Free Republic

Out actor George Takei has criticized a Supreme Court decision declaring that some for-profit companies may block their employees' access to certain birth control methods. Hobby Lobby challenged the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) requirement that insurance health plans include coverage for FDA-approved contraception, arguing that the law violates the company's religious freedom. “In this case, the owners happen to be deeply Christian; one wonders whether the case would have come out differently if a Muslim-run chain business attempted to impose Sharia law on its employees,” Takei said in a blog post. “As many have pointed out, Hobby Lobby is the...

On the June 29th episode of ‘Sister Wives,’ Kody Brown and his wives were confronted by the troubling truth that the family’s practice of polygamy could come to an end with their own generation, as their teens spoke out. Sister Wives‘ Kody Brown and his four wives — Meri, Janelle, Christine, and Robyn — risked jail time and the breakup of their family out of devotion to their Mormon fundamentalist polygamist faith. So it must be pretty hard to listen when they hear that their oldest children — Logan, 19, Madison, 17, Mykelti, 17, and Aspyn, 18 — speak out...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)On Friday night’s episode of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” in a discussion about the Tea Party’s pushback against last Tuesday’s Mississippi Republican primary runoff between State Sen. Chris McDaniel and incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), Max Brooks, author of the bestsellers The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z, made a comparison between the Tea Party and the early origins of the Nazis movement in post-World War I Germany. According to Brooks, who is the son of filmmaker Mel Brooks and actress Anne Bancroft, there are similarities to be drawn between the modern American Tea Party movement and the...

Stop paying the electric bill and they’ll turn off the lights. Cable TV, however, is no longer quite so essential. It’s now possible to stop paying the cable bill and enjoy much, if not all of your favorite programming — at great savings. But is cutting the cord right for you? To help answer that question we’ve created a new interactive cord-cutting calculator . Here’s how it works: Answer a few questions about your TV watching needs, including your favorite shows and sports leagues, and the tool will crunch the numbers and give you several options to best approximate your...

After NBC refused to air an ad for new movie “Obvious Child” because it included the word “abortion,” the network is facing heat from Planned Parenthood and Lena Dunham. The “Girls” star tweeted, “NBC refuses to air the trailer for Obvious Child because it mentions abortion and that’s not okay. #StoptheStigma.”

The Pakistani government on Friday suspended the broadcasting license of Geo News, a popular television channel, in a major escalation of Geo’s dispute with the country’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency. The Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority said the suspension would last for 15 days. It also imposed a $104,000 fine. The dispute began with accusations that the spy agency was behind a shooting attack on a senior Geo journalist in April. It has broadened into a wider confrontation that is seen as a threat to press freedom and a sign of tensions between Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders. Even...

Frustrated with rising prices? Check. Keep getting hit with more fees and charges? Check. You're paying for more channels than you'd ever want to watch? Check. These are just a handful of the most common complaints consumers have when it comes to grappling with cable companies. And it's not just anecdotal: A survey of subscribers on the nation's biggest cable providers has found that more than half of Americans would abandon their cable provider if they felt they could. Cable rage is real, and here's the data to prove it. Fifty-three percent of respondents to a recent survey said they'd...

Remember when David Letterman was funny? Yeah, me neither. On last night’s The Late Show the host did a “comedy” bit with guest Anderson Cooper on the inaction of the government to limit private gun ownership. Letterman complained that we are doing nothing, offered no solutions, but ultimately insisted it was a solvable problem. Letterman starts his anti-gun rant like any good liberal: Screw the facts! This is what I think and how you should to: "I think, I don’t have the statistics but that’s never stopped me. I think daily in this country a child or an underage boy...

The February announcement that Arsenio Hall’s syndicated late-night show would return for a second season turned out to be both premature and mistaken. CBS Television Distribution, which owns the show with Tribune Media, has announced a cancellation because of a ratings decline among the viewers most advertisers pay for in late night, people between the ages of 18 and 49.

Jail mug shot of Gregory Walter (Gregg) Jarrett. (Hennepin County jail) Fox News anchor Gregg Jarrett, said by the network to be on leave to address “serious personal issues,” has been charged with a misdemeanor after his arrest in a Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport bar, where he was “very intoxicated” and combative toward officers. Jarrett, 59, is charged in Hennepin County District Court with a misdemeanor, obstructing the legal process and interfering with a police officer. His arraignment is scheduled in an Edina courtroom June 6. The weekend co-anchor on the Fox News Channel was arrested about 12:40 p.m. Wednesday...

Fresh off promises from CNN boss Jeff Zucker that the channel will pursue more stories on global warming — whether their audience likes it or not — CNN anchor Carol Costello presided over a segment with two religious figures agreeing that to deny climate change is to sin against God. But Costello did much more than just moderate the “debate,” railing against “deniers” and questioning whether they’re “reading the Bible.” In the eye-popping intro to the segment — which aired during CNN’s “Newsroom”, not an opinion program — Costello pulls no punches while savaging those who dare to question the...

Left-wing extremism has a home at PBS – and that home, to be specific, is the set of Moyers & Company. Host Bill Moyers kicked off Sunday’s episode with a flashback to the previous week’s broadcast, in which scientist and environmental activist David Suzuki had announced that he believes society should literally punish politicians who don’t believe in global warming. [Video below. MP3 audio here.] This is what Suzuki told Moyers:(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Our politicians should be thrown in the slammer for willful blindness. If we are in a position of being able to act, and we see something going on and...

The Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) announced on Wednesday that it had purchased the rights to a documentary series that will follow the life of Michael Sam. Terms were undisclosed, but sources said that negotiations to make the deal took two months. Sam became the first openly gay man to be taken in the NFL draft when he was picked Saturday in the seventh round by the St. Louis Rams. Cameras for the network were with Sam when he received the call that he was drafted and will follow him through training camp as he tries to make the team. The...

HAVE you or Dan Patrick ever apologised for the years of lame sports-presenting imitators you set upon the world? For nearly 20 years I’ve acknowledged that if any of the world’s major religions are correct, I’ll be going not (necessarily) to hell, but I will be going to purgatory. Some bureaucrat will ask me if I had ever considered the implications of opening that particular Pandora’s box, and then he’ll tell me to go over and sit on the bench and think about what I did for a few thousand years. I’m hoping I can get a seat near the...

After the group Right Wing Watch reported the twins who star in HGTV’s recently greenlit reality series Flip It Forward are anti-gay activists, the network said this morning it had given the hook to the series, which was set to debut in October. Yesterday, HGTV said it was “currently in the process of reviewing all information about the Benhams and we will provide an update as soon as possible.” Then came a tweet today: HGTV ✔ @hgtv HGTV has decided not to move forward with the Benham Brothers' series. 11:00 AM - 7 May 2014 194 Retweets 276 favorites Right...

MSNBC has screwed things up so badly with their viewers that the network now has its lowest ratings since October 2007. According to TVNewser: Compared to the same month last year, MSNBC was down -12% in total viewers and -19% in A25-54 viewers in total day. In primetime, the network was down -10% and -26%, respectively. “Morning Joe” slipped to third among the cable news morning shows in April, delivering its lowest-rated month in total viewers since December 2009. All three of MSNBC’s primetime shows were down across the board compared to April 2013: “All In with Chris Hayes” was...

In her Article, “What I Learned As a Liberal Talking Head For Fox News,” for The Christian Science Monitor, Sally Kohn indicated that while working for Fox News, she had what can best be described as an epiphany. She said, “For a radical progressive who once harbored negative stereotypes about folks on the right, it was a turning point for me: Though Sean Hannity or Sarah Palin and I disagree profoundly on politics – they’re personable, kind, and human. If you want to persuade people, you can’t demonize them.” . She went on to say, “And no one will even...

2014 marks the 40th anniversary of the landmark, and highly entertaining television show "Good Times." The Norman Lear created sit com focused on day to lives of the Evans family, living in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago. While the Evans clan was most certainly poor, the fictional family lived up to the show's title in that what they lacked in material possessions, they more than made up for this in the love that was ever present in nearly every episode. The show was a breakthrough at the time of its debut not only in that it had an...

Al Jazeera America, which launched last August with nearly 850 employees and 12 news bureaus in the United States, has laid off dozens of employees as part of restructuring. The channel is disbanding its sports unit and scaling back its social-media-driven show The Stream from a daily show to a once-a-week program. our editor recommends Al Jazeera America: Can Oil Money Buy Relevance for the Controversial Network? CNN's Jeff Zucker: Larry King/Piers Morgan-Style Interview Shows 'No Longer Viable' MSNBC Host Ed Schultz Must Again Face Partnership Lawsuit Inside Roger Ailes' Fox News Suite (Photos) CNN Announces Primetime Lineup, New Shows...

The Brody File was watching Sarah Palin’s comedy bit on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon and it made me wonder the following: Is Sarah Palin relevant? The answer is a bit complicated. Is she taking seriously as a politician by the liberal mainstream media? No. But do they still pay attention to her every move? Yes they do. Why is that? Yes, part of it has to do with the fact that there is a certain carnival atmosphere surrounding how she goes about her business. I mean, she knows how to command an audience and entertain. But let's not...