Free Republic

An Anaheim technology company and its top executive have won $1.56 million in an Internet defamation case that illustrates the potential seriousness of false information put online. Such cases may be a backlash to people who like to vent online., hitting such online commenters in the wallet if they can’t prove their rants.

Thanks to HonestReporting, you can easily speak your mind to the UN and sign the "We demand the dismissal of Khulood Badawi" petition (click on this link or below). Remember that this UN "media official," one Khulood Badawi, paid by U.S. and European taxpayers, had blatantly spread lies about Israel. This "official" tried to pawn off a photo on Twitter which showed a poor Palestinian girl allegedly injured in an Israeli airstrike, while in reality, the girl was hurt "by falling off a swing." Here's the petition text: Dear Head of UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA),...

A UN "media official," one Khulood Badawi, paid by U.S. and European taxpayers, has blatantly spread lies about Israel. This "official" (liar and inciter of violence) tried to pawn off a photo on Twitter which showed a poor Palestinian girl allegedly injured in an Israeli airstrike, while in reality, the girl was hurt "by falling off a swing." This picture, taken in 2006 by Reuters, had already been used to smear Israel, but Reuters retracted and apologized for this misinformation. The facts were uncovered by HonestReporting (here and here). Her UN agency's, "own website espouses that 'humanitarian actors must not...

Several critics, most of them conservatives, have complained that Game Change, the new HBO movie made from the best-selling 2008 presidential campaign book, portrays Sarah Palin as profoundly stupid. And it does. Those critics have also complained that the picture sometimes portrays John McCain and his top advisers as deeply craven. It does that, too. And then there's the fact that Game Change, the movie, focuses on a negative portrayal of Palin while ignoring the dramatic and divisive primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that made up the biggest part of the book. So there's a lot of...

I hemmed and hawed over this error in the Charleston Gazette’s editorial on Monday, because we all make mistakes. Besides, I am not the Gazette editorial reviewer. I write editorials for the Charleston Daily Mail, which obviously shows I have a prejudice. Still the mistake in the editorial bothered me. Maybe if the editorial board of the Charleston Gazette were not so vicious, mean-spirited and perhaps even anti-Catholic in its editorial against Rick Santorum, I might have overlooked it. Here is the error: "When Santorum’s wife miscarried, he and she brought the dead fetus home “to cuddle and sing to...

It’s the kind of virulent hate speech you’d expect to find on a neo-Nazi website or in a Patrick Buchanan column: American Jews who support current Israeli policies are accused of dual loyalty and called “Israel firsters.” AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) fares even worse: “Saying AIPAC is guilty of dual loyalty is giving it credit for one more loyalty than it holds.” In other words, this widely respected American organization, and the hundreds of thousands of Jews (and Christians) who support it, have absolutely no loyalty to our nation; their sole loyalty is to the foreign nation...

(CALGARY, Alberta) - There were sombre ceremonies across Tucson, Arizona on Sunday, January 8, 2012, in remembrance of Jared Loughner’s shooting spree a year earlier where he seriously wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords, killed six and wounded 12 more. I suggest that the Untied States, is the only country in world, where remembrances could be held virtually every single day of the year for egregious killings of citizens by other citizens—all indirectly supported by the National Rifle Association. The day before the Tucson ceremonies, on January 7, there was a funeral in Brownsville, Texas, for a fifteen-year-old eighth grader who was...

In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Herman Cain said a new accuser would be coming forward to accuse him of having a 13-year affair with him. No links yet as the story is currently breaking and details are still being released. Apparentally a Georgia TV station has the exclusive.

Fr.Reynolds being welcomed back to his parish Last May, RTÉ, the national television network of Ireland, aired a high-profile, prime-time special entitled, "A Mission to Prey." It was a show designed to lambaste the Catholic Church for sex abuse scandals. The show made the startling claim that a previously unblemished Irish priest, Fr. Kevin Reynolds, had raped and impregnated a young girl years earlier in Kenya. It even claimed that the priest had secretly supported the mother and his child financially. Even before the program aired, Fr. Kevin vehemently denied the claims. Not only did he assert that he...

When Herman Cain held the long-awaited news conference late Tuesday afternoon to tackle allegations that he sexually harassed four women, a smooth-talking Southern attorney was the first person to step to the microphone. Cain’s lawyer is L. Lin Wood, a well-known Atlanta-based trial attorney who has carved out a successful career representing the high-profile and falsely accused, often seeking eye-popping damages for those he believes have been libeled or slandered in the press. Former CBS news anchor Dan Rather once called Wood the “attorney for the damned.” When asked why he had chosen to represent Cain, Wood cited the media...

All three morning shows on Monday hyped a "bombshell blast" against Herman Cain, playing up a story in Politico charging the Republican presidential candidate with sexual harassment back in the 1990s. ABC's Good Morning America led with the allegations. Co-host George Stephanopoulos, whose former boss, Bill Clinton, repeatedly faced sexual harassment claims, touted, "And this morning, bombshell blast. Major allegations against front-runner Herman Cain. Two former female colleagues accuse him of sexual harassment." CBS's Early Show ...Crawford also connected the allegations, linking, "...This reminds me of similar allegations that were levied just 20 years ago against Justice Clarence Thomas who,...

An attorney for Sarah Palin is threatening to sue over a new book that he says defamed the Palins and contains "a series of lies and rumors." John Tiemessen, in a letter to the publisher of Crown Publishing Group Monday, cites an email that author Joe McGinniss allegedly sent a blogger in January seeking substantiation for several rumors that have surrounded Palin's family. That email was posted online last week by Andrew Breitbart. Tiemessen says McGinniss' book, "The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin," contains "most of" the stories that merely "amounted to the wishful fantasies of disturbed individuals."

Sarah Palin’s family attorney John Tiemessen has written a letter to Maya Mavjee, the publisher of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, that Palin may sue her, the company, and the book’s author Joe McGinniss “for knowingly publishing false statements” in his book released last week, “The Rogue,” ABC News has learned.READ THE ENTIRE LETTER HEREThe book was widely panned by critics for using unnamed sources to criticize Palin and her family. Tiemessen cites an email they have access to in which McGinniss writes that attorneys from Crown Publishing told him “nothing I can cite other than my...

Andrew Breitbart appeared on the Hugh Hewitt Show to discuss the Big Government investigative report on the Joe McGinniss Sarah Palin book. Breitbart promises more stories are about to break on this including an interview with the prostitute who McGinniss used as a source for the book. Video at link:

The awful launch week for the over-hyped, expected bestseller The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, by controversial author Joe McGinniss, just got worse. Much worse. After a week of universally scathing pans from the reflexively anti-Palin establishment media, McGinniss now faces the fight of his literary life: the accusation that he seems to have knowingly submitted a book to his publisher, Crown/Random House, that was filled with unproved “tawdry gossip” and rumors that lacked “factual evidence.”

The allegations about the former Alaska Governor, who has been pursued by the tabloid press since running for the Vice Presidency in 2008, were originally published in the National Enquirer, which quoted publishing sources close to the book.

Imagine a Jewish member of Congress accusing the members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) of wanting to see Jews gassed. How would every decent American — Right and Left — describe such a statement? Loathsome? Morally reprehensible? An obvious lie? All three descriptions would be entirely accurate. Next question: How much media exposure would that libel be given? Front page in the New York Times and Washington Post? Ferocious editorials written from coast to coast? Lead stories on TV newscasts? Correct on all three again. Final question: Would said congressman be allowed to stay in office? We all know...

Judges of the High Court of Justice have ruled that Arab film director Mohammed Bakri will not have to compensate the IDF fighters for the defamatory and false content of his film 'Jenin Jenin’. The film portrays IDF fighters as vicious war criminals, presenting falsified testimony claiming that IDF soldiers cracked the skulls of women, children and elderly people during the bloody house to house battle in Jenin during Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002 Thirteen IDF soldiers were killed in that battle, because the IDF refrained from air strikes to flush out terrorists so as to avoid hurting civilians,...

Obama's Chilling Crew   By Andrew WaldenFrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, April 28, 2009 Why is there so little media investigation of the financing behind Barack Obama’s early political sponsor—and now convicted felon—Tony Rezko?      The dual US-Syrian citizen Rezko--who assisted Obama in the purchase of his Chicago mansion--was heavily funded by loans from Iraqi-British ex-Baathist billionaire Nadhmi Auchi.  According to testimony at Rezko’s trial, Obama met Auchi at an April 3, 2004 event at Rezko’s home during Obama’s 2004 US Senate campaign.  The Times of London reports discovering, “state documents in Illinois recording that Fintrade Services, a Panamanian company, lent...

A 13-year-old girl who called her teacher a pedophile online says her principal ordered her to log onto Facebook so she could read the offending post and ensuing responses by her friends. The investigation by Douglas County school officials resulted in the suspension of Alejandra Sosa and two other Chapel Hill Middle School students. They could face harsher penalties, including banishment to a school for children with behavior problems, when they go before a tribunal March 10. Alejandra told the AJC in an interview that included her mother Thursday that she regrets what she posted Feb. 17. She said she...

Manhattan blogger Pamela Geller and her posse of anti-Islamic protesters have been branded a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Stop the Islamization of America was included in the civil rights organization's annual roundup of extremist groups - a rogue's gallery that includes everything from the Ku Klux Klan to white supremacists and Nazis. Geller's group was one of the most vocal opponents of the proposed Islamic Center near Ground Zero. The group was also behind ads that were placed on city buses urging Muslims to leave "the falsity of Islam." Geller, who runs a blog called Atlas...

In a suit filed in federal court in New York, former president Jimmy Carter, along with his publisher, Simon & Schuster, is being sued by five readers of his 2006 book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." The suit alleges that the defendants violated New York's consumer protection laws by committing "deceptive acts in the conduct of business, trade, or commerce." The plaintiffs, who hope to be considered a class, were "members of the reading public who thought they could trust a former president of the United States and a well-established book publisher to tell the truth..." Does Carter deserve this trouble?...

The Left and its handmaidens – the gaggle of talking heads on MSNBC/CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC and their allied printed versions, namely the “The Washington Compost,” “Slime” and “Newspeak” magazines, etc. – have been rather harsh on Sarah Palin this past week after she went public in a 7-minute video segment on Facebook, defending herself against the Left’s accusations that she was the actual perpetrator (along with Rush, Beck, Hannity and anyone else who didn’t vote for Obama) behind the cue-ball-headed madman who opened fire on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several other innocents on Saturday, 01/08/2011. How dare Sarah Palin defend herself against...

Last week, following the murder of six people and the attempted murder of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, the American people were given a vivid display of the single most important tactic of the left: libeling opponents. Most Americans have been naively and blissfully unaware of this aspect of the left's arsenal against the right. But now, just as more Americans than ever before understand the left's limitless appetite for political power in an ever-expanding state, more Americans than ever before understand that a key to the left's success is defaming the right. I do not recall any major American...

In order to prove libel and slander on the part of the media the bar is set pretty high here in the US. The material must be inaccurate/false, they must know it's inaccurate/false (I think it's not that tight) and then they went ahead and published it. The kicker is that they have to do it with malice. It's pretty obvious the media had no supporting information that Sarah Palin, the T-Party, talk radio and others had any connection to this especially when they first started spinning this. As time went on it became even clearer that there was no...

As Sarah Palin has just learned, keeping up with the rules about using phrases that are associated with Jewish history is not as simple as it used to be. I was under the impression that the list of phrases that were considered off limits for general consumption was confined more or less to those associated with the Holocaust. Meaning, for instance, that the use of the word "holocaust" should be confined to discussion of events surrounding the genocide of Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945. But even that stricture has been hard to enforce. Indeed, when an episode of...

The dead in Tucson were still lying on the street, and the injured were still being rushed to the hospital, when liberal pundits began concocting reasons to blame conservatives in general, and Sarah Palin in particular. On the contrary: â—� The murderer was clearly unstable. His delusions of government mind-control were typical of paranoid schizophrenia. If we want to assess blame, let us blame the inadequate funding and inadequate awareness of mental illness. â—� The would-be assassin became fixated on his target, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, before Palin appeared on the national scene, before Obama became president, and before there was...

Sarah Palin, who had been silent for days, on Wednesday issued a forceful denunciation of her critics in a video statement that accused pundits and journalists of “blood libel” in their rush to blame heated political rhetoric for the shootings in Arizona. “Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own,” she said in a video posted to her Facebook page. “Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.” Ms. Palin’s use last year of...

All of us at The Heritage Foundation were profoundly saddened by the tragedy that occurred this past Saturday morning in Tucson, Arizona. We mourn all of those who lost their lives and are praying for a full recovery by all of the surviving victims. As Speaker John Boehner said Saturday, “An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve.” Unfortunately, some have chosen to use this tragedy for political gain. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, the Democrat who refused to enforce SB 1070, told FOX News‘ Megyn Kelly this weekend that the shooting was caused by...

Does this really surprise anyone? Currently, the liberal psuedo-news site the Huffington Post has a gigantic picture of former VP candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and a 99 font size (and all capital letters) "GOTCHA" on the front of their website: The picture, which intentionally tries to mock Palin, links to an article by the Huffington Post that states that Palin "misquoted" a story in the Wall Street Journal. However, if you wade through the article and past the liberal slant, you would realize that Mrs. Palin is telling the truth. If you read the article, Palin stated that...

"The Daily Kos, Twittergate & Obama's Birth Certificate Controversy Posted by Erica The Zapem blog has produced a video, Twittergate - The Democrats Hire A Twitter-Thug, which details how the Democrats hired Neal Rauhauser, a Daily Kos blogger, to paint the tea party movement as racist, homophobic, extremist and every other pejorative you can imagine. Rauhauser owns a company co-founded with Beth Becker called Progressive PST. Zapem says,"The evidence submitted demonstrates the systematic and deliberate provocation towards people in an attempt to elicit unfavorable responses after a series of malicious and vile attacks. The idea was to antagonize, collect and...

The Internet giant AOL libeled Free Republic as "hosting child pornography" in an article published Wednesday, September 22, 2010, at their Daily Finance news site. The site's masthead reads: Daily Finance An AOL Money & Finance Site.Authored by Daily Finance media columnist Jeff Bercovici, the article entitled Muzzled Reporter Says 'Maw of Yahoo' No Place for Journalism tells the story about John Cook's reasons for leaving Yahoo News and returning to his previous gig with Gawker. According to the article, Cook was the senior national affairs reporter for Yahoo's The Upshot news blog. Bercovici notes that he and Cook are...

The AOL-owned site Daily Finance this morning retracted a passage in an article that falsely stated Free Republic hosted child pornography.The article was about reporter John Cook leaving Yahoo News to return to Gawker. Included in Cook's reasons for leaving, according to Daily Finance reporter Jeff Bercovici, was that Yahoo would not allow him to write about Free Republic "hosting child pornography." The Salon.com article that was linked to support that claim actually stated that Free Republic did not host child pornography.The offending Daily Finance passage now reads:"... On similar grounds, he was prohibited from writing about the conservative website...

President Barack Obama has signed into law new legislation protecting US writers from foreign libel judgements. The Speech Act, recently passed by Congress, makes foreign libel rulings virtually unenforceable in US courts. The act targets "libel tourists" who launch cases in countries whose legal systems are considered far more claimant-friendly, such as the UK. In the UK defendants must prove statements are true, whereas in the US claimants have to prove they are false. ome cases have been brought in the UK because US libel laws include the so-called Sullivan defence, in which the claimant must prove malice or serious...

The local Republican-oriented strategy firm of Landmark Communications is out this afternoon with the first polls in the Republican runoffs for governor and attorney general. In the governor’s race, former secretary of state Karen Handel has a nine-point lead over former congressman Nathan Deal, 45.8 percent to 37.1 percent. Undecideds were measured at 17.1 percent.

What will it take for the media to acknowledge that the Tea Party is not a racist movement, and that liberals have smeared it as such in a naked politicization of race relations? How about a lefty activist admitting just that. UPenn professor Mary Frances Berry, a leader of the "far-left black political scene," as NB Executive Editor Matt Sheffield wrote,  penned this astonishing email to Politico, published on July 20: Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any...

Mike's post yesterday about the NAACP’s recent goals to distract from Obama’s failures by leveling charges of racism is a great compliment to this one by Bob Owens. Bob describes how Think Progress, a blog founded by the George Soros insidious group The Center for American Progress (CAP) (and a very influential group inside the Obama administration), is putting out false propaganda to paint the Tea Party as racist. Days after the NAACP passed a resolution calling all Tea Party members as racist. (h/t Gateway Pundit) Think there is no coordination going on with this White House? Do you remember...

Senator Scott Brown's office sends over a furious statement in response to the comic Kathy Griffin's joke on the cable network BRAVO Tuesday night -- in a segment featuring two CNN reporters -- today that a photograph of him and his daughters featured "Scott Brown – who is a senator from Massachusetts, and has two daughters that are prostitutes."

On Friday's CBS Early Show, fill-in co-host Erica Hill confessed Levi Johnston's apology for making false statements about the Palin family was "highly under-reported." During the 'Early Wrap' segment, Hill told a panel of media pundits: "My favorite story of the week, which was highly under-reported...is that Levi Johnston came out and said....Some things he said about the Palin family were not true."It's interesting that Hill used the phrase "under-reported," when CBS did not cover Johnston's admission at all since he made the statement in a Tuesday interview with People Magazine. Meanwhile, the network, and the Early Show in particular,...

Israel has created an inquiry commission to probe all the circumstances of a deadly raid on a Turkish ship trying to breach the blockade of Gaza.  But before the commission has even begun to do its work, the New York Times already has dismissed it as a worthless "farce" -- and in the paper's news section no less. Any fair, impartial observer would wait until the commission performs its task and releases its findings.  But not the New York Times, which in its superior wisdom already divines that the Israeli commission is a government tool to divert blame elsewhere.  Never...

In its attempts to portray IDF soldiers as violators of judicial rulings and war criminals, the newspaper would not let itself be distracted by the actual facts. Many in the media say that what Anat Kamm uncovered was an important revelation. The IDF, they claim, violated High Court of Justice orders, and conducted targeted killings while violating judicial guidelines. The IDF, they continue to assert, committed war crimes, and there is no journalist out there who would have remained silent, were he or she to receive documented proof of this. Let us put aside the thousands of documents that have...

The US Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that the government may not restrict what or when individuals and organizations may spend to voice their opinions was roundly denounced by leading Democrats. The decision came in a case in which the producers of a film critical of Hillary Clinton had been barred from showing the film during the period before the 2008 election. President Obama charged that “the Court’s decision is an invitation to unconstrained criticism of candidates for public office. The measured give-and-take of candidates debating each other over how to govern will now be polluted by heckling from outsiders who...

Maintaining his stature as one of the most forceful defenders of the Bush Administration's defense policies former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Obama of committing "libel" against CIA interrorgators on Wednesday. Mr. Cheney’s criticized the Obama White House in a wide-ranging address on foreign policy matters for abandoning commitments to allies in Poland and the Czech Republic in favor of the Russians, sacrificing American intelligence officials to satisfy the political left and "dithering" on taking action in Afghanistan, among other things. The speech, delivered to the Center for Security Policy, comes as the White House considers U.S. Commander of...

Radio host Rush Limbaugh is interviewed on the sidelines before the start of the NFL AFC championship football game in Pittsburgh. Rush Limbaugh, who saw his bid to co-own a National Football League team sacked partly because of quotes he purportedly made regarding slavery, could have grounds for a libel suit, legal experts told Foxnews.com. The conservative radio host was dropped on Wednesday from a group seeking to buy the St. Louis Rams. Dave Checketts, chairman of the St. Louis Blues hockey team, who is leading the effort to buy the NFL team, said Limbaugh was dropped from the group...

Rush's enemies in the leftist media have come up with a clever but very shameless way to smear him. When he was bidding for the NFL team, the media came up with such outrageously shocking but blatantly false quotes allegedly made by Rush, that his NFL partners were forced to reject Rush's participation in the deal. The media knew fully well that the quotes were false. Can anybody sane make a claim that Rush made a statement supporting slavery? Having sabotaged Rush's business deal, CNN and the media are now admitting what they already knew, that the so-called quotes were...

During the 3:00PM ET hour of live coverage on MSNBC Friday, co-host David Shuster admitted that racially charged quotes he and other hosts attributed to Rush Limbaugh had not been verified: “MSNBC attributed that quote to a football player who was opposed to Limbaugh’s NFL bid. However, we have been unable to verify that quote independently. So, just to clarify.” Shuster did not formally retract the quote or apologize.

All week, intrepid bloggers have been trying to trace the source of two "racist" quotes attributed to Rush Limbaugh -- quotes which poisoned the atmosphere to the point where he was dropped from a bid to purchase the NFL's St. Louis Rams. Now comes word that the quotations may have been added to Rush Limbaugh's Wikipedia entry by someone using a computer at a liberal New York law firm.

-- UPDATE-- Well, well, well, lookee here (from the firm's own website) Firm Establishes Sports Group September 21, 2009 Growing Cross-Disciplinary Practice Handles Disputes and Transactions for Numerous Sports-Related Entities NEW YORK, NY - September 21, 2009. Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP is pleased to announce the formal establishment of its interdisciplinary Sports Group. The firm's work in this area dates back decades and includes high-profile disputes and transactions involving professional baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis and golf, as well as the representation of sports-related media entities. Among other matters on behalf of various leagues, teams, and other sports-related entities,...

Not sure if anyone has picked this up yet, but the editors at the Huffington Post have pulled the fake Limbaugh "slavery" quotes from a 2006 Jack Huberman article. Huberman's book was one of the original sources for the fake quotes, apparently picking them up from the wikipedia entry where they first appeared. A note at the beginning of the article now states: Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post contained quotes attributed to Rush Limbaugh, which Limbaugh has since denied making. As is our policy when a fact in a blog post is called into question, we gave...

Thanks to an intrepid blogger with the tag Trapdoc posting a letter to Mark Steyn, the search for the Wikipedia Libelist responsible for damaging posts to the Rush Limbaugh account has been narrowed to the IP address of a New York City law firm: "The quotes were added by a user with the IP address of 69.64.213.146. This address has been used mostly to make changes to the article about Rush, but also Karl Rove, Sean Hannity,.. James Dobson and Sara Palin from 2005 until earlier this year. "While others have noted this in various forums, no one seems to...