Free Republic

The basic credo of the New Age Movement, which looks to usher in a New World Order, is that a person creates their own reality according to what feels right for them. For example, a person may choose to be homosexual, bisexual, monogamous or polygamous and it's "okay" as long as it's "right for me." A person may choose whether or not to have an abortion. And so on. Of course, this is nonsense. For, as Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand reminds us, "The truth of a proposition is essentially objective; a truth which as such would be valid for one...

The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were "very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world". "I am more worried than I have been in the past," he said. "It's scary." The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment...

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,...

Since Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 there have been several major scandals in which his Administration has been involved, principally, Operation Fast and Furious the government sponsored sale of guns to small time gun sellers along our border with Mexico; the failed ‘Stimulus’ loan of multi-millions to Solyndra and LightSquared, two small businesses that were Obama preferred for loans. All three of these Obama Administration ventures were major failures involving scandalous behavior. ...Is the entire communications arm of our country becoming beholden to Obama and his scandal ridden administration peopled by socialist, communists who break our laws with impunity and...

Late last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took what is being called "the final step" towards implementing their illegal Net Neutrality regulations. You may recall, that back on December 21, the FCC bypassed government regulations and seized control of the Internet -- delivering what many believe is a knockout blow to one of the last, great free-market frontiers our nation and the world has ever seen. According to the organization Less Government, regardless of a multiple lawsuits, a move by the House of Representatives and a D.C. Circuit Court unanimously ruling that the FCC had no authority to take...

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has uncovered documents from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that indicate officials at the FCC colluded with the leftist Free Press organization to publicly push a new plan to regulate the Internet under the FCC’s so-called “net neutrality” program. Judicial Watch obtained the documents pursuant to a December 27, 2010, Freedom of Information Act request...

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - The Federal Communication Commission's net neutrality rules were made official on Friday morning, with their publication in the Federal Register. As already announced, they will go into effect on November 20. .... Consumer advocates were on the whole more positive. The non-partisan group Free Press, which champions universal access to communications, supported the rules while also voicing reservations about loopholes. " don't do enough to stop the phone and cable companies from dividing the internet into fast and slow lanes, and they fail to protect wireless users from discrimination that is already occurring in the marketplace...

Miller asked Obama to consider the plight of a hypothetical young, African-American in Chicago's South Side: Father gone, mother working 10 hours a day for "peanuts," there are no jobs and, "You won't even say, 'Look, I am going to help you,'" Miller said. "Emmett, that is not -- first of all, that is not what people are saying," Obama said, bristling. "What people are saying all across the country is we are hurting and we've been hurting for a long time. And the question is how can we make sure the economy is working for every single person." Obama...

U.S. prosecutors have sent News Corp. a letter seeking information about possible payments made by its U.K. tabloid newspapers to British policemen, according to people familiar with the matter. The letter of request, sent last week, is part of a Justice Department investigation, these people said, into whether the company violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a U.S. law t hat prohibits companies from bribing foreign officials. The fact the Justice Department chose to issue a "letter of request" rather than a criminal subpoena suggests the department has opted for a less confrontational approach to the matter, legal experts say....

FULL TITLE: O'Reilly Tells Ingraham NBC's Todd Worked for Lib Senator, 'His Wife Makes Living Working for Democratic Party' The story broken by NewsBusters last week involving Chuck Todd saying NBC's pollsters were "concerned" about President Obama's poll numbers has brought some scrutiny on the Peacock Network's chief White House correspondent. After radio's Laura Ingraham questioned Todd about this issue Thursday, Fox News's Bill O'Reilly brought her on his program Friday saying, "We did a little research on Mr. Todd...His wife makes a living working for the Democratic Party. There is a report that Chuck Todd actually worked for Senator...

On April 8, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Boston conference on ''media reform.'' She was joined by four other congressmen, a senator, two FCC commissioners, a Nobel laureate and numerous liberal journalists. The 2,500-person event was sponsored by a group called Free Press, one of more than 180 different media-related organizations that receives money from liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros, who first made a name for himself in investing and currency trading, now makes his name in politics and policy. Since the 2004 election, the controversial financier has used his influence and billions to push a laundry list...

As reported by the Blaze earlier today, CBS News's online store is selling seven different Obama-related items, but complementary Republican merchandise is suspiciously absent. The online store includes paperback and hardback copies of Obama's memoir, "Dreams From My Father," and five memorabilia books and DVDs of his campaign and election. When the Blaze looked into the matter, CBS News had even dedicated an entire tab of its store to the president. The category has since been removed, but searching "Obama" in the online store still returns all the merchandise. When the items are clicked on, though, shoppers are redirected to...

Chicago, August 11, 2011 – This week U.S. Senator Dick Durbin held a press conference with members of the mainstream media to talk about the downgrade crisis. But the Senator’s scripted storyline veered off-course when a conservative reporter – me – showed up to ask an embarrassing question. Namely, “Senator, you’ve blamed the tea party…but do you bear any responsibility for this downgrade crisis?” What, you didn’t hear about this incident in the media? For those of you that need more proof that journalism is dead, read on. … I went to Durbin’s press conference to set the record straight....

Former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur’s departure from the network earlier today was fairly quiet for a close-to-primetime host, and the network made it clear it was his choice to leave. It didn’t take long for the newly liberated Uygur to address his fans. In the end, he explained, it boils down to this: Cenk Uygur is a tiger, and MSNBC tried to cage him. “They offered, honestly, a lot of money,” Uygur explains in his message, where he also says the role would have been a smaller one– “contributor, etc.”– instead of the alternate program the MSNBC statement suggested. He...

Former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks has been arrested in connection with an investigation into phone hacking and bribery. The 43-year-old was arrested by appointment by Operation Weeting police at a London police station. Met Police said she is currently still in custody. This is the 10th arrest made by police investigating hacking allegations by the News of the World newspaper. She was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications and on suspicion of corruption allegations. The Operation Weeting team is conducting the current investigation into phone hacking.

The parent company of Fox News — News Corp. — paid the U.S. government $4.8 billion in taxes over the last four tax years (2007-2010). GE, which owned most of MSNBC until late last year, paid zero taxes in 2010.In fact, GE received a $3.2 billion welfare check from Uncle Sam.From Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston: (Reuters) — Readers, I apologize. The premise of my debut column for Reuters, on News Corp’s taxes, was wrong, 100 percent dead wrong.Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp did not get a $4.8 billion tax refund for the past four years, as I reported. Instead,...

"We'd prefer if you skip Fox please," a White House broadcast media staffer advised a Treasury Department public affairs secretary ahead of the interview. In other emails during the same time frame, deputy White House communications director Jennifer Psaki called Fox News anchor Bret Baier "a lunatic" and boasted that "I am putting some dead fish in the fox cubby--just cause." In yet another email, another White House press officer wrote: "We've demonstrated our willingness and ability to exclude Fox News from significant interviews …"

But I’ve learned, by participating in over a decade of specific media struggles, that when you are in the short-term and you are fighting to win, sometimes you make tactical alliances. You don’t sacrifice your principles and embrace someone else’s lame political agenda. If you want to win public credibility and advance a progressive media agenda that actually has a broad impact, this is what you do. That is how politics works. Most progressives understand this. But there is always going to be those who say: “here is a checklist of seven-hundred points that we think reflect the ideological foundations...

Should CNN be using President Obama's pollster as a paid contributor to its network? A Washington insider says dapper data guru Cornell Belcher represents a potential conflict of interest for the cable network, now that he's reportedly going to work for Obama's reelection effort. In February, CNN announced that Belcher - who did polling for the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2008, including Obama's presidential campaign - was joining its team of on-air political contributors.

A standoff between public interest groups and Verizon Wireless could determine whether many consumers can use their smartphone as a modem for a laptop or tablet — or whether they’ll have to pony up for an aircard or separate wireless plan instead. Consumer advocates say Verizon has violated its license agreement to operate over a valuable chunk of public airwaves known as the C-Block. According to (soros funded)Free Press and (soros funded)Public Knowledge, Verizon has asked Google to block third-party applications on Android phones that allow “tethering,” or using a smartphone to connect to the Internet on another device such...

The White House says an off-color remark about President Barack Obama by MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin was inappropriate. Halperin said during an appearance Thursday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that he thought Obama "was a dick yesterday." The Time magazine editor at large was talking about Obama's performance at a White House news conference on Wednesday. White House spokesman Jay Carney said the comment was an inappropriate thing to say about any president.

Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitizer prize winning reporter who has worked for the Washington Post and Huffington Post, has revealed that he is an illegal alien in a coordinated media push with the New York Times and ABC News seeking amnesty for illegal aliens like him.Vargas also revealed that he breached White House security by using a fake ID, including when he covered a state dinner. And that a superior at the Washington Post knew and approved of his actions.Vargas made the revelations in an article he authored published in the upcoming New York Times Sunday Magazine.Vargas writes that at...

On the reason.com website, there is an article titled "Internet cop", which is 5 long pages. In it, it lists some interesting things that should be discussed on their own. Despite its relative newness and its radical ideas, Free Press has had an outsized influence on the net neutrality debate. It has a former staffer in the FCC chairman’s office: In June 2009, Jen Howard left her job as press director for Free Press to become Genachowski's press secretary. The group also benefited from its longstanding alliance with MoveOn.org, a netroots giant with massive influence on progressive politics. Free Press...

On April 8, 2011, FCC Commissioners Clyburn and Copps spoke at the National Conference for Media Reform, held in Boston by Free Press. The moderator asked Commissioner Clyburn about her comments calling on North Carolina to cease consideration of a bill advanced by Time Warner Cable to preempt local authority to build superior broadband networks. The entire event is available via Free Press' Conference site but we isolated the comments about local authority here.

Remember a couple of weeks ago when The White House got ticked off at Comrade Marinucci for posting video of activists protesting President Obama inside a San Francisco fundraiser? To Team Obama she was violating an unwritten rule on a print reporters posting video and they threatened to exclude The Chronicle from being the pool reporter in the future. To other sentient beings, Comrade Marinucci was -- and pardon the technical term here -- "reporting the news." News that MANY other non-journalists who were there at the fundraiser were recording with various camera phones. And she was perfectly within her...

We have recently heard very much about the Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-induced flood of released documents. They show that the anti-free market group Free Press worked quite closely with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) uber-Democrat Commissioner Michael Copps in advance of the December 21 FCC Internet power grab, executed so that the Commission could then impose the ridiculous Network Neutrality. This knowledge certainly helps explain why the technologically inept Free Press was cited fifty-three times in the FCC’s absurd write-up of their absurd December Internet folly. ... Free Press continually acts completely insane – at which they...

House Republicans continue to question how the Federal Communications Commission developed and passed rules designed to prevent anticompetitive behavior online. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., criticized what she called "collusion" between the FCC and the advocacy group Free Press on Friday. On Thursday the conservative group Judicial Watch released emails between Free Press employees and Democratic FCC Commissioner Michael Copps and his staff. "I am deeply disturbed by the revelations of collusion between the FCC and Free Press on the net-neutrality issue. The FCC has moved against the will of the people, the wisdom of Congress, and the order of the...

Documents made public yesterday by Judicial Watch describe extensive collusion by Federal Communications Commission officials with a left-wing advocacy group in a campaign to expand government regulation of the Internet. The documents, obtained by Judicial Watch in a December 2010 Freedom of Information Act request, were created after Democrat appointees solidified their 3-2 control of the agency in March 2009. Judicial Watch is a conservative nonprofit that specializes in using the FOIA and other avenues to expose corruption in government. The coordination between FCC officials and Free Press, the advocacy group, was on behalf of a proposal that the agency...

Complete title: FCC Colluded with Leftist Organization Free Press to Push Government Regulation of Internet, Documents Show Organization with Socialist Ties Driving “Net Neutrality” Agenda inside the Obama FCC? Washington, DCJudicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has uncovered documents from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that indicate officials at the FCC colluded with the leftist Free Press organization to publicly push a new plan to regulate the Internet under the FCC’s so-called “net neutrality” program. Judicial Watch obtained the documents pursuant to a December 27, 2010, Freedom of Information Act...

The mainstream media are willfully ignoring many questionable ties and friendships of Barack Obama. The list does not end with the radical racist preacher Jeremiah Wright and unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers. They have totally ignored Obama campaigning for the socialist revolutionary Raila Odinga in Kenya. They have also ignored his ties with radical Islamic extremist Khalid Al Masour. LA Times takes things to the next level. They are going beyond the level of ignoring to the level of willfully witholding informative evidence from the public. The associate of Barack Obama in question this time is Rashid Khalidi, a former...

Don't look now but the last time President Obama allowed questions from the press was on April 5 during the budget battle. So far, the press doesn't seem to mind very much. They meekly accept the PR handouts offered by the White House press office and bombard press secretary Jay Carney with questions he couldn't possibly answer anyway. But some in the 4th Estate are noticing. President Obama today met King Abdullah of Jordan in the Oval Office -- statements, no questions. Still, it was better than last week's meeting with the NATO leader:

The White House is engaging in a “troubling” pattern of heavy-handed dealings with the press, media critics said after yesterday’s news that the Boston Herald was frozen out of full access to a presidential visit to its home city. “It’s always troubling when you have the administration deciding what’s fair in the media or what is unfair because that clearly does create a situation where they are trying to select the coverage that they’re going to receive,” said Boston University College of Communication dean Tom Fiedler, who covered the White House as a reporter for the Miami Herald.

Figures. They just can’t help it. The leftists at Obama’s Secret Service can’t stand FOX News. They even tweeted about it.

Media: The Obama administration has picked another fight with a dissident newspaper, kicking the Boston Herald out of the press pool on an unprecedented claim that its coverage is unfair. Who died and elected them judge? If the mainstream media had any gumption at all, they would vigorously protest the strange, new self-appointed arbiter of "fair" press coverage as an implicit threat to their own capacity to cover the news fairly. What the White House has done by telling the Boston Herald it can no longer send a pool reporter to cover local campaign events on behalf of the media...

The White House Press Office has refused to give the Boston Herald full access to President Obama’s Boston fund-raiser today, in e-mails objecting to the newspaper’s front page placement of a Mitt Romney op-ed, saying pool reporters are chosen based on whether they cover the news “fairly.” “I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters,” White House spokesman Matt Lehrich wrote in response to a Herald request for full access to the presidential visit. “My point about the op-ed was not that you ran...

It’s time for the MSM to put its drool buckets in permanent storage. In the past month, we’ve had: – The Pleasanton (CA) Weekly bullied by the White House press shop over a benign article that irked the administration because it made Michelle Obama look snooty. – The San Francisco Chronicle punished by the White House because a print pool reporter used a cell phone to record video of protesters at an Obama Bay Area fundraiser. And now, the Boston Herald has been spanked by the White House for…running a front-page op-ed by Mitt Romney: The White House Press Office...

Several veteran and prize-winning journalists who covered presidents from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush say that the current crop of White House correspondents are too timid and deferential and have played a role in killing the impact of presidential news conferences. "If you watch an Obama news conference, and watched a Bush news conference previous to that, where correspondents sit in their seats with their hands folded on their laps, [it's] as if they are in the room with a monarch and they have to wait to be recognized by the president," says Sid Davis, the former NBC...

The White House Press Office received another dose of bad press Wednesday as the Boston Herald lashed out at the office after being denied full access to a third consecutive visit by President Obama to Boston. The Herald, the smaller and right-leaning counterpart to the Boston Globe, lashed out at the press office, printing correspondence that indicated that the paper’s front-page placement of an op-ed by Mitt Romney was the reason for its exclusion. Matt Lehrich of the White House Press Office wrote to the Herald, “I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the...

The White House Press Office has refused to give the Boston Herald full access to President Obama’s Boston fund-raiser today, in e-mails objecting to the newspaper’s front page placement of a Mitt Romney op-ed, saying pool reporters are chosen based on whether they cover the news “fairly.” “I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters,” White House spokesman Matt Lehrich wrote in response to a Herald request for full access to the presidential visit.

What are you afraid of, Mr. President? I know it must be tough dragging yourself to these glitzy fund-raisers and mingling with rich people who shower you with money and affection. Who needs an unfriendly reporter shouting an unscripted question at you, or checking to see whether any of the guests are getting government contracts? We all know Obama has an aversion to tough questions. During the campaign, he would refuse to engage with most local media, and reporters who camped out at the rope line got a stern talking-to from a campaign staffer. But using the White House press...

Reuters White House photographer Jason Reed describes how the president made his speech to a single TV camera, then immediately after finishing, he pretended to speak for the still cameras. Reed writes: “As President Obama continued his nine-minute address in front of just one main network camera, the photographers were held outside the room by staff and asked to remain completely silent. Once Obama was off the air, we were escorted in front of that teleprompter and the President then re-enacted the walk-out and first 30 seconds of the statement for us.” That means the photograph that appeared in many...

Update: Chronicle responds after Obama Administration punishes reporter for using multimedia, then claims they didn't Update: In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area. Chronicle editor Ward Bushee called the press office on its fib: Sadly, we expected the White House to respond in this manner based on our experiences yesterday. It is not a truthful response. It follows a day of off-the-record exchanges with key people in the White House communications...

Yesterday, the Chronicle reported that the White House had threatened to kick veteran reporter Carla Marinucci off the press pool because she posted a video of a protest at a San Francisco fundraiser last week. Today Politico.com ran a story on the controversy that included White House claims that the Chronicle report was "not true." Let me assure readers that the Chronicle does not run a story of this nature -- plus an editorial and a blog by Phil Bronstein lightly. It may well be the case that Carla remains on the pool -- I can't tell from this statement...

The White House that fancies itself as the most transparent in history is not without its control-freak instincts when it comes to media access. It seems that Team Obama was none too pleased that veteran Chronicle political reporter Carla Marinucci posted a 40-second video of a group of supporters-turned-protesters serenading the president a cappella - "We paid our dues ... where's our change" - at a recent fundraising breakfast at San Francisco's St. Regis Hotel. The protesters' objection: the treatment of Wikileaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning. The White House threatened that Marinucci would no longer be allowed to serve as...

The hip, transparent and social media-loving Obama administration is showing its analog roots. And maybe even some hypocrisy highlights. White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news. The Chronicle's Carla Marinucci - who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times - pulled out a small video camera last week and shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel. Read more:...

The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), a group that creates advocacy campaigns themed to the spells and characters in the popular book series, is campaigning to promote net-neutrality regulations. The group first teamed up with Free Press on campaign efforts last year, as the Federal Communications Commission mulled whether to create rules reining in how phone and cable companies may treat Internet traffic. The executive director of the Harry Potter group, former comedian Andrew Slack, also participated in the Free Press conference in Boston earlier this month.

BOSTON - Even as the House voted to repeal federal Internet access rules Friday, top Democratic policymakers called free and open communications a vital part of American democracy. Speaking at Free Press’s National Conference for Media Reform, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said she was pleased by Democratic opposition to the GOP-backed resolution, which cleared the House Friday afternoon. The resolution would nullify Federal Communications Commission net neutrality regulations that aim to prevent Internet service providers from blocking certain websites.

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. ......... For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski’s press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio. ............... Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues,...

Two mainstream news organizations are receiving hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars from Obamacare’s Early Retiree Reinsurance Program (ERRP) — a $5 billion grant program that’s doling out cash to companies, states and labor unions in what the Obama administration considers an effort to pay for health insurance for early retirees. The Washington Post Company raked in $573,217 in taxpayer subsidies and CBS Corporation secured $722,388 worth of Americans’ money. “It is fine with me if they continue covering the ObamaCare debate,” said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, in an e-mail to The Daily Caller. “When NBC used to...

Tim Wu, the coiner of the term "network neutrality", and a senior adviser to the FTC, has an interesting solution to solve the non-existent problems plaguing the tech industry. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports: "In the class at MIT, Wu floats some hypothetical ways you could fight abuse... "something like term limits for monopolists. In theory, the government could say, 'Well, this company has clearly shown it's corrupt. ... So let's just nationalize their source code.'"