Free Republic

The Supreme Court could not have been clearer when it ruled late last month that states may not refuse to marry same-sex couples. But in several states where the resistance to marriage equality has been most entrenched, government officials whose job it is to license or perform marriages continue to misunderstand, stall or flatly defy the court. However they justify these tactics, their conduct is illegal and they must stop. These public employees seem to forget that taxpayers pay them to do their job. If doing that job violates his or her religious beliefs, the best solution is to find...

In her 1985 speech after receiving the Best Actress Oscar for her role in "Places in the Heart," actress Sally Field famously gushed, "You like me; you really, really like me." The latest in a long history of surveys examining the public's level of trust in the news media might paraphrase Field's line this way: "You hate us; you really, really hate us, but we don't care." The 2015 State of the First Amendment Survey, a project of the Newseum Institute's First Amendment Center, has "discovered" what most of us could have told them. According to the survey, "Only 24...

Wow. The media just allowed a bogus AP hit job on Cosby to happen. He did not admit to what AP insinuates he did. It editorializes with commentary from the PLAINTIFF'S LAWYER. It also notes that two other women took quaaludes voluntarily. At NO TIME does Cosby state that he gave *anything* to *anyone* involuntarily. A question that is unanswered because of an objection means NOTHING. It is NOT an admission of anything, folks. They want you to leap to a conclusion unsupported by any evidence. This is NOT a smoking gun. He admitted that he took quaaludes for sex,...

Every once in a while there comes along a candidate who is head and shoulders above the rest. Such a person is Senator Ted Cruz. He is that rare candidate who stands his ground, does not intimidate, never loses his cool and is, above all, always a gentlemen. Everyone who is anyone in the liberal media has been having interviews with Cruz. Not because they are so enamored of the Senator, but more because they are on a mission-a mission to trip him up, catch him off-guard, back him into a wall. They haven't been successful yet. Cruz is fully...

“What I’ve got is F*****G Golden,” said jailed Democrat Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. He was referring to his opportunity to appoint an IL senator to Congress after then Senator Barack Obama became President in 2009. Well, pardon my hubris, but what I have is Golden also, in today’s Hades of Politically Correct Journalism. I have a FIFTIES JOURNALISM DEGREE from that same state, Illinois. Therefore, permit me to advise you budding cub reporters and “J Skul” students of some imperatives I was taught way back when Dinosaurs roamed Wright Street into Greg Hall. “Just the Facts, ma’am; Just the Facts,”...

In America, “accuracy, honesty, transparency, impartiality, and accountability,” went out the day Obama came in The country infamous for its running dog-mainstream media cheering anything Obama in a cacophony of barks, including the “fundamental transformation” of their own country, is now branching out through its State Department to the world. Bureaucrats of the U.S. State Department, who have already taken it upon themselves to teach “ethics” to the “up and coming journalists” of India, are going to “embed” up-and-coming Russian journalists in American newsrooms. Having gained control of the mainstream media on home turf, why not try for world media...

Now that the United States has "normalized" relations with Cuba, which was taken off of the State Department terror sponsor list this week, journalism professors from American universities are starting to train students inside the communist country. Despite the liberal leanings of the professors embarking on this task, this is a very good thing. Press freedom and holding government accountable through the sunlight of reporters are two fundamental principles of a free society. Because of this, despite "normalization" and a "new era," the Castro regime still counts practicing journalism as a crime. It's not just that they are studying journalism...

The economic recovery is really coming along great. For the third time since the expansion began in June 2009, the U.S. economy suffered a setback. Don’t call it a setback. It’s a strategic retreat. Those ‘optimistic’ estimates keep being revised. Such declines in GDP are rare in economic expansions, pointing to the fragile nature of the current rebound. The economy hasn’t contracted in three different quarters during good times since the 1950s. It’s the fault of the GOP. Also the weather. That’s the weakest reading since frigid winter temperatures derailed growth at the start of 2014. We can’t have an...

WBRZ reporter Brett Buffington was arrested after a run-in with officers at the scene of a burglary investigation Thursday morning. According to The Advocate, the Baton Rouge, La. ABC affiliate’s reporter was booked on counts of interfering with an officer and intimidating a public official. Police placed Buffington in the back of a police unit until the area was made safe, the report says. Buffington was then issued a criminal summons and told he was free to leave, to which he told an officer, “Hope you enjoy the rest of your career.” The report says the officer took the comment...

FACT CHECKER: “ISIS didn’t exist when my brother was president. Al Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was president.” Bush seems to have fallen prey to Washington conventional wisdom, in which ISIS suddenly emerged into consciousness in the past year or so. That may be fine for armchair analysts or journalists. But that’s little excuse for a presidential candidate, who might have to grapple with this problem if he or she is elected president. With some fine-tuning of his statement, Bush could have made the case that Obama’s decision to withdraw from Iraq, combined with the president’s...

By now, I assume most of you have figured out that I’m not a huge fan of Sen. Ted Cruz. I’m even less of a fan, however, of what passes for journalism in this country these days, by which I mean the shallow, image-driven, trivia-obsessed folderol that seeks to find the “gotchas” in the most ridiculous things. Did Obama ordering orange juice on the campaign trail mean he’s not a “regular guy” who can relate to the kind of simpletons these overpaid celebrity journalists assume we are? Did Hillary Clinton not tipping in a diner mean she’s insensitive to working...

Full title..."Not how they roll: Pentagon asks media to scrap old footage of ISIS columns" ISIS may be on the move, but not the way you see on television, claims the Pentagon. Footage of the menacing, black-clad terrorist army rolling across the desert in long convoys predates U.S.-led air strikes that have forced the jihadists to travel more discreetly, say senior State Department and Pentagon officials. They have asked television networks to stop using stock footage that makes the terror army seem more mobile - and more formidable - than they say it actually is. “One Toyota speeding down the...

President Obama is taking heat for calling for changes in "how the media reports," during an anti-poverty event where he also took a swipe at Fox News. At the Georgetown University discussion on Tuesday, Obama lamented how, sometimes, the poor are cast as "sponges" who don't want to work. "I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu -- they will find folks who make me mad," Obama said. "I don't know where they find them. They're like, I don't want to work, I just want a free Obama phone...

America is crumbling before our eyes. Once, the U.S. was the envy of the world with its modern roads, airports, railroad bridges and other infrastructure. Everything was first-class. Now, it’s third-rate. An Amtrak passenger train derailed Tuesday in Philadelphia, killing at least seven passengers. The investigation into the crash is only beginning, and it’s too early to say what caused it. But it’s not too early to say that Amtrak’s crumbling infrastructure didn’t help matters. “It’s an extremely heavily used stretch of track,” transportation analyst Matthew L. Wald told CNN, referring to the area where the train derailed Tuesday night....

Little Rock journalist Suzi Parker, author of “Sex in the South: Unbuckling the Bible Belt" and a former contributor to Salon, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News and other outlets, recently self-published her first novel, "Echo Ellis: Adventures of a Girl Reporter," about "a Southern reporter living in Bill Clinton's Arkansas who often finds herself in dangerous yet thrilling situations." As Parker put it in a recent interview, "Echo is my alter ego. She has many adventures that I may or may not have had in my life." Check out the noir book trailer above, in which she describes...

Just when you think the GOP might modernize, the knuckles start dragging again, this time on immigration and trade. It’s political suicide. If you want to see where the impulse to reform the Republican Party in a more libertarian direction of limited government, social tolerance, and free markets goes to die, look no further than the recent attacks on immigration and freer trade by Jeff Sessions, the influential senator from Alabama. Every time the GOP seems finally ready to orient itself in a forward-looking, post-culture-war direction, some holdover from an America that never quite existed to begin with blows his...

The transparency standards for an NFL quarterback rising higher than for the Secretary of State surely speaks to the bread-and-circuses quality of 2015 America. We expect more from our gridiron heroes than from our nation’s leaders. Perhaps the tizzy over Tom serves as a tacit admission that we also expect more responsiveness to public opinion from 345 Park Ave. than from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. No law decrees that a quarterback must turn over his texts and emails to the NFL the way that the Federal Records Act demands that the Secretary of State turn over correspondence to the government. Yet...

Global warming will eventually push 1 out of every 13 species on Earth into extinction, a new study projects. It won't quite be as bad in North America, where only 1 in 20 species will be killed off because of climate change or Europe where the extinction rate is nearly as small. But in South America, that forecasted heat-caused extinction rate soars to 23 percent, the worst for any continent, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Science. University of Connecticut ecologist Mark Urban compiled and analyzed 131 peer-reviewed studies on species that used various types of...

Climate change could drive to extinction as many as one in six animal and plant species, according to a new analysis. In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, Mark Urban, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut, also found that as the planet warms in the future, species will disappear at an accelerating rate. “We have the choice,” he said in an interview. “The world can decide where on that curve they want the future Earth to be.” If emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases continue to grow, climate researchers project the world could warm by...

A YOUNG student from Seattle has been revealed as a senior female ISIS agent responsible for recruiting women to join the terror group. On Twitter, she is known as @_UmmWaqqas, and is pictured shrouded head-to-toe in black; an inscrutable and high-ranking officer of ISIS who boasts more than 8000 followers online, and is in close contact with the British, Americans and the jihadi brides in Syria. Channel 4 News has since revealed her identity as a woman in her 20s who went to school in the US, and by her friends’ accounts grew up as a regular teenager in a...