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At my church‘s Oktoberfest yesterday, I was speaking with some members — he’s a fighter pilot, she’s a writer — about our shared libertarianism. My congregation — located just outside of Washington, D.C. — has all political persuasions (including the wrong ones!) but we have more than a few members who are libertarian.
One of the men that the recently killed Anwar al-Awlaki worked with was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He’s the guy known as the underwear bomber, after his attempt to take down a Detroit-bound plane two Christmases ago. And you can thank the U.S. response to that failed attempt for the nudie scans and freedom fondles you receive at airports these days.
One of the complaints your GetReligionistas hear the most is that we spend too much time complaining about the same old things. Why can’t we just understand that the stupid and/or enlightened members of our mainstream media are never going to do W or X or stop doing Y and Z and just move on?
One of the hazards of being married to a political journalist and living in a small house is that you have to watch or listen to each and every political debate and major policy speech. By my count, we’ve seen 49 Republican debates in the last few months. Or maybe it seems like there are so many because they are so danged interminable. Each one goes on for hours.
GetReligion readers of a certain age may remember the catchphrase: “This just in … Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”
Shortly after the Day of Rage that kicked off the Occupy Wall Street movement, I complained about the lack of coverage in general and the lack of religion coverage in particular. (See: “Prayer, song, meditation and ‘rage’“)
Violent, chaotic events are hard for journalists to cover — period. This means it is especially important to pay attention to second-day news reports.
On Friday morning, Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Yemeni activist Tawakul Karman were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for womenâs rights to full participation in peace-building work.”
Earlier this week I read a story in the Denver Post about Najibullah Zazi’s plot to set off bombs in the New York subway. The plot was thwarted after someone monitoring the email of a key al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan intercepted a message from Zazi, a Denver-area airport shuttle driver.
