Free Republic

Bart Ehrman, prolific author, New Testament scholar and former evangelical Christian, says it took him eight years to research and complete his new book, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. Yet, a group of fellow scholars responded in their book, How God Became Jesus, by claiming that the Christian-turned-agnostic's "sloppy" scholarship on Jesus' divinity leaves much to be desired. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, says his research reveals that Jesus, a first century Galilean, never claimed to be God, and that it...

On April 1, Washington Mayor Vincent Gray was denied a second term, defeated in the primary by upstart city councilwoman Muriel Bowser. The beginning of the end came on March 10, when U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen struck a plea bargain with a wealthy businessman who confessed he'd spent $668,000 on an illegal "shadow campaign" to fund get-out-the-vote efforts that helped Gray win the mayoral office in 2010. So the corrupt mayor of America's most important city is thrown out. A political scandal? The same networks that were utterly breathless over the local story of Gov. Chris Christie's aides slowing traffic...

There was a clear difference of opinion between male and female justices at the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. The issue was whether for-profit corporations, citing religious objections, may refuse to include contraception coverage in the basic health plan now mandated under the Affordable Care Act. The female justices were clearly supportive of the contraception mandate, while a majority of the male justices were more skeptical. The lead challenger in the case is the Hobby Lobby corporation, a chain of 500 arts and crafts stores that has 13,000 employees. The owners object to two forms of contraception, IUDs and morning-after...

e day after a Democrat Illinois lawmaker cruised to victory in his party’s primary Tuesday, he gave up his seat in the wake of a child pornography raid. State Rep. Keith Farnham stepped down from representing Elgin, a city about 35 miles northwest of Chicago, days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided his home and his state office in Springfield. Items that were seized included the laptop computer Farnham used on the House floor, The Associated Press reported. The search warrant sought material that “in any format and medium concerning minors visually depicted while engaged in sexually explicit conduct,”...

Even National Public Radio (NPR) occasionally realizes that some college courses are straight from la-la land. A recent report from the Protojournalist mentions an unusual offering in the area of Mythology and Folklore at Harvard called Maledicta, which is described as “an academic exploration of ritualized verbal abuse,” according to a report in the Protojournalist. Students taking this class apparently examine “international traditions of vituperation and cursing in their folkloristic, historical and sociological settings.” Not only that, “they learn about practices including Turkish verbal duels, Scottish flyting and African-American “dozens.” Rutgers University also proves it is no slouch in the...

Democrats from President Barack Obama's very own party joined Republicans derailing Obama's nominee, Debo Adegbile, for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.Explaining the failure, the taxpayer funded National Public Radio (NPR) announced “a handful of southern Democrats joined Republicans yesterday to defeat President Obama’s choice to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division.” Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online  helpfully named the "handful of southern Democrats", something NPR failed to do.  Here they are:  Chris Coons (Del.) Bob Casey (Pa.) Mark Pryor (Ark.) Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) Joe Manchin (W.V.) Joe Donnelly (Ind.)  John Walsh (Mont.)  And, of course,...

MSNBC reinvented itself around Rachel Maddow. Its new talkers, Chris Hayes and Ronan Farrow, are cut from the same cloth, delivering nasal lectures with a tone somewhere between passive aggressive argument and ironic detachment. Imagine Air America crossbred with NPR and then mated with Pitchfork Magazine. Their horrible abortion would be MSNBC’s bland hipster ethos of earnest liberals earnestly talking down to their audience while Al Sharpton tries to figure out how a teleprompter works. The Maddow MSNBC is a leftist student newspaper stridently denouncing racism, sexism, homophobia, claustrophobia, transphobia, pipelines, microaggressions, white privilege, cherry pies, political incorrectness, model trains...

A prominent conservative group is hiring a consulting firm which had been all but excommunicated by national Republicans at the behest of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last year. The Club for Growth has yet to endorse in Kentucky's GOP primary battle between McConnell and Tea Party-backed businessman Matt Bevin, but the group has said it is paying close attention to the race. It now appears the Club is bucking the National Republican Senatorial Committee by working with the New Jersey-based firm Jamestown Associates, which McConnell's aides had recently blacklisted. From The Washington Post: The Club announced Friday that it...

NPR didn’t mean to offer a perfect example of how an unfalsifiable, infallible theory works.  It’s stated goal was to have people better understand what a polar vortex is.  However, when it chose to interview “Andrew Freedman, senior science writer for Climate Central, an independent non-profit organization that researches and reports on the science and impact of climate change,” Mr. Freedman, true to his climate change beliefs, came up with a good one.Before I get to Mr. Freedman’s words, let me make sure we’re all on the same page about an unfalsifiable, infallible theory.  Mike McDaniel has an easy-to-understand, elegantly...

This is a post that is out of the norm for me, but I have to do it... This post is about liberalism's (lack of) intelligence, but before going forward I should qualify that I only think they're stupid in matters of politics and the ways of the world. Liberals have made brilliant artists, musicians, actors, yadda yadda yadda. I know some (even many) liberals who could school me all day long in certain subject matters, nobody is all-knowing, even if they think they are. That said, anytime I find out someone I know who isn't particularly political (to my...

Just a few dozen stations now carry liberal talkers, as key affiliates in cities with active left-wing politics are falling like dominoes, going dark or switching formats. Detroit’s progressive outlet shut down in January, along with Seattle’s liberal talk station, which changed to sports. And after last year’s election, Portland’s progressive talk station ended its political programming. With the political battlegrounds of 2014 and 2016 on the horizon, reducing the whopping imbalance between conservative radio, with its huge fan base, and the left has become more important than ever, according to those in the progressive media world. POLITICO spoke with...

Enrolling in HealthCare.gov is not easy, and it's been particularly difficult in Alaska. Just 53 people enrolled Anchorage hair stylist Lara Imler is one of the few who got through, as we previously reported. "I don't even know how to feel about the whole thing anymore because I can't even get anyone who has an answer to help," she says. "It's just such a lost cause at this point." So on a recent morning, she sat down in her living room, with her laptop and a cup of coffee to try to resolve her difficulties—but not without frustration. "I've had...

On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid showed up for a phone interview on The Diane Rehm Show on NPR to discuss shredding the filibuster for presidential appointees. A very polite Rehm asked if this might make partisanship worse. “I'm sorry to smile, as you can't see on radio, but more dysfunction? I mean, gee whiz,” Reid replied. But underneath the Nevada-nice routine came an attack out of nowhere on black libertarian judge Janice Rogers Brown as one of the “extreme right wing people” the Senate confirmed in the Bush years. **SNIP** Later, Reid added that “we put on that...

Greek riot police have cleared the headquarters of the defunct national broadcaster, temporarily detaining at least two journalists. The raid, ordered by the prime minister, began at 4am local time, causing a clutch of journalists and technicians guarding the facility to scramble. ERT was shut down in June when the government sacked the network's 2,700 staff as part of cost-cutting measures linked to Greece's €240bn (£202bn) bailout programme. Government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou said the eviction was "legal" and that a prosecutor had escorted police during the operation at the sprawling compound north-east of Athens.

The joke in question came from the Bluff the Listener segment of the show Saturday, in which an audience member was asked to identify which of three stories about an old joke coming true had been taken from that week's headlines. Peter Grosz, an actor and TV writer who has appeared as a panelist and guest host on "Wait Wait," offered a supposed news item referencing a joke asking how many Poles it takes to screw in a light bulb.

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Obama administration says “Don’t believe what you’ve heard” from the following news sources On October 25, 2013, regarding the various criticisms of Obamacare, Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius said:“Don’t believe what you’ve heard.”In other words, the Obama administration says we shouldn’t believe the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, Politico, the Wall St. Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, Investor’s Business Daily, Forbes, the BBC, Huffington Post, the Nation, Mother Jones, or New Republic.

October 22, 2013 NPR Reporter Probes Jay Carney: Will WH Provide Obamacare Updates Like They Would Natural Disasters? Noah Rothman On Tuesday, the White House announced that it was tapping former acting Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Jeff Zients to head the team overseeing the repairs on the Affordable Care Act health insurance exchange website. NPR Reporter Mara Liasson probed White House Press Sec. Jay Carney about whether he would be providing regular updates on those repairs as they did for disasters like the Deep Horizon oil spill in 2010. “In the past when you had a natural...

Fifteen years after tobacco companies agreed to pay billions of dollars in fines in what is still the largest civil litigation settlement in U.S. history, it's unclear how state governments are using much of that money. So far tobacco companies have paid more than $100 billion to state governments as part of the 25-year, $246 billion settlement. Among many state governments receiving money, Orange County, Calif., is an outlier. Voters mandated that 80 percent of money from tobacco companies be spent on smoking-related programs, like a cessation class taught in the basement of Anaheim Regional Medical Center. "So go ahead...

Vivian Schiller, NBC News’ SVP and chief digital officer, is being tapped for Twitter’s head of news position, according to sources familiar with the matter. AllThingsD reported last week that she was the leading pick for the high-profile job. The deal is now “all but done,” according to sources, although Schiller will apparently take a significant period of time off between the end of her current position at NBC and the start of the new job at Twitter. -snip- Schiller’s NPR stint ended in controversy; she resigned from NPR in March following some very dicey snafus.

EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty slammed NBC News Chief Digital Officer Vivian Schiller, the person who shut down his start-up, by advising Twitter not to hire her for its Head of News opening. The tweet comes shortly after a report by AllThingsD that said Schiller is believed to be the top candidate for the position. Adrian Holovaty @adrianholovaty Attention @twitter management: hiring @VivianSchiller would be a huge mistake. Check your references!