Free Republic

“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” so says former Vice President Dick Cheney in a campaign ad released Thursday for his daughter’s floundering re-election campaign.Cheney bases this assessment on his claim that Trump is a liar. According to Cheney, Trump is “a coward” and not a “real man” because “a real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters.”Would a “real man” lie to the world? That’s what Dick Cheney did.As Donald Trump famously stated in 2016 during the Republican debate right before the South Carolina...

Steven Bing, Peter Benjamin Lewis, George Soros It is late in the day, but there is still time to ask the Kerry-Edwards campaign and the Democratic National Committee about their financing sources. Equally important to ask is just what do these ridiculously rich and strange people expect to get for their millions of dollars. Let's look at three of Kerry's friends, probably responsible for at least $30 million in donations. Steven Bing: Our Victorian ancestors had the right words to describe Bing. He would have been known as "a cad and a bounder," while today he is dismissed as a...

The Writers Guild of America says it has instructed its 13,000 members to fire their talent agents at midnight on Saturday, unless their agents sign a new "Code of Conduct" agreement that promises they will do away with packaging fees and their stakes in production companies. The bottom line: Most of the Guild's writers agree with the Code of Conduct, but most of the agents who represent them don't. The hope was that the 2 sides would come up with a compromise before the current negotiations expired on Friday. Without a deal, Hollywood is stuck in a messy limbo that...

Joseph Bologna, an actor, playwright and screenwriter who was so memorable as the egotistical King Kaiser in the 1982 comedy classic My Favorite Year, has died. He was 82. Bologna died Sunday morning at City of Hope hospital in Duarte, Calif. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer three years ago, said his wife of 52 years, actress and screenwriter Renee Taylor. Bologna received an Oscar nomination for adapted screenplay, shared with his wife and David Zelag Goodman, for his work on Lovers and Other Strangers (1970). The couple had first written it for Broadway in a 1968 production directed by...

Harlan Ellison is still an angry young man, except he'll be 81 on May 27. He has used this anger, fueled by childhood anti-Semitism, throughout his extraordinary career as a writer of speculative fiction. This year saw the publication of his 116th and 117th (so far) books: The Top of the Volcano, a collection of his awardwinning short stories, and a graphic novelization of his original script for "The City on the Edge of Forever," widely considered the best Star Trek episode ever written. Although Ellison's hundreds of published stories contain a wealth of Jewish characters, his most complex creation...

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — A writer desperate to get a movie script read suffered the ultimate rejection Thursday when police blew up a briefcase he said contained the screenplay after an agent refused to read it, police said. The bizarre story was set in Beverly Hills, where a man visited the office of a literary agent and left behind a briefcase that he said contained a computer, police Sgt. Brad Cornelius said. The man left instructions for it to be delivered to someone at the business, who told another person in the office, "This guy's been kind of pestering me...

He’ll still sit court side at Los Angeles Lakers’ games, but Hollywood legend Jack Nicholson has quietly retired from the movie business, RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned. The 76-year-old icon has no plans to appear in films again after a career spanning five decades. “Jack has — without fanfare — retired,” a well-placed Hollywood film insider confirmed to Radar.

NEW YORK – Budd Schulberg, the son of a studio boss who defined the Hollywood hustle with his novel "What Makes Sammy Run?" and later proved himself a player with his Oscar-winning screenplay for "On the Waterfront," died Wednesday at age 95. His wife, Betsy Schulberg, said he died of natural causes at his home in Westhampton Beach, on Long Island. She said he was taken to a nearby medical center, where doctors unsuccessfully tried to revive him. "He was very loved and cherished," she said. "On the Waterfront," directed by Elia Kazan and filmed in Hoboken, N.J., was released...

I pick up a copy of the NY Times yesterday, and read an arts brief with the headline "Diversity Still a Problem For Hollywood Writers." ... A few minutes after reading this story, I get a call from my TV agent at ICM, telling me that the new management of Lifetime is not very interested in The Dirty Girls Social Club TV show. That, in fact, they wanted to "kill" it immediately, but that they are willing to listen to a re-pitch. That means that even though Lifetime owns the option for now (meaning I can't do anything with it)...

Article published: Jun 28, 2005http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050628/REVIEWS/50606007/1023 http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050628/REVIEWS/50606007/1023&template=printart War of the WorldsCreaking Havoc Release Date: 2005 Ebert Rating: **    By Roger Ebert / Jun 29, 2005 "War of the Worlds" is a big, clunky movie containing some sensational sights but lacking the zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg. It proceeds with the lead-footed deliberation of its 1950s predecessors to give us an alien invasion that is malevolent, destructive and, from the alien point of view, pointless. They've "been planning this for a million years" and have gone to a lot of trouble to invade Earth for no...

War of the Worlds screenwriter David Koepp admits political propaganda in movie KABC talk show host Larry Elder said today that David Koepp, one of the two War of the Worlds screenwriters, stated in a recent interview for a Canadian publication that the Martians slaughtering the humans are a metaphor for the adventurism of the American military forces, i.e., for the Bush Administration's war on terrorism, and the human civilians are a metaphor for the Iraqi people. He stated that this is going back to the original H. G. Wells book upon which the movie is loosely based. However, the...

SWEET SIXTEEN / ***1/2 (R) June 13, 2003 BY ROGER EBERT "Sweet Sixteen" is set in Scotland and acted in a local accent so tricky it needs to be subtitled. Yet it could take place in any American city, in this time of heartless cuts in social services and the abandonment of the poor. I saw the movie at about the same time our lawmakers eliminated the pitiful $400 per child tax credit, while transferring billions from the working class to the richest 1 percent. Such shameless greed makes me angry, and a movie like "Sweet Sixteen" provides a social...