Free Republic

America Prepares to Get Angry at Jon StewartBy Elspeth Reeve | October 26, 2010 11:38am Jon Stewart has begun his tour of the nation's capital with a taping of The Daily Show before a "very, very policy-oriented" audience in Washington, The Washington Post's Dan Zak reports. ("We're not used to people nodding, like, 'Oh, I worked on that bill,' " Stewart said.) Stewart and Stephen Colbert's many young fans are packing their bags and arranging for sofas to crash on as they ready to head into D.C. for the comedians' pro-satire Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. But not everyone's...

(RollingStone.com) -- Jon Stewart has revealed the location of his Rally to Restore Sanity (and Stephen Colbert's March to Keep Fear Alive): The east end of Washington D.C.'s National Mall, between 3rd and 7th Streets.

Kerry: Yacht story 'our fault' By: Andy Barr July 30, 2010 07:50 AM EDT Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said Thursday that he and his office mishandled the politics surrounding tax questions on his new $7 million yacht. “I don’t think I dealt with it fast enough, effectively enough. There’s nobody to blame but myself for that,” Kerry said Thursday in an interview with the Boston Globe. Throughout the weeklong story, Kerry has insisted that he will pay whatever state taxes are owed – estimated to be $500,000 – on the yacht. Kerry has so far not had to pay Massachusetts’...

7 anti-Apple cliches that need to dieby Chris Rawson (RSS feed) on May 29th 2010 at 8:30PMPC vs. Mac flamewars are older than the web itself, but it seems like the more popular/successful Apple gets, the more heated the argument gets on both sides. Almost any debate about the relative merits of one platform or another is guaranteed to degenerate into an all-out shouting match. In the midst of all the fighting and name calling, the oddest thing happens: almost every time, you'll see a lot of the same points being raised by both sides again and again. Some of...

Earlier today I was driving to Google for a product briefing, minding my own business, talking on my Google phone with Google PR and trying to figure out what Google building I was supposed to be driving to. I stopped at a crosswalk for a bunch of Googlers to pass. And this guy, who’s wearing a Google employee badge, decides it’s time to take a stand against cell phone use in cars. So he stands in front of my car and won’t move. That’s right, it was his Tiananmen Square moment. Cars behind me start swerving. I back up to...

I never will forget meeting former North Carolina State Senator Hugh Webster my senior year of high school. He came to my school and had lunch with the seniors. As he sat down beside me, I asked him to tell me what he most loved and hated about being in Raleigh. I don't remember what he most loved, but I'll never forget what he most hated. In the words of Mr. Webster, "I don't deal well with incompetent people." At that point, I knew Mr. Webster and I were kindred spirits. I too don't deal well with incompetent people. As...

After lying to the American people today about American corporations using "illegal" tax havens and bashing corporate America in general, how much do you think corporate America would pay today to see B.O.'s real long-form birth certificate?

Writing about that recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll on the number of books Americans read in the previous year, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra J. Sauders pounced on how AP reported the findings – specifically, that "liberals read more books than conservatives": The poll found that among people polled who read at least one book in the last year, liberals read nine books and conservatives read eight.When I called Michael Gross, associate vice president of Ipsos public affairs, to find out more about the Ipsos poll, he told me the one-book difference "is within the margin of error, it's not a...

I hate Macs Charlie Brooker Monday February 5, 2007 The Guardian Unless you have been walking around with your eyes closed, and your head encased in a block of concrete, with a blindfold tied round it, in the dark - unless you have been doing that, you surely can't have failed to notice the current Apple Macintosh campaign starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, which has taken over magazines, newspapers and the internet in a series of brutal coordinated attacks aimed at causing massive loss of resistance. While I don't have anything against shameless promotion per se (after all, within...

I just turned on the Today Show and saw Meredith Viera repeatedly interrupting the First Lady -- it was incredibly rude and disrespectful -- I couldn't bear to watch it, so I turned it off after about 1 minute. Whatever happened to respect and civility in this country? Is this what the mainstream media thinks we want to watch?

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Greens snub eco-cars Sweden has an international reputation for being environmentally progressive. With two weeks to go before elections, it turns our only a very small percentage of those politicians registered at Parliament actually have an eco-friendly car – and Green Party politicians are most likely to have a polluting old car. Although ethanol, biogas and hybrids have been big sellers in Sweden the past few years, of the party leaders only Centre leader Maud Olofsson owns one. Many cars produced in the 80s and before lacked catalytic converters, a small device used to reduce the toxicity of emissions from...

Hatin’ on Hillary: N.H. Dems lambaste Clinton By Brett Arends Boston Herald Business Columnist Monday, August 7, 2006 - Updated: 02:56 AM EST MANCHESTER, N.H. - Dick Bennett has been polling New Hampshire voters for 30 years. And he’s never seen anything like it. “Lying b**** . . . shrew . . . Machiavellian . . . evil, power-mad witch . . . the ultimate self-serving politician.” No prizes for guessing which presidential front-runner drew these remarks in focus groups. But these weren’t Republicans talking about Hillary Clinton. They weren’t even independents. These were ordinary, grass-roots Democrats. People who identified...

What is it with the halos following the hybrids? There you are, in a group of folks having a perfectly rational discussion, then one person announces she's looking into getting a hybrid car - that environmentally correct model that uses both gas and electricity - and everyone sort of says, "wow, really?" and "good for you!" as if the person has just scored eternally usable brownie points for helping to rescue the planet. The cars are given all sorts of special status. Their buyers get tax breaks. In many parts of the country, they get a free pass to drive...

On Comedy Central's South Park cartoon last night, the world's environment is threatened by the impossible smugness of those driving hybrid cars. (The smug clouds are biggest over San Francisco, naturally.) The danger passes only when the people of South Park mash their hybrid cars into little aluminum cubes. And, just for fun, the animators named their hybrid the "Pious," a knock on Toyota's "Prius." Funny enough, but then this morning on NBC's Today, reporter Tom Costello was lauding the wonders of efficient, low emission hybrid cars (as opposed to those awful SUVs) when he showcased a smug driver who...

DEAR ABBY: I am a female who is almost 38 years old. Most of my adult life has been spent in school, working or traveling. It is only in the last two years that I have met someone and settled down somewhat -- although we are not married. We are both artists, so much of our time is filled doing the things that we love and believe in. Neither of us feels a giant void in our relationship or our lives that needs to be filled by a baby. In the past year or so, several of my co-workers and...

In Sunday's Observer, Robert McCrum observed: "Today, by some margin, George W Bush is the most despised figure in America." Really? The paper sent McCrum to America to interview nine novelists about the election. That's the first mistake right there: shipping a guy 3,000 miles to take the pulse of the nation by interviewing a bunch of guys who already agree with him. One of the reasons why the Bush-despisers will be waking up stunned on the morning of November 3 is because they spend way too much time talking to each other and sustaining each other's delusions....

"Even at the Times' lowest moment, which may be right about now, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the paper's significance. Not only is it bigger and better than its rivals. . . . An event it doesn't cover might, in a manner of speaking, just as well not have happened." -- Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, June 30 No place in American journalism is so smug and superior as the New York Times. Kolbert's casual observation captures the reigning conceit, which she absorbed in 14 years as a Times reporter before leaving. It was this conceit -- the...

This is a brief excerpt from an article from The New York Times. A bunch of liberal "do gooders" decided that they wanted to "help" families in Ecuador by protesting against child labor. In response to the prostetors, the children were fired. So now the "do gooders" are smug with the knowledge that they have "helped" the children. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/13/international/americas/13ECUA.html July 13, 2002 In Ecuador's Banana Fields, Child Labor Is Key to Profits By JUAN FORERO But while rights activists regard such labor as unacceptable, many parents like Mr. and Mrs. Menéndez see it as a necessity. When several plantations, fearing...