Free Republic

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday, Dec. 5, 2005 CONTACT: Gary Glenn 989-835-7978 Professor David Halperin 734-647-5884 Family group renews criticism of tax- funded college class "How to be Gay" U-M catalogue calls class "an experiment in the very process of initiation it hopes to understand." ------- ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- A statewide family values group Monday renewed its criticism of a controversial University of Michigan class -- offered this fall for the first time since 2003 -- again calling on state lawmakers to pressure university officials to drop the course altogether. The American Family Association of Michigan, in a letter to...

In a recent message on a Yahoo listserv — a venue where groups of people post questions and comments on a particular topic — Paul Mirecki, chairman of KU’s department of religious studies, described his upcoming course “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationisms and other Religious Mythologies.” “The fundies want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category ‘mythology,’” Mirecki wrote. He signed the note “Doing my part (to upset) the religious right, Evil Dr. P.”

This is a rather simple thread; who do YOU think is the classiest player (or players, if you have multiple choices) currently playing? You may even list a team. On the flip side, what about those with the least class (points at Randy Moss)? You may even list a team (points at Vikings). Also, you may even list those who have played and gone (players from the older days had a lot of class. Remember Gale Sayers?). Who's your choice?

Free Republic: Art Appreciation/Education “class” #10: Postmodernism Now it is time to truly finish these mini-lectures on the development of modern art with this final lecture of Postmodernism. Andy Warhol and other Pop artists may have made the first forays into Postmodernism, and some textbooks begin their postmodern sections with Pop Art. But I like to save Postmodernism for the 1980’s and thereafter. One question to consider is whether postmodernism (or at least its validity) might have come to a screeching halt on 9/11, (when thinking people realized that there were indeed evil people in the world and that the...

I saw this show last night. I can't remember when I've seen someone play so hard for so long. And take no shortcuts. He had two drummers, a second guitar, bass, keyboard, and percussion/backup vocal. He didn't have to pay for two drummers, but he did. With his name, he could tour as a trio. Point being, again, no corners cut. Some tight originals indicate he's definitely not living in the past.I had a friend who played next to him in St. Pete at a benefit a few years ago, so I was paying close attention to the interaction between...

The Death Penalty in Georgia William John Hagan Houston Home Journal This week I was assigned the unpleasant duty of reporting on the murder of 16-month-old Christian Edward Martinez. For those of you that didn’t read my article in Tuesday’s newspaper, I’ll briefly bring you up to speed.(Original report at: http://news.mywebpal.com/partners/963/public/news653608.html ) Christian was murdered last August, and authorities believe the killer was Gregory Class. The details of this case are sickening, so if you have a weak stomach I suggest you turn a few pages and read the more comforting words of your daily horoscope. For those who want...

The Death Penalty in Georgia William John Hagan Houston Home Journal This week I was assigned the unpleasant duty of reporting on the murder of 16-month-old Christian Edward Martinez. For those of you that didn’t read my article in Tuesday’s newspaper, I’ll briefly bring you up to speed.(Original report at: http://news.mywebpal.com/partners/963/public/news653608.html ) Christian was murdered last August, and authorities believe the killer was Gregory Class. The details of this case are sickening, so if you have a weak stomach I suggest you turn a few pages and read the more comforting words of your daily horoscope. For those who want...

Trivia Tidbit Of The Day: Part 23 -- Baby Names. BABY NAMES: Girls, by income- Most Popular High-End White Girl Names in the 1990s 1. Alexandra 2. Lauren 3. Katherine 4. Madison 5. Rachel Most Popular Low-End White Girl Names in the 1990s 1. Amber 2. Heather 3. Kayla 4. Stephanie 5. Alyssa Boys, by income- Most Popular High-End White Boy Names 1. Benjamin 2. Samuel 3. Jonathan 4. Alexander 5. Andrew Most Popular Low-End White Boy Names 1. Cody 2. Brandon 3. Anthony 4. Justin 5. Robert WHITEST AND BLACKEST GIRL NAMES- The 20 Whitest Girl Names 1. Molly...

The Navy will commission the newest Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyer, Halsey, Saturday, July 30, 2005, during an 11 a.m. PDT ceremony at Pier J, Naval Air Station, Coronado, Calif. Sen. John McCain of Arizona will deliver the ceremony's principal address. Heidi Cooke Halsey, Anne Halsey-Smith, and Alice “Missy” Spruance Talbot will serve as sponsors of the ship named for their grandfather. In a time-honored Navy tradition, they will give the first order to "man our ship and bring her to life!" Halsey honors U.S. Naval Academy graduate Fleet Adm. William F. Halsey Jr. (1882-1959). During World War I, Cmdr....

So we have studied Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism in Europe. What was happening in America? At first, as we saw earlier, the American Ash Can School thought they were the most modern school. They sponsored the Armory Show in 1913 and brought over the Europeans from Cezanne through Kandinsky, and as a result the American works looked a bit backward. Robert Henri Snow in NY 1902 and Kandinsky Improvisation 28 1912 But some Americans were intrigued by the Armory show, and a few knew about European modernism before 1913. In fact, the famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz pioneered more than just...

Of all the myths of the left, the most exasperating and pervasive (perpetuated by its media propaganda machine and trumpeted by blowhards like Ted Kennedy) is the fantasy that conservatives are rich, cruel, plutocrats who get their kicks evicting widows and orphans on Christmas Eve, whilst liberals - salt-of-the-earth-types, don't you know -- are champions of the powerless and downtrodden. The Supreme Court decision last week in Kelo v. City of New London should lay to rest that lie for all time. Kelo was a classic confrontation between the little guy and powerful, moneyed interests. The high court's five doctrinaire...

N.Korea provides nuclear aid to Iran -intel reports By Louis Charbonneau Wed Jul 6, 9:18 AM ET Recent intelligence reports accuse North Korea of secretly helping Iran develop its nuclear program, raising fresh concerns about Pyongyang's nuclear proliferation and Tehran's atomic intentions. The United States and the European Union fear Iran is using its nuclear energy program as a front to develop nuclear weapons and have called on Iran to cease all sensitive atomic work. Tehran says its program is peaceful and refuses to give up its sovereign right to a full atomic program. "In the late 1990s, cooperation began...

U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack issued a stinging rebuke of doctors and plaintiff lawyers involved in a massive set of silicosis lawsuits, a move that could send re-verberations throughout the nation in other tort class actions. In a 249-page ruling made public Friday, Jack determined the plaintiffs' attorneys and the doctors involved in diagnosing about 10,000 potentially sick workers hatched a scheme aimed at making money and had no interest in protecting their clients. "These diagnoses were about litigation rather than healthcare," she wrote. "It is apparent that truth and justice had very little to do with these diagnoses...

Time to deal with Cubism and its development. For those who are really intense about all this, there is an excellent book from which many of today’s ideas come from. It’s edited by William Rubin (former curator of the Museum of Modern Art) and is called Cezanne: The Late Work. It’s the essay on Cezannism and the beginnings of Cubism that opened my eyes to how it was not Picasso, but his buddy Georges Braque, who really did the first cubist paintings. Surprised? I think most of the art world was surprised at that and most of them probably still...

Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In the 1960's America was a place in which very few people were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security. But as The Times's series on class in America reminds us, that was another country. The middle-class society I grew up in no longer exists. Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the...

The war that nobody talks about - the overwhelmingly one-sided class war - is being waged all across America. Guess who's winning. A recent front-page article in The Los Angeles Times showed that teenagers are faring poorly in a tight job market because of the fierce competition they're getting from older workers and immigrants for entry-level positions. On the same day, in the business section, the paper reported that the chief executives at California's largest 100 companies took home a collective $1.1 billion in 2004, an increase of nearly 20 percent over the previous year. The paper contrasted that with...

When F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that the very rich "are different from you and me," Ernest Hemingway's famously dismissive response was: "Yes, they have more money." Today he might well add: much, much, much more money. The people at the top of America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Call them the hyper-rich. They are not just...

'Survey' sounds like an act of desperation Jack Markowitz FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW Thursday, June 2, 2005 Here, in the mail, comes an invitation -- but not to clear economic thinking. To class envy, maybe. Or even to the old Marxist cry of class struggle. "Protecting Social Security retirement benefits promised to America's seniors is more important than keeping the tax cuts promised to America's wealthiest. Agree? Disagree? Not sure?" That purports to be a survey question. Democrats are receiving it all across the land. But what do tax cuts have to do with Social Security? **SNIP** President Bush has a...

THE outgoing artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and his ebullient successor have clashed over the true identity of the playwright. Mark Rylance, who leaves the Globe at the end of this year, has always doubted that the author was William Shakespeare. He recently endorsed a theory that Shakespeare’s work was composed by a team of writers led by Francis Bacon. Dominic Dromgoole, who will join the Globe from the Oxford Stage Company, has branded Mr Rylance’s favoured theory “baloney” and its supporters “snobs”. “I think that all this theorising about Shakespeare is absolute baloney,” he told The Times. “There...

This is a question from me, not a comment on a published article. (Is this okay?)