Free Republic

Robin Zander lead singer of Cheap Trick, “The Republican National Committee called our office and offered us $100,000 to play at their convention in Cleveland [this summer],” Zander says. “We turned it down. Then we had second thoughts. Maybe we should have accepted it – but we would all have got swastika guitars made.”

Alice Cooper, Robin Zander and Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick, Ted Nugent, and Tommy Shaw of Styx were among the artists performing at Cooper's annual holiday benefit concert, Alice Cooper's Christmas Pudding, which took place Saturday in Phoenix. According to Blabbermouth, the band Damn Yankees - Nugent, Shaw, Jack Blades and Michael Cartellone - reunited at the show, and additional performers included country legend Glen Campbell and comedian Sinbad. The show raised funds for the Solid Rock Foundation, a nonprofit Christian organization that provides funding for organizations that help young people.

Hope you enjoy. Surrender

Most of us already suspect that environmentalists are dictatorial wolves dressed in the democracy sheepskin. Despite all the lip service they pay to justice and liberty, they are really all about state power and regulation. So it is with Germany’s authoritarian statists and greens, who not long ago called for the enactment of a nationwide “Veggie Day” once a week in order to start weaning people off climate-killing diets containing meat. Fortunately the citizens roundly rejected the nonsense, sending the wackos off – to return another day. Electric heater German city of Bremen attempts to form a green police to...

WINSTON-SALEM — Julie and Bob Clark were stunned to receive a letter from their church in July asking them to “participate in the life of the church” — or worship elsewhere. “They basically called us freeloaders,” says Julie. “We were freeloaders,” says Bob. In a trend that may signal rough times for wallflower Christians, bellwether mega-church Faith Community of Winston-Salem has asked “non-participating members” to stop attending. “No more Mr. Nice Church,” says the executive pastor, newly hired from Cingular Wireless. “Bigger is not always better. Providing free services indefinitely to complacent Christians is not our mission.” “Freeloading” Christians were...

Long-simmering tensions between the current members of Cheap Trick and the band’s absentee drummer, Bun E. Carlos, appear to be boiling over into the courtroom. Carlos, a founding member of Cheap Trick, remained a fixture of the lineup until March 2010, when the band released a statement announcing that he “is not currently the touring drummer for Cheap Trick. Bun E. remains a band member. Everyone is healthy and Cheap Trick will continue to tour as planned.” While that made it sound like Carlos’ absence was temporary, he’s remained in exile, even during the band’s sporadic forays into the studio....

Less than a day after surviving a stage collapse at the Ottawa Bluesfest in Ontario, Canada, the members of Cheap Trick and their manager Dave Frey are feeling glad to be alive. "We are so thankful," Frey tells Rolling Stone. According to Frey, the sudden windstorm that brought down the main stage at the festival came as a surprise. "They said that we should be looking out for a storm but it wasn't really that apparent," he says. "I was actually on stage behind the drummer and I was taking a few pictures right before it happened. The air was...

When my youngest daughter was about three years old, I pulled a cheap trick on her, teaching her that whenever I asked “Who's the man?”, she should reply “Darwin!” She does this quite well now. It is hard to imagine any living biologist not thinking that Darwin IS the man, and I am certainly no different. But I have a different hero, and for a slightly different set of reasons. The man is Noam Chomsky. Like Darwin, Chomsky raised a set of questions that literally turned around a discipline, and opened the door to several new disciplines. In Chomsky's case,...

When the family of Staff Sgt. Joseph Goodrich gathered in Pittsburgh for the fallen Marine's funeral, they expected a large crowd – after all, they've lived in the area for generations and Joseph had been a police officer before becoming a leatherneck – but they didn't expect to see Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor show up, hand out her business card and tell them "our government" opposes the war...

IN a bizarre incident, a Bulawayo man allegedly developed a female genital organ on the right side of his face stretching up to the chest in what is suspected to be a case of witchcraft.The man was the talk of the Egodini commuter omnibus terminus in the city on Monday where many people who spotted him as he was boarding a omnibus to Magwegwe West suburb on Sunday could not believe what they had seen.The man was yesterday admitted at Mpilo Central Hospital where doctors said he had a "cancerous tumor", the Chronicle newspaper reported.The hospital superintendent, Dr Lindiwe Mlilo...