Free Republic

So there it is -- a hitherto-missing link in the chain of information that every Obamaphile was dreading.  Senior Obama administration officials knew that the Inspector General was auditing the IRS for political targeting of conservatives in June of 2012.  The Treasury's general counsel -- that's right, William J. Wilkins -- was told on June 4, 2012 by the IG; Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin was informed shortly thereafter.Neal Wolin was Tim Geithner's Deputy.  That's the second-in-command at the Department of the Treasury.  And Wolin had been around the block; he had held high government posts in the Clinton administration...

Congrats to Hillary Clinton: She’s become everything she said she was fighting against when Nixon was in the White House. She was either liar then or a hypocrite now. If I had to pick one, I’d pick liar and hypocrite. Maybe when she runs from president 2016, she can help herself in the polls and go on Letterman or the Tonight Show or Jon Stewart and talk about whether she wears Obama’s boxers or briefs for him. It could help her. The press would just love it. You see Hillary and Barack can do no wrong. Because, like DC Mayor...

If ponies rode men and grass ate cows, And cats were chased into holes by the mouse … If summer were spring and the other way round, Then all the world would be upside down. Once in a long while, an event evokes one of my favorite historical images: the British Army band, at Lord Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown which sealed the Americans’ revolutionary victory, playing “The World Turned Upside Down.”In this case, the event is the dramatic change over the past two weeks in the “mainstream” media’s coverage of President Obama. From reporters to opinion writers, from newspapers to...

In the old Soviet Union, the oppressed subjects of regime had a phrase used to describe the news media: "There's no pravda in Izvestia and there's no izvestia in Pravda." In Russian, "Pravda," the leading Communist Party periodical, means "Truth," and "Izvestia," the principal state periodical, means "News." The bosses of the Kremlin had no interest in their subjects knowing anything about the world or having any honest opinions expressed. Instead, the news media (also all cultural life, all educational institutions, all common means of ordinary people sharing anything together) was placed in the hands of bureaucratic flacks, well-trained in...

Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput, head of the archdiocese of Philadelphia, said that in addition to the ongoing trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, an equally important story is the “failure” of the “most important national media” outlets to cover the case. “The real story in the Gosnell trial is bigger than the ugly allegations against Gosnell himself,” said Abp. Chaput in his April 25 column. “It includes the failure – the allergic disinterest – of some of our most important national media.” Gosnell has been on trial in Philadelphia since Mar. 18. He is charged with four counts of first-degree murder,...

What a country! as the Russian comedian Yakov Smirnoff would say. Smirnoff came to the U.S. in the days when people from the old Eastern Block would risk life and limb to try to get here. Today the only limbs at risk when we allow political sanctuary are our own. There was a lot more freedom in the U.S. then: Freedom from fear, freedom from foreclosure, freedom to work, freedom to run a marathon, freedom to love the country without being called a tea bagger; freedom for citizens to do their part with the government staying out of the way....

72 Congressmen slam media for failing to cover Gosnell, Planned Parenthood infanticide remarks WASHINGTON, D.C., April 18, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a sternly worded letter, 72 congressman have accused the three leading mainstream media networks – ABC, NBS, and CBS – of “blatant media bias” for failing to cover two of the biggest abortion-related stories in recent years: the trial of “House of Horrors” abortionist Kermit Gosnell, and remarks made by a Planned Parenthood representative in support of infanticide. “The broadcasters’ blackout of the Planned Parenthood infanticide lobbying scandal and the Gosnell ‘House of Horrors’ murder trial are the biggest...

The Plain Dealer in Cleveland announced Thursday that it is cutting back home delivery of the newspaper to three days a week. The Plain Dealer, Ohio's largest daily, will be delivered on Sunday and two other still unspecified days of the week beginning in late summer, publisher Terry Egger said in a news release. The newspaper will still be printed every day and be available for purchase at thousands of outlets in northeast Ohio.

Is the Iraq war to blame for the mess we are in? Now, I should qualify that question by explaining "mess" and "we." By "mess," I mean the dawn of Barack Obama's second term, the predictably catastrophic rollout of Obamacare, the exploding debt and deficit, the stimulus boondoggles, etc. By "we," I mean conservatives (particularly those, like me, who supported the war), but also anyone else who doesn't think Obama has done a bang-up job. There seems to be a growing consensus that the answer to that question is "yes." In a recent column, the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein writes,...

CBS finally apologized Sunday night one week after the television show “Amazing Race” broadcast what critics called an “anti-American” segment that offended Vietnam War veterans. “We want to apologize to veterans – particularly those who served in Vietnam – as well as to their families and any viewers who were offended by the broadcast,” said host Phil Keoghan in a statement at the beginning of Sunday’s night’s episode. “All of us here have the most profound respect for the men and women who fight for our country.” The episode caused widespread outrage among war veterans. James Koutz, the national commander...

Sometimes it's hard to measure the distance between the supposedly established, respectable press and the seediest corners of hardcore pornography. On March 1, ABC's "Nightline" celebrated a porn star named "James Deen" (real name: Bryan Sevilla). The apparent "news" hook is his role in a forthcoming movie with the ever-more pathetic Lindsay Lohan. ABC reporter Cecilia Vega sold Deen as a 27-year-old hazard to teenaged girls. They're boasting that he's found a new frontier of porn consumers, "some of them so young we couldn't even interview them on camera. Their parents had no idea that secretly they have a crush...

NBC doesn’t want to deal with George Zimmerman’s libel suit. In a Feb. 20 filing in the case, NBC Universal Media LLC asks a Florida circuit court to stay the case until the conclusion of Zimmerman’s June trial for second-degree murder of Trayvon Martin. --snip-- To recap Zimmerman’s case against NBC News: On the night that he shot Martin, Zimmerman called 911 and narrated his pursuit of the teenager in his gated community in Sanford, Fla. A March 27 edition of the “Today” show abridged the 911 tape, as follows: Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good....

Barack Obama's strategy going into the scheduled sequestration was to hit the panic button, over and over again, putting the very Obama-friendly media into a heavy rotation of disaster metaphors. "Hours, now, until massive government cuts go into effect that could impact every American. Jobs vaporizing, flights delayed, even criminals walking free," warned ABC morning anchor Josh Elliott. On screen were the words "BUDGET ARMAGEDDON." The only people being released from jails were about 2,000 illegal immigrants who were facing deportation. The Department of Homeland Security released them, citing "looming budget cuts." That's just more gamesmanship. Put another quarter in...

CNN's Dana Bash fact-checked President Obama's falsehood about the sequester on Friday, but the major networks didn't exactly follow CNN's lead in reporting the distortion that Capitol Hill janitors and police would receive a pay cut because of the sequester. In his Friday press conference, Obama claimed, "They're going to have less pay, the [Capitol Hill] janitors, the security guards. They just got a pay cut." Shortly after that, CNN's Bash obtained from the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms that the workers would not receive a pay cut, just a limit on overtime pay. NBC ignored the distortion on its weekend newscasts, while...

Yusuf Ibrahim, a Muslim man, targeted and murdered two Coptic Egyptian Christian men who lived and worked in New Jersey. He beheaded them and cut off their hands.

It seems the liberal media are more concerned about Sen. Marco Rubio's midspeech sip of water than about President Obama's State of the Union commitment to double down on his disastrous policies. What will it take for once-reasonable people to become alarmed at the state of this nation's fiscal condition, its stagnant economy and its egregious unemployment? Is there no number of irresponsible liberal policies from an extremist liberal president that will exceed their willingness to tolerate? Do liberal media -- and rank-and-file Democrats, for that matter -- believe that this recklessness can go on forever? Knowing President Obama's capacity...

WASHINGTON -- It has happened again. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review referred to by Paul Krugman the other day as "a long-time conservative," has essayed in the New Republic the modern conservative movement, and traced us all back to John C. Calhoun. I suppose our point of origin could have been more sinister. Sam could have traced us back to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the former Confederate General who went on to be an early member of the Ku Klux Klan, but John C. Calhoun is bad enough. Of course, Calhoun is no kind of...

1) Starting in the sixties there was an explosion of children born out-of-wedlock and kids who don't grow up in two parent families fare more poorly percentage wise on just about any and every scale imaginable including substance abuse, teenage pregnancies, suicide rates, criminality and homelessness. 2) Many people are becoming so childlike in their dependence on the government that they can't save for their own retirement, escape from an oncoming hurricane, or even purchase their own birth control without the government handling it for them. 3) Our legal system encourages frivolous lawsuits, is punitively expensive and because of the...

I do not get this from her blog, but as a tweet of hers when it was re-tweeted by someone I follow. I never heard of her before today, but thought the term "Assault Media" deserved widespread notice around there here parts.From now on, that's how I will refer to them. I don't even know if she came up with the term.

Al Gore said President Barack Obama was forced to be cautious during his first term in office because of the “propaganda” served up by Fox News and talk radio that created a “hostile environment for progressive ideas.” The former vice president — who has been on somewhat of a media whirlwind since the sale his Current TV to Arab news network Al-Jazeera — made the comment during an interview to promote his latest book with PBS’ Charlie Rose this week in New York. “I think it has been a pretty hostile environment for progressive ideas,” Gore said. “And why is...

The sad fact is that it appears completely rational to be ignorant about politics. The cost of being an 'informed' voter - as opposed to a bigotted closed-minded ignoramus - is high, from the time spent following (and interpreting) the news in the paper, online, and on the television. As the following clip notes, "becoming an informed voter is competing with a lot of other needs in your life," from American Idol watching to eating Cheetos in the bath. Of course, the sad truth is that it has never been more important to be 'informed' and so the 'bread-and-circuses' will...

The New York Times spins it this way: The longest-serving president of any of the three network news divisions, Steve Capus of NBC News, stepped down from his position on Friday, six months after Comcast restructured its news units in a way that diminished his authority. Exactly how voluntary was this “stepping down”? John Nolte points to the scandal-plagued tenure of Capus at NBC News: 1. During last year’s presidential election, Andrea Mitchell was caught manufacturing a Romney gaffe where none existed. 2. During last year’s GOP primary, Ed Schultz edited video of Texas Governor Rick Perry to make him...

It's been a week full of liberal media bias examples, but after all, every week is full of them. We saw NBC news purposely edit another video clip smearing Second Amendment supporters in order to push a gun control agenda. This is the same agenda President Obama just happens to be pushing as he continues to single out the NRA and its members as enemy number one. The move by NBC impacted public opinion for a few hours until luckily new media, the team over at Twitchy.com precisely, debunked the entire thing. Although this was a case of editing to...

Many have rightly condemned MSNBC's serpentine editing of a video to make it appear that certain gun rights activists heckled the father of a 6-year-old victim of the Sandy Hook shooting massacre, but let's not pretend this was a one-off event. The liberal media long ago forfeited their respected role as watchdog over the government and have voluntary descended to the status of a public relations arm of the Democratic Party and various liberal causes. It doesn't do it justice to call them cheerleaders, for they are active participants, every bit as much involved in bringing about the events...

Abraham Lincoln, deeply troubled by four years of Civil War bloodletting, gave a great second inaugural address in 1865. By then Lincoln saw slavery as a terrible stench in God’s nostrils, so he mused about why God was taking so long to blow it away with His mighty breath. Lincoln’s words: “If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago,...

Isn't it ironic that Republicans keep receiving advice to be more conciliatory and work with President Obama while President Obama not only is receiving the opposite advice but fully intends to be even more divisive in his second term? On "Meet the Press" last week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "There's also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the (Republican) party. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities." That is outrageously false, but lest you think hypersensitivity to race is all that's...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Aw, darn it! Obama is trying so hard. The regime is trying so hard. They never worked harder trying to overcome all of the messes left by George W. Bush, and here we are. We're on the verge of a recovery! The unemployment situation (they keep telling us) is improving. Even though we added people to the unemployment rolls yesterday, that was called "stability" by the AP. We're still at 375,000 unemployment applications every week, but we're on the verge -- we're on the verge! -- of overcoming the big mess left by George W. Bush and,...

Before examining the ridiculous controversy stemming from Monday night’s college football championship broadcast, let us stipulate that there are more urgent and scary ways to describe the current changes in America. We are becoming a culture of dependency. We are becoming a neo-socialist experiment. We are becoming a dumbed-down nation unappreciative of its founders. We are losing touch with the Constitution and the very concept of liberty. I do not argue that today’s essay is our most pressing problem. But as scores of fine writers address the various angles of our republic’s dangle from a precarious thread, I thought...

As a senator and presidential candidate, Barack Obama said that he detested budget deficits. In 2006, when the aggregate national debt was almost $8 trillion less than today, he blasted George W. Bush's chronic borrowing and refused to vote for upping the debt ceiling: "Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.'" In 2008, Obama further blasted Bush's continued Keynesian borrowing: "The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of...

The current state of the GOP brings to mind the surviving Marines in Aliens, with no shortage of demoralized hacks lamenting their inability to resist by channeling Private Hudson: “Maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events but we just got our a**** kicked, pal!” So what? So we took a hit on the Fiscal Cliff. Stand up, brush off and get back into the fight. This is no time for self-pity, no time for weakness. Every combat leader knows that when you take a hit, you regroup, reorganize, and prepare to counterattack. The defense is but a temporary,...

The liberal media have spent 12 years feeling sorry for Al Gore. The Man Who Should Have Won in 2000 has had megatons of positive publicity dumped on him, hailing him as the "Goracle." They cheered as leftists honored him with the Nobel Peace Prize and gave an Oscar to his filmed eco-sermon, "An Inconvenient Truth." So when Gore sold his left-wing cable channel Current TV to Al-Jazeera for $500 million, where were they? Despite the fact that conservatives thought the deal sounded like a ridiculous April Fools' joke, the networks had nearly nothing to say. ABC skipped it entirely....

Just a few days after Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the New York Times' Paul Krugman crowed triumphantly about the federal government's response to the disaster. "[A]fter Katrina the government seemed to have no idea what it was doing; this time it did. And that's no accident: the federal government's ability to respond effectively to disaster always collapses when antigovernment Republicans hold the White House, and always recovers when Democrats take it back." What a fairy tale. Mature adults understand that earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters are an unfortunate fact of life. They...

Some in the media have popularized the term “culture war,” giving the impression that the war being waged against Christianity is the same thing as a war against everything that is traditional. But in 2013, let’s change the term. Let’s call it what it is: “A war against Christ.” Certainly there are many American traditions rooted in Christian teaching and history. But mixing some traditions with what is purely Christ-honoring—although it may recruit support from non-Christian traditionalists or conservatives—dilutes the Christian dye. Take for example the ACLU’s war against Christians praying in public schools while obliging Muslims the ability...

Sometimes there is so much stupid going on in the world that you have to just stop and take stock of it all. Al Gore sells Current TV to Al Jazeera. The Americans who owned the anti-American network Current TV soon will be replaced as owners by foreigners who operate the anti-American network Al Jazeera. I doubt any of the 40,000 regular Current TV viewers would have noticed had the news not gone public. Of course, most of them spend their time writing diaries at the DailyKos, when not being yelled at by their moms to clean their rooms. But...

President Obama never disappoints. When the monthly unemployment rate fails to drop, forget it. What’s important is the number of jobs created. But when the rate actually does drop, forget the growth (or lack of it) in jobs. It’s the rate that matters. And don’t blame Obama for the persistence of slow economic growth and high joblessness. That’s the “new normal.” As for the millions of dropouts from the job market, that’s no big deal, hardly worth more than a passing mention. Full credit is due Obama for his role in the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. He was...

Most of us would be honored to have our name become a verb. Especially those of us in public life. But that is not how Judge Robert H. Bork got into the dictionary. He was "borked" when President Reagan nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court. No sooner had the announcement been made by the White House on July 1, 1987, than Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) raced to the Senate floor to denounce the distinguished judge and former Yale Law Professor. In Robert Bork's America, Kennedy roared, blacks would once again sit in the back of the bus, rogue...

On Sunday December 17, 2012, 2 days after the CT shooting, a man went to a restaurant in San Antonio to kill his X-girlfriend. After he shot her, most of the people in the restaurant fled next door to a theater. The gunman followed them and entered the theater so he could shoot more people. He started shooting and people in the theater started running and screaming. It’s like the Aurora, CO theater story plus a restaurant! Now aren’t you wondering why this isn’t a lead story in the national media along with the school shooting? There was an off...

The year 2012 was a depressing time for people who are already pessimistic about the state of our common culture. Conversely, the re-election of Barack Obama, in large measure made possible by the heavy financial support of Hollywood, projects the optimism of the cultural Left. They anticipate increased blue-state voting patterns in favor of gay "marriage," legalized pot, gun regulations, and what next? Legalized prostitution? Euthanasia subsidized by Obamacare? So let's just line up the cultural winners of Obama's America, where the only impediments to progress are those who believe in religion, manners and "family values." Winner: Seth MacFarlane,...

A "serious" proposal is one that has a reasonable expectation of resolving a conflict. Anyone studying Speaker Boehner's Plan B proposal knows it wasn't serious. Why are so many defending it and bemoaning its defeat? It tells you an awful lot about the dishonest nature of politics in America today. Republicans -- fiscally conservative Republicans -- have argued since forever that tax increases diminish economic growth. For the past two years, they have argued that increasing taxes on the "wealthy" would wreak havoc on our fragile (at best) economy. In fact, three studies have confirmed that this "millionaires tax," now...

Was there anything about the Sandy Hook massacre the media got right on the day it happened? In their rush to be first, they ignored their obligation to be right. Nearly every detail they disseminated Friday was wrong, even down to the name of the killer. Their desire to sensationalize had them shoving microphones in the faces of children who couldn’t possibly comprehend the events of the day. This was just the latest example of how out of control and dangerous the media has become, and it’s time government did something to protect us. You’re probably asking yourself, “What...

"The greatest gift which America has received from the Lord is the faith which has forged its Christian identity," Pope John Paul II wrote in a document on the Church in America in 1999. Here at the end of 2012, the words might be the rallying cry of the season -- a reminder, a challenge, a warning -- and a gift to be pondered born of a grotto in Bethlehem. And it's not just something for Christians. As the pope wrote at the time: "The evangelization which accompanied the European migrations has shaped America's religious profile, marked by moral...

If you are reading any opinion column during the Christmas season, you are likely an individual who seeks out information and observations, and comes to your own conclusions. In other words, you are a "thinking" man or women, and whether you ever agree with a single word I write, I nevertheless both congratulate and give thanks for you. And this column is for you. Most politicians and many in the media truly believe we are stupid. We are the masses. We are those meant to receive a pat on the head, an empty promise and a warm feeling --- that...

The year 2012 was defined by the calculated re-emergence of Obama worship, no matter how obvious his failures in office. After his re-election, the actor Jamie Foxx let it all hang out in a tribute at the BET Awards on November 25: "First of all, give an honor to God and our lord and savior, Barack Obama!" For that President Jesus gasbaggery, Foxx was selected as one of the winners of the Media Research Center's Best Notable Quotables of 2012, a collection of liberal foolishness selected by 46 judges of distinction in the conservative media. Foxx won the "Barbra Streisand...

Some thoughts about Army Pfc. Bradley Manning's pretrial hearing, which concluded this week. Manning, of course, is charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the website WikiLeaks and, at his trial in March, will be pleading guilty to certain charges while rejecting the military's contention that he "aided the enemy" in doing so. Manning was in court this month seeking dismissal on the grounds that since his arrest in May 2010, he has been subjected to unlawful pretrial punishment. Certainly the conditions Manning and his civilian lawyer David E. Coombs described in often dramatic testimony were...

It’s apparently cool for the cool kids to think that Grover Norquist is a dweeb. Yes, the guy who has been warning all of us about the untenable nature of the federal tax-and-spend system, the guy who came up with the novel idea that the Republican Party should actually stand for something- and be held accountable for campaign promises- is in trouble now. Prior to the election, the reason why politicians like Barack Obama and Lindsey Graham trimmed their sails to the political winds in the first place and extended the Bush era tax cuts was because a guy like...

The conventional wisdom has emerged that in order to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff," politicians in Washington must agree to some method of tax increases ("revenue") -- which will be real, even if low taxes are not the cause of our ills -- alongside some kind of promise of spending restraint on entitlement programs, which is our problem, and which no one believes Washington will restrain. The American left and our "objective" journalists -- same thing, I know -- are not helping the nation balance its budget. As usual, these partisan hacks are obsessed with tearing the Republican coalition apart,...

I have to admit that when Obama “won” re-election I became more depressed than Madonna’s audience was when they were forced to watch her strip the other night. For God’s sake, Madonna, put some material on that mess, material girl. I guess she’s going to follow Cher’s path and torture us with her exhibitionism ‘til she takes the big dirt nap. Like a virgin? Yeah … right. More like a sturgeon. Hang it up, Madge … you’re scaring the children. Anyway, back to my post-election depression. As I was saying, giddy I was not that Obama secured a second term...

Many of us woke up the morning after the election in a daze and I imagine quite a few of us thought, okay…we lost, it is a new day…WWBD-What Would Breitbart Do? None of us can speak conclusively for him, but many of us were so deeply influenced and impacted by his leadership that in different ways his ideas live on inside of us. Just before he died, Andrew called for a true vetting of President Obama, something that simply did not happen in 2008. Though he did not live to see it, many people led the charge and...

NBC's sitcom "The New Normal" isn't just trying to remake society for the Gay Left. It's trying to remake Christianity, which is to say, destroy it. For its October 22 episode, "The Godparent Trap," NBC ran promos with the gay character Brian in the confessional, and the priest sneering, "If you're not going to take this seriously, I'm going to go back to playing Angry Birds." As the plot unfolds, we're told Brian was raised Catholic, and as he sits in a pew and looks around at religious pictures, he cracks gay jokes in his mind. He sees the Apostles:...

President Obama was on the ropes in the polls after the first presidential debate. After the second presidential debate, he hit the mat in the polls. And after the third presidential debate, he looks to be down for the count. The question, of course, is why. Looking at the debates alone doesn't tell the full story. Romney surely won the first debate -- in fact, he cleaned President Obama's clock -- but in the second debate, he fought President Obama to a draw. And in the third and final debate, which centered on foreign policy, Romney pulled his punches. So...