Free Republic

The White House is in a tiff over Samsung’s use of a selfie shot taken Thursday of the president and Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz as a quick and easy marketing ploy. “As a rule, the White House objects to attempts to use the president’s likeness for commercial purposes,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said, The Hill reported. At the same time, Mr. Carney refused to say whether attorneys for the administration were calling Samsung to get the company to stop using the snapshot, the media outlet said.

--> NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com           April 1, 2014 2:44 PM Gosnell Filmmakers Quit Kickstarter, Claiming CensorshipFilmmakers have raised over $195,000 in five days By Josh Encinias Makers of a film on abortionist and convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell say the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter singled out their project for special objections. They have ankled the massively popular platform in favor of another crowdfunding site. Ann and Phelim Media have  raised nearly $200,000 in five days on crowdfunding site Indiegogo for a planned movie about Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortionist who was convicted in 2013 on a host of charges including multiple illegal...

Silicon Valley is in an uproar. Angry blog posts have been written, resignations tendered, and boycotts organized, with no sign that the furor is likely to abate. Seeing such ruckus, a casual observer might assume that some fallout had finally resulted from the shocking revelation that several of the largest names in the technology industry—including Google, Apple, Intel, and others—have secretly colluded to drive down wages among software engineers and executives for the better part of the past decade. In fact it concerns nothing of the sort, but rather the appointment of a man named Brendan Eich to the role...

Leland Yee should be making national headlines. A Democratic state senator from San Francisco, a statewide candidate until this week, and a rising member of Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein’s Democratic political machine, was arrested on Wednesday by the Justice Department for wire fraud, corruption, and his alleged involvement in illegal gun deal between Chinatown gangsters and Islamist militants. **SNIP** Yet four of the most prominent news outlets in America — CNN, USA Today, Politico and the Chicago Sun-Times — made no mention of the Leland Yee scandal within two days of the story breaking. When Politico finally ran a...

A ruling by a Ukrainian court to suspend broadcasts of four Russian TV channels in Ukraine is an attack against human rights and media freedom, a senior Russian diplomat said on Tuesday. The District Administrative Court in Kiev ruled to suspend broadcasts of Russia's Rossiya 24, Channel One, RTR Planeta, and NTV-World in Ukraine pending hearings on a permanent ban. "Undoubtedly, this should be viewed only as an infringement on democratic freedoms and as a violation of Ukraine's international obligations. Certainly, millions of [Russian-speaking] residents of this country have the right to watch [Russian] TV and have access to [other]...

PALO ALTO, CA, March 21, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A group of about 100 homosexual activists at Stanford University have successfully intimidated the Graduate Student Council (GSC) into withdrawing $600 in previously-approved funding for a pro-marriage conference to be held on campus in April. The university administration also tried to charge the organizers $5,000 for security costs, but backed down amidst public pressure after the organizers accused them of “impos[ing] a tax on free speech.” The Stanford Anscombe Society (SAS) is sponsoring the event, called “Communicating Values: Marriage, Family and the Media.” Featuring prominent pro-family speakers, the event’s goal is “to...

Preface:  The scientific method requires allowing a free-for-all of hypotheses, which then rise or fall based upon the results of actual experiments.  In other words, science means that you throw out theories - no matter how good they look on paper - that are disproven by experimental results, and adopt those confirmed by the results. [Economics is supposed to do that, too ... but hasn't.]For example, putting Galileo to death because he didn’t agree with the “accepted” consensus that the Sun revolved around the Earth was not a great example of the scientific method. Instead of conducting experiments to see...

The town of Longview, Texas has reportedly paid conservative rocker Ted Nugent $16,000 to make sure he does not play at their annual 4th of July concert this summer. That figure represents half of the amount Nugent would have been guaranteed if the performance happened as scheduled. -snip- “I’m sad the City of Longview has done this. I think it was done by a great deal of political correctness, political pressure,” Gregg County Republican Party Chair Keith Rothra told KLTV. “We have various performers who have made all kinds of statements that rattled people’s conscience and yet they are still...

Unreal. This is outrageous that government has been given this power. Check it out: A major anti-Obama YouTube channel with 55 million views was shut down yesterday just days after a new policy went into effect handing governments the power to flag “extremist” content on the video sharing website. Media commentator and activist Mark Dice, whose channel had 55 million views and 265,000 subscribers, had his account suspended yesterday for what YouTube described as “severe terms of service violations”. The channel was not deleted due to copyright issues. The most popular videos on Dice’s channel lambasted supporters of Barack Obama....

A high school student who founded a pro-life club says the principal banned her group from using life-sized fetus models as displays. Samantha Bailey-Loomis, a 17-year-old senior at Branford High School tells WWLP-TV that the school’s principal, Lee Panagoulias, refused to let them set up the fetus models during lunch. “He tells us that this topic in particular is too controversial to be talked about in public school,” she explained to WWLP. Samantha, founder of Students for Life Club, stated that other high school clubs have had no problem setting up their tables during lunch.

SAN FRANCISCO — The U.S. government is relinquishing its control of the Internet's address system in a shift that may raise questions about the future direction of online innovation and communications. The decision announced Friday begins a long-planned transition affecting the stewardship of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. Although other countries have had a say in how the Internet is run, the U.S. government retained veto power over ICANN. The Commerce Department hopes to end its ICANN oversight by the time its contract expires in September 2015. Proposals for a new ICANN stewardship will be...

A House committee report claims Lois Lerner, who oversaw the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status, lied to Congress about her involvement in the targeting scandal. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report Tuesday concluding that Lerner “created unprecedented roadblocks for Tea Party organizations” and “worked surreptitiously to advance new Obama administration regulations that curtail the activities of existing 501(c)(4) organizations.” […] The emails paint a picture of IRS officials being aware of the potential political consequences of their actions and the increasing attention on the issue. On several occasions, Lerner received...

Speaking to a group of “pro-choice” advocates for government-funded abortions, President Obama praised them as “doing God’s work.” In a bid to stem criticism from “pro life” opponents of abortion, Press Secretary Jay Carney suggested that “since God is supposed to be all-powerful, how can the President’s assertion be wrong?” “When a person dies the devoutly religious often say God has called him back to heaven,” Carney recalled. “So, if a doctor sends a fetus back to heaven who’s to say he isn’t doing God’s work? Look at all the suffering that is averted. An unwanted child is spared a...

Like a simple parlor trick, the networks are able to make skeptical scientists vanish, at least from the eyes of their viewers. In some cases, the broadcast networks have failed to include such scientists for years, while including alarmist scientists within the past six months. ABC, CBS and NBC's lengthy omission of scientists critical of global warming alarmism propped up the myth of a scientific consensus, despite the fact that many scientists and thousands of peer-reviewed studies disagree. Neither CBS nor ABC have included a skeptical scientists in their news shows within the past 1,300 days, but both networks included...

I've been told by various experts in America's "justice" system that I shouldn't risk incurring the wrath of judges by talking about them. We'll see how that pans out. But I'm heartened by the stirring example of Lou Pelletier, a Connecticut father who took his sick daughter to hospital in Boston only to have her kidnapped by the tinpot tyrants of the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families. That was a year ago. Since then he has been under a "gag order" imposed by Suffolk County judge Joseph Johnston. Initially, Mr Pelletier abided by the terms of the gag order,...

President Obama expressed his frustration with a news media that “feels compelled to give air time to opponents of my policies. We all know that there is no substance to the views of these malcontents, but out of a ‘knee-jerk’ compulsion to appear even-handed the media are allowing them to voice their opposition to a wide audience.” Obama acknowledged that “mainstream media outlets have been appropriately favorable in most of their coverage of what I'm trying to do, but the sliver of contention that they allow to be juxtaposed to the Administration's official proclamations is undermining the country's faith in...

Hello Everyone, On Tuesday night, I participated in a national conference call with the Executive Director, President and Chief Counsel of True The Vote - who, along with the Heritage Foundation, NumbersUSA, the NRA and even left leaning orgs like the ACLU, AARP and Sierra Club, are strongly opposing new, draconian IRS arbitrary rules designed to punish (mostly) those outside of the direct sphere of the White House and the Democrat Party's influence - i.e., Tea Party, Libertarian, the left that is not in Obama's camp, etc. I have a special request. I've published an article on Communities Digital News...

A U.S. appeals court ordered YouTube on Wednesday to take down an anti-Muslim film that sparked violence in many parts of the Middle East, prompting widespread riots and influential clerics calling for the death of an American actress who sued for the removal of the clip from the site. The decision by a divided three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated a lawsuit filed against YouTube by an actress who appeared briefly in the 2012 video that led to rioting and deaths because of its negative portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad.

USN&WR. Link only.

The Federal Communications Commission plan to send “researchers” into newsrooms in order to observe how stories are selected and reported has sparked fears of government intimidation and censorship. Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, said “the mere presence of agents of the government may exert a subtle pressure to slant reporting in a way that deters critical coverage of Administration policies.” Ajit Pai, one of the FCC's Commissioners, voiced his concern that “this claimed 'information gathering effort' to ascertain the 'philosophy' behind how those in the news media do their jobs could stifle dissent....