Free Republic

When Sean Youra was 26 years old and working as an engineer, he started watching documentaries about climate change. Youra, who was struggling with depression and the loss of a family member, was horrified by what he learned about melting ice and rising extreme weather. He started spending hours on YouTube, watching videos made by fringe scientists who warned that the world was teetering on the edge of societal collapse — or even near-term human extinction. Youra started telling his friends and family that he was convinced that climate change couldn’t be stopped, and humanity was doomed. In short, he...

Sarah Longwell serves on the Leadership Council for Conservatives Against Discrimination and is the chief executive of Longwell Partners. Last week, when I picked up my 3- and 5-year-old from school, I found myself drawn to the family pictures that adorn their classroom walls. The teachers asked us to send these photographs along with our children on the first day of school, as both a comfort measure as well as to help the kids get to know each other better. There’s me and my wife, smiling along with our two boys — all of us wearing helmets as we paused...

The Washington Post was already skating on thin ice with its fantastically convenient hit piece on Mitt Romney, published in perfect synchronization with President Obama’s embrace of gay marriage. Designed to paint Romney as a mean-spirited homophobic bully during his prep school days – which, let us remember, occurred over seventeen thousand days ago – the ridiculously bloated and overly-dramatic 5000-word Post “expose” related the story of how Romney allegedly led a gang of high-school hooligans and forcibly cut the hair of a “presumably gay” fellow student named John Lauber. The piece does a great deal of mind-reading to insinuate...

Earlier this month I posted on the attack by Lisa Miller, the Washington Post’s egregiously stupid religion correspondent, on Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney because they had large families. Miller found large families to be vaguely threatening to her self esteem and indicative of a “smug fecundity” and not valuing women for anything other than their ability to reproduce. Today Miller doubles down and accuses Rick Santorum of being a “cafeteria Catholic.” For those who aren’t familiar with the term, a cafeteria Catholic applies to Catholics who dissent from Church dogmas. These are the “smells and bells” Catholics who have...

Los Angeles (AP) - The Washington Post will close its remaining U.S. bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago at the end of the year to save money and will focus news efforts on covering the nation's capital. Six correspondents are being offered jobs in Washington, while three news aides will be let go Dec. 31. In a staff memo Tuesday, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told workers that the paper needed to concentrate its "journalistic firepower" on its central mission of covering Washington, D.C. In the last decade, the paper has closed bureaus in Miami, Denver and Austin, Texas....

In an unprecedented move, the nation's top military officers blasted the editors of the Washington Post and editorial cartoonist Tom Toles for an editorial cartoon published in the newspaper on Monday and on its website. The letter to the Post editors charges that the six military leaders "believe you and Mr. Toles have done a disservice to your readers and your paper's reputation by using such a callous depiction of those who have volunteered to defend this nation, and as a result, have suffered traumatic and life-altering wounds. ... As the Joint Chiefs, it is rare that we all put...