Free Republic

Barbara1247 wrote:  The Republicans have helped bring us to this sorry state of affairs. - How About More Scandal, Incompetence, Venality, Hubris, Vanity and Error to Start Dear Comrade 1247, You’re a liberal, so even when you are right- like you are now- it’s accidental. So as a public service, let me explain to you, in the simplest terms, what you got right, accidentally. Certainly the GOP has helped establish a track record of what might be the sorriest 25 years of governing in American history. But it’s because they have supported watered-down versions of the Democrat agenda. For every...

Well apparently a president can’t just make new lows for respect of American moral authority in one single term and then let it go at that. Nope. Apparently after getting stiff-armed by our ideological enemies once in the first Obama term- turning his back on American values and getting called out on it- the administration felt the need to demonstrate crumbling American might and values by going back to that well early in the second term too. During the first term, we suffered the embarrassment of the Chinese Communist who publicly lectured Obama about straying away from capitalism and taking...

<p>WASHINGTON, June 6, 2013 — Al-Jazeera is about to bring jihad to American cable TV.</p> <p>Al-Jazeera bought Al Gore’s unwatched Current TV earlier this year and plans to convert it to Al-Jazeera America. That’s right, the alleged news organization that gets much of it’s funding from the Qatar government is coming to American TV screens.</p>

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...