Free Republic

Why is the head of the U.S. Bishops meeting with the White House and the Director of the liberal Center for American Progress? What goals could they possibly share? Is there anything Catholic about that pro-gay, pro-death power group? As the Obama administration tries to position itself as a world leader on climate change ahead of United Nations talks, it's engaging a powerful ally: the Catholic Church. Pope Francis has been moving the Church into a more aggressive posture on climate change, citing the moral need to protect the planet and its citizens. With countries preparing their own climate plans...

Media Malfeasance: Short of handing local rioters a locator map, the newspaper of record provides enough information to find the home of the police officer some still accuse of murdering Michael Brown for no good reason. We're not sure what the New York Times was thinking when it published an item last Monday by Julie Bosman on the recent marriage of Officer Darren Wilson along with the town they lived in and street they lived on. The street in the small St. Louis suburb they live in is only two blocks long, and the piece had almost all the information...

The New York Times, whether consciously or not, has just endangered Darren Wilson’s life. With tensions running high in Ferguson over the lack of an indictment for Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown, the paper has published the officer’s approximate address -- the street and town where he lives with his new wife, who also is named. Given the racial animosity unleashed by Brown’s death, given the rioting and the looting and the stores that were set afire, how can a news organization make it easier for some crazy zealot to track down Wilson? But there it is in the paper:

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, Kentucky, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, was an active participant in this month’s Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the theme “The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization.” The synod’s purpose was to examine challenges to the family today, and ultimately to develop a more effective pastoral approach for the Church in addressing those challenges. In addition to speaking out in defense of the unborn, Archbishop Kurtz has been a vocal supporter of the traditional family against legal recognition of same-sex marriage. During the two-week-long...

Among the political cynics out there warning conservatives to run from the word “impeachment” where President Obama’s lawlessness is concerned, we find Howard Kurtz.Before delving into that though, let’s point out a few facts.  First, it is a FACT that President Obama and the administration has refused to enforce the laws on the books many times on illegal immigration.  It is a FACT that when states try to create their own legislation to take matters into their own hands, the administration spends more energy fighting them than they do securing our borders.  Immigration aside, it’s a FACT that Obama and the...

Charles Krauthammer says it right up front in his Washington Post column: “I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier.” He does, however, challenge the notion that the science on climate change is settled and says those who insist otherwise are engaged in “a crude attempt to silence critics and delegitimize debate.” How ironic, then, that some environmental activists launched a petition urging the Post not to publish Krauthammer’s column on Friday. Their response to opinions they disagree with is to suppress the speech. Brad Johnson (@ClimateBrad), the editor of HillHeat.com and a former Think Progress...

Now that the president has lost the “Morning Joe” crowd, ObamaCare may be in even deeper political trouble than we thought. Mark Halperin, the “Game Change” coauthor and a regular on Joe’s show, called the rollout “unacceptable” and added that “the secrecy is unacceptable,” accusing the administration of withholding information about how many people have signed up. His fellow panelist, liberal commentator Mike Barnicle, ratcheted up from there: “They’re lying about it now,” he said. “They’re not depriving us of information, they are outright lying.” On “CBS This Morning,” the network’s political director, John Dickerson, calls the rollout “a total...

Along with NBC's David Gregory and Chuck Todd, you can now add CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin to the list of journalists (and NBC journalists) floating the idea that one of their own, The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, has done something illegal in reference to his work with NSA leaker Edward Snowden: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvpXztqqzCcMy personal suggestion to Gregory, Todd, and Sorkin is that before they throw these kinds of baseless accusations around, they might want to clean up their own backyard. With their selectively edited videos and audio, NBC News is currently a hotbed of journalistic malpractice unlike anything I have ever seen...

FOX News Channel (FNC) has hired veteran media reporter Howard Kurtz, announced Michael Clemente, Executive Vice President of News for the network. He will begin in this new role on July 1st.

This DOE project explores a variety of strategies designed to curb America’s greenhouse gas emissions up to 80 percent by about 2050. Arguably the most controversial of those reports covers the “effects of the built environment on transportation.” To put it plainly, the “built environment” report lays out strategies the federal government can use to force development away from suburbs and into cities, supposedly for the sake of reducing carbon dioxide emissions given off by all those suburban commuters. The Obama administration wants to force so-called smart growth policies on the country: get out of your car, stay out of...

Paul Kurtz, who sought to debunk psychics, astrologers and anything related to the paranormal, has died. He was 86. The secular humanist philosopher died Saturday at his home in the Buffalo suburb of Amherst. His death was announced Monday by the Center for Inquiry, which he founded. His family isn't releasing the cause. Kurtz founded the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and The Skeptical Inquirer magazine, which advocates relying on science and reason to examine everything from alien sightings to homeopathic remedies. He also was a well-known voice for the idea that decisions and behavior should be guided by science and...

The Associated Press published an article on the reasons for the demise of the print of edition of Newsweek but skipped any mention of the former editor of that magazine, Jon Meacham, who was instumental in ensuring its failure. It's the equivalent of publishing an article on the reasons why the Titanic sunk in which the word "iceberg" does not appear. What Meacham did to destroy Newsweek was so absurd that he really deserves a plaque in the Bad Business Decisions Hall of Fame. Am I exaggerating? Here is Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post explaining the business "genius" of...

People at home may remember Barack Obama and Mitt Romney circling each other like wary gladiators. Folks online are wallowing in Romney saying that as governor he wanted "binders of women." But on television Wednesday, most of the talk about the second presidential debate centered on the flareup over Libya—which is exactly the way the Republicans want it. By attacking moderator Candy Crowley for inserting herself into the middle of that argument, the Romney camp is diverting attention from the fact that an energized Obama often dictated the terms of the argument and frequently put their man on the defensive....

On his CNN program Reliable Sources, the one that allegedly analyzes the news business and its performance, Howard Kurtz spent 15 seconds on what he called a "stunning verdict" on the American people's distrust of the "objective" press. "I want to put up a chart," Kurtz announced on his way to a commercial break. "New Gallup poll showing distrust in the media. Look at that line, 46 percent back in 1997 had little or no confidence in the mass media. It's now up to 60 percent. It's a stunning verdict against our news business." That's it? Kurtz wanted to move...

Minutes of the meeting on January 11, 1996, of the New Party’s Chicago chapter read as follows: Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He signed the New Party “Candidate Contract” and requested an endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party. Consistent with this, a roster of the Chicago chapter of the New Party from early 1997 lists Obama as a member, with January 11, 1996, indicated as the date he joined.

Burn Down the Suburbs? Not exactly, but Obama is already working to get rid of them. By Stanley KurtzEditor’s Note: This article is adapted from Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, by Stanley Kurtz, from Sentinel HC. President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. With suburban voters set to be the swing constituency of the 2012 election, the administration’s plans for this segment of the electorate deserve scrutiny. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools,...

On his Sunday show “Reliable Sources,” CNN host and Daily Beast Washington bureau chief Howard Kurtz made it clear that he disapproved of The Daily Caller reporter Neil Munro’s attempt to ask President Barack Obama a question during his immigration announcement on Friday. However, he then asked guest Matt Lewis, also a contributor to The Daily Caller, to react to Munro’s attempt, asking if he would have done the same thing. That led to the following exchange between Lewis and Kurtz. Transcript as follows: KURTZ: All right. Matt, he’s your colleague at The Daily Caller. But a lot of conservatives...

Barack Obama was, in fact, a member of the socialist New Party in the 1990s and sought its endorsement for the Illinois senate--contrary to the misrepresentations of Obama's presidential campaign in 2008, and in spite of the efforts of Politico's Ben Smith to quash the story. Stanley Kurtz, author of Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (2010), has released new "smoking gun" evidence at National Review Online. It is evidence that the mainstream media can no longer ignore--and Obama can no longer deny. When the story of Obama's association with the New Party first broke in...

CNN's show "Reliable Sources" with host Howard Kurtz seems to try and come off as an unbiased balance look at the media.

It was...a pure Roger Ailes production—and the latest sign that the Fox News chairman is quietly repositioning America’s dominant cable-news channel. Hours before last week’s presidential debate in Orlando, Ailes’s anchors sat in a cavernous back room, hunched over laptops, and plotted how to trap the candidates. Chris Wallace said he would aim squarely at Rick Perry’s weakness: “How do you feel about being criticized by some of your rivals as being too soft on illegal immigration? Then I go to Rick Santorum: is Perry too soft?” “That’s going to get some fireworks going,” said managing editor Bill Sammon, grinning....