Free Republic

I saw Lorax yesterday with five of my grankids, ages 10 down to 5. It was a fun kids movie, but clearly slanted towards environmentalism and particularly with an anti-business and anti-lumber company...really, and anti-capitalism bias. On the way home it provided teaching moments. I asked the kids how many of them did not like lumber companies that cut down and harvest trees and why. All of them said they did not like them because they are "stealing our air," hurting animals, and destroying their places to live. I pointed to the Boise Mountains which we could see from the...

Before I read the two reviews of this animated feature this morning, I had said to myself over the past few weeks: "Pharmboy, this movie must really be awful since you cannot look anywhere without seeing some sort of promotion for it. A cry for help if I've ever seen one."Well, it appears even worse than that. I read two reviews (The New York Times and the New York Post) and both HATED this dreck, and each said that the absolute preachiness was worse than Al Gore and Obama, respectively. You know what to expect: bad corporations raping the environment....

In the Dr. Seuss book, the Lorax speaks for trees, "for the trees have no tongues." Lou Dobbs, on the other hand, most definitely has a tongue and he's not afraid to wield it against the beloved children's character. On a segment of Dobbs’ Fox Business Network show Tuesday night that was flagged by the advocacy group Media Matters, the cantankerous conservative pundit bashed two new animated movies as an example how Hollywood "once again is trying to indoctrinate our children.” Dobbs lambasted Disney's "The Secret World of Arrietty," a Japanese film that opened last Friday, for its story about...

This summer we enrolled our older one in a local half-day recreational camp. They use one of the public elementary schools in our town. As I was walking back through the hallway after dropping him off at the classroom, I stopped to notice this poster hanging on the wall: Note the URL at the bottom of the poster: Energystar.gov/kids. Dot-gov? Yup. This is a government-run—and therefore, taxpayer-funded—website that has evidently gotten together with whoever runs “Energy Star” and whoever owns the rights to Dr. Seuss’ “Lorax.” And lookie, the EPA is involved too! And you know if the EPA’s involved,...

I read "The Lorax" by Dr. Seuss yesterday evening to my 5-year-old. My wife had borrowed it from the library. I was expecting an amusing kid's book like "Green Eggs and Ham" (also by Seuss), but what I got was tiresome environmental, anti-business agit-prop. Ugh. Almost everyone on Amazon has given it 5 stars -- no wonder Obama is president. I think the language in the book is dumb, too. Why invent words like "biggerer" (used repeatedly) instead of using the word "bigger". It's too bad I need to screen children's books for political indoctrination. I wonder if there are...

Authorities said a man who escaped from a southern New Jersey prison more than 30 years ago was arrested this week after he was found hiding in a closet in the Bay Area. The U.S. Marshals Service said James Quisenberry was captured in Union City Tuesday after escaping from Cumberland County's Leesburg State Prison, now Bayside State Prison, in June of 1974. The U.S. Marshals Service said a new investigation into the case was initiated in March 2004. Since then, investigators said they followed leads developed in Kentucky, Texas, Nevada and California. Investigators said Quisenberry lived under assumed names. The...