Free Republic

Bristol Palin's new abstinence campaign shines a light on the Republican Party's unhealthy attitude about sex and desire. BY MEGHAN MCCAIN The first time I ever heard about oral sex was during the Lewinsky scandal. Mostly, I remember being confused by President Clinton’s response—“it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is”. When it comes to sex, politicians face all sorts of double standards: who is allowed to have sex with whom, what constitutes sex, and whether it’s appropriate, to name a few. Candie’s Foundation’s announcement that they were partnering with Bristol Palin to promote an abstinence-only campaign has caused...

Another progressive talker falls victim to the rightwing corporate stranglehold of our public airwaves... The Peter B. Collins Show will come to an end, as of next Friday, according to an announcement by Collins on today's broadcast. After nearly five years on the air, the economic climate, and the stranglehold of rightwing corporate control over the public's airwaves has made it impossible for him to continue.(snip) ...heartbreaking, but hardly surprising in today's climate for nearly everyone but the vast majority of rightwing whackjob radio hosts propped up by rightwing corporate interests. After a quick segment, during our appearance on today's...

Meghan McCain calls Ann Coulter 'offensive' and 'insulting' Posted: 12:55 PM ET Meghan McCain takes aim at Ann Coulter in a new blog post. Meghan McCain takes aim at Ann Coulter in a new blog post. (CNN) – Fresh off public complaints about her own love life, Meghan McCain has a new target for her most recent gripes: conservative commentator Ann Coulter.

Editor: Once again you have allowed Ann Coulter's noxious, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, neurotic screed to insult entire groups of people, in this case, the intellectually challenged, or the "retarded," which is her preferred usage, and teachers, whom she attacks with an irrational ferocity. She demeans public schools, public school teachers and, apparently, all education that is publicly funded. Why? In last Monday's column, Coulter dismisses Nancy Pelosi as "the first elected mentally retarded" Speaker of the House. I can't fault Coulter's abusive, misinformed, morally bankrupt and irrelevant whining. She makes a fortune off of an ever-shrinking bunch of illiterate, unthinking...

Hate's last stand It's racism and homophobia, neck and neck, down to the wire. Can they hang on? By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, October 29, 2008 Let's not get carried away. Let's not go so far as to suggest we're about to enter into some sort of fluffy utopian tofu puppy happyland where nipples fly free and consciousness expands and the fetid rivers of racism and homophobia that course through the American heartland like acidic sewage somehow magically vanish, somehow become dramatically curtailed, should the twin forces of progress known as President Obama and a vanquished California Proposition...

In the early days of The Movement, as we ground-zero feminists were calling it then, we tried without much success to explain to the white men who were running things how affirmative action was supposed to work. "You don't run out and hire the first woman or the first black person you find on the sidewalk and call it a day," we said. "You spend the extra 10 minutes and the extra 10 bucks recruiting and interviewing until you find a woman or a minority who has the qualifications to do the job. "Trust us," we said. "They are out...

It is the end of the nutball Christian right. Here is your proof. To go - Hey, remember the angry evangelicals? The quivering clan of militant Christoholics who propelled Bush into office and seized the national narrative for a few terrifying moments about five years back, ran deep into the woods with it and rubbed it all over their naughty bits in a frenzy of fear and confusion and lust for all things homophobic and saccharine and spiritually denigrating? Dying. Nearly dead. Gasping their last. Very soon to be a footnote, a caricature, a gag, a punch line, blasted to...

Hillary was ready. Hillary was unstoppable. Hillary was, by all accounts, a lock. What the hell happened? Are you paying any sort of attention to this moment in time? Are you reading bits and hints about the transformation, the shift, the unusual and slightly surreal energy coursing through the nation? Are you tattooing this seminal period on the sacrum of your sociopolitical consciousness? Are you under 50? Then there's been nothing else like this in your lifetime. And there probably never will be again. You gotta take it all in, you know? Because it was no time at all ago,...

You think a $100K salary is a lot? $500K? Please. The truly wealthy scoff at your paltry breadcrumbs. Then it came to pass that I stumbled across this story from Forbes magazine, which is officially called "Forbes" but is actually called "Forbes oh my God we worship ruthless CEOs like shiny meth in the summertime," and among the glittering ads for luxury intergalactic travel and sleek private jets and $50K Rolexes and big phallic yachts and surreal 20-page ad inserts for Abu Dhabi megadevelopments, there was an article about the new home being built in Mumbai right now for Mukesh...

Bored with the 'war' on Iraq? 4,000 dead merely induce shrugging? Need an incentive to keep caring? It is a time for a radical rethinking. It is a time to reconsider it all, to perhaps reassess how we are presenting and digesting America's most costly and lost and unwinnable and brutal and ignoble and inept and insidious and depressing war that's not really a war; it's time to revolutionize how it's all packaged and broadcast and pumped like hot sticky misery into the heavily narcotized American cultural bloodstream because, oh my God, we are sick sick sick of it all,...

Right now, deep in the GOP dungeons, they're planning their racist, disgraceful assault. Whatever will it be?

The Need For Gun Control By Seth Schortz 05/03/2007 3:17 pm The Roundup (Half Hollow Hills High School West) How many Columbines and Virginia Techs must we endure before Congress becomes serious about gun-control legislation? How often must we listen to those who are opposed to such legislation cry that it is their constitutional right to "bear arms"? If we actually read the Constitution, it should be apparent that this so-called right is by no means absolute. The Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights reads, "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 17, 2006 CONTACT: Brendan Daly/Jennifer Crider 202-226-7616 Pelosi Statement on Signing of Military Commissions Bill Washington, D.C.– House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi released the following statement today on the military commissions bill that President Bush signed into law this morning: “Democrats voted overwhelmingly to go to war in Afghanistan so that those responsible for the 9/11 attacks would be brought to justice. More than five years later, because of the failure of the Bush Administration to devise a legal process that could withstand the scrutiny of the Supreme Court, not a single person who planned the...

Conservatives are outbirthing libs by a wide margin. How soon can you get knocked up? Let this be your rallying cry. Let it be your new hot-button topic, a raw naked condomless blog-ready wildfire underground grassroots crusade, your juiciest of incentive programs, your inspired call to hot naked impregnable sperm-a-riffic action. Because the statistics are ugly, getting uglier: Despite all divine hope and prayer to the contrary, it looks like baby-happy conservatives are outbreeding liberals by a margin of some 20 to 40 percent. It's a fact. It's a trend. It's an onslaught. It's a dreadful soul-curdling predicament and the...

(August 11, 2006)—Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was being treated Friday evening in the emergency room of Providence Health Center in Waco. Sheehan, who has been on a liquids-only diet for 37 days as part of a fast in protest of the war, was described as being gaunt and pale as she arrived at the hospital. An assistant said Sheehan, who flew to Central Texas after a trip with other activists to Jordan to meet with members of Iraq’s new parliament, was being treated for exhaustion. Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son Casey died in Iraq in 2004 while serving with Fort Hood’s...

It is not for Republicans. It is not for bow hunters. Also, no cat hoarders. Sign up now! Match.com does not allow cleavage. This much I learned from a female friend who used the enormous online dating service during a brief glitch in her dating career, and for whom I helped prepare the most modest of pix (waist up, cowboy hat, big smile, snug halter top, faintest sliver of shadow between breasts), only to have the photo immediately nixed by the site's apparently pallid and secretly Mormon editors who actively disallow even the slightest hint of flesh or pillow talk...

When all the fanatical Christians disappear, will traffic finally improve? Wait, did I miss it? Did it happen three days ago, on 6-6-06, a.k.a. Tea Time with the Beast, a.k.a. the Great Day of Reckoning, a.k.a. the National Day of Slayer, all the world crashing down in a heap of hissing steam and belching smoke and balmy gusty breezes sometime around noon just after lunch but not before rush hour and hitting right around siesta? I might have been napping. Did the Apocalypse finally hit? Did the deep wish of roughly a half-billion zealous believers come to pass and were...

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV...

Think sex and drugs destroy America? Try naive chastity. Oh, and "Purity Balls" There are these things. These unholy events called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my God. But hey, free country. Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys,...

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over? Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe. Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime. Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known...