Free Republic

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...

At the center of the controversy surrounding Rush Limbaugh's bid to purchase the St. Louis Rams are some apocryphal quotes attributed to the the king of talk radio. On Monday, CNN's Rick Sanchez attributed this quote to Limbaugh: "Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back; I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark." Limbaugh informed CNN that he never said those words, so Sanchez quoted Limbaugh's denial on Tuesday. Rather stating clearly whether or not the quote was false, Sanchez acted like the accuracy of the quote...

Tony Harnden has an excellent column that appears in the Telegraph on the effort to smear Rush Limbaugh. Even for the Left, this is quite extraordinary. It’s not simply a matter of taking quotes out of context; it’s a matter of making up quotes out of whole cloth to cast Limbaugh as a racist — and then placing those quotes on Wikipedia, considered the gospel truth, and spreading them on the Internet and various television news outlets... READ THE REST AT COMMENTARYMAGAZINE.COM