire and wounded a guard...

I admire the many faith-based organizations in this country that provide services to those who are homeless or hungry or substance abusers or unwed moms or domestic violence victims or ex-convicts or others who need loving-kindness. But I especially appreciate the work of Christian missionaries. Those who have accepted the Great Commission set forth by Christ before he ascended to the Father: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.” Jack...

Much like us, PBS is pretty obsessed with all things British right now. At the Television Critics Association summer press tour yesterday, the public broadcaster held a well-received panel, during which the network excitedly praised all the UK-created programming that is giving them its best numbers in years. Masterpiece is up 107 percent from three years ago! Downton Abbey — the ITV-produced smash that will return for a third season early next year — is of course leading the charge on that, but it is not the only popular import. ......................................................... This isn't BBC America, this is our public television!...

With the first heart-breaking headlines out of Colorado, gun-rights advocates just had to know that leftist lecturers in our media would mount their soap boxes and trash this country for its gun culture and trash the National Rifle Association as an "enabler of death -- paranoid, delusional, and as venomous as a scorpion." But it's additionally sad that the soap box in this case is paid for by taxpayers -- in the form of taxpayer support for every PBS station that spews out this leftist loathing. On his show Moyers & Company, 78-year-old PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers reached back to...

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) -- PBS President Paula Kerger said Saturday she's disappointed public TV's federal funding again is under attack by lawmakers. The move is ironic, she said, given the impressive number of Emmy Award nominations earned last week by PBS programs, including the popular drama "Downton Abbey." PBS received 58 nods, second only to HBO and CBS. Public television gets 15 percent of its money from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with the rest largely contributed by viewers, Kerger told a meeting of the Television Critics Association. But some stations would lose more than half their...

Liberal media's love for higher taxes is a thing of legends. On Inside Washington Friday, PBS's perpetually pandering pundit Mark Shields told viewers that since 1991, "21 years, Republicans have not voted for a single broad-based tax increase, and that’s become the theology of the party, the ideology of the party, the definition of the party, and that is irresponsible" (video follows with transcript and commentary): Mark Shields: Republicans Haven't Raised Taxes in 21 Years 'And That Is Irresponsible' CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Obama has to defend the policies he’s instituted. Five trillion dollars of debt added leaving us with a 1.7...

Tonight on the PBS NewsHour, our Health Unit takes a look at what's becoming a controversial part of the federal health care reform law: the expansion of Medicaid to cover up to 17 million uninsured adults. While the individual mandate has been the headline-grabber since last week's decision, expansion of the shared federal-state program that provides health care to poor people is also a major component of the Affordable Care Act. It was supposed to bring millions of low income Americans into the program, including childless adults who right now are not covered in most states. But Republican governors in...

When most people think of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s education programs, they remember the gentle Mr. Rogers welcoming children to his home, or documentaries offering exciting encounters with whales and other exotic creatures. These shows still exist. But CPB today produces lessons that glorify the Black Panthers and riots and protests of the 1960s, present rocker Patti Smith as a “patriot” for singing songs that condemn President George W. Bush, vilify Wal-Mart, and sanctify environmentalist Rachel Carson. Although their educational materials claim to be objective, the truth is that their unrelenting ideological slant that promotes the politics of protest...

Brian Maloney at Radio Equalizer found that on his Sunday public-radio show with socialist professor Cornel West, PBS host Tavis Smiley thumped Obama chief of staff Valerie Jarrett for an apparently rude speech at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention in New Orleans on  June 23. She came to describe Obama's "genuine love for black people," which Smiley thought was ridiculous since Obama did not show up. Several NABJ vets did complain to blogger Richard Prince about Jarrett reading a list of Obama accomplishments: "Why not just send a [campaign] video?" one said. "That was out of line," said...

Elmo imposter hassles tourists for money and gets booted from Central Park Zoo Man dressed up as furry Sesame Street Muppet gets taken away on ambulance An Elmo imposter who has hassled tourists for money for years was taken away from Central Park in an ambulance Sunday afternoon after cops got a call about an emotionally disturbed person. “Elmo” began yelling obscenities when security guards booted him from Central Park Zoo for pestering tourists to pay him to pose for pictures. An emotionally disturbed man dressed as Elmo is taken away by ambulance after hassling tourists for money and shouting...

Robert Lepage's acclaimed new production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, will air on Great Performances at the Met, September 11-14 in primetime each night on PBS stations (check local listings), as a major television event. The operas - Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung - will be preceded on Monday, September 10 at 9 p.m. (check local listings) by the airing of award-winning filmmaker Susan Froemke's documentary Wagner's Dream, which chronicles the backstage story of the creation of this ambitious new staging. This is only the third time a complete Ring cycle has been aired on PBS. In...

Guantanamo Bay Prisoners Were Tortured With Sesame Street Guantanamo Bay prisoners were reportedly tortured with the sounds of children’s Sesame Street songs, in an attempt to get them to talk. Al Jazeera reports that Thomas Keenan, a human rights researcher, explained that: “Prisoners were forced to put on headphones. They were attached to chairs, headphones were attached to their heads, and they were left alone just with the music for very long periods of time. Sometimes hours, even days on end, listening to repeated loud music.” Christopher Cerf, the award-winning composer of the songs used to torture prisoners at both...

(CNSNews.com) – Two conservative lawmakers are teaming up to urge appropriation leaders in the House and Senate to defund the Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB), which is asking for $445 million advance for FY 2015. This week, Sen. Jim Demint (R-S.C.) and Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) each sent letters to the heads of the appropriation committees, saying defunding the entity “should be one of the easiest decisions to make,” while searching for cuts in a government $15 trillion in debt. “CPB’s requested appropriation represents no reduction from its prior year appropriation level,” Demint and Lamborn write. “While so many Americans...

A PBS 'American Masters' documentary investigates the mystique of the elusive 'Tonight Show' host, 20 years after he left TV. Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer all made their best pitch but were turned down. Johnny Carson, the man who changed forever the world of late-night talk, wasn't talking. The network news powerhouses had separately attempted to secure interviews with Carson to get him to speak about his life and his place as one of the most influential figures in TV history. But from his 1992 retirement after 30 years on"The Tonight Show"until his death in 2005 at age...

DeMint Takes Aim at Axing CPB One More Time Argues that the $445 million in advance appropriation that CPB is seeking for 2015 is an "enormous" sum Sen. James DeMint (R-S.C.) is collecting colleague signatures on a letter asking Senate Appropriations Committee and Education Subcommittee leaders to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). That is according to a source familiar with the letter, as well as a copy posted online by a group critical of CPB. DeMint is a veteran critic of CPB funding, fighting to defund the organization in the last Congress and penning op eds in opposition...

Why do US TaxPayers finance Arab lobby [on WLRN]?J. Zogby is propagating on (PBS') WLRN with his so-called: Viewpoint aaiusa[DOT]org, pushing his "Palestiniansm" of (self-inflicted) "victimhood" upon the American people. No matter on what subject he tries to begin with, he always makes a poisonous "turn" to his obsessive Arab anti-Israel bashing.For eaxmple, tpday's title was about [massacres of oppressive dictatorship] Syria... yet, he had to bring up Netanyahu...My question is, why do you and I have to give money to an Arab lobby before giving to an: Irish, Italian, etc. lobby?---http://wlrn.org/inside/help/Florida branch:305-995-1717. e-mail: readytolearn@wlrn.orgSouth FloridaWLRN Public Radio and Television 172...

(Reuters) - A divided U.S. appeals court struck down a federal ban on political advertising on public TV and radio stations, a decision that could open the public airwaves to a heavy dose of campaign ads leading up to the November elections. By a 2-1 vote, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the Federal Communications Commission violated the First Amendment's free speech clause by blocking public broadcasters from running political and public issue ads. The court said the ban was over broad and that lifting it would not threaten to undermine the...

[snip] For one serendipitous weekend he was Mr. Rogers’s actual neighbor. [snip] He asked about the young man’s job at MTV and got him talking about his parents’ divorce two decades earlier...an MTV senior vice president with a shrine of Mr. Rogers mementos above his desk...a self-described “PBS mind in a jump-cut, sound-bit MTV world.” Mr. Rogers listened, then offered, “I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex,”... [snip] He took that suggestion to heart after Mr. Rogers’s death in 2003, teaming up with his brother, Christofer, 43, a television editor, to...

Whether or not it was the bombshell many hoped it would be, footage emerged last week — most notably on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” – from a 1991 speech by then-Harvard Law School student Barack Obama, asking an audience to “open [their] hearts and minds” to the controversial Harvard professor and Derrick Bell. That footage included an embrace between Bell and Obama in a portion that was cut out of the PBS “Frontline” documentary called “The Choice 2008.” Some have made the case that that editing was proof of a media campaign to protect then-Democratic presidential nominee Obama and hide...

Public Television touted the Bill Clinton documentary as a long-awaited warts-and-all piece. USA Today called the two-parter a "solid and even-handed account ... of a remarkably skillful politician with an immense intellect." While calling it "tedious and predictable," The Washington Post described the documentary as "honest." In the first hour, the documentary stumbled out of the gate. If it were a racehorse, they'd have to put it down. The whopper we get hit with right away and again and again is this: Clinton inherited a recession -- not an economy that long ago came out of a recession. Never mind...