Free Republic

On September 10, 2010, the day before our enormous freedom rally at Ground Zero protesting the Ground Zero victory mega-mosque, the New York Times profiled a Muslim named Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam, who had no place to pray. The whole story was a subtle advertisement for the Ground Zero mega-mosque. But as it turns out, Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam is not quite the "moderate" that the leftist NYT dhimmis assumed he was, but calls openly for the murder of apostates from Islam -- here in the U.S. Here again we see The NY Times legitimizing and norming the most extreme voices. They...

Journalist Michael Hastings died in car accident in Los Angeles today. Details of the accident have not been released. He was 33. Best known for his 2010 profile of General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone—it effectively ended the military career of the man who had led the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan—Hastings won the 2010 Polk award for magazine reporting and wrote a book about his experience reporting on the war, The Operators: The wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan. A second book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad, details Hastings’ time as a war correspondent...

The three minor children of a man whose suicide was broadcast live on television are suing Fox News Channel, claiming that watching the footage of their father shooting himself in the head has left them emotionally traumatized. In a lawsuit filed in Phoenix, Ariz., earlier this month, the three children of JoDon Romero, ages 9, 13, and 15, claim they have suffered emotional distress after watching a clip of the video posted to the internet. The two older children claim that since watching the video, they have been unable to attend school and suffer flashbacks, "sleep disturbance and obtrusive thoughts,"...

Americans' confidence in newspapers fell slightly to 23% this year, from 25% in 2012 and 28% in 2011. The percentage of Americans saying they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers has been generally trending downward since 1979, when it reached a high of 51%. Newspapers rank near the bottom on a list of 16 societal institutions Gallup measured in a June 1-4 survey. Television news is tied with newspapers on the list, with 23% of Americans also expressing confidence in it. That is up slightly from the all-time low of 21% found last year....

especially interesting in a New York Times story from Friday on Iran, where they found it advantageous to edit out an America-hating Iranian who wished the Times building would burn down: “He is a war veteran, a good manager and a religious person,” said Noushin Sobhani, 31, a gynecologist. She and her parents voted at the Imam Sadegh University, where most of Iran’s cadre of bureaucrats are trained. “We hate America,” her father said, smiling. “I hope The New York Times building burns down.”

... Obama authorized his administration to provide arms to rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, officials said Thursday, a major policy shift after the White House said it had confirmed that Damascus used chemical weapons in the country's civil war.

In its upcoming Sunday magazine, it acknowledges most women turned away from clinics are happy they gave birth.Talk about burying the lead. In a piece in its upcoming Sunday magazine, the New York Times allows in an absurdly roundabout way that a recent study has found that the vast majority of women denied abortions end up glad that they gave birth. If you blink, you might miss the decisive quote from the researcher, Diana Greene Foster. It comes very late in the piece: “About 5 percent of the women, after they have had the baby, still wish they hadn’t. And...

So much for Edward Snowden's lack of an online profile. In the immediate aftermath of his self-outing over the weekend, reporters fired up their computers and went looking for the obvious—Twitter, Facebook, and other social media accounts—with no luck. But after a little more digging, it looks like the Internet has stumbled across Snowden's rather extensive commenting past on Ars Technica message boards. The trove of comments—roughly 750 of them in all—provides us with our best (and, no doubt, most unfiltered) peek to date into the 29-year-old former defense contractor's life and worldview.

“Thousands of U.S. bridges vulnerable to collapse.” That was the headline of print edition of a CBS news story a few days after an interstate highway bridge collapsed over the Skagit River in Washington State. It was the most ominous sounding lead-in to a warning we’ve heard before. But are events like these signs that our nation’s infrastructure is really crumbing? Or is the news media responding to an illusion that America can and should be made immune to human tragedies? Fortunately, even though a few vehicles plunged into the Skagit River, no one was killed. Nor were there any...

Let´s start by going through the Post´s article to create a list of journalists married to or closely related to officials within the Obama administration. The size and scope of this is bad enough. But what is most troubling is how high up this incest occurs in the worlds of both the media and the Obama administration: •ABC News President Ben Sherwood, who is the brother of Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a top national-security adviser to President Obama. •His counterpart at CBS, news division president David Rhodes, is the brother of Benjamin Rhodes, a key foreign-policy specialist. •CNN’s deputy Washington

Two Miami police officers were injured Wednesday while participating in [Obama's] motorcade....

"What do we want from modern man?" is the headline on the cover of the Style section of The [London] Sunday Times' latest issue. The man in the cover photo, almost naked, looks androgynous, as if he hadn't quite made up his mind whether to be male or female (a common occurrence these days). I'll answer that question by taking a cue from The Sunday Times itself, which for years - at least until I stopped reading it in disgust, no, I mean, because it was too riveting and captivating to bear - has been telling us that man...

The traditional Marxist theory of power was a very one-sided one based on the role of force and coercion as the basis of ruling class domination. This was reinforced by Lenin whose influence was at its height after the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Gramsci felt that what was missing was an understanding of the subtle but pervasive forms of ideological control and manipulation that served to perpetuate all repressive structures. He identified two quite distinct forms of political control: domination, which referred to direct physical coercion by police and armed forces and hegemony which referred to both...

A group of protesters plans to hold a "National Hoodie March" in Sanford this morning as jury selection in the George Zimmerman trial gets underway. The group plans to gather in front of the Seminole County Courthouse at 9 a.m. to demand justice for Trayvon Martin. At noon, protesters wearing hoodies plan to pull their hoodies over their heads.

Reed Hayes is a court qualified handwriting and document examiner whose business is located in Honolulu, Hawaii. He has nearly 40 years of handwriting related experience, and has worked as an international consultant and speaker. Never heard of him? Well, Hayes is the Certified Document Examiner (CDE) who produced the 40 page opinion referenced in the Mike Zullo affidavit that was submitted to the Alabama Supreme Court in the Obama eligibility case and his report concluded that the Obama birth certificate image, located at WhiteHouse.gov, is a complete fabrication.

Well, this news should launch a thousand more goofy Beverly Hills Occupy protests: WICHITA, Kan.—Billionaire Charles Koch confirmed that his company, Koch Industries Inc., is looking into the possibility of acquiring newspapers, but insisted he is looking for a profitable business, rather than a forum to advance his politics. "There is a need for focus on real news, not news with an agenda or news that is really editorializing," Mr. Koch said in an interview. Mr. Koch added in a follow-up statement to The Wall Street Journal that the editorial page of any newspaper his company acquired "would be a...

The apologists for this administration in the press corps responded predictably enough as one scandal after another was unfolding in Washington: They went after those who revealed the scandals, not those who perpetrated them. Benghazi? All those cover stories, one after the other, for weeks? Why, the White House was just patching together the usual talking points from all agencies concerned. Happens all the time. Move on, folks, there's nothing to see here. The whistle-blowers in the diplomatic corps? Their testimony was powerful but, in Hillary Clinton's words, "what difference, at this point, does it make?" To quote Jay...

Employers stepped up hiring in May in a show of economic resilience that suggests the Federal Reserve could begin to scale back the amount of cash it is pumping into the banking system later this year. The United States added 175,000 jobs last month, just above the median forecast in a Reuters poll, Labor Department data showed on Friday. The unemployment rate ticked a tenth of a percentage point higher to 7.6 percent, in a relatively hopeful sign as it was driven by more workers entering the labor force.

"This ought to serve as a warning shot across the bow to the naysayers of our criminal investigation in the Obama fraud case. The impressive credentials of Mr. Hayes, and the fact that he has testified in court cases for Perkins-Coie coupled with the fact that Mr. Hayes is a registered Democrat, demonstrates the integrity of our investigation and our conviction that we possess incontrovertible evidence to back our case. It must be emphasized that we possess much more evidence similar to this revelation that we have not yet released for public information." - Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Lead Obama ID...

After talk radio titan Rush Limbaugh mocked left-wing/birth control activist Sandra Fluke as a "slut" (something he later apologized for) the organized left thought they could finally silence The Most Listened To Talk Show Host in America by picking off his advertisers. The boycott, organized mostly by the left-wing Media Matters, can now officially be called a failure with the news that advertisers have not only returned, but that the show is pacing ahead of last year: "Rush Limbaugh’s distributor on Thursday said there is no denying the conservative radio host’s controversial comments about Sandra Fluke hurt advertising last year...

Welcome to the era of Bush-Obama, a 16-year span of U.S. history that will be remembered for an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties and a disregard for transparency. On the war against a tactic—terrorism—and its insidious fallout, the United States could have skipped the 2008 election. It made little difference. Despite his clear and popular promises to the contrary, President Obama has not shifted the balance between security and freedom to a more natural state—one not blinded by worst fears and tarred by power grabs.

A Providence woman screamed racial slurs at a local news crew and sic-ed her Pitbulls on the female reporter as she ran down the street. The reporter was bit on the arm before she escaped to a neighbor’s yard.

Ever since he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has become a lightening rod for media criticism. At the same time, he has become a favorite among conservatives across the nation. On Tuesday, Cruz had a message for the media that is “so hysterical” over what he is doing in the Senate. “Let me say that the fact that the mainstream media and the New York Times is so hysterical about what I’m doing – to me frankly suggests that maybe we’re doing something right,” Cruz said on Mark Levin’s radio show. “Because I...

Internal Revenue Service staff have a long history of discouraging applications for tax-exempt status from controversial groups by burying them in complicated questionnaires, according to former IRS officials. Among other reasons, they said, the tactic was sometimes used to persuade groups to drop their applications so the IRS could avoid making a ruling. This approach - allegedly used in the recent IRS targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups - has been around for decades, the officials said, citing lengthy questionnaires sent to applicants including religious and gay-rights organizations and a children's summer camp group that promotes atheist thinking....

MSNBC’s ratings are so bad that even The Huffington Post is slamming its decline. On their media page, Olivia Nuzzi wrote an article titled “MSNBC: ‘All In’ or ‘All Over’?” “MSNBC has hit a ratings low in primetime not seen since the days that the network still carried a show hosted by raspy-voiced Fox News refugee Rita Cosby,” Nuzzi wrote. Especially disappointing were the 8pm ratings of "pleasant but exceedingly dry" Chris Hayes after they put Ed Schultz out to pasture on the weekends: Chris Hayes' new 8 PM lynchpin show has lost a third of the audience Ed Schultz...

U.S. Rep. Joe Garcia said Saturday he was saddened and disappointed by absentee ballot fraud allegations leveled against his former chief of staff. The congressman said at a press conference he asked for the staffer’s resignation and called for fixes to the “flawed voter absentee process” which left the system vulnerable. Garcia said he demanded the resignation of chief of staff Jeffrey Garcia (no relation, according to local media reports), then fired him shortly after learning of the allegations Friday afternoon. No fraudulent ballots were cast as a result of this alleged plot, the congressman said. “I’ve asked an attorney...

Richard Grenell, a political consultant and media commentator reported today via Twitter that NBC’s Mark Murray, senior political editor for NBC News wife, Sasha is an Obama appointee but never publicly disclosed it. Grenell asked Murray yesterday if he was married to an Obama appointee and why it was not disclosed. Murray told him that he hasn’t publicly disclosed that his wife is an Obama appointee because he told NBC officials and they didn’t care. Murray also told Grenell that his first wife worked for Ray Lahood so disclosing her as an Obama appointee wasn’t necessary. Murray’s wife, Sasha Johnson...

Zullo's video @ 1:04:10: "Some of the anomalies that we have pointed out today were first discovered by a certified document examiner named Reed Hayes. Mr. Hayes has over 20 years of experience in document examination. In 1994 he was certified by the American Board of Forensic Examiners. In 2001 he was certified by the National Association of Document Examiners. He's testified 26 times in various courtroom proceedings in HAWAII. In 2006 he authored a book entitled Forensic Handwriting Examination: A Definitive Guide. He's also editor-in-chief of the National Association of Document Examiners Journal, and he's a board member of...

Maricopa County Sheriffs Office Cold Case Posse chief investigator Mike Zullo this morning addressed the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association Convention (CSPOA) being held in St. Charles, Missouri. Much of the information that was revealed by Zullo we have already heard but he also unveiled new evidence that we have not been aware of. Commander Mike Zullo appears in the video at the 36:00 mark. The audio and video from the streaming isn't that good but pay attention very closely.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told media editors on Thursday that he would change the way the Justice Department handles investigations that involve reporters and not repeat searches that have raised concerns about freedom of the press, the editors said. After a meeting that other media outlets boycotted because of its secrecy, the editors who did attend said they were encouraged by officials' expressions of regret, though one said the Justice Department still has a long way to go to understand how journalists work. "There was a commitment to change the department's guidelines for handling cases such as these and...

It was Victoria Day in Canada and the Toronto Blue Jays were hosting the Rays of Tampa Bay. The word “hosting,” however, hardly applied to the treatment that one Yunel Escobar, the Rays shortstop, received, who was lustfully booed each time he came to the plate. When he homered in the 9th inning, he was booed again for employing his signature gesture as he crossed home plate—stretching his arms out to indicate the “safe” sign. Cuban-born, Escobar does not speak English. Through a translator, he expressed his astonishment: “It’s something I do every time I cross home plate.” But...

MADISON — If U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin can make it there … Well, first of all, what was he doing there? The Janesville Republican — he of the conservative budget hawk gang who has taken an apparent nose-to-the-grindstone approach to his House work after the Romney-Ryan ticket defeat — was hobnobbing with the Big Apple’s media elite Tuesday evening, says the New York Post. It all got the Post huffing, asking this question: “Is Congressman Paul Ryan’s first stop on the 2016 presidential campaign trail in Manhattan?” U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, then Mitt Romney’s presidential running mate, speaks...

It is one thing to raise millions from grassroots activists or appear on record numbers of TV talk shows or give rhetorically charged speeches before adoring crowds – it is quite another to do the hard work of governing. Both Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin were political lightweights who were full of sound and fury and accomplished very little. Both quit their posts like spoiled children, after meteoric rises that had precious little to do with actually getting anything done. Both were bad examples of what public service should be all about and both exhibited a certain pathology steeped more...

The dustup over whether journalists should meet privately with Attorney General Eric Holder is a forest-for-the-trees flap. The existential issue still tangling Washington in knots a dozen years after 9/11 is how to balance our primal need to protect U.S. security with our fundamental belief in civil liberties.

Despite his administration's ongoing feud with the media over government spying on journalists, President Obama has accelerated his private courting of selected reporters because he thinks they can propel his agenda and will give him a favorable hearing. He has met at the White House recently with national security writers and prominent columnists identified by Politico as including Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal, and David Ignatius of the Washington Post. And he has met separately with liberal journalists, including Ezra Klein of the Washington Post and Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC. This...

From: Bill Montgomery To: Brian Reilly Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2012 8:30 AM Subject: Website Submission Dear Mr. Reilly, Thank you for taking the time to write and for the concerns you have expressed. There are a couple of points of analysis, though, in determining whether a criminal charge can be filed, regardless of the charge or who the suspect might be. The first is whether I have jurisdiction over the case. That requires that some conduct had to have occurred in Maricopa County for me to have jurisdiction. From the Sheriff’s Office investigation into suspect documents produced by the...

Dick Durbin: Are bloggers and tweeters entitled to constitutional protection? Share By Doug Powers • May 26, 2013 05:53 PM **Written by Doug Powers Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin has in the past had a very subjective and abstract view of the Constitution, and on Fox News Sunday he once again wondered which people might be “entitled” to constitutional protections and which people might not: “You’ve raised an important point and I heard Sen. Graham call for special counsel,” Durbin said. “I’m not ready to do this at this moment. I would like to know if Holder has any conflict in...

Blaming America’s woes on the Tea Party is par for the course these days, but after the IRS begrudgingly admitted they targeted conservative political organizations for ideologically purposes, it seems the Tea Party is undergoing something of a political revival. In fact, a new Rasmussen poll shows that a plurality of respondents have a favorable opinion of the grassroots movement -- up 14 percentage points since earlier this year. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 44% of Likely U.S. Voters now have a favorable opinion of the Tea Party. That's up 14 points from Januarybut still down...

Holder has already lied under oath. Does anyone think this won’t be another way to just cover everything up? Check it out: President Barack Obama has asked his friend Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate Holder’s unprecedented investigation of a Fox News reporter. Holder approved the Justice Department’s extraordinary 2010 investigation of contacts between a Fox News reporter and a State Department official who has since been charged with leaking classified information, according to NBC. The Justice Department searched the reporter’s e-mails and phone calls under the legal claim that he may have contributed to a crime. The Fox News...

The English vocabulary will soon be depleted of words, if everybody starts speaking like the mainstream media. In connection with the Woolwich killing, the media talked about "religious centres", not "mosques", a now obsolete word. Other archaic, disused terms are "Islam" and "Muslim": we just say "man", "woman" and as useful data we add their age. A news flash on BBC Radio 5 Live delivered the information that, basically, a man had been killed in Woolwich by two men, and there were another man and a woman, both 29, involved. Of course it is that magic age, 29, that...

Chuck Norris has shared his feelings about Tim Tebow. Finally. The martial arts legend, Hollywood action star, random fact-generator inspiration and occasional bearer of very bad news recently wrote an opinion column -- a manifesto really -- on his remarkably deep well of feelings for Tim Tebow. Seriously. Chuck Norris really likes Tim Tebow. He needed 1,463 words to express his admiration for the free-agent quarterback. It reads like he could have went on for a few thousand words more.

The two previously unpublished pictures were given to Time magazine by the girl who was escorted by Barak Obama’s best friend. NBC’s Ann Curry reports....

May 2, 2007 - Springfield, Illinois - Barack Obama announces his candidacy, to the media and to the country, for President of the United States "And that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for president of the United States of America." The preceding paragraph contains some of the actual words used by Barack Obama to announce he was running for President. Many of us were not surprised, as...

KMOV (Channel 4) fired Larry Conners after a social-media controversy, prompting St. Louis' longest-tenured anchorman to defend his claim that IRS "pressure" followed his 2012 interview of President Barack Obama. Freed from a KMOV gag-order Wednesday, Conners said his statements on Facebook were simply questions about the possibility of an Internal Revenue Service vendetta in the wake of national stories about the agency. "I never said that's what happened, and I'm still not saying it," Conners said. "I'm only asking that question." Conners also said a televised statement he made about the situation last week — which he conceded damaged...

From its earliest days, even before the Revolution, Americans valued their newspapers and understood they played a crucial role in the issues and events of the times in which they lived. It would take a while, however, before newspapers evolved from highly partisan advocates of the early political factions to their role as watchdogs of government.

BREAKING: KMOV FIRES LARRY CONNORS In April 2012 St. Louis News 4’s Larry Conners grilled President Barack Obama on his extravagant vacation schedule and on bullying the Supreme Court. “The economy is a big concern for folks, I mean the unemployment, trying to make ends meet, gas prices, food prices going up. Some of our viewers are complaining that they get frustrated and angered when they see the first family jetting around different vacations and so forth…” It was one of the few hard-hitting interviews the president sat through last year. Last week Larry Connors revealed that after his interview...

The studio space at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. is changing hands, Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton reports. Next month, ABC’s “This Week” will vacate the space and return to the network’s Washington bureau, and Al Jazeera America will move in. ... Al Jazeera America, which B&C reports will have both office space and editing facilities in the Newseum, is preparing for its launch later this year. The network recently hired Adam May, a local reporter from Baltimore, as a D.C.-based national correspondent.

MemeCenter.com   h/t twitter

Top White House aides first learned of a draft report detailing IRS abuses in targeting conservative groups in late April, but they chose to insulate President Obama by not informing him until it exploded in the press, the president’s spokesman said Monday. White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters Monday that White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler learned about an IRS inspector general’s draft report looking into the singling out of conservative groups on April 24. She advised senior White House staff including chief of staff Denis McDonough — about the then-draft report, but Mr. Carney said she believed that...

Plenty of people rightly mocked the news a few years ago that the Associated Press was working on a plan to "DRM the news." The idea was to put some sort of licensing mechanism together to get news aggregators to pay to promote their news. This seemed incredibly dumb for a whole host of reasons. It added no value. Its only purpose was to limit the value for everyone in the system by putting a tollbooth where none needed to exist. When it finally launched last year to great fanfare in the newspaper world, under the name "NewsRight," we pointed...