Free Republic

Until this year, the world had recorded 1,640 deaths from Ebola since the virus was discovered in 1976. Then Ebola appeared in West Africa. So far this year, 887 people have died of Ebola in West Africa, the World Health Organization Monday. The graphs include only years in which 50 or more Ebola deaths were reported. To put that into perspective, more than a third of all people known to have died from the virus have died in the current outbreak. And the outbreak is still spreading at a frightening rate. Last week, there were more than 200 new cases...

NPR’s education team sent out a curious tweet Wednesday that prompted an online backlash. “I reach out to diverse sources on deadline,” the tweet from @npr_ed said. “Only the white guys get back to me.” The tweet seemed uncharacteristic for NPR, an outlet that fired analyst Juan Williams after he made remarks about feeling “nervous” if he sees people dressed in “Muslim garb” on an airplane.Kamenetz said she had mistakenly sent the tweet from the NPR education account instead of her own and that she regretted it.

Last week National Public Radio (lavished with over $4 billion by U.S. taxpayers over the past decade) ran a week-long “special series” on—and from—Cuba. Such was its propaganda value for the Castro regime that Cuba’s own KGB-founded and mentored media gleefully ran some of the programs —and in their pristinely unedited form. Given totalitarian media practices that’s quite a “compliment” to NPR’s producers. To wit: "Everything within the Revolution, nothing outside of it." (Fidel Castro speech, June, 1961.) "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." (Benito Mussolini, Doctrine of Fascism, 1932.) In his famous speech...

That National Public Radio has nice things to say about socialism shouldn’t be surprising. After all, “Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public,” explains NPR’s own website. “Elimination of federal funding would result in fewer programs, less journalism…and eventually the loss of public radio stations.” NPR’s brand of journalism came under fire most recently when Republican Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn sponsored a bill in 2011 to defund the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. “Since 2001, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds programming for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, has received...

You already know how the national polling looks, but those numbers include the opinions of many Americans whose votes will have zero impact on the much-watched battle for control of the Senate. NPR clears out New Yorkers, Californians and Texans (among others) from its sample, focusing instead on the following 12 states: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina and West Virginia. A look at the results, bearing in mind that presidential approval rating has historically been the single most significant variable in midterm election cycles: That would be (38/58) overall, including an...

Lots of tense, awkward laughter on NPR today! Hillary Clinton's book tour took her to "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross this afternoon, where the two got into it a bit over if and when Clinton "evolved," as they say, on the issue of gay marriage, or whether she held her personal opinions in favor of equality until they were politically viable. The answer is: Clinton is not telling. But it wasn't for Gross's lack of trying. "So what's it like when you're in office and you have to do all these political calculations to not be able to support something...

As part of a prisoner swap to free Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the United States agreed to transfer five Guantánamo detainees to Qatar. NPR's Tom Bowman received a list of the prisoners being released from a Pentagon official. According to documents leaked to the organization WikiLeaks, all five prisoners were high-ranking Taliban officials. Some were considered high-risk and "likely to post a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies." U.S. officials said working with the government of Qatar, they had ameliorated some of those risks, because the detainees will face restrictions on their movements and activities. Using those leaked...

There's been nothing but bad news lately for Gov. Sam Brownback. The FBI is investigating close associates of the Kansas Republican, including his former chief of staff, for possible lobbying and fundraising improprieties, as well as sweetheart deals involving state business. Brownback dismisses it as a "smear" campaign. Nothing may come of it, but it's certainly made for some bad press. Also, the state's bond rating was cut earlier this month amid plunging revenues, lending credibility to his opponents' arguments that his massive tax-cut packages have damaged the state. "The polls show that he's very vulnerable for somebody who should...

We’ve been told over and over that opposing President Obama’s socialist anti-American agenda is due to deep-seated racism and not any conservative values one might hold. Now, the National Public Radio (NPR), of all media outlets, has posted a piece on their blog saying that there might be something more to disliking Obama than just racism. I know, I’m shocked too. This refreshing revelation from a decidedly left-leaning news source starts out with a great premise: There’s no question we’re living in a time of divisive politics, when roughly half the country is likely to hate the president, no matter...

Did you catch the story about those conservative Republican male chauvinist pig politicians in Florida who think that it was a waste of time to pass a bill which would make it a crime for a guy to secretly administer an abortion-inducing drug to a spouse or partner he impregnated? How utterly outrageous ... Wait a minute ... It was Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz who said that? C'mon, that's not possible. What? There's audio of her saying that on a Florida public radio station? Get outta here. If that were true, the press would be printing and...

It's a fact of American life that a good share of the electorate is , and even of President Obama. What's less certain are the reasons why. For some Democrats, the explanation is simple: race. In recent weeks, West Virginia Sen. , Mississippi Rep. and former Florida Gov. have all said racism is the driving force behind Republican resistance to the president. Republicans, unsurprisingly, say their disdain for Obama is based not on the color of his skin, but on the content of his policies. "If any white Democrat had pushed through a billion-dollar stimulus plan and a takeover of...

Media industry veteran Jarl Mohn will be NPR's new CEO, the organization's board of directors has announced. Mohn, 62, currently sits on the board of directors at several media organizations, including Scripps Networks Interactive and Web analytics company ComScore. He is also on the boards of KPCC Southern California Public Radio and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Announcing the hire, Kit Jensen, who chairs NPR's board of directors, said Mohn has "an ability to find nuanced and new ideas." He is slated to start work at NPR on July 1. The move to NPR represents something of...

WASHINGTON – Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens says he thinks the federal government should legalize marijuana. The 94-year-old retired justice tells NPR that public opinion has changed on the issue. Stevens also says that there isn't much distinction between marijuana and alcoholic beverages.

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...