Free Republic

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Gas prices are once again dominating the national debate. But despite rhetoric, high gas prices aren't hurting as much as they used to.

After it was reported Monday that Malia Obama was going to Mexico for spring break with 25 Secret Service agents, people began to notice that such reports were being scrubbed from the Internet. Politico's Dylan Byers reported Tuesday this was done at the request of the White House: The AFP page for the story now links to a story titled "Senegal music star Youssou Ndour hits campaign trail," as does the Yahoo page. The Huffington Post page now links directly back to the Huffington Post homepage. The Daily Mail, Telegraph, and Australian stories now lead to 404 error pages,...

Writing articles on terrorism in a post 9/11 world becomes more difficult each day. It’s certainly not due to the lack of terror or terror arrests; that, unfortunately, is never ending. Since 9/11 there have been 18,598 deadly terror attacks all in the name of Islam. The writing on the subject of terror for myself and others has become a ‘cat and mouse game’ with the media and the current administration. I cannot even count the amount of times arrests have been made in a terror plot here in the U.S. and there is absolutely no further information available.When I...

.........[SNIP]........... And now? What of Sleep Train? The Los Angeles Times tells us that Sleep Train, thanks to furious Rush Ralliers, has come crawling back to Rush begging -- begging -- to come back on the program. And Rush said: no. Specifically, a spokesman for Rush said in response to the begging-to return Sleep Train: Unfortunately, your public comments were not well received by our audience, and did not accurately portray either Rush Limbaugh's character or the intent of his remarks. Thus, we regret to inform you that Rush will be unable to endorse Sleep Train in the future. Taken...

There is a new street art poster that’s being emailed around and will no doubt eventually be spotted on a street corner near you. It’s a gritty black and white image of Andrew Breitbart looking both battle-worn and ever vigilant with the caption: “BREITBART IS HERE.” Those three words express the instant connection many of us feel for our fallen friend. They express our identification with him, and our need to continue his fight for the good of our republic. With the death of Breitbart, the conservative movement didn’t just lose a General – we lost an entire Special Forces...

Bob Caldwell, editor of The Oregonian's editorial pages, was in the Tigard apartment of a 23-year-old woman when he went into cardiac arrest Saturday afternoon. The woman called 9-1-1 at 4:43 p.m. to report that Caldwell, 63, was coughing and then unresponsive after a sex act. Washington County sheriff's officers and medical personnel responded and transported him to Providence St. Vincent Medical Center, where he later was pronounced dead. The woman told deputies she met Caldwell about a year ago at Portland Community College. Caldwell, she said, knew she didn't have much money, so he provided her cash for books...

According to Joe Williams, the senior White House reporter for Politico, Rush Limbaugh is like the "serial murderer" who was caught with "three bodies in the trunk." The veteran journalist made the outrageous comparison on Tuesday's Martin Bashir show, a program that included other liberal smears against the conservative radio host. Before making his offensive connection, Williams highlighted his background covering the police. Regarding Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke, the journalist linked: "... [Law enforcement] always would catch the serial murder because he was driving around with a busted taillight, not because he had, like, three bodies in the trunk."...

From ABC News on line about the Fort Hood Gunman, Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 12 soldiers: "According to the Associated Press, Retired Army Col. Terry Lee told Fox News that Hasan had expressed hope that President Obama would pull troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq and often argued with others who supported the wars."... From Yahoo.com about about the soldier who killed 16 civilians: "Photos from the scene show blood-splattered floors and walls inside a villagers home, one of three believed to have been attached, and blood-soaked bodies of victims, including the elderly and young children, wrapped in blankets...

It’s a twist of irony: The Russian news website Pravda has published an accusation that the American media is “tame,” afraid to publish news and is “deliberately hiding the evidence published on the internet about [President Obama's] defrauding of the American public and the deliberate evisceration of the Constitution of the United States.” In a March 7 Pravda column, “Arizona sheriff finds Obama presidential qualifications forged,” Dianna Cotter, a senior at American Military University, blasts America’s mainstream media for their virtual silence about Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s six-month investigation into the controversy surrounding Obama’s birth certificate and his...

Here’s my post from yesterday, which kicked this off: Soledad’s performance here is absolutely jaw-dropping. This video could just as easily been headlined, “Soledad OBrien Melts Down, Ends Reputation As Journalist, Unmasks Herself For All Time As Leftist Propagandist” Joel Pollak handles the situation perfectly, staying on offense, and making all the right points. Joel had the following to say to me after I told him he had performed impeccably: “I thought of Andrew, and the rest was easy.” Perfect advice for all of us, going forward. UPDATE: Having seen this, Soledad responded to me on Twitter, but refused to...

EGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: There's an interesting story to start with today. This is a Politico story, and it was out last night. Obviously this story was written before this morning's unemployment report came out. Now, the unemployment number, 8.3%, no change, and you would not believe the way this is being reported. Why, we are in a roaring-back economy. We have got a recovery that's unprecedented. Have you noticed it, Dawn? No, I mean the reporting. Wherever you look on radio, television, and print, you would believe that we are sitting atop the greatest powder keg of an economic recovery...

Why The Media Wants Romney To Win The Nomination So Badly This recent item in the New York Times below is in good part what's behind the liberal media's desire to see Mitt Romney get the nomination. Now, I don't see Romney quite this way. But the left does. Religion, wealth, a "retro vision of the country." In short, in Romney they see everything they have been working to destroy for decades. They even want to pretend he isn't flawed, hence the over-looking of his many gaffes and retorts that invite his being slammed. But they don't slam him, ......

Many Americans disdain Rush Limbaugh, some of them high-placed and influential. The author of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot is now a US senator from Minnesota. The incumbent president of the United States publicly picked a fight with the broadcaster less than a week after being inaugurated. "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh," Barack Obama admonished attendees at a White House summit in January 2009. But tens of millions of fans do listen to Limbaugh – fans whose years of loyalty have made him the most important talk-show host in America. Those fans deserved better than Limbaugh's...

Last night, Breitbart.com released a video of President Barack Obama fully embracing radical Marxist Harvard Professor Derrick Bell. Now, predictably, the mainstream media is circling the wagons around the president and trying to distract away from the real issue: Barack Obama is a radical and his political philosophy was built by people like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Derrick Bell. The Vetting: CNN Implodes Over Obama/Bell VideoNotice how CNN host Soledad O'Brian tries to cut off Amy Holmes, who happens to be black, when she defends the production of the video and the vetting of President Obama. "This is an...

The Associated Press and other mainstream media are so biased in favor of President Barack Obama that they should register with the Federal Election Commission as Obama super PACs, Rush Limbaugh says.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: According to Gallup, the unemployment rate in February: 9.1%. We're gonna get the federal unemployment number here pretty soon, and we will hear what the Obama regime is claiming the new unemployment number is. Now, unemployment compensation requests or applications went up by about 8,000. Jobless claims jumped 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 362,000 in the week ending March the 3rd. This is according to the Labor Department. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had forecast that claims would rise by 2,000. So this was unexpected. Claims rose by 8,000. That's the government. Gallup says that their...

Boycott ABC. Please read this story below and send it to all your Christian friends and family. We need to ban together and get this disgusting blasphemous TV show off the air. Some one should inform the liberal secular progressive Christ-haters at ABC that… OUR GOD WILL NOT BE MOCKED. Hey… I wonder what would happen if these liberal secular progressive Christ-haters at ABC made a primetime tv show mocking Muhammad and offending Muslim women? Hmmm. No way. They wouldn’t dare do that, they just attack, mock and defile Christians and our Holy faith. No one else’s. Why? Weird. I...

On February 29, The Washington Post created a scandal for the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington by dramatizing the denial of communion to lesbian activist Barbara Johnson at her mother’s funeral. Reporter Michelle Boorstein painted an emotional picture of a Catholic daughter being publicly shamed by a priest at her lowest moment. But new details keep ruining the Post’s report. Thomas Peters at Catholic Vote today reveals that Johnson has publicly declared she is a Buddhist, and not a Catholic! The Post is going to need to fill the Corrections box.

Rush Limbaugh's Advertisers Continue To Drop Off- ABC Asks If This His "Imus Moment" (video)

The elite national media that is trying to destroy Rush Limbaugh over his calling liberal activist Sandra Fluke a 'slut' and 'prostitute' is set to host a comic who attacked Sarah Palin (and her son Trig) in vile terms.The Radio and Television Correspondents Association (RTCA)announced in December that its 68th Annual Radio & TV Congressional Correspondents' Dinner to be held June 8, 2012, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. will be headlined by comic Louis C.K.As reported by Brent Bozell, Louis C.K. repeatedly attacked former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin with crude language about her femininity. (Profanity...

Today, the editorial board of the Washington Post took a stand against Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, claiming that the GOP must distance itself from the popular radio talker. IN A DEMOCRACY, standards of civil discourse are as important as they are indefinable. Yet wherever one draws the line, Rush Limbaugh’s vile rants against Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke crossed it. His way of showing this anger was to smear Ms. Fluke, who approached Congress to support the plan, as a “slut” seeking a government subsidy for her promiscuity...[Snip] What we are saying is that Mr. Limbaugh has abused...

So the media and the liberals are all in a tizz because Rush Limbaugh referred to a law student who is demanding free birth control as a slut. The same hypocritical, duplicitous criminal liberal media and politicians that regularly referred to you and I as "tea baggers"

What Would Rick Santorum’s America Look Like? By Sarah Posner. February 24 Rick Santorum , the culture warrior who lost his Senate seat in 2006 , is polling within striking distance of Mitt Romney in Michigan and Arizona, where Republican primaries will be held Tuesday. His unabashed use of his traditionalist faith in politicking and policymaking has been gaining popularity. What if he wins the nomination — and then the White House? What would life look like in Santorum’s America? How religious would his presidency be? Here, the author imagines what President Santorum would tell his key constituency — religious...

Today’s USA Today carries a letter from a member of Occupy Wall Street in response to that paper’s editorial, headlined “‘Occupy’ movement fading out in a whimper.” The letter’s author — a “self-employed massage therapist” from Austin, Texas — suggests that the movement should turn to violence, rendering their “occupation” a little more akin to those we’ve seen historically: USA TODAY’s editorial is right to say that Occupy might lack clear goals on how to move forward, but the movement has accomplished its main original goal: to protest these injustices, not by simply holding a rally and going home, but...

Thanks to some remarkable reporting from Big Hollywood, it has become increasingly clear the upcoming HBO movie "Game Change" is less a political melodrama than an all-out attempt to destroy the person and reputation of Sarah Palin. The movie is based on a poorly researched book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, and it was criticized at the time of its publication by Howard Kurtz, then a media reporter for the Washington Post, and the New York Times for its overreliance on unsourced "deep background" interviews that were difficult to verify. Two of those sources have been revealed, according to...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This is one of Andrew Breitbart's pieces. And it's actually an interesting question, and it was also raised by Byron York at the DC Examiner a couple of days ago, might have been yesterday or the night before last. Remember the book Game Change? Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, two reporters followed both presidential campaigns in 2008. They learned a whole bunch of stuff during the campaign, but they didn't report a lot of it. CBS Tampa: "Florida Drivers Shelling Out Nearly $6 A Gallon At Some Gas Stations -- According to GasBuddy.com, motorists are shelling out...

If you deny that there is liberal bias in the mainstream media, you are living under a rock. In 2008, it was Journolist. We saw George Stephanopolos take marching orders into debate questioning. Here are some good questions for the President. The only thing they don’t ask Republican candidates about much is economic questions and debt questions. Instead they ask horribly slanted, often irrelevant questions designed to make them look bad and help Obama. We’ve heard questions about contraceptives, religion, Newt’s angry ex-wife, Cain’s employees, Romney’s personal wealth, Gardasil, etc. Newt’s rise was because of the way he attacked the...

I recently made a private vow not to use the term “Israel Firster” again, for two reasons: it’s derogatory (and it was, initially, my vituperative response to being called “anti-Israel” by assorted neoconservative blowhards) and it’s inaccurate–most of those who are, I believe, unduly aggressive about Israel’s national security believe that the national security of Israel and the U.S. are identical. But how does one describe Sheldon Adelson, who says–tongue slightly in cheek, it seems–that he could spend $100 million to support Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign…and who also is known to have only one public policy issue on his agenda:...

Foster Friess, a major donor to the super PAC backing Rick Santorum, has apologized for a joke about contraception that prompted outrage from women's groups. "Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives," Friess said on MSNBC on Thursday, adding: "The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn't that costly." The implication was that women held the aspirin between their legs, which left them unable to open them.

Rick Santorum backer Foster Friess raised more than a few eyebrows yesterday when he told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that, back in his day, “they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptions. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.” Now — as Santorum tries to distance himself from Friess’ comment — the businessman has taken to his blog in order to explain that had been joking, as well as to apologize to anyone who may have been offended: After listening to the segment tonight, I can understand how I confused people with the way I worded the joke...

For anyone who doubts the legacy media are the handmaidens or the Democratic Party and its propaganda arm, Media Matters, has only to follow the story of the aspirin joke. In some convoluted logic, a joke told by a campaign contributor has become the responsibility of Rick Santorum. In typical fashion the multiple voices of the three legacy networks and major papers including the New York Times and the Washington Post are parroting in unison the identical message. It is shoddy journalism to the extreme. The joke, poorly told by Foster Friess, is most decidedly not anti contraception. Quite to...

On Friday's CBS This Morning, Rick Santorum pushed back against Charlie Rose's interrogation about supporter Foster Friess's recent "bad off-color joke" on contraception, all but name-dropping former Obama pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright as an example of the media's double standard on playing "gotcha" politics with Republicans, but not Democrats. Rose initially countered, "This is not gotcha; what this is, is trying to understand exactly what Rick Santorum stands for, and what he might say or do as president." But the GOP presidential candidate wasn't having any of it: "You don't do this with President Obama...he sat in a church for...

ABC News and George Stephanopoulos have a credibility problem with conservatives and Middle America. And it seems to be getting worse. It’s not just that ABC News hired Bill Clinton’s White House spokesman and counselor George Stephanopoulos as a journalist; it’s that the pack mentality at ABC News doesn’t see it as a problem. “The planning meetings [at ABC News] have little political diversity. Everyone is left of center and at ease with their liberal ideals. The other viewpoint is rarely raised and never fully represented,” a current ABC News producer told me last week. ,,,,, But the bias at...

RUSH: I want to move on to this Dick Morris business and the attack on the Catholic Church last week by Obama. I want to ask you, if you remember back in January there was a presidential debate, a Republican debate in Manchester. Do you remember -- 'cause this is a setup for what's coming -- do you remember, we were all perplexed here. George Stephanopoulos kept hounding Romney on contraception. It had not come up, nobody had said anything about it, and we were all confused, as was Romney, what the deal was. Well, it is Dick Morris' theorem...

It is certainly no surprise for gun owners to see the New York Times run a story belittling the United States Constitution. After all, the Times has worked for decades to devalue our founding document. "[I]ts influence is waning," opines the Times. It is "terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights." The paper faults the Constitution for being difficult to amend and reflective of the times in which it was written. While the Times does not go so far as to claim the U.S. Constitution has been bad for America, it does lament that it is of "little...

“The gunwalking story has never been mentioned on either NBC Nightly News or the Today show,” Geoffrey Dickens reports in a Feb. 8 Media Research Center “Reality Check” piece. Perhaps that’s not quite fair. After all, MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” with Al Sharpton gave Rep. Elijah Cummings unchallenged time to make his case that the congressional Fast and Furious investigation is an “election-year witch hunt” against Eric Holder by Republicans, gunwalking was George Bush’s fault, and the real problem is we need more gun control. So leave it to “Today” to send “national investigative correspondent” Jeff Rossen to Phoenix of all...

I think late January and February have been the busiest time for Operation Fast & Furious. The media still doesn’t give it proper coverage, especially this news: On February 4th, Mexico arrests a key figure in Fast & Furious. Not only is he a key person in Fast & Furious, but he was also a top lieutenant to El Chapo. I first found out about it on Borderland Beat, a great website keeping us up to date about the drug war in Mexico. The Los Angeles Times reported it on February 7th and my colleague AWR Hawkins published commenrary on...

The U.S. economy produced another solid month of job gains in January, offering a hopeful sign for hiring in the year ahead. Employers added a net 243,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported Friday. That’s higher than December, when employers added a net 200,000 jobs, and it marked the seventh straight month in which at least 100,000 jobs were created. That hasn't happened since 2005. The nation’s unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent in January from 8.5 percent in the prior month. The unemployment rate has fallen for the past five months and is now at its lowest level...

Things haven't gotten much better for Newt Gingrich ..... The former House speaker abruptly canceled a meeting with Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval ... Not even Gingrich's campaign advisers know why the campaign scheduler called it off, irking them and those in Sandoval's office who had helped set up the event. ..... Other signs of disarray appeared Wednesday. Gingrich's schedule called for a 1 p.m. rally in Reno, but volunteers put out word that the event would be at noon — and that supporters should show up at 11:30. .....

The New York Times Company reported its Q4 earnings today, and they lost $39.7 million in 2011, or 27 cents a share, after making $107.7 million in 2010. Q4 profit is down 12.2% y/y thanks to the continuing decline of print advertising and a 67.4% decline in the About Group's operating profit, which also saw a 25.7% decrease in quarterly ad revenues y/y. The NYT also missed analysts' estimates — quarterly net income of 39 cents a share was lower than expectations of 42 cents a share. The fourth quarter income also reflects a $4.5 million payout to departed CEO...

Where was the public outcry for justice when Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry bled to death at the hands of a drug cartel in cahoots with the U.S. government? It happened in the Peck Canyon corridor northwest of Nogales, Arizona -- nowhere. The general public didn't hear about it... --snip-- Last November, Dennis Wagner of The Arizona Republic wrote a chronological exposé of the Fast and Furious scandal. But he put a fancy spin on his article which illustrates perfectly how a Big Lie can emerge from a kernel of truth told with bad intent. *The once-obscure case in Phoenix...

A few weeks ago, we warned against an increasingly prevalent narrative in news: That war Veterans are violent, unstable, and dangerous. I explained why that simply isn’t the case, and how those aspersions can hurt Vets and deepen the divide between us and civilians. Thursday, the national media moved a step closer to establishing this unfortunate characterization as conventional wisdom in the newsroom. USA Today, a national newspaper second to only the Wall Street Journal in distribution, published a story with a headline brimming with violent imagery:

Politico's Jonathan Martin provides expert analysis of the Florida primary for MSNBC this morning and hurls an offensive epithet to describe counties in the panhandle of the state.

WASHINGTON — Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday are expected to publish a report on the disputed gun trafficking investigation called Operation Fast and Furious, concluding that agents in Arizona — not Obama administration officials — were responsible for the tactics used in the inquiry and for providing misleading information relayed to Congress. In an 89-page report, titled “Fatally Flawed: Five Years of Gun-walking in Arizona,” the Democratic staff portrays Fast and Furious as the fourth investigation, dating back to 2006, in which Arizona-based agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives employed...

ORLANDO, Fla.--It's total newt-iny on the Gingrich campaign press bus. For each caucus or primary during the 2012 presidential campaign, Gingrich's campaign has organized transportation for the reporters assigned to cover him--as is customary for nearly every presidential candidate. [snip] That working relationship pretty much stopped working this weekend, two days before the Florida primary. The trouble began when Daniel Malloy, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, started to do some simple math, [another snip] Sitting in the back of the bus that day, the penny pinching press got to thinking: [yet another snip] One by one, the reporters...

By daring to stand up for herself in recent exchange with President Obama, the media quickly labeled Arizona Governor Jan Brewer a villain. On Thursday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams was aghast: "Who have you ever seen talking to the president like this?....The governor of Arizona with her finger in the face of the President of the United States. You don't see that often or maybe ever." In the report that followed, White House correspondent Kristen Welker piled on with nasty sound bites attacking Brewer. A clip of left-wing MSNBC host Martin Bashir echoing Williams: "Is that really how...

<p>When CNN convenes its GOP debate tonight, the moderators should tell the audience to shut up.</p> <p>Newt Gingrich said Tuesday that he wouldn’t “allow” moderators to ask live audiences to remain silent during debates. He won the South Carolina primary on his appeal to two insufferably partisan debate audiences last week, but he stumbled this week in a debate before a silent crowd.</p>

The surging Newt Gingrich has mastered debates — and disguise. The debate part is clear: The former Speaker of the House comes to play and owns the stage with an uncanny capacity to connect with the grievances of conservative voters. The disguise part is clear, too. Gingrich has used his debate skills — and his instinct to hit the raw nerves of conservatives — to camouflage considerable weaknesses as a candidate. The three wives, and cheating on and leaving the first two while they were ill; inconsistency on the most consequential conservative causes of the past decade; episodic bouts of...

Newt Gingrich insists his fans will not be silenced. Mr. Gingrich, a former House speaker, on Tuesday morning threatened not participate in any future debates with audiences that have been instructed to be silent. That was the case on Monday, when Brian Williams of NBC News asked the audience of about 500 people who assembled for a debate in Tampa to hold their applause until the commercial breaks. In an interview with the morning show “Fox and Friends,” Mr. Gingrich said NBC’s rules amounted to stifling free speech. In what has become a standard line of attack for his anti-establishment...

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Resentment lurks near the surface of the conservative political consciousness. Many voters believe (not always without cause) that elite, hipster liberals in academia and the coastal Big Media are sneering at them, their lives, and their beliefs. They see themselves presented as unsophisticated, bigoted, and quite possibly stupid. So Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was tapping into a powerful psychological current when he attacked the news media Thursday at the start of a CNN debate, responding to an ABC News interview with his ex-wife Marianne, in which she said he had demanded an "open marriage" so he...