Free Republic

James Vanderbilt's Truth, the high-profile movie chronicling the scandal that derailed Dan Rather's career, has gotten the greenlight to begin shooting this fall. Brett Ratner's RatPac Entertainment and Echo Lake Entertainment will finance the movie, starring Robert Redford as the iconic news anchor and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, Rather's producer. At the same time, FilmNation has come aboard to represent international rights and will pre-sell the project to foreign buyers at the Toronto Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday night (based on the cast, it's sure to whet appetites). Mythology Entertainment is the driving force behind Truth, which was...

The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter. ... “This service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda [?], and assist in the preservation of open debate,” the grant said. ... “Truthy” claims to be non-partisan. However, the project’s lead investigator Filippo Menczer proclaims his support for numerous progressive advocacy groups, including President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, Moveon.org, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, and True Majority. ... The government-funded researchers hope that the public will use...

Not content with imposing the highest corporate tax structure in the “free” world, Democrat hacks in the legislature are now asking the Imperial President to unilaterally take action. A group of tax happy corporate protectionists are hoping the President uses his "pen and his phone" to start punishing American businesses that have the audacity to lower their corporate tax burden. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), Dick Durbin (D-Ill), and Jack Reed (D-RI), have crafted a letter (yeah… It took three of them) to President Obama requesting that action be taken toward businesses that have sheltered themselves from some US taxes. According to...

On July 31, when all eyes were focused on the Ted Cruz-stoked chaos unfolding in the House chamber over the border bill, the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee did something rather remarkable. It voted to declassify its Benghazi report. After two years of investigation, it found no evidence to buttress any of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, attack that killed Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans. We didn’t get this news from committee chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). Nope. There was a story in the San Francisco Chronicle on Friday. A press release...

The man who heads the federal agency responsible for many of the 50,000 unaccompanied alien children from Central America who have entered the U.S. illegally in recent months told attendees at a conference on Tuesday that those working with refugees should look to Jesus Christ as a role model.

There is a scandal going on at the Internal Revenue Service, but it has nothing to do with Lois Lerner or her missing emails. No, the real scandal is what Republicans did to cripple the agency when virtually no one was looking. Since the broad Tea Party-driven spending cuts of 2010, the agency’s budget has been cut by 14 percent after inflation is considered, leading to sharply reduced staff, less enforcement of the tax laws and poor taxpayer service. The budget cutters are also trying to prevent the agency from performing its new job of collecting higher taxes on the...

As we celebrate the Fourth of July, who can argue that our democracy is working the way the Founders intended? And who can deny that most of the blame for dysfunction must fall to the Republican Party? George Washington distrusted all political parties. He warned in his farewell address that, as they alternated power, parties would act in “the spirit of revenge” — rather than, presumably, in the best interests of the nation. The “disorders and miseries” that resulted, Washington feared, would inevitably threaten democracy. Whatever the motivation, Republicans have paralyzed our government in a way that would have shocked...

A new documentary makes the controversial case that a political cocktail of big corporate money and racially charged sentiments has helped fuel the rise of the tea party. And squarely behind that movement, the film argues, are the Koch brothers. Co-Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin sat down with “Top Line” to discuss their film, “Citizen Koch,” and why they say the GOP’s deep-pocketed donors, the Koch brothers, are such figures in American politics today. “Money – $100 billion now,” Deal said in explaining the Kochs’ influence. “When we started out making this film, their net worth was about $68...

The Taliban prisoner swap for Bowe Bergdahl might do some good, but fear and anger are getting in the way of a realistic appraisal.Richard Hofstadter opened his 1968 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," with this line: "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds." He continues, "Behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." One wonders...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is re-establishing a law enforcement group to fight those it designates as domestic terrorists, with an announcement expected on Tuesday, Department of Justice officials said. Following hate-motivated shootings such as the one at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, Missouri in April, federal prosecutors have pressed the need to coordinate intelligence of such criminals on a national level, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The group will coordinate cases that involve Americans who may be spurred to violence for political or prejudicial reasons.

Democrat Who Wanted to Hand Out KKK Hoods to GOP Gets Absolutely Schooled By Black Conservative Woman By Emily Hulsey Days after announcing his plan to hand out KKK hoods at Wisconsin’s GOP convention, State Representative and Democrat candidate for Governor Brett Hulsey (no relation to author) took to the streets once again. Dressed in a (homemade and inaccurate) Confederate uniform, he flagged down conservative attendees to speak about what he says is the GOP’s racist agenda. However, I don’t think he intended for it to go like this…

Charles and David Koch are one of the “main causes” of climate change, charged Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the Senate floor. “While the Koch brothers admit to not being experts on the matter, these billionaire oil tycoons are certainly experts at contributing to climate change. That’s what they do very well. They are one of the main causes of this. Not a cause, one of the main causes,” Reid said. Now in his fifth month of flogging the billionaire conservative benefactors on the Senate floor, Reid dubbed them “multizillionaires” on Wednesday and mockingly applauded their spokeswoman for saying...

I stand by every word of it. And it’s even worse today. Of the thousands of Clinton presidential records released to the public last week, one among them has received of the bulk of attention: a 332-page memo from 1995. The memo, which offers an in-depth analysis of the right-wing media, describes how conservative conspiracy theories about the Clintons passed from the fringes to the mainstream. (...) Let’s go all the way back to the summer of 1995. At the time, my then colleague (and current business partner) Mark Fabiani and I were working at the White House as lawyers...

Without mentioning reports that the man accused of shooting up a Jewish Community Center over the weekend was apparently a fan of the left's Max Blumenthal, CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen exploited the murders to claim the American Right is more deadly than jihadists.

While returning to a dorm room last month, a black student at Grand Valley State University in Michigan was greeted by racist graffiti on a dry erase board on the door complete with a hanged stick figure labeled “black.” But on Friday, the Grand Valley Police Department reported that the owner of the board was the very person responsible for the racist remarks. This incident at Grand Valley State is just the latest of many instances over the past few years in which people claim to be the victims of hate crimes they inflicted on themselves or completely fabricated. Perhaps...

Sarah Palin believes flight 370 flew directly to heaven... how is she a senator? — DIMV (@Freshselective) March 21, 2014 The Daily Currant strikes again. The website, which calls itself “The Global Satirical Newspaper of Record,” last week claimed that Sarah Palin told Sean Hannity she believes Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 “accidentally flew too high and got stuck in heaven.” The story was cross posted to other non-satire sites and managed to fool quite a few.

Fred Phelps, a former street preacher who led a family ministry that raged against what he perceived as a morally bankrupt society, died Thursday. His legacy of picketing funerals of military veterans and disaster victims, promoting coarse language to condemn conduct he viewed as amoral, and waging legal battles that protected his actions under the First Amendment, earned him an international reputation of a man’s whose absolute conviction was never swayed in the face of widespread contempt. “The level of his vitriol, the savageness of his comments, were just unmatched anywhere. His rhetoric was such he united people both on...

Fred Phelps Sr., the former head of the Westboro Baptist Church, died late Wednesday night, according to a family member. Phelps' son, Timothy told 13 News that his father died just before midnight. Timothy Pheps works at the Shawnee Co. Jail. Ironically, another son who is a member of the church, attorney Jonathan Phelps told us Thursday morning, "Pastor Phelps is doing just fine." That, of course, could have been a spiritual reference. Over the weekend, we learned that Phelps was reportedly "on the edge of death." In a statement on his Facebook page, Nathan Phelps, who has been estranged...

"The product is good and people want it," President Obama said, touting his health insurance plan to an audience at DreamWorks Animation in November. Yet, for being such an illustrious product, the Obama Administration sure seems desperate for people to get on board. Here are 15 ways the White House, state exchanges, and supporters have tried to sell Obamacare. 2. Quickly followed by Hoe-surance: 3. With a "geek" selfie: These geeks are covered ... are you? #geeksgetcovered Send us your #getcovered stories http://t.co/MMo1RXlWK3 pic.twitter.com/b9BSAGU2hN — The White House OSTP (@whitehouseostp) March 13, 2014 4. With a message from Lebron...

You’d think conservatives Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are outspoken enough without liberal media sources having to lie about their words. But you’d be underestimating the unscrupulous partisanship of political “journalists." Case in point: the dishonest reporting of the comments from both GOP senators at the Susan B. Anthony Campaign for Life Summit in Washington, D.C. on March 12. An AP report appearing on The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, U.S. News and World Report and several other organizations cherry-picked and twisted statements from Sen. Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Lee (R-UT) from the pro-life event.  Here’s what Sen. Cruz actually said: (More after video.)...