Free Republic

The View has become the center of controversy once again, this time after Raven-Symoné admitted that she would not hire someone with a 'black' name. 'I'm not about to hire you if your name is Watermelondrea,' the former child star said to her shocked co-hosts during Thursday's episode of the ABC show. 'It's just not going to happen,' she continued. 'I'm not going to hire you.' Raven's comment came while the women discussed a recent UCLA study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, which found that Americans make racist assumptions based on people's names. Whoopi Goldberg introduced the...

3% – Planned Parenthood (hereafter PP) often claims that that abortions account for only 3 percent of the services they provide. While this may be technically true, it is a highly misleading statistic. PP considers an "activity" any separate action, exam, or test they do for a patient. If patient comes in for an abortion they may also give her an HIV test, a STI test, a pap test, medication to prevent a urinary tract infection, and some oral contraceptives. PP counts each as an "activity." Even if a pregnant woman came to a PP clinic specifically for an abortion,...

President Obama is under fire from The Washington Post’s fact-checker over a series of recent far-fetched gun claims, including suggesting the country’s homicide rate is higher than that of other industrialized nations “by like a mile.” The comments, made during a stop in South Carolina last week, earned the president three out of four "Pinocchios" -- the fact-checker's scale for measuring inaccuracy.

The world’s largest search engine is setting itself up to become the global arbiter of truth online.

THE internet is stuffed with garbage...Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness. Google's search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them. A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of...

Requesting a devastating set of well cited facts detailing the true nature of the economy to shut up / shut down d@named fool Obola supporters. Anyone know of an infographic?

Liberals aren't going to let mere facts get in the way of a good story. A Politico magazine article on the UVA rape accusation debacle, in which the accuser's allegations have unraveled, quotes a student newspaper editor thusly: "to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake."

My daughter Heather, visiting from her home Madison, Wis., for Thanksgiving, took me by surprise with a peculiar request: She asked me to take her to Ferguson. All the more peculiar was the fact that this was a week ago yesterday, while the ruins of gutted businesses still smoldered from fires set barely 36 hours before. Heather wasnÂ’t asking just some random dad. She knew that mine had been one of the Post-DispatchÂ’s fingers on that communityÂ’s pulse since the shooting of Michael Brown on Aug. 9. IÂ’m police and court editor here, which accounts for why I havenÂ’t had...

People say America is one of the most religious countries in the world. But is it religious in the way that you think it is? You’re bound to learn something new in this list:

And this is really not the time to be demanding that people resign. We’ve heard a lot of unfounded talk about Ebola in recent days. I don’t sense a widespread panic out there, and I’m certainly not panicking myself, but if people don’t know the real facts, they might not have the most responsible reactions to what’s going on. So let’s review some basic facts: When is Ebola contagious? It’s only contagious when an infected person is showing symptoms, such as fever, vomiting, flu-like body-aches and diarrhea.

NEW YORK (AP) — Less than a month away from the midterm elections, President Barack Obama's campaign schedule is getting off to a late start. Even while he raises money for Democrats this week from coast to coast, Obama will steer clear of any public campaign events with Democratic candidates, which would hand Republicans easy opportunities to saddle their opponents with Obama's own political baggage. The White House says Obama will start appearing with candidates as early as next week, but as of yet, no events have been announced. Obama headed first on Tuesday to New York, where police shut...

In a world threatened by the rise of radical Islamism, by the outbreak of diseases like Ebola... Thanks to Sunday’s Climate March in New York and Tuesday’s Climate Summit at the United Nations, Americans and others will have been deluged with the lies that have been told to sustain this greatest of all hoaxes. Here are the known facts. Use them to protect yourself against the Green assault the truth:

What has happened to America? Please show these numbers to anyone that does not believe that the United States is in decline. It is time for all of us to humble ourselves and face the reality of what has happened to our once great nation. For those of us that love America, it is heartbreaking to watch the foundations of our society rot and decay in thousands of different ways. The following are 50 facts that show how far America has fallen in this generation, but the truth is that this list could have been far, far longer… #1 According...

The police officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown did not know that he was a suspect in a convenience store robbery, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson said Friday.Jackson said the officer, previously identified as 28-year-old Darren Wilson, initially stopped Brown and a friend ”because they were walking down the middle of the street blocking traffic.” Police earlier Friday released security footage they said showed Brown grabbing a box of cigars from a convenience store and then shoving the clerk away to leave.Daryl Parks, an attorney for the Brown family, confirmed that the security footage “appears to look like” the teenager,...

Do Americans understand the scientific consensus about issues like climate change and evolution? At least for a substantial portion of the public, it seems like the answer is no. The Pew Research Center, for instance, found that 33 percent of the public believes “Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time” and 26 percent think there is not “solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades.” Unsurprisingly, beliefs on both topics are divided along religious and partisan lines. For instance, 46 percent of...

The conservative life is a happier one. Survey says...

A State of the Union address is often difficult to fact-check, no matter who is president. The speech is a product of many hands and is carefully vetted, so major errors of fact are relatively rare. But State of the Union addresses often are very political speeches, an argument for the president’s policies, so context is sometimes missing. Here is a guide through some of President Obama’s more fact-challenged claims, in the order in which he made them. At the end, we also examine one fishy fact in the Republican response. As is our practice with live events, we do...

Since this year will mark the 50th anniversary of the "war on poverty," we can expect many comments and commemorations of this landmark legislation in the development of the American welfare state. The actual signing of the "war on poverty" legislation took place in August 1964, so the 50th anniversary is some months away. But there have already been statements in the media and in politics proclaiming that this vast and costly array of anti-poverty programs "worked." Of course everything "works" by sufficiently low standards, and everything "fails" by sufficiently high standards. The real question is: What did the "war...

One of the things that attracted me to the political left, as a young man, was a belief that leftists were for "the people." Fortunately, I was also very interested in the history of ideas — and years of research in that field repeatedly brought out the inescapable fact that many leading thinkers on the left had only contempt for "the people." That has been true from the 18th century to the present moment. Even more surprising, I discovered over the years that leading thinkers on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum had more respect for ordinary people than...

Someone summarized Barack Obama in three words — "educated," "smart" and "ignorant." Unfortunately, those same three words would describe all too many of the people who come out of our most prestigious colleges and universities today. President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again. Economic equality? That was tried in the 19th century, in communities set up by Robert Owen, the man who coined the term "socialism." Those communities all collapsed. It was tried...