Free Republic

After three years of eating steaks the size of elephants' ears, Kevin bids farewell The BBC's America correspondent Kevin Connolly is packing his bags for a new post in the Middle East. During his three years in the US he has visited 46 out of 50 states and covered the country's election of its first black president.Sometime around the spring of 1835, a young Frenchman called Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to the United States on a mission guaranteed to make Americans bristle with irritation. He was going to understand them, and explain them. De Tocqueville was smart, Gallic and aristocratic...

The Frontline Club in London is the kind of place where war correspondents and investigative reporters mingle with admirers and wannabes, fired by a shared passion for exposing government spin, revealing the truth — and fine dining. So when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange found himself at the center of an international firestorm over the website's publication of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, he knew where he would be well-fed and, more importantly, safe. Amid calls for Assange's assassination or prosecution under espionage laws and condemnation from U.S. commentators like Sarah Palin — who dubbed him "an anti-American operative with blood on...

Helen Thomas's latest may be too much for the Society of Professional Journalists. If your lifelong ambition is to win the Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity Award from Detroit's Wayne State University, you might as well end it all now. Thomas's alma mater terminated the award Friday "after she made controversial remarks in Dearborn on Thursday... As you might expect, Thomas is not happy with Wayne State's decision. "The leaders of Wayne State University have made a mockery of the First Amendment and disgraced their understanding of its inherent freedom of speech and the press," she told the Free Press....

The MSM continues to fawn over this outrage at Ground Zero to show us common folk how “progressive” they are…Via Pundit Press:NBC and its affiliates have been trounced in ratings over the last several years. With stations like MSNBC under their belt and liberals such as Matt Lauer and Keith Olbermann hosting programs, NBC is clearly disconnected with the average American. Another clear sign of their mismanagement: naming Sharif El-Gamal, developer of the Ground Zero Mosque, one of their “People of the Year.” In an interview set to air on Thanksgiving Day, Matt Lauer sat down with El-Gamal and discussed...

Fox News pays Sarah Palin as a contributor to their network. And apparently to be “fair and balanced,” they also pay Judith Miller and Liz Trotta to make fun of Sarah Palin: LINK TO THE VIDEOUPDATE: Here’s what was said: LIZ TROTTA: “Alessandra Stanley [of the New York Times] had the best line [in her Nov. 11 review]. She said the new [Palin TLC] show was like ‘The Sound of Music’ without the Nazis, without the romance and without the music.” JUDITH MILLER (laughing): ”Oh, the Washington Post hated it, too . . . [Post TV critic Hank Steuver] said...

No bargaining, no deals, no compromise — that's the hard-line stance that Republicans have staked in the days since seizing control of the House. Their prescription for the sluggish economy — lower taxes, huge spending cuts, less regulation, and repeal of the sweeping healthcare law just taking effect — excites the party's conservative base. But a long and ugly fight with President Obama and Senate Democrats, starting with next week's lame-duck session, could end up alienating the large number of Americans more interested in jobs than ideological battles. The midterm vote was "an expression of anger and impatience," said James...

Wow, is Chris Mathews now starting to see the light of truth about President Barak Obama and the Democrats in light of the upcoming mid-term elections come tomorrow? I sense that Chris Mathews is waking up to the reality that as Americans go to the voting booths tomorrow, Tuesday November 2, 2010 for Election Day and the mid-term elections that is starting to look like a major political earthquake that will make the mid-terms of “1994″ look like a walk in the park. From what I have seen in this video, Mr. Mathews is NOT VERY HAPPY with how President...

Imagine the furor if a televangelist went on TV and told viewers Christianity would conquer the world and that the flag of Christianity would fly over the White House. Network reporters would seize the moment as an example of the evils of America’s supposed Christian theocracy. Radical Islamists would likely do as they did during the Koran burning episode or after the Danish cartoons were published. People might die. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. What did happen is far scarier. ABC News held a townhall meeting, bringing on experts to ask the question: “Should Americans fear Islam?” Thanks to ABC, we...

In trying to understand how so many Americans adore people like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh I have come to this critical understanding: Poorly educated, terribly informed, intellectually deficient and downright stupid people need idols. They feel angry, frustrated, ignored, cheated and disillusioned by so much going on in American society. They find the emotional, political and philosophical rants by talk show, loud mouth celebrities matching and justifying their feelings. Of course, those celebrities work hard to fan the flames of all that unhappiness and discontent, and also perpetuate ignorance. They sell stupidity to gullible dummies,...

Boiling Mad: A surprising and revealing look inside the Tea Party movement—where it came from, what it stands for, and what it means for the future of American politics They burst on the scene at the height of the Great Recession—angry voters gathering by the thousands to rail against bailouts and big government. Evoking the Founding Fathers, they called themselves the Tea Party. Within the year, they had changed the terms of debate in Washington, emboldening Republicans and confounding a new administration's ability to get things done. Boiling Mad is Kate Zernike's eye-opening look inside the Tea Party, introducing us...

A new poll released by Gallup shows that American distrust in the mass media has reached a record high. This is the fourth straight year that a majority of respondents have said that they have little or no trust in the media, but the 57% who say that this year is a new record for the poll. According to the poll, 48% of respondents say the media is too liberal, 15% say it is too conservative and 33% say it is “just right.” You can see how the responses have changed over the years here: (snip to picture of chart)...

I don't think I ever want to meet Steven Thrasher in person. Aside from the fact that the NPR and Village Voice contributor has an ominously violent last name, this dude is p!ssed. Despite this, I'll admit that while reading his recent Voice cover essay on the insanity of white America, I occasionally pictured myself giving Mr. Thrasher a hug. Don't worry, Steven, I'd whisper: Christine O'Donnell is down 15 percent in Delaware. The Islamic community center near Ground Zero will soon be a reality. A single tweet from Sarah Palin doesn't signal the end of white American sanity. (In fact, there is...

Forty-four percent of Americans now see the upstart "tea party" movement in a favorable light, according to a new Christian Science Monitor/TIPP poll. What's more, about 40 percent of tea party sympathizers say they would not attend a tea party event, meaning they are essentially "closet admirers" of the small-government movement, says TIPP pollster Raghavan Mayur. "The general party line says the tea party is fringe, but I think most of the public hasn't bought that point of view ... and sees the tea party movement in a positive to neutral light," says Mr. Mayur, president of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence...

A look inside a teacher's mind could help you understand lesson plans and maybe even guide your child to perform better. 1. If we teach small children, don’t tell us that our jobs are “so cute” and that you wish you could glue and color all day long. 2. I’m not a marriage counselor. At parent-teacher conferences, let’s stick to Dakota’s progress, not how your husband won’t help you around the house.

The Huffington Post has pulled an article published this morning targeting Glenn Beck with a $100,000 bounty after news of the threat was broken on Free Republic.The article, titled $100,000 For Glenn Beck's Sex Tapes has been replaced with the following message:Editor's Note: This piece was published directly to the Huffington Post by its author. It didn't meet our editorial standards and has been removed from the site.The URL for the pulled article reflects the title: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beau-friedlander/100000-for-glenn-becks-se_b_698724.html The author of the threat, Beau Friedlander, is the former editor-in-chief of Air America.Here is the text of Friedlander's call for information to...

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

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is actually about to win an award for her "civility" and "tolerance." "The Walter Cronkite Faith & Freedom Award, established by Interfaith Alliance in 1998, recognizes individuals who courageously promote democratic values, defend religious freedom and reinvigorate informed civic participation," reads a statement released by the organization Monday. "The award recognizes individuals whose actions have embodied the values of civility, tolerance, diversity and cooperation in the advancement of public dialogue and public policy on traditionally controversial and divisive issues."

White House reporters are keeping quiet about an off-the-record lunch today with President Obama — even those at news organizations who've advocated in the past for the White House to release the names of visitors. But the identities of the lunch's attendees won't remain secret forever: Their names will eventually appear on the White House's periodically updated public database of visitor logs. The White House posts them with a three-month lag, so records of August visits won't be available until late November. (Although, since many of those invited already work in the White House every day, their lunch visit may...

President Obama spent much of the week harvesting bits of good news from some of his short- and longer-term initiatives. In Chicago, he showcased the revived U.S. auto industry that he bailed out last year. And here in Washington his senior advisers highlighted a federal report showing that most of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is gone, suggesting a less-grave scenario than had been predicted. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs called that "good news" and said the federal response to the spill had played an important part in containing the potential damage. Obama even dropped in on...

Conservatives have long claimed that the media is biased against them and tries hard to shape stories in ways that help Democrats and hurt Republicans. This has sometimes been dismissed as paranoia - as in my former MSNBC co-blogger Eric Alterman's book, "What Liberal Media?" - but it turns out to be truer than they imagined. If this were a Hollywood movie, there would have been clandestine meetings in basements or bars or parking garages. But since it was real life, it was just an e-mail list, called "JournoList," set up by the Washington Post's Ezra Klein. It had over...

If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would. But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, that isn’t what you’d do at all. In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed...

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign. The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public –...

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is being urged to monitor "hate speech" on talk radio and cable broadcast networks. A coalition of more than 30 organizations argue in a letter to the FCC that the Internet has made it harder for the public to separate the facts from bigotry masquerading as news. The groups also charge that syndicated radio and cable television programs "masquerading as news" use hate as a profit model.

MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, David, it's been decimated. It's been decimated by everything from the gerrymandering of political districts to cable television to an Internet where I can create a digital lynch mob against you from the left or right if I don't like where you're going, to the fact that money and politics is so out of control--really our Congress is a forum for legalized bribery. You know, that's really what, what it's come down to. So I don't--I, I--I'm worried about this, it's why I have fantasized--don't get me wrong--but that what if we could just be China for...

With Jay Leno and Matt Winkler from Bloomberg News. (Michelle wore red, for May Day)Sen. Chris Dodd and Michael Bloomberg.Chevy ChaseLarry KingRupert Murdoch and Tim GeithnerArianna Huffington and Joy Behar.Jessica Simpson and Gabourey Sidibe ("Precious")Dennis Quaid and Queen Latifah.Bill Maher and Seth MacFarlaneThe one who was supposed to move out of the country in November, 2004.No, it's not Madonna. That's Donatella Versace.Gail Simmons and Tom Colicchio of 'Top Chef'.King, MacFarlane, and Jeff Probst.Tracy MorganColin Powell and Joy Behar.Chelsea Handler (female equivalent of Bill Maher) and Katie Couric.Cynthia NixonJon Bon Jovi is pleased to introduce his wife to race-baiter Al Sharpton.Peter...

President Barack Obama struck a hyperpartisan note Thursday, telling Democrats that he was "amused" by the Tax Day Tea Party rallies. Obama, addressing a Democratic National Committee (DNC) fundraiser in Miami, did little to endear himself to the Tea Party groups protesting around the country, saying "they should be saying thank you" because of the tax cuts he has signed into law. The president went as far as to say that this week's special election in Florida, which was won by Democrat Ted Deutch, was portrayed by Republicans as "a referendum on healthcare, a referendum on the stimulus." "And you...

After several days of hype and hand-wringing about liberal plans to infiltrate Thursday’s tea party rallies, the great 2010 Tax Day Tea Party Crash did not produce much of a bang in Washington. To be sure, a handful of obvious crashers engaged in some mostly non-confrontational back-and-forth with tea party activists at a Thursday evening rally that drew thousands to Washington’s National Mall near the Washington Monument. And some less overt crashers subtly mocked activists from amidst their ranks at both the evening rally on the Mall and an earlier event at Freedom Plaza near the White House. And there...

The Hate Man is probably the most colorfully oddball homeless person on Berkeley's famously oddball Telegraph Avenue. Known as Mark Hawthorne when he was a New York Times news reporter from 1961 to 1970, Hate Man has lived mostly on the streets in Berkeley since opting out of normal society in 1986. For a man whose penchant for wearing cast-off women's clothes and eating garbage seems a tad feral, the 73-year-old Hate Man is a surprisingly gentle, lucid conversationalist about most anything - particularly his philosophy that everyone must acknowledge that they really hate each other. He went over the...

The Laysan albatross is a downy seabird with a seven-foot wingspan and a notched, pale yellow beak. Every November, a small colony of albatrosses assembles at a place called Kaena Point, overlooking the Pacific at the foot of a volcanic range, on the northwestern tip of Oahu, Hawaii. Each bird has spent the past six months in solitude, ranging over open water as far north as Alaska, and has come back to the breeding ground to reunite with its mate. Albatrosses can live to be 60 or 70 years old and typically mate with the same bird every year, for...

So, according to Frank Rich of the New York Times, the Tea Party protesters are indulging in a “small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.” There is a “tsunami of anger” gathering across the land, he writes, and an “accompanying rise in right-wing extremism”. Well, I detest some of the expressions reported in recent days and I’m hoping the Tea Party movement – where I’ve met many thoughtful, responsible people – will begin a little self-policing. I’m also hoping that the worst sign-carriers will be taken aside and questioned — as I would be willing to bet that some of them are plants,...

Ask anyone in the Tea Party movement and they'll tell you how difficult it is to get any media attention at all, not to mention coverage that is actually fair and accurate, yet the Coffee Party movement sprung up overnight and it's already a media favorite. Find out why and comment here: http://pjtv.com/v/3251

Ivory Tower Conundrum Bethany Stotts, March 10, 2010 Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” But some in the ivory tower would prefer that the sunlight of transparency not shine too brightly into the classroom. “An associate professor [at the University of Virginia] who focuses on digital media, Mr. [Siva] Vaidhyanathan regularly teaches and writes enthusiastically about movements to make music, movies, and other creative works free online,” writes Jeffrey R. Young this...

Harvard Still Hates America Malcolm A. Kline, March 10, 2010 A number of years ago, former congressman John LeBoutellier wrote a book about his alma mater which he titled Harvard Hates America. The thesis is worth revisiting. Since then, (1978), a quartet of Harvard grads have run for president, two of them successfully, displaying varying degrees of affection for their native soil. The last Crimson candidate, who now occupies the White House, matriculated from Harvard Law. “On this faculty, there are around 100 professors or assistant professors, and of that 100, I think you’d have to estimate there would be...

An attempt is being made to inculcate into our society the notion -- create a meme if you will -- that liberals and atheists are smarter than conservatives who believe in God. Cited as evidence by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa are conclusions gleaned from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health which began with a survey of high school students in 1994 and part of which included a picture-based vocabulary test used to estimate their IQs. Interviews of participants 14 years later showed higher-IQ scorers to be disproportionately liberals and atheists. There is surprisingly simple test that you can perform...

Fantasies old and new Gene Lyons The first great rule followed by all American politicians and most journalists is to flatter the people about how smart and savvy they are. The reality, of course, is that much of the electorate is so poorly informed that it’s a wonder our political system works as well as it does, which many think is hardly at all. Last week, CNN released a poll showing that 86 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. government is “broken.” I admit my first reaction was to wonder subversively, “How would they know?” A contemporaneous Pew survey...

Many of us on the right like to claim that the Old Media is just an arm of the Democrat Party. Of course some of that on our part is bombast, but incidents like this tend to make conservative’s complaints seem more like right-on-target truth than over-the-top complaining. On February 23, ABC TV Channel 7, WTRF News (Wheeling, West Virginia/ Steubenville, Ohio), posted on its website what was originally credited as a story written by reporter Bob Westfall. Unfortunately, though, this posting was only posing as a news story as it was nothing but a word-for-word re-posting of Democrat Ohio...

Police launched an investigation Tuesday after veteran British TV broadcaster Ray Gosling confessed on air to smothering his lover, who was dying of AIDS. A spokesman said officers would liaise with the BBC after Gosling's admission was aired on its 'Inside Out' program, broadcast at 7:30 p.m. GMT Monday. The BBC did not alert the police in advance of the confession, which was reportedly recorded last November. A police spokesman said: "We were not aware of Mr. Gosling's comments until the BBC Inside Out program was shown. "We are now liaising with the BBC and will investigate the matter."

Enough is enough. Post-docs, complaining of low pay while conducting vital research, are rising up in university towns across the state. Nearly 300 postdoctoral researchers at University of Massachusetts campuses in Amherst, Boston, and Dartmouth joined the United Auto Workers union, becoming the first post-doc researchers in the state to unionize. The move triggers a process that will require the university system to negotiate over wages, health insurance, job security, and other workplace issues. “We’ve taken this step so we can protect our rights on the job, and make sure post-docs working on different campuses and in different labs are...

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called on President Barack Obama to form a White House commission to help save the press Tuesday night in an impassioned speech at the Aspen Institute. “I personally encourage the president to establish a White House commission on public media,” the legendary newsman said. Such a commission on media reform, Rather said, ought to make recommendations on saving journalism jobs and creating new business models to keep news organizations alive. At stake, he argued, is the very survival of American democracy.

The tea partiers are enjoying their day in the sun, but coffee is the beverage preferred by most Americans, and we don't have time to gang up and holler and wave our arms -- we prefer to sit quietly with coffee in hand and read a reliable newspaper and try to figure out what's going on in the world. Great heaps of dead bodies are moved by front-loaders and dumped, uncounted, unidentified, into open pits in a stricken country while people feast and walk treadmills on enormous cruise ships sailing a hundred miles off the coast en route to the...

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz presented quite a paradox in a Charlie Gibson profile Monday. The retiring ABC World News anchor said that "it’s time to move on" since objectivity is "less of a marketable commodity." But Kurtz also underlined how Gibson dared to keep airing live coverage of Ted Kennedy’s funeral until they were able to broadcast the reading of Ted Kennedy’s letter to Pope Benedict. These passages came late in the article: Gibson worries whether broadcast networks will be able to support sizable editorial staffs in an era of declining audiences, when cable news channels are louder...

Gay newspapers in several U.S. cities, including the Washington Blade, shut down on Monday, as the company that owned them, Window Media, abruptly went out of business. Window Media had been in serious financial trouble, but employees said they had expected a reorganization or sale, not a liquidation. “We found out when two of the corporate officers were waiting for us when we got to work this morning,” said Kevin Naff, editor of the Blade, a 40-year-old paper that was one of the most important publications written for a gay audience. “It’s not a complete surprise. The abruptness of it...

Dan Calabrese notices a scolding tone coming from the Associated Press in reporting its latest polling. It headlines the report by noting that “a grouchy public [is] sticking with Obama,” having seen a 54% job approval rating in its survey — but some bad numbers on the issues. Does the AP report those falling levels of support as a consequence of Barack Obama doing a poor job? No, as emphases from Dan and myself show: The public grew slightly more dispirited on a range of matters over the past month, including war and the economy, continuing the slippage that has...

If Fidel Castro and Sean Penn are in the same room, which one do you think hates America more? Such a question doesn't seem to concern Vanity Fair who according to the website TMZ has hired Penn to write an article about how Barack Obama and his administration have impacted Cuba.

JOHN KING (host): If you pick up Maureen Dowd's column in The New York Times this morning, she goes through Congressman (Joe) Wilson's statement, some of the other things, and she says in her -- she has come to the conclusion, quote: "Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it." Does the president believe that some of these attacks are based on his race? WHITE HOUSE PRESS SEC. ROBERT GIBBS: I don't think the president believes that people are upset because of the color of his skin. I think people are upset because...

Tom Brokaw: "It's frightening, frankly."

Michelle Malkin: Independent TV documentarian Jan Helfeld asks California Democrat Rep. Pete Stark about the national debt and the economy. Stark tells him repeatedly to “shut up,

Political figures are said to be remembered in one line. George Washington was the father of his country. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. Ted Kennedy let a woman die at Chappaquiddick and tried to cover it up. If obituaries rightly remember the Massachusetts solon as America's third longest serving senator, they do history a disservice by downplaying why he served so long in the Senate and not a day in the White House.

When George W. Bush was President, ABC and Charles Gibson, like most media members, couldn't get enough of anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan. Now that Barack Obama is in the White House, the host of "World News Tonight" is no longer interested in Sheehan, even telling WLS radio in Chicago, "Enough already." I guess she served her purpose as reported by the Washington Examiner's Byron York Thurday: In an appearance August 18 on WLS radio in Chicago, ABC News anchor Charles Gibson was asked about anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan's plans to travel to Martha's Vineyard next week, where she will protest...

The L.A.Times' Dan Neil is confused. He thinks that the so-called progressive movement is right on all the issues, but he just cannot understand why they can't win the public debate. Neil laments that they have all the "English majors" on their side but cannot win "any war of words." Just what is going on here, he wants to know? He's so frustrated that he took to his keyboard to ask these questions in a Pittsburgh Gazette article from August 9. In his piece, Neil wonders, for instance, why the "progressives" are so inept at debate and cannot convince the...