Free Republic

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...

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: ● 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. ● 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.