Free Republic

President Trump said Wednesday that his controversial July call with his Ukrainian counterpart was transcribed “word-for-word, comma-for-comma,” an assertion that fueled growing questions about the nature and completeness of an official memorandum about the call released by the White House last week. “This is an exact word-for-word transcript of the conversation, taken by very talented stenographers,” Trump said. White House officials previously had portrayed the document as not a verbatim transcription but rather a summary that closely tracked the words the president used in his July 25 call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. They said it was being released in...

Calvary Baptist Church, a progressive Baptist landmark in the heart of downtown Washington, has named a gay couple as co-pastors. Sally Sarratt and Maria Swearingen were presented to the congregation during worship services Jan. 8 and are set to begin their new jobs Feb. 26... The 155-year-old church severed ties with the Southern Baptist Convention in 2012: It was at loggerheads with the group on several issues, including the SBC’s stance against homosexuality. Calvary Baptist still affiliates with American Baptist Churches USA...

As far as hiking buddies go, Barack Obama and Bear Grylls make for an unlikely pairing. Grylls is a TV outdoorsman with a flair for drama and a propensity for drinking his own urine. Obama is cerebral and stolidly even-keeled, and, you know, the president of the United States. Nevertheless, the strange duo is slated for some bonding Tuesday while hiking the Exit Glacier, a south Alaskan river of ice that has shrunk by 1.25 miles in recent decades. They have no plans to drink urine, Grylls has confirmed, and the adventurer’s usually madcap exploits will be scaled down to...

Imagine for a moment, if you will, Sarah Palin attending an event at Ohio State University. She casually greets college aged supporters, and a group of excited, young students decide to spell out the word “Ohio” using the old YMCA routine. The group is in place, arms readied, fans surrounding them armed with their cameras and cellphones. Then this happens… OIHI. It is inarguable that the media, in all their smugness and ‘we are intellectually superior’ attitude would have ripped her from the California coast to the glaciated plains of … well … Oihi. Oi. Hi. More like oy vey....

The Washington Post is engaging in online political activism by encouraging its readers to boycott news coverage of Sarah Palin. The Post has picked up the call initiated this morning by Post columnist Dana Milbank, adding a Twitter link on the column page. The link generates a message to be sent from a Twitter member’s page that reads, “I’m making February a Palin-free month. Will you join me?” The Post added the Twitter link to Milbank’s column this afternoon, several hours after running and pulling a Washington Post online poll about boycotting Sarah Palin news coverage. The poll initially accompanied...

f any large publication stands to suffer from the JournoList controversy, it’s the Washington Post. The paper hired JournoList founder Ezra Klein from the left-wing publication The American Prospect, and Klein continued to run JournoList while at the Post. In June, the paper quickly accepted the resignation of David Weigel, whom it hired from the left-wing publication The Washington Independent, over comments made on JournoList. (Klein announced he was shutting down the list-serv shortly thereafter.) It is not known whether other Post writers, some of whom also came to the paper from left-wing publications, took part in JournoList; I have...

Santa Barbara is about as far from Greenville, S.C., as you can get in the continental United States, but Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) cares more about principle than geography. He is leading a conservative insurgency across America. Speaking at the David Horowitz Freedom Center's annual retreat here late last month, DeMint told the faithful that if they want to return to the principles of limited government, they need to elect people who believe in limited government: "I came into the Senate with 55 Republicans, George W. Bush in the White House and large majorities of Republicans in the House, and...

Virginia Muslims are calling on McDonnell (R) to disavow comments made by the Virginia Beach religious broadcaster last week in response to the shootings at Fort Hood, Tex., in which Robertson asserted that Islam is "not a religion" but a "violent political system" and that those who practice it should be treated like members of a communist or fascist party.

Beckwith responds to The Washington Post. The first thing I have to say about "An Attack That Came Out of the Ether," published by The Washington Post on June 28th, is that at NO time was I ever contacted by this woman, Danielle Allen.  I spoke to two male Post reporters, who spoke to me over the phone for a period of months.  The first contact was in the fall of 2007.  They told me they were trying to track down the source of emails they considered negative to the Obamamessiah. Allen obsesses about the "Muslim" Obama stories, but steers...

The Washington Post published an article today in the Style section about researcher Danielle Allen's efforts to track down who is behind allegations that presumed Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Hussein Obama (Illinois) is a Muslim. Allen is an Obama supporter who works for the Institute for Advanced Study.The article was written by Matthew Mosk. A curious choice for The Post considering Mosk's involvement in the nefarious MD4Bush scandal in which Mosk claimed to have been given access to a Free Republic poster's account to expose a Maryland GOP government appointee who was alleged to have commented on rumors that...

This past Sunday, Major General William McCoy, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Gulf Region Division/Project and Contracting Office in Iraq, sent a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, a copy of which we obtained, in response to a Washington Post article by Andy Mosher on 2 August 2006.After spending almost three days traveling with and being interviewed by one of the co-writers of a very poorly written article Much Undone in Rebuilding Iraq, Audit says , Washington Post, August 2, 2006), I’m astounded at how distorted a good story can become and what...

Amid speculation about a possible vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, The Washington Post apparently jumped the gun. A screenshot from the newspaper's Bloglines newsfeeds service captured by blogger Jason Kottke shows headlines and lead paragraphs of four stories about William Rehnquist, including one titled "Chief Justice Rehnquist Retires/Dies." The items are no longer on the Bloglines site, and WashingtonPost.com spokesman Eric Easter said the problem was due to "a publishing glitch." "Clearly it was part of a package that is being prepared, like all newsrooms do," he said. "It was just a potential headline, just in case. It got...

I know I am supposed to be on vacation, but I can't get away from this stuff. Evelyn Nieves is a reporter from the WASHINGTON POST who has been covering the David Rosen trial. Covering is a bit of an exaggeration. This is something they are tiptoeing around because it will affect Hillary. I just spoke with Evelyn, who is based in San Francisco. She has now been given the information that Hillary wanted Gary Smith to do the concert for the Hillary fundraiser, and that she negotiated down the fee to 800K. Yes, Evelyn, Hillary was directly involved. She...

Jesus Christ was one groovy dude -- at least according to "Judas," an ABC movie that tells a very familiar story but from a unfamiliar point of view. In the modern-vernacular film, airing tonight at 9 on Channel 7, Jesus is certainly the Good Guy (okay, the Best Guy), but Judas isn't simply the bad one. History's most famous traitor, in effect, gets plopped down on an analyst's couch and probed, and though he's guilty as sin of betraying Jesus, we're asked to consider him as a complex human being with traces of decency as well as dishonor running...