With Pope Benedict coming to visit the United States next week relations between Roman Catholics and Protestants will likely be the subject of media scrutiny. The pope's itinerary includes a visit to the White House with President Bush, a Protestant, who was re-elected with 51 percent of the Catholic vote in 2004, despite running against a Catholic.

Although certain doctrinal differences remain in place, conservative Catholics and Evangelical Christians have been drawing closer together in recent years, according to a new book that explores the growing influence of Christian voters.

Deal Hudson, the executive director of the Morley Institute for Church and Culture in Washington D.C., describes some of the key factors responsible for the convergence between conservative minded American Catholics and Protestants in his just released book.

Age old grievances have gradually receded to the point where Christians from various denominations have joined together to resist secular assaults on shared values, Hudson argues in  "Onward Christian Soldiers: The Growing Political Power of Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States."

War veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan have been touring the country over the past few weeks in an effort to focus public attention on recent strategic gains in the war against terrorism. Vets for Freedom(VFF) is a non-partisan organization with 20,000 members and 44 chapters. Captain Pete Hegseth, who served with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq in 2005 and part of 2006, serves as the executive director.

The VFF's "National Heroes Tour" was launched aboard the U.S.S. Midway in San Diego, California in mid-March and included stops in Los Angeles; Phoenix, Ariz.; San Antonio, Texas; Des Moines, Iowa; Fort Campbell, Ky.; Columbia, S.C. and Virginia Beach, Va. Today the Vets are visiting Capitol Hill where they are working to persuade members of Congress to fully support the military mission in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The tour continues up to New York City tomorrow.

A critically acclaimed, widely viewed docudrama that ties in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing with the 9/11 attacks has not been released on DVD because the Walt Disney Company’s chief executive officer is protecting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and her husband’s legacy, a mutual fund manger argued at the company’s annual shareholder meeting last week.

Disney’s unwillingness to make the film available on DVD suggests Chief Executive Officer Robert Iger is working to advance his own political interests at the expense of shareholders, Tom Borelli, a portfolio manager with the Free Enterprise Action Fund contends. Iger has been a consistent and steady contributor to Sen. Clinton (D-N.Y.), Borelli pointed out. He also asked Disney officials to explain why they have thus refused to sell the film rights to Lionsgate.

The exchange between Borelli and Iger is available here.

Iraq’s Anbar Province has awakened, the U.S. military is on the offensive, and Al Qaeda and is on the run but it is a mistake to assume this dramatic turnaround is exclusively the result of additional troops, J.D. Johannes, a former Marine and television news producer explained in an interview.

Johannes traveled to Iraq with the Marine Corps unit he previously served with in 2005 with the intention of pursuing syndicated television reports. This project grew into a documentary called “Outside the Wire: Call Sign Vengeance” that told the story of a Marine platoon on deployment in Fallujah.

Three additional documentaries followed from a subsequent trip in 2007 as part of “Outside the Wire.” The film, "Anbar Awakens," was screened during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washignton D.C. last month. It highlights the partnership between coalition forces and Sunni tribes. The film points out that in 2006 a classified report had declared the province to be lost.

Prior to becoming a serious presidential candidate in the run up to the 1964 election Barry Goldwater was on the receiving of favorable press coverage and even led a “charmed life” that he was reticent to give up, according to a new book that explores the origins of the modern conservative movement.

In the spring and summer months of 1961 Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report all ran positive and often highly complimentary stories on the Republican senator from Arizona. His popularity among college students and his growing influence within the party were widely acknowledged. 

“Goldwater has more than his share of political sex appeal,” a Time Magazine piece observed.

American freedom is under assault within the scientific establishment and the academic community where the proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) theory are being silenced and marginalized at the expense of research that could potentially expand human knowledge and boost medical research, according to a new documentary that raises questions about Darwinian assumptions.

A growing number of scientists with expertise in biology, chemistry, physics and astronomy have encountered a level of complexity in the observable universe that in their estimation cannot be sufficiently explained by a random, directionless process. For this reason, they are compelled to offer up alternative theories for biological and astronomical objects that appear to be carefully calibrated and finely tuned by way of an intelligent agent.

Unfortunately, scientists in the United States who offer up Intelligent Design as a possible alternative to Charles Darwin’s 150 year old theories about the origins of life and the evolutionary process often find they cannot speak out without jeopardizing their careers and professional reputations.

“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” calls attention to the plight of highly credentialed researchers and scholars who have been forced out of prestigious positions. Instead of entertaining a free, unrestrained open debate on the merits of competing theories, the scientific establishment has instead moved to suppress the Intelligent Design movement in a “systematic and ruthless” fashion at odds with America’s founding principles, the film asserts.

Suppose for a moment that Al Qaeda operatives who used pharmaceutical factories in Sudan and Yemen for the purpose of manufacturing deadly chemicals decided to ply their trade in China, where lax standards and deleterious practices have already claimed lives?

This unsavory scenario has been missed in media reports and public policy discussions circulating around dangerous and unsafe Chinese imports that were discovered in American markets last year, and are most likely “lurking on shelves this holiday” season, Richard Miniter warns in a just released report entitled: “Buyers Remorse: How America Has Failed to See the Threat Posed by Dangerous Chinese Goods and the Case for `Safe Trade.’ ”  

Miniter is a best selling author and a fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Like many Reaganites, he was no media darling; at least not initially.

In fact, he was intensely ridiculed at home and abroad in newspapers and magazines that frequently called his credentials and his intelligence into question. The media onslaught directed against William P. Clark was replete with misrepresentations and inaccuracies that were nevertheless widely circulated in the 1980s a political science professor, and best-selling author maintains in a recently released biography entitled "The Judge."

Although he was responsible for crafting "highly respected opinions" for the appellate and supreme courts in California, Clark remained "The Forever Unqualified Man" in eyes of the news media, Paul Kengor explains his new book.

To be caged like an animal and deported to Siberia as a 14-year-old girl is to know a level of brutality that seemingly stands outside of reality, as one gulag survivor puts it in a new documentary on Estonia.

When the Soviet Union began its occupation of the country, prison quotas were set for Russian soldiers who grabbed any convenient person they could find, the narrator informs audience members during a film segment that reviews key historical moments.  

As it turns out, one-third of those deported to Siberia beginning in 1940 were children, according to the film.

"Thank God for CSPAN," Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas declares in his recently released memoirs entitled: "My Grandfather's Son."

Without the "gavel to gavel" coverage made available through an alternative media source Thomas tells readers he may not have had the opportunity to present himself to the American people in a compelling and straightforward manner.

Press coverage of his highly charged confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate 16 years ago was very weighted in favor of his critics, especially Anita Hill, the Supreme Court Justice recalls in his book.

Thomas contends Hill was in fact a "left-winger" who was permitted to serve up a false image of herself in testimony, thanks in no small part to a compliant media.

Left-wing secularists who oppose religion in the public square may be dismayed to learn that their values apparently conflict with those of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.), according to the author of a new book on the former first lady's religious beliefs.

Although many Democrats support a very strict separation of church and state, the front-runner for the party's presidential nomination does not, Paul Kengor, author of "God and Hillary Clinton," said in an interview. In fact, Clinton is not reticent about injecting her faith into policy discussions, said Kengor, who teaches political science at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.

CORRECTION (17:50 EDT, Sept. 12): In the original entry, quotes attributed to PBS ombudsman Michael Getler should have been attributed to Jeff Bieber, vice president for news and public affairs at WETA, the Washington, D.C. affiliate of PBS. We regret the error and any confusion it may have caused.

Where conservatives see "Islamist sympathizers" and "egregious conflicts of interest at work" officials with the public broadcasting system see "respected authorities" plying their trade on behalf of objective journalism.

A central complaint registered against PBS concerns the hiring of two outside advisors charged with the responsibility of reviewing films that were under consideration for inclusion the "America at a Crossroads" series this past April.

Martyn Burke, director of documentary films at ABG Films, and Frank Gaffney, president of the conservative Center for Security Policy, and Gaffney's colleague Alex Alexiev, also with CSP, collaborated together in producing the documentary for the series entitled: "Islam versus Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center."

Where are the moderate Muslims who willingly speak out against the Islamist agenda, and why are their voices not heard in the mainstream media?

These questions are explored in a documentary that is receiving national exposure over the next several weeks via an Oregon affiliate of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). Producers and advisors with WETA, the Washington D.C. affiliate of PBS, had previously denied airing the film as part of the "America at a Crossroads Series."