Free Republic

There is nothing more American than mom’s apple pie. The image of the hot sugar-crusted pie is a happy memory for countless Americans. Variations of this tasty dessert belong to all American mothers regardless of race or ethnic origin. Leave it to progressive demagogues to find a way to tear down this cultural icon. They cannot let an apple be an apple. They deconstruct an apple pie to always find a hidden racist or oppressive narrative. Food InjusticeThe Left rejects the truth that apple pie is just an easy-to-make dessert. Instead, it denounces what it calls “food injustice.” This sour...

Whenever 30-year Dunedin resident John Tornga takes visitors on a tour of his quaint, coastal town, he makes sure to pass the home at 129 Buena Vista Drive S. “It’s the only place anyone calls a ‘mansion’ in Dunedin,” said Tornga, a city commissioner. “There’s a mystique to it. Who else can say they have a Kellogg mansion in their city?” The 7,600-square-foot, Mediterranean revival-ish home was built in 1925, and was then known as Villa Marino. W.K. Kellogg, founder of the Kellogg Company that revolutionized breakfast via ready-to-eat cereal, purchased it in 1934. The interior is a wild mashup...

<p>NEW YORK (AP) — They are fighting, yes, but the fight crackles with the enticing electricity that only Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn could deliver. He is storming out the door. She is throwing his golf clubs after him. The music is jaunty. He is charmingly irritated.</p>

Shares of the ailing department store chain JCP, +6.10% crashed on Thursday, dipping as low as 92 cents before closing down 7.5%, at 97 cents — the first time they’ve ever closed below a dollar since the company went public in the late 1970s. [Shares remained below $1 Friday morning.]

BOSTON (CBS) – Animal crackers are being released from their cages after 116 years. You may not recognize the packaging of Nabisco’s classic treat Barnum’s Animals crackers the next time you’re in the grocery store. The exotic animals – a zebra, elephant, lion, giraffe and gorilla – pictured on the box are no longer behind bars, but featured roaming around grass and trees. The package redesign comes after pressure from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The group called for a change saying the outdated boxes showed the exploitation and cruelty animals are subjected to in the circus....

Ford today announced it will phase out most cars it sells in North America. According to its latest financial release, the auto giant will "will transition to two vehicles" being the Mustang and an unannounced vehicle, the Focus Active, as the only traditional cars it sells in the region. Ford sees 90 percent of its North America portfolio in trucks, utilities and commercial vehicles. Citing a reduction in consumer demand and product profitability, Ford is in turn not investing into the next generation sedans. The Taurus is no more.

All the Raisinets in the world aren’t enough to sugarcoat this fact: In recent months, the Hollywood box office has been a disaster. In terms of attendance, Tinseltown just wrapped up its worst summer at the box office in nearly a quarter-century. That means theaters now have to fight harder than ever to get butts in seats. “For a very long time, movie theaters were not overly focused on pleasing the consumer,” says Eric Handler, a media analyst at MKM Partners. But in recent years, he says, theater owners have wised up to a novel idea: making the theater experience...

ELLENTON, Fla. (AP) - The owners of Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced Saturday that they will close the 146-year-old show in May. Kenneth Feld, the chairman and CEO of Feld Entertainment, which owns the circus, said declining attendance combined with high operating costs are the reasons for closing. Follow Ringling Bros. ✔ @RinglingBros .@RinglingBros will hold its final performances in May of this year. Details: https://goo.gl/75ndaN #RinglingBros 10:31 PM - 14 Jan 2017 2,262 2,262 Retweets 2,003 2,003 likes NBA star Shaquille O'Neal was among those who appeared upset over the announcement that the circus will end,...

Saturday morning American broadcast TV was once animation's home field. Filling a cereal bowl with artificially colored sugar pebbles and staring at the tube was every kid's weekend plan. Not any more: For the first time in 50-plus years, you won't find any animation on broadcast this morning. It's the end of an era. Yes, The CW, the final holdout in Saturday morning animation, ran its last batch of Vortexx cartoons last weekend. This week,where you once saw shows like Cubix, Sonic X, Dragon Ball Z and Kai, Digimon Fusion, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, you'll instead find "One Magnificent Morning," a block of live-action educational programming. It's the end of...

The wood frame of the Delta Queen steamboat creaks and groans as the old lady tugs passively against her moorings. Weather and time have taken their toll on the silent relic, which sits lashed to a storm-damaged quay along Chattanooga's Coolidge Park. Workers have long since battened down her hatches and blocked off her decks. The only sign of life is a fairly believable scarecrow, cobbled together using an old hat, a pair of boots and a duct-taped Dickies uniform. It sits in the shade with a fire ax across its lap to dissuade intruders. But the once-stately chunk of...

Al Feldstein, who took over a fledgling humor magazine called Mad in 1956 and made it a popular, profitable and enduring wellspring of American satire, died on Tuesday at his ranch in Paradise Valley, Mont. He was 88. His wife, the former Michelle Key, confirmed the death. In recent years, he was a wildlife and landscape painter in Montana, outside Livingston. Mr. Feldstein had been a writer and illustrator of comic books when he became editor of Mad four years into its life and just a year after it had graduated from comic-book form to a full-fledged magazine.

"On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and then vanished without a trace" In the world of early-20th-century African-American music and people obsessed by it, who can appear from one angle like a clique of pale and misanthropic scholar-gatherers and from another like a sizable chunk of the human population, there exist no ghosts more vexing than a couple of women identified on three ultrarare records made in 1930 and ’31 as Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. There are musicians as obscure as Wiley and Thomas, and musicians as great, but in none does the Venn...

B.B. King has spent decades singing “The Thrill Is Gone.” Perhaps at long last it actually is. Make no mistake: King is a living legend, a national treasure, and the sobriquet “king of the blues” is not mere wordplay, but a title earned. To be in the same room as him and breathe the same air is an honor and a privilege. But for the majority of King’s concert at the Peabody Opera House on Friday night, the sizeable crowd could have been excused for thinking that’s all they were going to get. King’s shows in recent years have featured...

Steve Gilbert assembles the evidence, and it is conclusive. Either President Obama is dying his hair, or it has miraculously gone from graying to solid black since he took office. At one point in t he campaign, as a young and inexperienced candidate, a little gray was a good thing. But now that he is energetically grabbing control of the economy, a more youthful look is important. I well remember the media scorn for Ronald Reagan's hair dye. Needless to say, the lapdog media will remain silent, unless forced to acknowledge the obvious by bloggers and talk radio. I have...

The ubiquity of the cell phone has finally prompted AT&T to pull out of the pay-phone business, the company announced on Monday. By the end of 2008, AT&T says, it will have exited the business completely. The nation's No. 1 wireless-network operator, AT&T says it expects independent operators to pick up service contracts on its pay phones, which, over the past 10 years, have shrunk in number to about 1 million nationwide from 2.6 million.