Free Republic

When a company defrauds its customers, or delivers shoddy goods, the customers sooner or later are going to take their business elsewhere. But if that company has a virtual monopoly, and offers something its customers must have, they may have no choice but to keep taking it. That’s when the customers, en masse, need to raise a stink. That’s when someone else with the resources needs to seriously consider whether the time is ripe to compete. The Associated Press is embroiled in a scandal. Conservative bloggers, the new media watchdogs, lifted a rock at the AP. Curt at Floppingaces, www.floppingaces2.blogspot.com,...

Marilyn W. Thompson, then editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, faced a problem last year that is afflicting more and more newspaper editors across the country: She wanted to initiate a major reporting project but lacked sufficient resources to finance it. Thompson, who wanted the paper to take a deep look at Mitch McConnell, Kentucky's senior senator, came up with an answer. She would seek support from the Center for Investigative Reporting, a California-based non-profit group that has financed or conducted groundbreaking work in television and print journalism. The idea was approved by Thompson's bosses at Knight Ridder, which owned the...

A military guy e-mails a weekend website blooper: Thought you might be interested in posting this. The DNC website has a page called Veterans and Military Families where they purpo[r]t to care about the welfare of US troops. Unfortunately they couldn't even find a picture of a US soldier to post on the page. The picture in the Get Involved frame is not a US Army uniform. The soldiers in the background are not in a US uniform either.

It seems the poker world has been under siege for the past week or so. With the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gaming Act a little over as week ago, and the media attention the passing of the bill has gotten, it is starting to feel like the poker world is like it used to be – a small gang of people fighting for the survival of this great game. This coming week, the 'Ambassador of Poker', Mike Sexton is going to fight the good fight in a very public way. PokerNews.com has learned that Sexton is going to embark...

Millions of U.S. online gamblers - and the offshore companies that take their bets over the Internet - began scrambling to find workarounds Monday after Congress passed a law meant to quash the burgeoning business of online wagering. The new rules, which were approved by lawmakers on Saturday and now await President Bush's signature to become law, would ban U.S.-based banks or credit card companies from processing payments for gambling activities that are illegal here. Some of the estimated 12 million to 20 million U.S. online gamblers, commiserating in online forums, already said they planned to set up overseas bank...

Shares of newspaper publishers headed mostly lower Monday after a Deutsche Bank analyst lowered his fourth-quarter and full-year 2007 earnings estimates on some companies. Analyst Paul Ginocchio cut full-year 2007 forecasts on Tribune Co., New York Times Co., McClatchy Co., Belo Corp., Lee Enterprises Inc., E.W. Scripps Co., Washington Post Co., Gannett Co. and Media General Inc. due to weaker-than-expected third-quarter advertising trends. Tribune's full-year earnings per share estimate fell to $1.99 from $2.01, while the New York Times dropped to $1.36 from $1.46. McClatchy's estimate slipped to $2.52 from $2.62 and Media General sagged to $2.37 from $2.44. Belo...

US President George W. Bush this week is expected to sign a bill making it harder to place bets on the Internet, a practice which already is illegal in the United States. Bush was expected to act quickly after Congress approved the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act making it illegal for financial institutions and credit card companies to process payments to settle Internet bets. It also created stiff penalties for online wagers. Billions of dollars are wagered online each year and the United States is considered the biggest market. "It is extraordinary how many American families have been touched by...

Reaction to the online gaming legislation passed in a late night pre-recess session in Congress has been one of outrage as poker lobbying organizations and support groups prepare for the future. Late Friday evening, Congress was able to link a bill regarding online gaming to the latest bill regarding American port security. This bill, which was enacted to prevent another situation such as the Dubai scenario earlier this year (which would have awarded security rights for several coastal cities to a Muslim country), was virtually guaranteed to pass through the Senate. It was with this bill that Senator Bill Frist,...

Katie Couric slimmed down in the blink of a CBS eye. Tiffany Network officials admitted yesterday that an airbrushed photo making the bubbly broadcaster appear several dress sizes smaller appeared in its promotional magazine "Watch!" The incoming "CBS Evening News" anchor said she didn't know about the digitally doctored photo until the September issue of the quarterly glossy landed on her desk. "I liked the first picture better because there's more of me to love," the 49-year-old former NBC "Today" show host said, laughing off the manipulated publicity shot.

As the parents of Daniel Pearl, The Wall Street Journal's reporter who was kidnapped and brutally murdered in Pakistan in 2002, we share the anguish of the families of the kidnapped Israeli soldiers, and their frustration with the international community for failing to secure the release of their loved ones. For more than six weeks now, these soldiers and their families live each day tortured by unimaginable fears and shattered hopes, praying desperately for the nightmare to end; we relive this nightmare each time an innocent person falls victim to the inhumanity of terrorist abduction. Whatever success the U.N. Security...

Inside the quiet San Francisco headquarters of the Poker Players Alliance, a political group that boasts 100,000 members, a laminated poster hangs above the desk of executive director Michael Bolcerek that reads, "The Threat is Real." In this case, the immediate threat to Bolcerek and his poker-playing army is the growing anti-gambling forces that argue the game is bad for American family values and want to remove it from the Internet. Despite online poker's rabid popularity -- the game now draws an estimated 23 million Americans to their keyboards every day -- it has recently suffered some big-time legislative hits....

WASHINGTON -- The background of a federal district court declaring President Bush's national security eavesdropping unconstitutional was a conservative's fantasy. The judge, a former Democratic politician and civil rights activist, wrote what read more like a political manifesto than a judicial opinion. What's more, she was responsible for contributions to an organization that was a plaintiff in the case she decided. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's decision has been stayed and probably will be reversed by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Nevertheless, she was playing more than a cameo role on the stage of history. For this opinion ever...

Looking out of the Long Gallery at Worstall Towers, surveying the rolling acres, I can see that the nights have started to draw in. It is also an even numbered year, so that must mean there is an election in the offing. Time to gird the loins and hoot derision at our enemies. Did you know that if you feel you are not paying enough tax you can simply send a check to Uncle Sam? To say thank you for all of the blessings that have been showered upon your grateful and smiling countenance? Indeed you can and the address...

Columbia Journalism School dean Nick Lemann couldn't have been clearer in his recent New Yorker article analyzing the growing influence of the Web and citizen journalism: "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away." Thursday, however, Lemann informed staffers at one of the Columbia Journalism Review's Web sites, CJR Daily, that he has made the decision to, in effect, strip reporters away from the Web by slashing the site's budget by 45% to help prop up the money-losing print edition of the magazine with a direct-mail campaign. In response,...

An apparent discrepancy in the portrayal of events surrounding the deaths of four unarmed U.N. observers in Lebanon threatens to unravel Secretary-General Annan's initial accusation that Israel "deliberately" targeted the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon. A Canadian U.N. observer, one of four killed at a UNIFIL position near the southern Lebanese town of Khiyam on Tuesday, sent an e-mail to his former commander, a Canadian retired major-general, Lewis MacKenzie, in which he wrote that Hezbollah fighters were "all over" the U.N. position, Mr. MacKenzie said. Hezbollah troops, not the United Nations, were Israel's target, the deceased observer wrote.

LARRY KING, CNN HOST: Tonight, ABC News anchorman Bob Woodruff and his cameraman seriously wounded yesterday by a roadside bomb in Iraq. We'll get the latest on their condition. Plus, disturbing new video of kidnapped journalist Jill Carroll in tears shown on Al-Jazeera TV. With us friends and colleagues of Bob Woodruff and Jill Carroll, including ABC News White House Correspondent Martha Raddatz, CBS Evening News interim anchor Bob Schieffer, CBS News and "60 Minutes" correspondent Lara Logan, she's reported extensive from Iraq and Afghanistan; CNN's Christiane Amanpour, most recently in Iraq last month; veteran war correspondent Peter Arnett and...

MORE THAN TWO MONTHS AGO, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra requested 40 documents captured in postwar Iraq as he sought better understand the activities of the Iraqi regime in the months and years before the U.S. invasion in March 2003. On Friday afternoon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence finally provided 39 of the 40 documents Hoekstra had requested. I had been seeking the same documents. For more than five months I pestered Department of Defense public affairs staff to see them. I provided titles to the Pentagon staff and, eventually, filed a Freedom of Information Act...

In a speech last week, Al Gore took another swing at the National Security Agency's electronic surveillance program, which monitors international communications when one party is affiliated with terrorists. Specifically, Mr. Gore argued that George Bush "has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently," and that such actions might constitute an impeachable offense. The question he raises is whether the president illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). But the real issue is national security: FISA is as adept at detecting--and, thus, preventing--a terrorist attack as a horse-and-buggy is at getting us from New York to Paris. I have...

OLYMPIA -- Sen. Patty Murray said Friday that returning contributions from Indian tribes represented by Jack Abramoff would "taint" the tribes. The state's senior senator, a Seattle Democrat, said there was nothing wrong with accepting more than $40,000 in campaign donations from out-of-state tribes represented by the disgraced lobbyist. Abramoff's excesses have been halted, and Congress is considering myriad ethics reforms, she said. The donations, from 1999 to 2005, placed Murray second among Senate Democrats and ninth overall in the Senate, according to records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington, D.C., organization that tracks money in politics.

It's been almost a year since he left the anchor's chair. The bloggers who took aim at him have subsided, perhaps thinking their work done. Speculation about a successor has pushed other names into the spotlight. But Dan Rather is still everywhere — perhaps more so, now that he no longer has to be in a studio for "The CBS Evening News." "I love the news," he says, when asked what sustained him in the months after Memogate. "I've made mistakes and taken hits, some deserved and some not. But I love the news."