Free Republic

When you sup with the Devil, you must bring a long spoon. Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky has never been a favorite of mine, but I love irony, and this week he’s my avatar of people whose actions have come back to bite them. He has publicly bragged, for example, how much easier it is to avoid anti-discrimination laws in his faculty hires than it is in student admission, tacitly admitting that is what he has done and what he encourages others to do. But that seems to be of no avail to him now that he’s become a target...

Did you feel it? Small, brief earthquake. A couple movements, pause, then shaking. One cat took notice. The other slept through it.

Tuesday "social media censorship" segment on Newsmax ended in dramatic fashion as MyPillow founder and ardent President Donald Trump supporter Mike Lindell ranted about election fraud until one of the anchors walked off the set. One of Newsmax's live broadcast anchors, Bob Sellers, appealed to the show's producers "can we get out of here please," after he asked Lindell whether he should be permanently or temporarily banned from Twitter. Instead of responding to the question, Lindell launched into a tirade about voting machine fraud and other false conspiracies that pulled several TV networks into legal problems late last year. Sellers...

Nikelodeon appears to have hinted that SpongeBob SquarePants is gay after showing Bikini Bottom's most famous resident celebrating Pride Month. The network made the revelation on Saturday in a tweet to celebrate Pride Month, although it did not specifically state SpongeBob's sexual orientation. In a Twitter posting, Nikelodeon tweeted: 'Celebrating #Pride with the LGBTQ+ community and their allies this month and every month.'

An Iranian cleric, Shahab Moradi, said Iran would struggle to hit back against the US by striking a parallel figure to Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani because the US has only "fictional" heroes. In the clip, Moradi says: "In your opinion, if anyone around the world wants to take their revenge on the assassination of Soleimani and intends to do it proportionately in the way they suggest — that we take one of theirs now that they've got one of ours — who should we consider to take out in the context of America? "Think about it. Are we supposed to...

"Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spiderman and SpongeBob?" he said in a live interview on Iran's IRIB Ofogh TV channel. An Iranian cleric mocked the US by saying Iran would not be able to strike back in kind after the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani because the US has only fictional heroes such as Spider-Man and SpongeBob SquarePants. The cleric, Shahab Moradi, made the comment in a live TV interview on Iran's IRIB Ofogh channel. A clip of the segment was posted on Saturday evening on Twitter, but it is unclear when the program aired....

If you thought that leftist cancel culture couldn't get any more absurd, well, it just did. SpongeBob Squarepants, the popular television cartoon, has been accused of cultural appropriation by a university professor. Campus Reform covered the strange premise put forth by professor Holly Barker of the University of Washington that she wrote for an academic journal called "The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs." The accusatory title of Barker's article is "Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom."

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) Can somebody tell me why I still watch these things? – The NFL almost pulled off what I had always assumed was the utterly impossible last night, staging a Super Bowl game that was very nearly as boring and tedious as a damn soccer match. Yes, yes, yes, I know – it was a “great defensive battle,” right? Spare me, please. It was a game in which LA Rams quarterback Jared Goff played worse than any Super Bowl QB since at least Billy Kilmer and really since Joe Kapp in Super Bowl...

Stephen Hillenburg, who created SpongeBob SquarePants and the absurd undersea world he inhabited, has died at age 57, Nickelodeon announced Tuesday. Hillenburg died Monday of Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as ALS, the cable network said in a statement. He was 57. Hillenburg had announced he had the disease in March 2017. His death comes just weeks after the passing of another cartoon hero in Marvel creator Stan Lee. An Oklahoma native with a love of both drawing and marine biology, Hillenburg conceived, wrote, produced and directed the animated series that began in 1999 and went on to spawn hundreds...

Stephen Hillenburg, the creator of Nickelodeon's animated megahit SpongeBob SquarePants, died Monday. He was 57. Hillenburg died from ALS; he was diagnosed with the disease in March 2017. Nickelodoen paid tribute to him in a tweet on Tuesday: "We are sad to share the news of the passing of Stephen Hillenburg, the creator of SpongeBob SquarePants. Today, we are observing a moment of silence to honor his life and work."

Javion Hill, 35, of Kings Mountain, North Carolina, says he took several photos of the object during a storm on the night of Aug. 18, as he drove on U.S. 74 southwest of Charlotte. The images feature something square hovering above the treeline, with its edges fringed in lights.... "I was on my way home with my wife on the speaker phone, and it looked like there was a tornado coming, so I was trying to take a picture of the clouds for my wife...But then I saw something that wasn't normal and I was, like: 'Oh my god, what...

In 1925, at the Norse-American Centennial, President Calvin Coolidge gave recognition to Leif Erikson as the discoverer of America due to research by Norwegian-American scholars such as Knut Geirset and Ludvig-Hektoen. United States Representative John Blatnik from Duluth introduced a bill in 1963 to observe Leif Erikson Day nationwide. On September 2, 1964, the United States Congress passed Joint Resolution 88-566authorizing the President to proclaim October 9 as Leif Erikson Day. President Lyndon B. Johnson and each President since have done so. In the proclamations, the Presidents have praised the contributions of Americans of Nordic descent generally and the spirit...

Explanation: The Crab Pulsar, a city-sized, magnetized neutron star spinning 30 times a second, lies at the center of this tantalizing wide-field image of the Crab Nebula. A spectacular picture of one of our Milky Way's supernova remnants, it combines optical survey data with X-ray data from the orbiting Chandra Observatory. The composite was created as part of a celebration of Chandra's 15 year long exploration of the high energy cosmos. Like a cosmic dynamo the pulsar powers the X-ray and optical emission from the nebula, accelerating charged particles to extreme energies to produce the jets and rings glowing in...

BURBANK, Calif., An upcoming episode of Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants" has political commentators dueling about the social safety net. The Nov. 11 episode, the focus of reports by the New York Post and Fox News Channel, involves the titular character being fired from his job at the Krusty Krab fast food eatery so the owner, Mr. Krabs, can save "a whole nickel," The Hollywood Reporter reported Wednesday. SpongeBob's friend, Patrick, attempts to show him the ways of "glorious unemployment," but SpongeBob eventually decides the life is not for him. "Lest he sit around idly, mooching off the social services of Bikini...

A cemetery's decision to withdraw its approval for a pair of SpongeBob SquarePants headstones has sparked a controversy in Cincinnati. Sgt. Kimberly Walker was killed this past Valentine's Day. Her boyfriend, Sgt. Montrell Mayo, was charged with her murder. Walker was apparently a passionate fan of SpongeBob SquarePants. Her mother, Deborah Walker, told WLWT that they placed the Nickelodeon cartoon character in Kimberly's casket. Seeking to honor Kimberly further, the family had two 6-foot-tall SpongeBob SquarePants headstones erected. The first, dressed in an Army uniform, would be for Kimberly. The second, dressed in Navy attire, would be for her twin...

For years, advocates of the gay rights movement have said that their goal is to make the world a more tolerant place for homosexuals. They have just as adamantly claimed that they had no intention of educating young children in the complexities of human sexuality. Not so in Hollywood. Take, for example, the new animated film Boxtrolls, created by studio Laika. The film is a riff on the old Mrs. Doubtfire morality that suggests that all families are created equal, no matter what their composition. “Families come in all shapes and sizes,” the narrator of the preview says. “Even rectangles.”...

..The Ukraine is considering a move to censor several children's shows after a new study from a conservative commission labeled the shows "a real threat" to the country's youth. The Ukraine's National Expert Commission for Protecting Public Morality released the report, which attacks several U.S. and international programs as detrimental to the country. Psychologist Irina Medvédeva is quoted in the study, alleging that children aged 3 to 5 years old, "pull faces and make jokes in front of adults they don't know, laugh out loud and repeat nonsense phrases in a brazen manner," after viewing the shows. The Ukrainian paper...

A woman dressed as Catwoman on Hollywood Boulevard is speaking out Friday after a pepper spray incident. Her name is Lydia and she tells CBS2′s Jeff Nguyen that she unleashed a canister of pepper spray Thursday night when she got into a scuffle with a character dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow. According to Lydia, the Sparrow impersonator and his friend were harassing her for hours. “And they were out of control… drunk out here,” she says. The incident in the 6800 block of Hollywood Boulevard was witnessed by several people. Lydia says the men bumped into her and tourists and...

Sponge Bob is in hot waterr! LAPD quiz man in cartoon outfit for 'fighting two women in Hollywood Boulevard' He lived in a pineapple under the sea, but now he's picking fights with two women on Hollywood Boulevard. A man dressed as Spongebob Squarepants nearly brought the busy Los Angeles street to a standstill on Tuesday. The man was thought to be one of those who dress up as a well-known character and then pose for pictures with tourists. According to police, there have been several run-ins recently where the 'character' has aggressively demanded money after the photo has been...

Pretty funny video. SPONGEBOB FIGHTING TWO WOMEN