Free Republic

There exists among my culture war brethren a hope, albeit a dwindling one, that the Terri Schiavo tragedy marks a great catharsis in the collective conscience of Americans. Finally, the thinking goes, Americans will awaken to the horrors wrought by the culture of death. Finally, people will understand government is no friend of the faithful. Lawrence Henry has wondered allowed on the cyber pages of the American Spectator whether the Schiavo situation is “It”: Conservatives have been asking themselves the question for years: "Is this finally it?" "This" being whatever event in the news exemplified a current gag-making excess of...

I never received a response from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences regarding our Passion for Fairness petition. But I did just receieve an e-mail from an exceedingly hateful Steve Norris, who claims to represent the Academy. Here's the e-mail.

Hello ... I'm hoping some of you Granite Staters will help me defend the First-in-the-Nation on the pages of the Union Leader. Crazy leftist Blogger Kos from the Daily Kos attacked me this morning and I'm looking for folks to write letters to the editor defending NH. Any takers?

A group that collected signatures on a petition urging the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to consider Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" for an Oscar nomination delivered 25,000 names to the organization today. According to a statement from the group Passion for Fairness, the signatures come from movie fans from all 50 states – "blue and red." After Gibson announced he would not campaign for an Oscar, Patrick Hynes started a web-based petition drive to generate grass-roots support for the film. The petition reads: To the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: It has come...

Damn the naysayers ... it CAN happenThe people have spoken and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ has won the People’s Choice Award for Best Drama. This despite a complete and thorough snubbing from the Hollywood industry; everyone from the Golden Globes to the Directors Guild to the American Film Institute has passed over The Passion. But not the people. So can this tremendous thumb in the eye to the Hollywood industry improve the film’s chances among Oscar voters? Well, maybe. Just maybe. For starters, it pays to know the details about Oscar voting. The voting system – whether...

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ will win the People's Choice Award for BEST DRAMA tonight. Good job FReepers!

The Golden Globes aren't the only ones that stiffed the best film of the year ...How does someone write and year-in-review piece about the movies of 2004 and not mention The Passion of The Christ? Perhaps a better question is: How does everyone who writes a year-in-review piece about the movies of 2004 not mention The Passion?Perhaps no other film in history has evoked as much soul-searching, discussion and controversy. Jim Caviezel learned Aramaic to play the part of Jesus, as did the other cast members for their respective roles. The interplay between Caviezel’s son and Maia Morgenstern’s mother Mary...

For Michael Moore, the campaign never ends. Not two months after getting smoked in the presidential election, Moore is ramping up his campaign for an Oscar. According to the Oscar watchers at Goldderby.com: MICHAEL MOORE WILL BE BACK IN L.A. STILL TRYING TO TURN UP THE HEAT ON HIS OSCAR CAMPAIGN with a January 6th concert tied to his works including Fahrenheit 9/11 at the House of Blues that reportedly will feature Oscar winner Bruce Springsteen among others. The live-show ploy has been used by the Miramax vets working on Moore's campaign before. Last year there was a special concert...

The role of religious faith in President Bush’s re-election campaign and Mel Gibson’s powerful film The Passion of The Christ were rated 2004’s top stories in a survey conducted among religious writers in America. Meanwhile the Washington Post has yet another insulting comparison between Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, this one written by someone named Ann Hornaday: But on a more subtle level, both "The Passion" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" reflected something more troubling and difficult to name, a particular kind of bullying, coercive sensibility that sought to colonize their viewers' political and moral imaginations, rather than open them up. (Gibson...

One objection we here at Passion for Fairness often hear about our petition drive is that The Passion of The Christ is too important a movie to diminish itself to the level of Hollywood award shows. It’s a valid argument, but one we (obviously) disagree with. For starters, we believe it is incumbent upon conservatives and Christians to engage the culture, not create an alternative one. Moreover, it’s not as if Mel Gibson has eschewed earthly pleasures. In fact, he’s the biggest moneymaker in Hollywood! "Mel Gibson is among the highest paid people in Hollywood this year, and probably will...

In what has to be the most absurd slap in the face to Mel Gibson and his moving picture The Passion of The Christ,” The American Film Institute named the film “a moment of significance.” The “events”, announced Monday, were those judged to have had the biggest impact on the world of the moving image during the past year as judged by two 13-person juries that also selected the film and TV awards. But the backhanded slap could not be more obvious than in this insulting justification for naming The Passion (as well as Fahrenheit 911) a “moment”: "Both filmmakers...

A website lobbying the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to consider "The Passion of The Christ" in its Oscar nominations has generated 10,000 signatures on a petition in just 10 days. Organizer Patrick Hynes says the petition on his site PassionForFairness.com will be presented to the Academy before it announces nominations at the end of January. "We have had a tremendous response," Hynes said in a news release. "Regular folks are frustrated that Hollywood snubbed 'The Passion' when they handed out nominations for a Golden Globe." Movie-goers now, he said, "have a chance to organize and let Hollywood...

(PRWEB) December 17, 2004 -- The advocacy website www.passionforfairness.com has generated a tremendous response with their petition to ask the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to nominate the film The Passion of The Christ, its director and its actors for Oscars in their respective categories. In just 10 days, the website has generated 10,000 petition signers. “We have had a tremendous response,” says Patrick Hynes, who spearheads the effort. “Regular folks are frustrated that Hollywood snubbed The Passion when they handed out nominations for a Golden Globe. They just don’t feel Hollywood is being fair. Now, they have...

Hideous murderers have a way of earning a nickname. It makes it easier for the press and the public to identify them and their modus operandi. Real crime history has given us Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler, Son of Sam, and the Hillside Strangler, among others. Ankle Biting Pundits hereby dubs Scott Peterson, found guilty on Friday of murdering his wife and unborn child, “The Blue State Baby Killer.” In a perfect world, “The Blue State Baby Killer” case, when it is all said and done, would cause us all to sit back and rationally discuss two blights in...

During the better part of the last three years we have endured an endless series of offerings from the Bush-Haters-Book-of-the-Month Club. These volumes have overexerted titles and overly verbose subtitles like Big Lies: The Rightwing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth or Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. They contain very little unique information from one to the next. Most are petty; some are demonstrably fraudulent, such as Joe Wilson's The Politics of Truth. They are mostly written by people who are professionally distasteful of President Bush. All of them have been written by...

The IRS has decided to investigate over 2,000 tax-exempt charities for the outrageous compensation packages they offer their executives. At the present time, we have no idea if any of the five charities collectively known as the Heinz Family Philanthropies (of which Ter-AH-za Heinz is the chairwoman) will be a focus of this investigation. But if information recently shared with us about Heinz employee Steve Ward from an anonymous inside source is any indication, the IRS may want to open a file on the billion-heiress and what may be blatant violations of campaign finance and tax laws. To refresh, we...

The recent passing of Ronald Wilson Reagan – subsequently removed from the headlines by Big Media’s hyper-coverage of phony scandals – demonstrated one thing for certain. Being liberal means never, ever having to admit you were wrong. During the early years of Reagan’s presidency, liberals across the globe predicted “Reaganomics” would bankrupt America’s economy and that his foreign policy would start a nuclear World War III with the Soviet Union. Neither happened, of course. In fact, just the opposite occurred; we are still in the full stride of the Reagan Recovery and the Soviet Union seems like a sad nightmare...

Two eminent American liberals effused their respective vapors into the gasbag of American culture this month. One of these men, as President of the United States, served during a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity. The other is a blowhard whose immensity has reached “smelly fat” proportions and who trades in conspiracy theories and ideological rants. Guess which has won the hearts of our dear friends in the mainstream press?Okay, so maybe Bill Clinton isn’t all that eminent. And while I will not read Mr. Clinton’s book or see Mr. Michael Moore’s film any time soon, I hold out the...

''We need above all a president who is not fazed by complexity. A president who likes to read.” So says Te-REH-za Heinz Kerry . Well for once we agree with Lady MacBe..er.. Heinz. Anyone who is President should like to read. But perhaps she needs to sit down her husband and lay down the law. It turns out that he himself did not read the National Intelligence Estimate, which contained all the information relied upon President Bush in going to war in Iraq. In perhaps the biggest act of hubris thus far in his campaign, Kerry ignored his own laziness...

One reason the left was so frustrated in their efforts to stop Ronald Reagan is because their narrative about him was self-contradictory: The slow-witted President of the United States designed a brilliantly-conceived -- but devious -- conspiracy (Iran-Contra) to misuse the US military to enrich his friends in the military-industrial complex. But if Reagan (who famously nodded off during cabinet meetings) was such an idiot, how did he come up with such a masterful scheme, intricately woven across continents? Michael Moore and the Democrat Party are, of course, selling the same exact story about George W. Bush. Plug in “Afghanistan”...