Free Republic

"Follow liberally," exhorts Liz Heron. "You never know who will lead you to discover something unique or important." This is one of "The Rules of Social Media" that Fast Company thinks we all should adhere to. Heron, who runs social media for the Wall Street Journal, doesn't mean "liberally" in a political sense. But if she did, I would tell her that I don't really have any choice: When it comes to politics, there are no conservatives worth following. This is not good for the conservative movement, and it's not good for America. Heron is right: The more different kinds...

Washington is full of nerds. I know. I speak nerd, not fluently mind you, at least not anymore. But I certainly know more than a few phrases memorized from a Berlitz nerd-to-English phrase book. I can talk Dungeons & Dragons (both D&D and AD&D). I know about the Golden Age of Comics (as in comic books -- if you thought that was a reference to Bob Newhart's heyday, subtract 20 nerd points right there). Anyway, if you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or...

Several GOP presidential candidates rushed in the last minutes of Tuesday evening’s CNN-sponsored national security debate to address an issue not otherwise mentioned: cybersecurity. During closing remarks Texas Governor Rick Perry, Herman Cain and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich rounded out the evening — which largely focused on Iran, Pakistan and the Patriot Act — by telling debate watchers that they believed cyber attacks were an emerging threat. CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer, and audience questioners, steered clear of the issue of cybersecurity during the evening. In response to conservative columnist Marc Theissen’ question about which foreign policy or national security...

...Can a medium completely lose touch with its audience, and start producing product solely for itself? As I written before, it happened 60 years ago in jazz, eventually transforming that genre from the popular American music to an insular art form called bebop, which eventually concluded that the audience wasn’t necessary. And the audience quickly took the hint, which is why jazz is now seen in small nightclubs and in the mausoleum of Lincoln Center, and not at your local hockey arena.... A comment by a reader the other day referencing Rush Limbaugh’s line from last week that the news...

One may think that someone as well connected as long-time Washington correspondent and MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell might also connect the dots. After an unseasonably rough DC winter occurring right in the midst of the ClimateGate scandal, she would be aware of doubt being cast over the idea of manmade global warming. But if you want evidence her mind is made up regardless of any of this, you could detect from her reaction to a report from Politco's Jim VandeHei that some Republican candidates are using the climate change debate to advance their campaigns. (Snip) ''"It just seems that I

I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real. The hacked e-mails have been mined for words and phrases that can be distorted to misrepresent what the scientists were discussing. In a Dec. 9 op-ed, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin argued that "The e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' . . . manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures." Yet the e-mail she cites was written...

"Climategate" has put scientists on trial in the court of public opinion. If you believe climate sceptics, a huge body of evidence involving the work of tens of thousands of scientists over more than a century should be thrown out on the basis of the alleged misconduct of a handful of researchers, even though nothing in the hacked emails has been shown to undermine any of the scientific conclusions. If we are going to judge the truth of claims on the behaviour of those making them, it seems only fair to look at the behaviour of a few of...

Great news...ridiculous analysis. There have been a lot of bad days recently for what’s come to be known as the mainstream media — or MSM — but Monday was one of the worst. New circulation figures showed that big city papers had lost as much as a quarter of their circulation in the past six months. And new TV ratings showed that CNN, the cable network that prides itself on news coverage down the middle, finished dead last in prime time against more partisan rivals like Fox News and MSNBC. Are the two connected? Yes, but not at all in...

NRO's "The Corner" discusses Wiki's bias Over at NRO’s “The Corner,” Jay Nordlinger tangentially mentioned Wikipedia’s left-wing bias. (Also read John J. Miller’s excellent article.) What does one get when a biased Internet medium covers biased MSM “journalists”? In one, minor case, the Wikipedia profile of MSNBC’s David Shuster calls him: “a regional Emmy award winning American journalist for NBC News and MSNBC.” David Shuster filled in for Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown Monday. Here are a few of the questions this “journalist” asked about the 9/12 rally of his guest, Clarence Page, in the opening segment alone: It seemed...

HOWARD DEAN may have jumped the shark with his declaration that "the capture of Saddam has not made America safer," but don't tell that to the online world that the Dean campaign has built for itself. Over at Blog for America, the official blog of the Dean campaign, Dean's astonishing and obstinately blinkered lift-off into the far fields of political rhetoric passed almost unnoticed as the zealots rallied around the campaign's outrage over the independent expenditure committee ad running in primary states accusing Dean of lacking the foreign policy and national security credentials necessary to challenge President Bush in a...

<p>Washington -- Departing House Majority Leader Dick Armey warned that the nation must guard against the "awful, dangerous seduction" of sacrificing freedom for safety in the fight against terrorism.</p> <p>It is no small irony that this Republican conservative firebrand is ending his 18-year House career as Washington's premier defender of individual freedom against alleged incursions by the Bush administration.</p>