Free Republic

The family put up the display for a contest, purchasing a dummy online and positioning a ladder beneath it to look like it’s tipping over. It’s a recreation of the scene from the movie "National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation," where Clark Griswold hangs from the roof while putting up Christmas lights. The display was too realistic for some. The Heerleins said someone rushed to help, thinking the dummy was a real person in distress. They called 911, along with about a dozen others.

The president of the Public Broadcasting Service on Tuesday rejected criticism by conservatives that public TV is guilty of liberal bias, and she offered a strong defense of PBS' Bill Moyers, a target of right-wing wrath. "PBS does not belong to any one political party," Pat Mitchell said. Mitchell's remarks at the National Press Club follow the disclosure that Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, hired a consultant to keep track of guests' political views on a program hosted by Moyers, who was White House press secretary during the Johnson administration. "The facts do...

(paraphrased) WASHINGTON--It took awhile for the class to warm up to him, but former Washington Mayor and convicted felon Marion Barry quickly had about 15 Ballou High School students talking about chemistry. At a school in one of the District's roughest neighborhoods, Barry taught a lesson and called on sleepy-eyed students, pressing them for answers about chemistry. "One thing you always got to do is speak up," Barry told the class. "Be careful of the people that you steps on the way up," he said. "because sometime you'll meets them on the way down!"Besides taqlking chemistry, Barry, 68, told the...