Free Republic

WASHINGTON – Congress has taken its first step toward an energy revolution, with the prospect of profound change for every household, business, industry and farm in the decades ahead. It was late Friday when the House passed legislation that would, for the first time, require limits on pollution blamed for global warming — mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Now the Senate has the chance to change the way Americans produce and use energy. What would the country look like a decade from now if the House-passed bill — or, more likely, a water-down version — were to become...

The aftermath of Katrina obscured many stories from public view. One of them concerned same-sex marriage. It deserves much more attention, particularly from national politicians. On September 1, the California state Senate, by a vote of 21 to 15, approved same-sex marriage for the Golden State. On Tuesday, September 6, the state Assembly approved the same bill by a margin of 41 to 35. No Republican voted for the measure, and four Assembly Democrats voted against it. The bill proposed changing the legal definition of marriage from "a civil contract between a man and a woman" to a "civil contract...

Flash-column by Joe Moody Terrorists are unable to confront the U.S. militarily, so their only weapon is terror. Whenever the terrorists be-head someone and videotape it, this is equivalent to them creating a "terror bomb." Whenever a media outlet replays a terrorist videotape, they are unknowingly dropping this bomb on their viewership. This is not about censorship but about how to effectively fight this new kind of war. Such atrocities must be reported, but showing the video fulfills the terrorists wishes and spreads their terror to the masses. Ultimately they hope to terrorize Americans so much that they are swayed...

LOS ANGELES, March 22 (UPI) -- The NBC comedy "Whoopi" takes on same-sex marriage in an episode this week that features arguments for and against the practice, but the show ends up more or less endorsing it. Goldberg stars as Mavis Rae, a former recording artist with one hit to her name, who owns and operates a hotel in New York City. In the episode, she is caught in the middle when she agrees to host a lesbian wedding for her cousin at the same time that her conservative Republican brother has scheduled a meeting of the Republican Inclusion Coalition....

The Death of Journalistic Ethics There has been a subtle shift in opinion journalism in America in the past few years. Now, we have people working for newspapers and magazines who are devoted to getting certain polticians -- namely the left -- elected to office. While Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing talk show cadre are entertainers -- and describe themselves as such -- these people are embedded in the elite media and are not supposed to be political activists. In a stunning admission in Sunday's New York Times, the following people attended a meeting with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) in...

In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge. The crowd I joined in Franken’s living room was comprised of: Al Franken and his wife Franni; Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for the New Yorker; David Remnick, editor for the New Yorker; Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Magazine; Howard...

I don't recall seeing a more well-orchestrated, well-timed, full frontal assault on a political figure than what we're seeing the Democrats do to President Bush right now. Forget references to Richard Clarke as "a Reagan appointee," that's nothing but window dressing. Democrats are well aware that President Bush's most favorable political attribute is his determined pursuit of the War on Terror. Approval for his leadership in the War on Terror remains well above sixty percent and he holds a substantial lead lead over John Kerry on the issue. For Kerry to have any chance at all of winning in November,...

It was September 19, 1996. I woke early, hurriedly dressed for a long day at the office during campaign season, walked out the front door of our townhouse, opened the Washington Post and beheld a vast, above-the-fold, picture of Bob Dole falling off a stage at a campaign rally in a Little League field in Chico, California. It was so patently wrong, so unfair, so mean-spirited, so petty that anger, pity and sadness all fought inside me for equal time. I was not alone. Washington Post executive Leonard Downie Jr. received more than 150 irate calls that day. His response...

According to a March 10 editorial masquerading as a news story in The Washington Post, the paper's most recent poll found that a majority of Americans "reject(s) amending the U.S. Constitution to ban same-sex marriages in favor of allowing states to make their own laws." Having just seen a CBS News poll suggesting an entirely opposite public sentiment, my first reaction was to compare the wording of the respective questions. My suspicions were confirmed. The Post led respondents to its desired answer by manipulating the question. CBS News straightforwardly asked: "Would you favor or oppose an amendment to the U.S....

The debate over homosexual marriage has gone on loudly in this nation for a while now, and the Leftists in the establishment media, specifically those in the newspaper industry, have made their biases known to the world -- from the front page to the editorial page. But yesterday the Washington Post declared a new frontline in this cultural battle -- KidsPostKidsPost, as you might be able to discern from the title, is the page in the Washington Post dedicated to news for kids, providing issues of the day written in a way that they will understand. For example, today's KidsPost...

<p>March 15, 2004 -- The liberal media's bias against President Bush is as legendary as it is insidious, so his bid for reelection is sure to be a heavy lift. Are the Bush folks up to it?</p> <p>So far, it seems not.</p>

Call it "three green suitcase" journalism. Let's say a feature writer thinks green luggage is becoming popular. So the reporter taps out a story citing three people in different states who have given up black suitcases and bought green ones. The second paragraph begins: "All across America, people are switching to green suitcases." This creates a media trend that might be real, but is probably bogus and certainly isn't established by three sales. The uproar over President Bush's 9/11 ads was a classic three-green-suitcase story. The New York Daily News broke the story on March 4th, with a huge headline:...

The Washington Post's David Broder, known as 'the dean of the Washington press corps, held a moderated online discussion last Thursday on the presidential campaign.Here is the question I posed and Broder's response. I was unable to answer his question back to me because I had submitted the question the night before and was at work when the online chat took place.Washington, D.C.: Sen. Kerry parades around former Sen. Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in an accident in Vietnam, like Jerry Lewis on a telethon so as to burnish his Vietnam combat credentials, yet he refuses to authorize the...

The Bush campaign may have $100 million to spend, but the Kerry team has the news media as part of its base, a reality demonstrated on Thursday, a day John Kerry took off and didn’t even campaign. Based on a single news story in the New York Daily News quoting a single firefighter and a few members of families with 9-11 victims, the morning and evening shows on ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, as well as CNBC and MSNBC in prime time, picked up the charge that new Bush campaign TV ads, which very briefly show images from 9-11, somehow...

So, given the news media’s standard that any fleeting scenes of a day when 3,000 Americans were killed is inappropriate exploitation, can we expect the media to apply the same standard to John Kerry in the future about Vietnam where more than 50,000 Americans were killed? Kerry’s primary campaign has already showcased video of him in Vietnam, video a 1996 Boston Globe revelation suggests may have been from a staged re-enactment conducted by Kerry. On FNC’s Special Report with Brit Hume on Thursday, the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes mockingly quipped about any Kerry use of Vietnam: “‘57,000 Americans died there....

Don't look now, folks, but the left-wing mainstream media are at it again, with one exception. On Thursday morning the media started a firestorm, blasting President Bush's TV campaign spot that includes a few seconds of images from Ground Zero. They immediately flocked to a small group of 9/11 families that accused the president of exploiting the tragedy for political gain. The New York Daily News went so far as to print a photo of President Bush standing at Ground Zero, bullhorn in hand and arm around a former firefighter, in its story. It gives one the impression that the...