Free Republic

This is a vanity post, I need Freeper help. I am looking into starting a publishing business for educational, spiritual, and short story works. I have never run a business so this is something I will be doing from scratch. I have another teacher who wants to be my partner in this venture. I need help in all areas and wanted to come to the one place where I know the smartest people are- FreeRepublic. Thank you for any and all help you can provide!

GENEVA (AP) — LGBTQ+ groups hailed the 60-day jail sentence a court in Switzerland gave to a writer and commentator for deriding a journalist as a “fat lesbian” and other critical remarks. The Lausanne court sentenced French-Swiss polemicist Alain Bonnet, who goes by Alain Soral, for the crimes of defamation, discrimination and incitement to hatred on Monday. He was ordered to pay legal fees and fines totaling thousands of Swiss francs (dollars) in addition to the time behind bars.

For many years, I made my living writing TV shows for Disney. I was proud of my work, considering it a privilege to make kids laugh all over the world. But in light of Disney's disastrous embrace of pro-pedophilia policies, I'm glad that I grew disillusioned with kids' TV and walked away from the field.Every kids' TV writer knows that when crafting a story, you have to be careful about "modeling behavior." Whatever kids see, they imitate, so you should "model" positive traits in your scripts, particularly when writing for pre-schoolers. Imagine inserting a pint-size Larry David character in your...

The great American journalist and satirist PJ O’Rourke has died. He contributed a number of articles to The Spectator over the years.

I was wondering if there was a place where one can find the freepers who wrote books and what they are. Also would be nice to have a writer's section to discuss ideas and help publish and spread each others' works. This could be expanded to other work of arts such as drawing, music or video creations or reports.

Time is running out. This is a call for activism. Neda Amin, a female Iranian journalist who works for an Israeli news outlet and a UN refugee in Turkey, will soon be deported to Iran by Turkish authorities. Amin said that she has been harassed by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) for a long time. “People who said they work for the Turkish intelligence organization called me on the phone five or six times one-and-a-half years ago. Then they interrogated me at a foreigners' branch directorate. They kept asking me why I wrote for an Israeli newspaper and with whom...

...While Panetta pointedly never mentions Rhodes’s name, it is clear whom he is talking about. “There were staff people who put themselves in a position where they kind of assumed where the president’s head was on a particular issue, and they thought their job was not to go through this open process of having people present all these different options, but to try to force the process to where they thought the president wanted to be,” he says. “They’d say, ‘Well, this is where we want you to come out.’ And I’d say ‘[expletive], that’s not the way it works....

When I was growing up, my family wasn’t very engaged with politics and we spent little time discussing economic policy issues. If you would have asked me when I was a kid what “economics” was, I couldn’t have given much of an answer. But my parents were avid readers of newspapers — we got two daily papers, the Chicago Tribune and the Beacon News, as well as a weekly, the Sandwich Record, covering news from my hometown in Illinois. The economist Thomas Sowell had occasional columns in these newspapers. He, and other syndicated writers I enjoyed, led me to discover...

How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age. Picture him as a young man, standing on the waterfront in North Williamsburg, at a polling site, on Sept. 11, 2001, which was Election Day in New York City. He saw the planes hit the towers, an unforgettable moment of sheer disbelief followed by panic and shock and lasting horror, a scene that eerily reminded him, in the aftermath, of the cover of the Don DeLillo novel “Underworld.”

Pat Conroy, author of best selling novels, Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, has died of cancer. It is confirmed that he did get off the island, but it is unknown whether he took his little buddy with him.

Umberto Eco started working a novel that set the world's imagination on fire "prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk." The Italian author and academic who intrigued, puzzled and delighted readers worldwide with his best-selling medieval thriller, "The Name of the Rose," died at home in Milan on Friday evening after a battle with cancer, according to a family member who asked not to be identified.

Harlan Ellison is still an angry young man, except he'll be 81 on May 27. He has used this anger, fueled by childhood anti-Semitism, throughout his extraordinary career as a writer of speculative fiction. This year saw the publication of his 116th and 117th (so far) books: The Top of the Volcano, a collection of his awardwinning short stories, and a graphic novelization of his original script for "The City on the Edge of Forever," widely considered the best Star Trek episode ever written. Although Ellison's hundreds of published stories contain a wealth of Jewish characters, his most complex creation...

On May 27, the American novelist Herman Wouk will attain the prodigious age of 100. Over his long career, Wouk has achieved all the wealth and fame a writer could desire, or even imagine. His first great success, The Caine Mutiny (1951), occupied bestseller lists for two consecutive years, sold millions of copies, and inspired a film adaptation that became the second highest-grossing movie of 1954. Wouk’s grand pair of novels, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, likewise found a global audience, both in print, and then as two television miniseries in the 1980s. Wouk won a Pulitzer...

The phrase has become slippery. “Christian writer.” What does it mean? For some the phrase plays like a favorite old song, an evocation of the glory days of Greene, Waugh, Percy, O’Connor, et alia. Days long gone and sorely missed. For others “Christian writer” may spell an oxymoron, or at least refer to the kind of writer one would not like to meet at a Manhattan cocktail party. And for still others the phrase increasingly tends to serve as a signal that some exceptionally maudlin fiction is quivering like a bad cheese on the horizon. But even looking at the...

JACKSON, Tenn. – April 20, 2009– A new book by Union University’s Harry Lee (Hal) Poe seeks to correct some of the misconceptions about his ancestor, Edgar Allan Poe. “He’s generally thought of as a gloomy, dark loner, obsessed with death and that sort of thing, said Hal Poe, the Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union. “Actually, he was a rather cheerful, witty, friendly person who enjoyed music and singing with his friends around the piano.” In the new book, “Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories,” Poe provides some biographical information about Edgar...

On the pages of The Washington Post, columnist Kathleen Parker (who poses as a Republican) compared the Republican Party to a fictional mafia crime family and refers to Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz as "Ted bin Laden," an obvious reference to the Osama bin Laden, the Islamist terrorist responsible for the murder of thousands of Americans: In trying to understand the Republican Party’s internal battles, it helps to think of Michael and Sonny. Corleone, that is. … That would be Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who grabbed headlines by speaking for 21 hours against Obamacare. Cruz is neither Michael nor...

When "Memorial Day" was published in 2004, Flynn told the Pioneer Press how elated he was when a CIA chief of operations said "you can't get into a Humvee in Baghdad without kicking a Vince Flynn paperback." "That director is a former Marine responsible for operations in all the bad spots, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran," Flynn recalled. "When he jumped up, starts pumping my hand and tells me he's a huge fan of my books, I almost fainted. He'd just gotten back from Baghdad, where the guys sat around a bonfire, drinking beer, arguing about who should play Mitch Rapp...

Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman has just about had it with the focus of his 40 years of academic study. As he writes in the New York Times on Monday, it is the Constitution itself which has allowed for the series of legislative follies that finally resulted in the “fiscal cliff.” Seidman says that it is time for Americans to realize what lawmakers have known since the constitution’s inception – it is okay to ignore it. “As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government...

THE GATEWAY PUNDIT: Your tax dollars at work – Paying this douche to work at the EPA. EPA science writer says he’s happy Andrew Breitbart is dead.

The influential writer and cultural critic Christopher Hitchens died on Thursday at the age of 62 from complications of cancer of the esophagus. Hitchens confronted his disease in part by writing, bringing the same unsparing insight to his mortality that he had directed at so many other subjects. Over the years, Hitchens' caustic attention was directed at a broad range of subjects, including Henry Kissinger, Prince Charles, Bob Hope, Michael Moore, the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa.