Free Republic

Salma Hayek blisters John Lithgow’s self-satisfied real-estate mogul at a dinner party that goes off the rails... Hayek plays an immigrant from a poor town in Mexico... Lithgow’s appropriately named Doug Strutt mistakes Hayek for the help...As she’s talking about coming to the U.S., Lithgow blurts out, “Did you come legally?” Later, Lithgow is showing off photos of a rhinoceros he’s killed in Africa, insisting, “I don’t consider it murder” because it supposedly helps preservation efforts. It’s too much for Hayek, who throws her phone at him and says, “You think it’s funny? I think it’s sick.” “Beatriz at Dinner”...

I hope you all wont mind this vanity, but my father and I were working (yeah, I know Obama's trying hard to put an end to that), and we started talking about how cable news talking heads have adopted repetitious cliches in their constant partisan battles on the tube. Here are the top five I DESPISE: 1. At the end of the day... 2. Look,... 3. Speaking truth to power... 4. It is what is is... (a true exercise in tautology) 5. Literally... (when they're figuratively explaining a metaphor or hypothetical) I can see why political discourse made George Orwell's...

Wondering what cliche President Obama will use first in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday? So are the oddsmakers. Paddy Power, Ireland's biggest bookmaking operation, is giving 8-1 odds that "We have more work to do" will be the first cliche the president is likely to drop. Next-most likely are "As I stand here today," and "health care reform" — though given the usual structure of State of the Union speeches, that latter one will likely be saved for the last half of the speech.

Yet another study says biology may lurk in our political beliefs. Maybe! There’s another of those studies out there, that purports to show a biological difference between liberals and conservatives. People normally respond to “gaze cues,” or the direction that another person is looking, by glancing to see what caught that person’s attention. The new study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, finds that liberals respond much more strongly to such cues than conservatives. The finding is the latest in a series of clues that liberals and conservatives may be subtly different...

President Obama's Inaugural Address? Clichéd, surprisingly dull, naive, and memorable only insofar as it was forgettable. Mr. Obama's oration wasn't even...

Travis Lapham of the Blue Earth County Sheriff’s Office provided a feel-good moment for people attending the Blue Earth County Fair Saturday. For people suffering some guilt about eating the chili cheese fries at the 4-H stand or the deep-fried cheese curds at the snack wagon or the chili cheese fries and the deep-fried cheese curds, Lapham outdid them in calories and fat intake. And Lapham managed to do it in less than seven minutes. “I feel really good right now,” Lapham said, just minutes after winning the doughnut-eating contest. There was little indication — other than a quiet belch...

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama could soon be in Lubbock. NewsChannel 11 has learned that campaign organizers met with United Spirit Arena officials for a possible campaign rally there. Sources say, they will meet again this Friday. We're told Obama's visit could possibly come the last week of February.

Lake Superior State University 2008 List of Banished Words This year, in a gesture of humanitarian relief, the committee restores "truthiness," banned on last year's list, to formal use. This comes after comedians and late-night hosts were thrown under the bus and rendered speechless by a nationwide professional writers' strike. The silence is deafening. PERFECT STORM – "Overused by the pundits on evening TV shows to mean just about any coincidence." – Lynn Allen, Warren, Michigan. "I read that 'Ontario is a perfect storm,' in reference to a report on pollution levels in the Great Lakes. Ontario is the name...

It's sexy, it's sacrilegious, it's scandalous, and it's just in time for Christmas. LA's hottest art curator Lenora Claire has done it again with a new collection of saucy art pieces guaranteed to get folks hot and bothered. Mixing Christmas themes with ample female breasts...Claire chose not to rest on her laurels of the hugely successful Golden Gals Gone Wild collection of this summer, but instead opted to pump up the volume with a new group of art that's poised to get viewers hot under the collar. We were lucky enough to interview the Los Feliz curator who will present...

"Clichés are always tired. Increasingly, they are also wrong" TECHNOLOGY constantly overtakes language. Recent additions to the Oxford English Dictionary have included po-faced entries for “Google” (the verb), “wiki” and “mash-up”. But most clichés are stubbornly indifferent to such concerns. Indeed, they often act as a linguistic fossil record, preserving objects and behaviour that have long since fallen into petrified obsolescence. Industrious sorts no longer burn the midnight oil. Flashes in the pan are common even if the flintlock muskets that gave rise to them are museum pieces. Colours are still nailed to masts, metal though they now usually are....

There is NO "civil war" in Iraq

/28/2006 - HURLBURT FIELD, Fla. (AFPN) -- Most people in Air Force Special Operations Command think of going to war in Iraq or Afghanistan when they hear the words, “fight and win.” I admit I thought the same thing at first. But after I thought about it a few days, it was like the old cliché of a light going on. Fight and win isn’t just for those who signed the dotted line and joined the military. Fight and win goes deeper than that. What about the families we leave behind for 60-, 90- or 120-day deployments? How do they...

Perusing through college op-eds, essays, and activist slogans, my internal respect-o-meter hits rock bottom every time I hear a cliché. When a lot of college students attempt to prove their point they will blurt out something along the lines of “Its better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent men go to jail.” The reader’s or group members nod their heads as if the individual has just stated the Pythagorean proof or pulled out a trump card. But for the 10% of us who are skeptics, we cry out, “wait a minute! Why is it better? You see a...