Free Republic

These days, being seen as a victim can be useful. You immediately claim the moral high ground. Some people want to help you. Lawyers and politicians brag that they force others to help you. This turns some people into whiners with little sense of responsibility. Joe Biden's niece was arrested recently for throwing a punch at a cop. The New York Post says she's addicted to alcohol and pills, but rather than take responsibility for her actions, she blamed them on the "pressure she faces" because her uncle is vice president. Give me a break. America was founded by people...

Culture: Slavery's stain on American history cannot and should not be whitewashed. But neither should it be portrayed as worse than it was to serve a political agenda. And yet this is what Hollywood is doing with its slate of horror films about slavery and its legacy. "The Butler" — which claims to be "based on a true story" — opens with a stomach-turning scene of white cruelty. A boy picking cotton on a Georgia plantation watches his mother dragged off to a shack where she's raped by a white landowner, who not long after the assault coldly walks up...

So, at halftime of the Sunday Night Football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington REDSKINS, Bob Costas decided to lay down some wisdom on America. He started out okay in his discussion of Obama's new pet project, to pressure Washington into changing the name of the football team, but almost at the end when you were suffiently sucked in, he threw out the bombshell.....the use of the term "Redskins" is indeed offensive...a nasty slur. And there you have it. Just like Global Warming, um, I mean Climate Change, the debate about the term "Redskins" is now settled science....

BOB COSTAS: Think for a moment about the term Redskins and how it truly differs from all the others. Ask yourself what the equivalent would be if directed toward African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians or members of any other ethnic group. When considered that way, Redskins can't possibly honor a heritage or a noble character trait, nor can it possibly be considered a neutral term. It's an insult, a slur, no matter how benign the present day intent. It's fair to say that for a long time now, and certainly in 2013, no offense has been intended. But if you take a...

Wow...read this one! Then check out the suggested web sites. Many of the emails that I have sent or forwarded that had any anti Obama in it were negated by Snopes. I thought that was odd. Check this out. Shades of Krystalnacht Snopes, Soros and the Supreme Court's Kagan.We-l-l-l-l now, I guess the time has come to check out Snopes! Ya' don't suppose it might not be a good time to take a second look at some of the stuff that got kicked in the ditch by Snopes, do ya'? We've known that it was owned by a lefty couple...

LOS ANGELES – Funding for clinical cancer trials and other life-saving research under the National Institutes of Health was cut off in response to the government slimdown, but it looks like the cookie monster will still be knee-deep in chocolate chips (or is it carrots now?) According to the Daily Treasury Statement and first reported by CNS News, the administration dished out $445 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) on the first day of the slimdown, which means funds for the likes of PBS Newshour, NPR and “Sesame Street” are being spent before cancer research.

Megan Kelly is off to a rocky start, pulling Fox hard to left, challenging Senator Ted Cruz in much the same way Candy Crowley did at CNN. So far she has quoted polls by Politico and PPP.

In an interview with Politico, Senator Harry Reid argued that the media is being unfair to Democrats in its coverage of the shutdown. Reid said he believes that there is no way someone viewing the situation objectively could conclude that Democrats are at fault for the shutdown. You and other journalists have a real shortcoming in that you are trying so hard to be fair that you are unfair,” Reid said. “Democrats have had almost nothing to do with the problems here. It’s all Republicans.” *SNIP** Media Research Center, a conservative media-watchdog group, found that in 39 stories in the...

Facebook seems to be blocking access to criticisms of the shutdown, obamacare, and other political posts, and communication with others. Anybody else seeing a pattern of censorship, or is my tinfoil too tight?

The Left’s latest political celebrity has made it official, with Texas state Senator Wendy Davis kicking off a bid for governor owing its genesis to a filibuster of legislation banning restricting abortion after 20 weeks. That fact alone serves to undermine any rationale for her viability. Yet that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Davis, who pivoted from abortion to gun control prior to her formal announcement. Weeks ago, an interview with The Texas Tribune found her reaffirming past support for tighter gun restrictions on firearms sales between individual as well as prohibiting gun shows on...

On the same day, CNN and NBC both dropped their plans to make movies about Hillary Clinton. Interestingly, it looks like a win both for the Clintons and for RNC chair Reince Priebus, who boldly told the two networks that they wouldn't be moderating any GOP presidential debates in 2015 or 2016 with those promotional films in the pipeline. Apologies might be owed from The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which prematurely waved a white flag: "God grant Reince Priebus the serenity to accept liberal media bias. ... The Hollywood-media complex is going to line up hard behind Hillary's 2016...

The New York Times, in one more effort to paint the Southern states as hotbeds of racism, estimates that two-thirds of poor blacks and single mothers will be denied health insurance under Obamacare because the Southern states refuse to expand their Medicaid programs. The Times adds that more than half of low-wage workers without insurance won’t get any, either. Well down in the Times piece is this nugget: more than half of states in the United States have rejected Medicaid expansion, including Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, which are hardly Southern. To make the charge of racism stick, the...

The list of things on which Barack Obama has been wrong goes on to the crack of doom.  But there's one thing on which the President is surely right. In devising his strategy for dealing with the shutdown, the prez can count on the MSM to blame Republicans. Mark Halperin bared the president's calculus on today's Morning Joe, saying the Obama admin has little incentive to negotiate because it believes a "sympathetic" press will blame Republicans like they did in the 1990s, accusing them of being "obstructionist."  View the video after the jump. Halperin offered what amounted to an indictment...

Charles Ferguson says he was met with a wall of silence from more than a hundred people who refused to be interviewed.

NBC announced today that it would be launching a week of programming to help Obamacare get off its feet, according to a press release sent out by the network. The law has been widely opposed by all Republicans and supported by most Democrats, including President Obama. The headline of the press release reads: NBC News Launches “Ready or Not, the New Healthcare Law,” a Multi-Screen Experience to Help Americans Get the Most Out of the Affordable Care Act Dr. Nancy Snyderman Answers Most Pressing Questions Across Social and Via New Video Series #AskDrNancy Interactive Tools and Resources Help Audience Navigate...

Support for the tea party continues to fall among Americans, nearing all-time lows, according to a new poll Thursday. Twenty-two percent of Americans call themselves tea party backers, the Gallup poll found, while 27 percent consider themselves opponents of the tea party. Fifty-one percent choose neither or have no opinion. The level of support is a 10-point drop from November 2010, when a wave of pro-tea party sentiment helped Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, and is also down from 2012, when the GOP managed to hang on to the House and current tea party firebrand Sen. Ted...

Hmm. Witnesses later got IDs and voted in several elections, despite swearing under oath that they could not. The recent passage of a voter ID law in North Carolina has sparked opponents to issue the same polemic statements that always accompany these reform efforts.Phrases like “poll tax,” “suppression,” and even “the new face of Jim Crow” filled dispatches from Georgia media and liberal advocacy groups back in 2005, when Georgia passed an almost identical law. Just like in North Carolina today, Georgia’s law was called a “deceitful, devious plan to deny votes to hundreds of thousands” by “callous lawmakers determined...

Journalism isn’t what is used to be, and it wasn’t great to begin with. Last week a man who heard voices in his head followed the advice from the voices in Joe Biden’s head about armament, bought a shotgun, hacked off the barrel and killed a bunch of people in the Washing Navy Yard. As with all such incidents, two completely predictable occurrences came to pass. First, after waiting for facts to emerge, the sanity of the suspect was shown to be non-existent. Second, the gun control industry did not wait for facts to emerge. Neither did the media. One...

I'm fairly sure many liberals will consider this post as piling on President Obama. Their favored son, the first black President of the United States, is looking like a wall that has been painted with paint that is mostly water. Have you ever tried to do that? I have and it is impossible to get the wall properly covered. The paint will run away from your brush and roller. President Obama's colors are running pretty thin and he is having a hard time keeping his backside covered from all the scandals and claims coming out of his administration. Seriously, how...

Miller: New York Times gets it wrong, media obsessed with linking AR-15 with Navy Yard shooter The liberal media is so obsessed with linking the Navy Yard shooter with the AR-15 rifle that it is making up false tales of Aaron Alexis trying to obtain one. The New York Times attempts to give the impression that a so-called assault-weapon law stopped Alexis from buying a rifle in Virginia, but that is not true.

Last spring, as networks like MSNBC launched five months of saturation coverage intended to force gun control on the American people, we said, over and over and over and over again, that there was (tragically) “another Adam Lanza” sitting out there, glued to his TV screen, and planning his own five months of fame.” As it became clear that Congress was not going to pass gun control in April, MSNBC commentators said, almost wistfully, that it would take another mass shooting to reinvigorate their cause. Well, they got the mass shooting they were looking for. On Monday, a discharged Navy...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Now, for all of you Democrats who are back on your gun control high horse, I have one word for you: Colorado. You remember what happened in Colorado. Two Democrats thought to be in safe districts were recalled in Colorado over their efforts at renewed gun control on the innocent and the law-abiding. Greetings, my friends, and welcome. Here we are, back at it as promised yesterday, another three hours of broadcast excellence, Rush Limbaugh, behind the Golden EIB Microphone here at the distinguished and prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. The shooting in Washington is...

During CNN's live coverage of Monday's shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, anchor Carol Costello asked when the last time was that a gunman wreaked "havoc at a U.S. military facility." In 2009, a jihadist killed 13 in a mass-shooting at Fort Hood in Texas. "I used to work in Washington, live in Washington. This seems so unusual to me that a gunman could create this kind of havoc at a U.S. military facility," Costello stated. "Have you ever heard of it happening before, Brian?" she asked correspondent Brian Todd, reporting live from the vicinity of the shooting.

“Fox News joins the Pro-Homosexual Media Bandwagon” – so says Peter LaBarbera in a 40,000-word expose that flaunts over 220 footnotes. (Read the full report here: Unfair, Unbalanced and Afraid). While Sean Hannity chooses silence and John Stossel passive acceptance, rising star Megyn Kelly plays trans-gender advocate for Chaz Bono, then drops the “hate card” on the psychiatrist who disagrees. Bernie Goldberg pushes “Jesus is just alright with” gay, then implies that the Biblical heroes David and Jonathan were homosexual as were Ruth and Naomi. Sean Hannity? – Still mum. Bill O’Reilly bashes an ex-gay; Elizabeth Hasselbeck calls pope’s opposition...

After morning briefings on the crisis in Syria, President Obama played 27 holes at Andrews Air Force base, according to the White House. Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon, hosts of ESPN’s "Pardon the Interruption,” and aide Marvin Nicholson joined the six-hour golf game.

Whether they think that he got away with murdering 17-year-old Trayvon Martin or that he was just a brave neighborhood watch volunteer “standing his ground,” many Americans can’t seem to get enough of George Zimmerman. And he can’t seem to stop giving it to them. So it’s hardly surprising that everything Zimmerman does produces a Twitterverse explosion and spins out into heavy news coverage. …

US broadcast network National Public Radio plans to shed 10% of its staff in an effort to close a $6.1m (£3.8m) budget deficit, a spokeswoman has said. It will offer voluntary redundancies to its roughly 840 employees. The broadcaster put the budget shortfall in part down to a decline in corporate grants amid the slow US economy. National Public Radio (NPR) reaches 27 million listeners a week through 975 member stations across the US. The redundancies follow a series of shake-ups in the non-profit's leadership, and a 2008 reduction of about 8% of its staff. NPR, based in Washington DC,...

A little thin-skinned, aren't we? One thing the press can't stand is criticism. And sometimes the reaction of members of the press to criticism goes so over the top that the results are absolutely hilarious. Such was the case of Marci Shatzman, a reporter for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel Forum Publishing Group who was covering a routine meeting of the West Boca Community Council in Florida. What set Marci off to act completely unprofessional at the 43 second mark of this video was guest speaker Andre Fladell daring to criticize  members of the press for acting...unprofessional.

News radio anchor Brian Carey was beaten into semiconsciousness and left suffering a busted jaw in an attack at his midtown building, cops said. The 52-year-old Carey, 1010 WINS’ afternoon drive anchor, was found by a neighbor in the lobby of his E. 61st St. building around 11 p.m. Monday. In addition to his broken jaw, he had a deep cut on his head and facial fractures, police said. …

Sixty-one percent of Americans polled, who watched President Obama's prime-time speech, told CNN that they support his policy towards Syria. Since some surveys showed as much as two-thirds opposition to military action against Syria in the days before the speech, the poll suggests that he did what presidents rarely do: change people's minds, if only temporarily. How did he do it? In only 15 minutes, President Obama made his points, simply and straightforwardly. Anyone arguing a controversial case in the court of public opinion can learn from what he said and how he said it:

Recall James resigned from ESPN in 2011 to enter the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat that ultimately went to Ted Cruz. During the campaign James took a strong anti-gay stance. "We just asked ourselves how Craig's statements would play in our human resources department," said a Fox spokesman. "He couldn't say those things here."

Wednesday marks the one year anniversary of the 2012 attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead, and sent the Obama administration scrambling for a cover story that the Big Three broadcast networks initially bought and were slow to unravel. A similar pattern has emerged in 2013. As new information about the administrationÂ’s actions before and after the attacks have been revealed through congressional testimony, whistleblowers, and eyewitnesses, the Big Three have responded by censoring, breezing past or spinning politically damaging bombshells. The following are just some of the findings of...

... In a tearful on-air announcement on Friday, Summer Reese, the interim executive director of the Pacifica Foundation, which owns WBAI, said that after talks with SAG-Aftra, the union that represents broadcasting talent, “we will be laying off virtually everyone whose voice you recognize on the air,” effective Monday.

CNN Analyst: Many Companies Using Obamacare as 'Excuse' to Cut Employee Health Insurance By Matt Hadro Created 08/22/2013 - 4:35pm CNN's global economic analyst says many companies are just using Obamacare as an "excuse" to make employee health insurance cuts they already planned to make. "[H]health care inflation is between seven and ten percent a year. And that's with or without Obamacare. So I do think that you're going to see a lot of companies using Obamacare and the ACA as an excuse to make changes in their plan that they might have been planning to make already," said Rana...

Maybe I have missed it, but scanning the Obama worshipping media today, I've seen SCARCE coverage of 15,000 people losing health insurance because of the Clown's Death Panels.

Over the course of just two days, the Washington Post pounded its readers with 12 "birther" stories aimed at Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Headlines included, "Can Ted Cruz Run for President?", "Canadian Born Ted Cruz Releases Birth Certificate Amid Queries if He's Eligible for Presidential Run," "Ted Cruz: I am Not a Canadian," and "No, Ted Cruz "Birthers" are Not the Same as Obama Birthers":**snipThough there is no legal question as to Cruz's eligibility to run for president (Cruz was born an American citizen), the Post has spent the last 48 hours bedeviling the Hispanic senator with articles obviously meant...

"Pushing Sean Hannity out of the 9:00 p.m. slot, to make way for pro-homosexual advocate Megyn Kelly, is another sign of the channel's left-ward drift and decline," said ASI President Cliff Kincaid, a veteran journalist and media critic.

RNC Formally Drops NBC, CNN from 2016 Debates by Mike Flynn 16 Aug 2013, 8:32 AM PDT post a comment At its Summer meeting in Boston on Friday, the RNC formally adopted a resolution excluding NBC and CNN from hosting or moderating Republican primary debates during the 2016 Presidential campaign. The vote comes after RNC Chair Reince Priebus urged the networks to cancel their plans to air films celebrating the life of Hillary Clinton. Clinton is widely expected to run for President. "Your credibility as a supposedly unbiased news network will most certainly be jeopardized by the decision to show...

Walmart (WMT) reported earnings of $1.24 a share this morning on revenues of $116.2 billion. Analysts had been expecting $1.25 on $118.5 billion. Sales in stores open more than a year declined 0.3%. Walmart also guided lower for the full year citing a "challenging sales and operating environment." The stock is off sharply and at risk of going negative for the last 52 weeks. Those are the numbers, but not the whole story. Walmart is the thermometer of the American economy. Disregard the government data. Jobs and GDP and all the rest are at best inaccurate measures of the economy...

The rise of the “mostly secular” Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has had a decidedly non-secular effect: Persecution of Egypt’s Coptic Christians is on the rise. In the latest bout of civil unrest, the Brotherhood torched three churches. Copts are a minority in Egypt. They don’t control the military government any more than they controlled Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government. But notice how AFP characterizes the burnings.Supporters of deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi torched three churches in central Egypt on Wednesday in reprisal attacks as police dispersed demonstrations in Cairo, reports said.“Reprisal attacks”? They’re attacking Christians, who are largely powerless in Egypt,...

George Zimmerman should be disarmed. If ever a man deserved to be shunned by society, it is pudgy Georgie Zimmerman. And in some quarters, he is. Unfortunately, there are enough of his ilk around – the big guns who run the National Rifle Association, conservative talk radio Obama haters and others – who quickly and emphatically drew the besieged Floridian into their warm and fuzzy protective cocoon of right-wing fanaticism. The ink was not even dry on the long-delayed Zimmerman arrest warrant when the NRA brass leaped to his defense because he fulfilled their classic gunfighter role model — a...

Lila Rose of Live Action speaks during the March on the Media. Credit: Addie Mena/CNA. Washington D.C., Aug 12, 2013 / 05:20 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pro-life leaders from around the country are calling on major media outlets to do a better job of informing society about the reality of abortion, rather than obscuring the facts in their coverage choices. “The media has flinched from the reality of abortion for decades,� said Lila Rose, president of Live Action, which has worked through undercover videos to expose abuses within the abortion industry. “We call on the press to end the censorship of...

Mark Russell, whose nearly three years as editor of the Orlando Sentinel were marked by coverage of the Trayvon Martin case and the hazing death of a marching band member at Florida A&M University, was ousted Wednesday in a reorganization that eliminated his job. Russell was replaced by Avido Khahaifa [pdf], a corporate manager who is also African American and for whom the editor's job will be an additional role. Both men were at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week in nearby Kissimmee, Fla...........

About 40 percent of white Americans and about 25 percent of non-white Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their own race, according to an ongoing Reuters/Ipsos poll. The figures highlight how segregated the United States remains in the wake of a debate on race sparked by last month’s acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of unarmed black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. President Barack Obama weighed in after the verdict, calling for Americans to do some “soul searching” on whether they harbor racial prejudice. There are regions and groups where mixing with people of other races is more common,...

U.S.-born Junnyor Diaz studies at a Phoenix high school. His Mexico-born older brother, Edder, has applied for a program to avoid deportation, while their undocumented mother, Angelica, cleans houses to keep the family fed and, above all, together. For Junnyor and 16 million others like him in mixed-status families, reform could bring stability to a fraught situation in which a U.S.-born child is a citizen with a shot at a university education and a stable working life, while a sibling or parent born abroad can face instability and deportation. "There isn't a day that goes by that I don't worry...

Politico’s Dylan Byers, in a piece for his buddies in the MSM, declares that conservative criticism of the mainstream media is overblown. Byers writes: So often conservative media, like conservative media criticism, can't be taken seriously because it overplays its hand. Like someone who shouts "thief!" the second his keys go missing, much of the conservative echo-chamber has a hyper-aggressive penchant to see conspiracy where they'd do better to see questions in need of answers. As a general rule -- albeit with plenty of exceptions -- there is a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach among those who fashion themselves as "anti-MSM," which can...

Philip Rucker leads the Post today with a story about a study that claims there is a “vast” gun market thriving online that allows gun buyers to evade the background check system. Rucker’s story is full of misleading statements. The marketplace for firearms on the Internet, where buyers are not required to undergo background checks, is so vast that advocates for stricter regulations now consider online sales a greater threat than the gun show loophole. Misleading statement #1: Buyers are only not required to undergo background checks if they’re not buying from a licensed firearms dealer. If you buy...

The Republican National Committee has a message for NBC and CNN: If they don’t pull their planned Hillary Clinton miniseries and movie, no RNC partnered 2016 debates for them. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus wrote a letter to the heads of both networks to “express his deep disappointment” in their decision to either air a miniseries in NBC’s case or a movie in CNN’s, writing that the networks are “promoting former Secretary Hillary Clinton ahead of her likely candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. “As an American company, you have every right to air programming of your choice,”...

The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations. Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses. Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60...

"There are too many people on the American right who hate the very notion of Barack Obama in the White House...They hate not just his politics but him," says Chris Matthews. Let me finish tonight with this. I said it before and am now saying it again. There are too many people on the American right who hate the very notion of Barack Obama in the White House. It grates on them, just as it thrills – even now – tens of millions of others. They hate not just his politics but him. Think about all the days we have...