Free Republic

Contemplating life after devastating loss to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton joked that she would like to be buried with copies of all the newspapers that endorsed her. “I want to be buried with my editorial endorsements,” Clinton said in an interview with New York Times Magazine. “I want an open casket and they can all be piled on top of me. You won’t even be able to see my body.”

This is my last column until after the election, so I’d like to address the people least likely to read it: Donald Trump voters. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky and a few of them will buy fish wrapped in this column, and they’ll accidentally peruse it! Desperate times call for desperate measures.

If you vote for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, you’re voting in favor of “climate catastrophe,” according to liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. “Anyone who takes climate change seriously had better do everything possible to keep Donald Trump out of the White House,” Robinson wrote in a recent op-ed on why Trump would be bad for the fight against global warming. “Global warming is affecting weather patterns worldwide,” Robinson wrote.

Just when you think the media could not possibly become more loathsome, the Fourth Estate bullies prove you wrong again. The Washington Post’s latest ugliness was to exploit the disability of a newspaper reporter in order to smear the Republican nominee for president. Then — and this is the least surprising part of the story — the Post lied about it. Other than the subject of that paragraph — which I slyly switched from Trump to the media — that is an exact paraphrase of the Post’s opening lines from an editorial hawking the media’s most successful lie about Donald...

Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine has two cover stories, one for Bill Clinton and one (if you turn it upside down on the other side) for Melania Trump. As expected, Bill Clinton is going to get a gushier treatment. Post writer Neely Tucker is so tender to the president that he mangles a fact, and the copy editors (also tender hearts) allowed it. “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler will not be assigned to this story. Tucker wrote, “He allegedly cheated on his wife, repeatedly, even in the Oval Office, and with a young woman who wasn’t that much older than their daughter.”This...

About 10 or 15 minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which made gay marriage legal across the country, including the 13 states that up until now had banned it, a colleague of mine walked into the PennLive newsroom. A smile lit up her face and there were tears in her eyes. Up until about 10 a.m. on Friday, my gay colleague sat on pins and needles, waiting to see if nine lawyers were about to throw the life and her and her partner into absolute upheaval. We embraced and I offered...

Bill Donohue comments on bias at the New York Times: There is no newspaper in the United States that is more extreme in its defense of abortion-on-demand and homosexual rights than the New York Times. It regards the defense of partial-birth abortion to be a “moderate” position, and its reporters have openly bragged about the record number of homosexuals who write feature stories. Today’s edition offers more support to the accusation that it is biased in its coverage on these issues. There is a front-page story about a homosexual vice principal in Seattle who was asked to step down when...

If they can make Velveeta disappear - why can they not make pithy columnists and imperial presidents disappear? Hmmmmmm???? You'll forgive me if I just take a break from the ordinary format of buttressing my perspectives with documentation, quotes and data points and just vent. Perhaps I should do so more often and likely I will, because progressives don't know what to do with the truth when they see it and you rely on your native common sense to sort things out anyway.A buddy of mine who is part of my email band of gypsies, sent me a thing...

The New York Times Company [$NYT] reported second quarter 2013 earnings 48% below last year's quarter due to severance and other "special" items but digital paid subscriptions rose 40%. Despite rising numbers of readers and paid subscriptions, the company continues to struggle as advertising revenues continued to fall again— 6% in this quarter. This is the eighth sequential quarter of declining print and digital advertising revenues. "Print and digital advertising revenues decreased…

In January, on the one-month anniversary of the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School and just ahead of the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., we advocated on this page for weaving strong gun control legislation into the list of life issues demanding our attention. We specially called for strict legislation banning assault weapons and military-style magazines. "It is imperative that we not allow the deaths of 27 people in Newtown, Conn., to slip from memory before something is done. Action is long overdue," we wrote then. And we were not alone. New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president...

For eight decades, leaders of a community of Catholic priests and brothers spanning 10 U.S. states acted inadequately in responding to sex abuse allegations and prioritized protecting accused abusers over their victims, concludes an audit released by the group Tuesday. The report, released by a province of Franciscan priests known as Capuchins, could raise questions of how communities of religious, which are not under direct control of bishops, are handling abuse allegations. It also addresses themes many critics of the U.S. church's response to sex abuse have raised since the issue made national headlines in 2002. The report says that...

I often tell people that if you lose your way in Reformed Tradition (read Presbyterian) theology, you can always go back to square one, which says, in essence, this: God is sovereign. Or -- in wording I prefer now because most of us have no experience living under a sovereign -- God is gloriously free.I thought about that the other day when I read something Pope Francis said in a book he co-authored in 2010 as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Speaking about how he would converse with an atheist, Bergoglio wrote: "I would not tell him that his life is...

Here is something that I never thought I would write.Fr. Z kudos to Jamie Manson of the National Schismatic Reporter.One of Fishwrap‘s headliners, a darling of LCWR, the openly-lesbian, Margaret Farley-mentored Jamie Manson has sobered up about Pope Francis.She has a piece in the Fishwrap today in which she tosses Francis under the bus. Be clear about this: she is wrong in her positions, but she is honest enough to state her case clearly and she sees accurately what is going on.Context: she starts with the high hopes which the liberal, dissenting LCWR-ers had for Pope Francis, how jazzed they...

Barack Obama for Re-Election The economy is slowly recovering from the 2008 meltdown, and the country could suffer another recession if the wrong policies take hold. The United States is embroiled in unstable regions that could easily explode into full-blown disaster. An ideological assault from the right has started to undermine the vital health reform law passed in 2010. Those forces are eroding women’s access to health care, and their right to control their lives. Nearly 50 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, all Americans’ rights are cheapened by the right wing’s determination to deny marriage benefits to...

Workers for Haaretz and The Marker are planning to go on strike Wednesday beginning at 4 p.m. The strike, which will end Thursday morning, is expected to affect both the Thursday paper and the Haaretz web.... Workers are protesting over planned layoffs, which they say management is refusing to discuss. Representatives for the workers said the strike is aimed to remind management that “you can't have a newspaper without journalists.”

The editor of the New York Times just got religion: He thinks it’s time to ask GOP presidential candidates “tougher questions about faith.” Oh, brother, where wast thou in 2008? The Fishwrap of Record led the whitewashing of Barack Obama’s wacky black liberation theology pals and freaky-deaky Chicago pastors. Now, the skews-paper is ready to start asking “tougher questions about faith?” Snortalicious, dear readers. Snortalicious. Just a reminder before I get to his latest doozy: NYT editor Bill Keller is the same one who claimed “we are agnostic as to where a story may lead; we do not go into...

Independent voters in Massachusetts are an unpredictable breed and downright ornery when times are bad. On Tuesday, they will determine who will be the state’s next US senator in a race too close to call, capturing the nation’s attention because the fate of a national health care overhaul hangs in the balance. Termed unenrolled voters because they are not affiliated with a party, independents constitute a majority of the registered voters in the state. Republicans, outnumbered by Democrats by more than 3 to 1, need to capture a huge majority of independents and a slice of moderate and conservative Democrats...

WASHINGTON — Born and reared in Virginia, the son of immigrant parents from a small town near Jerusalem, he joined the Army right out of high school, against his parents’ wishes. The Army, in turn, put him through college and then medical school, where he trained to be a psychiatrist. But Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the 39-year-old man accused of Thursday’s mass shooting at Fort Hood, Tex., started having second thoughts about his military career a few years ago after other soldiers harassed him for being a Muslim, he told relatives in Virginia. The Associated Press, quoted federal law enforcement...

Philadelphia Newspapers, the company that publishes the Philadelphia Inquirer, admitted in court filings last week that if it does not get a proposed loan, it would have to cease publication. "Absent the proposed DIP facility and the use of the cash collateral, the debtors likely will be unable to pay their ordinary business expenses, including employee wages," said the filing. "In that event, all operations will cease -- employees will be terminated, the Philadelphia Inquirer will no longer be published, and all assets on which the prepetition senior lenders assert a lien will be liquidated." The filing did not give...

What do you call someone who uses bombs to turn civilians into body parts? If you’re not afflicted by moral relativism, you call them “terrorists.” If you’re The New York Times, you call them “militants,” “extremists,” or “insurgents.” An article in today’s paper reports that as the U.S. prepares to withdraw from Iraq, “jihadi and Baath militants are rejoining the fight.” It noted that among the spate of explosions which have left 123 dead in recent weeks, “three were suicide bombings, signatures of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni extremist group.” The same article observed that some “former insurgents...