Free Republic

The text editor of the 1991 literary agency booklet that described Barack Obama as “born in Kenya” said Thursday the line in question was “nothing more than a fact checking error.” Miriam Goderich issued a statement to the Political Wire saying the future president never suggested “in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii”: “You’re undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was nothing more...

The new medical reports on the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case tell us a lot. And it is not just for what they find, but also what they don’t find. First, the reports provide striking evidence that Zimmerman did not start the fight with Martin, and that Zimmerman shot Martin in self-defense. Martin’s injuries were two-fold: broken skin on his knuckles and the fatal gunshot wound. Zimmerman’s injuries involved: a fractured nose, a pair of black eyes, two lacerations to the back of his head and a minor back injury. It takes considerable force to break the skin on multiple knuckles....

When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might seem to have been news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn't. "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News Channel was the first major television program to report this incident. Yet this story is not just a Norfolk story, either in what happened or in how the media and the authorities have...

His reaction is priceless.

The Obama media -- the Gatekeeper Media who try to control what people know based on what fits their narrative -- are proving almost daily that they're not in the news business. They are in the business of political activism, aimed solely at getting their guy another four years in the White House.... .....When Newt Gingrich railed against the Gatekeeper Media in two primary debates, he struck a deep chord with Americans. According to a Rasmussen Poll released on June 15, 2010, "Sixty-six percent (66%) of U.S. voters describe themselves as at least somewhat angry at the media, including 33%...

Readers who heed what the media says would have thought the tea party bitter clingers were dead, so this week's election results must have seemed to them like the attack of the zombies. The zombies made their appearance known in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Utah. Less than a year ago a Washington Post blogger contended the tea party was running out of steam, that Senators Olympia Snowe, Dick Lugar and Orrin Hatch looked to easily win re-election against tepid tea party opposition.

Unbiased my ass: Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton touted the Post’s Romney-haircut “scoop” as a “deeply reported story” that “holds up to scrutiny.” But the family of the haircut victims told ABC it was “factually inaccurate” and it shouldn’t be used as a political football. Pexton said nonsense: the Post has received “no specific complaint of inaccuracy.” Perhaps more shocking is that the Post shamelessly admits they timed this story precisely to echo on the day after President Obama’s big pro-gay announcement. They actually waited a day longer than planned to let Obama have the front page to himself...

Jason Horowitz's July 6 piece in the Style section of the Washington Post, "Faith & Politics," was a continuation of the mainstream media's crusade against Michele Bachmann and her family. Half anthropology report from the darkest Midwest, half political hit-piece, Horowitz's article sniped at the Bachmanns' opposition to homosexuality and their strong Lutheran faith. Horowitz opened his article by portraying the Mr. and Mrs. Bachmann as unfeeling villains in their opposition to homosexuality: "In an interview last year with a Christian-radio talk show, Marcus Bachmann, a therapist who runs a faith-infused counseling center here, compared homosexuals to 'barbarians' who 'need...

ROBIN Roberts was worried Barack Obama would out her as a lesbian. According to a Gawker report, the ABC news anchor — who scored the President Obama gay marriage interview — wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the scoop because she thought it would bring her own sexuality to the forefront. “Most of the discussions [among TV people] today about why Robin got the interview have to do with her being gay,” a source said. “Not that she’s black, or friends of the Obamas. “Obviously they picked her because she’s black and gay.

It is customary when a newspaper makes an after-publication correction or change to an article for it to notify readers that an alteration has taken place. Some time after the Washington Post published a 5000-word hit piece on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney Thursday, a key edit was made to the article without such a notification.

Following Richard Mourdock’s commanding victory in the Indiana Republican primary, CNN’s John King felt it appropriate to criticize Mourdock for of all things his campaign pledge of legislating as a conservative. King began the interview with a loaded question, asking the GOP candidate, "are you so rigid in your ideology that you will refuse compromise and therefore keep the country from solving its problems?" The presumption, of course, that the country's problems can only be solved through compromise away from conservative solutions. King like many in the media have been mourning the loss of Dick Lugar who many viewed as...

It seems as though the only time Lawrence O’Donnell has something nice to say about Fox News, it comes at the expense of nearly half the country. Following the incendiary comments Fox News’ Smith made following Obama’s public support for gay marriage, MSNBC’s O’Donnell rushed to his defense and praised him for violating FNC's central value of remaining "fair and balanced." O’Donnell claimed that Smith is the lone voice of reason at Fox News and his comments caused the Fox News website Fox Nation to alter a headline reading "Obama flip-flops, declares war on marriage," to "Obama flip-flops."

A few weeks after the recent synod of the bishops of journalism — known to us taxpaying chumbolones as the White House Correspondents' Association dinner — the secular clergy pronounced sentence on Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock. Mourdock had the audacity to whomp the heck out of six-term U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar in Tuesday's Indiana Republican primary. Mourdock's sin, according to the high priests of establishment journalism? He's a conservative, and a constitutionalist, backed by the tea party. Watching all this from the bordering state once called Illinois — now known as the wind-swept economic wasteland of Madiganistan — makes me...

"Whatever people think about this issue, we know it's controversial, there's no denying when a president speaks out for the first time like that, it is history," co-host of ABC's "Good Morning America" George Stephanopoulos said to Robin Roberts. And let me tell you, George, I'm getting chills again," "Good Morning America" co-host Robin Roberts said about her interview with Obama.

Video at link.

Media Matters’ Founder David Brock showed no shame when he was caught illegally using guns for his own personal protection. Indeed, Media Matters’ continues to lash out at others who own guns or support letting individuals use guns for the own protection, even increasing their attacks. In April alone, Media Matters ran 32 articles attacking the NRA alone. Additional pieces have defended the Obama administration’s Fast & Furious program and dealt with other gun related topics. Media Matters also attacked me three times over the last two weeks: I had an op-ed in the New York Daily News and an...

Late last week the hallowed Washington Post announced a first-quarter operating loss of $22.6 million as print ads sank 17 percent year-over-year and online revenue dipped 7 percent, too. Weekday circulation is now under 500,000, falling almost 10 percent, while the company's onetime moneymaker, the education unit Kaplan, lost some millions as well. Journalists at the paper are well aware of the problems and last month had a dark-sounding "secret meeting" to talk things out. Adweek reports that ten of the paper's top staffers met with president and general manager Steve Hills over sandwiches to chat "about the challenges that...

“We should also look for an American channel that can be close to being unbiased, such as CBS, or other channel that has political motives that make it interested in broadcasting the point of view of al Mujahadin,” Bin Laden wrote in one of the letters uncovered in the raid that killed him. But one of his top aides, American-born Adam Gadahn, raged against coverage of the terror group on U.S. television. Gadahn believed that several of the American networks, in particular CNN, were “in cooperation with the government” —and saved much of his scorn for Fox News. -snip However,...

Al-Qaida letter about Fox News: ‘Let her die in her anger’ By Dylan Stableford | The Cutline – 2 hrs 23 mins ago In a letter outlining al-Qaida's media strategy ahead of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the terror group's top spokesman expressed disdain for Fox News. "From the professional point of view, they are all on one level—except [Fox News] channel which falls into the abyss as you know, and lacks neutrality too," al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn wrote in the January 2011 letter. The paper was one of a selection of more than 6,000 pages of documents seized during...

Washington is full of nerds. I know. I speak nerd, not fluently mind you, at least not anymore. But I certainly know more than a few phrases memorized from a Berlitz nerd-to-English phrase book. I can talk Dungeons & Dragons (both D&D and AD&D). I know about the Golden Age of Comics (as in comic books -- if you thought that was a reference to Bob Newhart's heyday, subtract 20 nerd points right there). Anyway, if you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or...

Walter Lippmann, the "Father of Modern Journalism", is really a piece of work. I had a hard time deciding what I wanted to make the title of this post. I simply do not believe that any man who holds the following views could possibly be a journalist worth a damn. Pardon my language, but this makes me sick. Every time I read something from this guy, I have an internal revolt. In his regular column "Today and Tomorrow", on April 7th, 1933, the following is written under the title "Roosevelt's Achievement": At the beginning of last month the country was...

I was also leery of journalists and TV personalities like Al Sharpton and his MSNBC colleagues setting up as prosecutor, judge and jury. Even if you didn't know about Sharpton's previous misadventures — he became famous due to his outrageous conduct during the 1987 Tawana Brawley rape hoax — the network's permitting him to report about a public event in which he'd enrolled as an active participant violated every known rule of journalistic ethics. -snip- A festival of bad reporting, speculation and mind-reading from the outset, the Zimmerman-Martin affair has turned into a classic example of what University of Virginia...

Everybody in the state knows where the governor works. Gov. Scott Walker's office is in the east wing of the Capitol. Many people know where the governor resides. Walker has the Executive Residence when he's in Madison. Otherwise, his family lives on Wauwatosa's east side. But here's something almost no one knows: Where his main campaign headquarters is. His staff is trying to keep that a secret. It's a page taken from the playbook of the 14 Senate Democrats who wouldn't let anyone know where they were hiding out in Illinois last year so they could duck protests. "Each of...

There have been 1954 U.S. soldiers killed so far in the Afghanistan war according to icasualties 1324 of those Deaths have occurred in less than 3 1/2 years under Obama while only 630 of those deaths occurred in 8 years under George W. Bush WHY NO MEDIA OUTRAGE? I remember when Bush was President the Liberal Media stations and news outlets had daily updates of the number of U.S. Soldiers killed with pictures and everything. Now It is almost hard to find out how many soldiers are dying every day because when a soldier dies now it is not on the front page or sometimes not even...

Charges of media bias have been flying like a bloody banner on the campaign trail. Newt Gingrich excoriated the “elite media” in a richly applauded moment during one of the Republican debates. Rick Santorum chewed out a New York Times reporter. Mitt Romney said this month that he faces “an uphill battle” against the press in the general election. Meanwhile, just about every new poll of public sentiment shows that confidence in the news media has hit a new low. Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center in the fall said the media “tend to favor one...

How badly has the media mis-reported the Trayvon Martin shooting? Just look at how rapidly the story is mutating, now that George Zimmerman is up on charges – thanks to a ridiculously over-reaching affadavit, for which some observers, including legendary liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz, think the prosecutor should be up on charges. Do you remember the story you heard on Day One, when this first became big national news? A racist white man gunned down an innocent little black boy for no reason, just because he was Walking While Black through a swanky gated condo community. The cracker cops of...

You won’t hear it anywhere else but here – insiders have told us WTVJ reporter Jeff Burnside was fired last Friday for allegedly editing the Trayvon Martin 911 tape, the same tape NBC aired on ‘Today’ in early April. Allegedly, his firing wasn’t announced internally and so far there is no information whether NBC made a conclusion if the edit was misleading on purpose or if it was an oversight.

Call them what you will: “Stand Your Ground” or “Castle Doctrine” laws. Mayor Bloomberg and members of Congress, speaking on the House floor, go so far as to label them “shoot first” laws. This is a gross exaggeration — a slander, in fact, against legislation designed to reform a flaw in our treatment of self-defense. Earlier statutes affirmatively required potential victims to retreat as much as possible before using deadly force to protect themselves, sometimes putting their lives in jeopardy. The supposedly infamous laws passed in Florida and elsewhere, in contrast, use a “reasonable person” standard for determining when it...

Reuters is worried that new tough anti voter fraud laws will hurt Barack Obama’s chances of reelection next November. Complaining that such laws “could” reduce Obama’s supporters by “hundreds of thousands” the media outlet apparently sees no irony in its own position. Reuters doesn’t feel at all self-conscious about the implication that only fraudulent applicants have to be concerned about these new laws and honest people would not be disadvantaged in the least. “Republican” led Legislatures Further exposing its support for voter fraud the media giant cites “Republican-led legislatures” in 12 states as the culprits who are sharply restricting fraudulent...

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the case against George Zimmerman for his shooting of Trayvon Martin, what has happened already is enough to turn the stomach of anyone who believes in either truth or justice. An amazing proportion of the media has given us a painful demonstration of the thinking — and lack of thinking — that prevailed back in the days of the old Jim Crow South, where complexion counted more than facts in determining how people were treated. One of the first things presented in the media was a transcript of a conversation between George Zimmerman and...

The gun manufacturing company Remington is standing strong against NBC, which has been going after the manufacturer for what it deems a flaw that allows the gun to be fired without the trigger being pulled. Despite the fact that Remington and the plaintiff came to an agreement, NBC kept on pressing and indicated Remington has been hiding the truth for years. Remington's statement is a strong response to what it indicates is much more than a concern about gun safety: "NBC continues to attack Remington and the firearms industry through sensational and factually inaccurate reporting. On April 11, 2012, Brian...

Late Friday afternoon, Free Beacon reporter CJ Ciaramella requested a comment from the Justice Department about my new book Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Coverup. This was the response he received.   That's right folks. Media Matters, the far Left website funded by George Soros, is now serving as a mouth piece for the United States Department of Justice. Not only did DOJ refer Ciaramella to Media Matters for information about Operation Fast and Furious, but didn't even refer him to material that had anything to do with his original question about the FBI covering...

... Eight years ago, The Times offered comparably scant campaign coverage of the incumbent, George W. Bush, even as it blanketed readers with articles about Senator John Kerry and others competing for the Democratic nomination. Now, though, the general election season is on, and The Times needs to offer an aggressive look at the president’s record, policy promises and campaign operation to answer the question: Who is the real Barack Obama? Many critics view The Times as constitutionally unable to address the election in an unbiased fashion. Like a lot of America, it basked a bit in the warm glow...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H8Zc5jN72s&feature=context&context=G2567afcFUAAAAAAAAAA

A task force headed by Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll, established to review among other things Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law, includes 17 members. The task force hopes to conclude its work by next year’s legislative session.

Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen, exemplifying mainstream media’s pervasive bias, unleashed a firestorm recently. Ms. Rosen ridiculed Mitt Romney’s wife regarding the economic literacy of stay-at-home mothers; contemptuously dismissing Ann Romney for “never having worked a day in her life.” Many mothers managing family finances implicitly understand economics better than political strategists or government bureaucrats. Housewives engage markets constantly. Ludwig von Mises noted of inflation, the “housewife knows much more about price changes as far as they affect her own household than the statistical averages can tell.” The myriad advantages of full time motherhood extend far beyond finance, but there are...

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney says a "vast left-wing conspiracy" in the media has joined forces with the campaign of President Barack Obama to beat back his challenge...

04/17/2012 Constitution Party National Convention to Meet in Nashville Amidst Unprecedented Voter Dissatisfaction with Obama and Romney Constitution Party National Chairman, Jim Clymer, announced the 2012 National Convention of the Constitution Party which will be held April 18-21 in Nashville, Tennessee. “American voters who support limited, constitutional government, traditional American values, the protection of American jobs and preservation of individual liberty can take heart! They will not be limited to a difficult choice between Obama and Romney as the one likely to be the least threat to their life, liberty, property and other interests. The Constitution Party will be offering...

Paul Krugman again. Still beholden to chimerical Phillips Curve absurdities, the professor proposes inflation to stimulate stagnant labor markets. The Phillips Curve insists that rising inflation lowers unemployment. The theory presumes businesses increase prices faster than workers’ wages raise effectively making labor inexpensive. When real salaries shrink, hiring accelerates. As Krugman details, the Fed’s focus is dual: stable prices and full employment. So he seeks to overcome persistent unemployment through purposeful failure on the price front, lamenting that “Fed officials ... are feeling intimidated ... and that American workers are paying the price for their timidity.” Krugman thus urges Ben...

Washington Post columnist Patrick Pexton made a rather startling admission in the paper’s Sunday edition: The Post never meant for their recent story about how President Obama’s health care law expands the budget deficit to become a viral Internet sensation. In fact, they deliberately tried to bury the story. ... The story in question was titled “Health care law will add $340 billion to deficit, new study finds.” It pointed out that the administration had double-counted Medicare savings in the law and once you adjusted for that it added to the deficit rather than reducing it, as the White House...

In Katie Pavlich’s devastating new expose of the Eric Holder Justice Department-approved Fast and Furious operation, Pavlich doesn’t just expose the Obama administration. She exposes the mainstream media for what they are: tools of the Democratic Party, and of the White House. As Pavlich recounts, the first mainstream media outlet to report on Fast and Furious was CBS Evening News, which aired a report by Sharyl Attkinson. She stated that the scandal itself was so awful that “some insiders say it surpasses the shoot-out at Ruby Ridge and the deadly siege at Waco.” She pointed out that the Bureau of...

Any hope that the media might fairly and responsibly cover the shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin was effectively doomed the moment Al Sharpton descended on Sanford, Florida, and started holding rallies with the victim’s family. Recall that Sharpton once said of Clarence Thomas’s tenure on the Supreme Court, “I remember growing up reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Now I get to see it.” Unless they agree with his race-driven political agenda, Sharpton is not above accusing even African Americans of wanting to return to a day when the Fugitive Slave Act was still on the books.

Yes, this is about race and racism. But no, it’s not about the Trayvon Martin case and how the media is pimping it. It’s not even about the equally tragic black-on-white crimes some push to expose media bias in the Martin case. I don’t subscribe to the “Yeah, sure, but what about this!� game some play to expose leftist hypocrisy. A crime is a crime, regardless of the skin tone of the victims or the perps. This is about how progressives continue to exploit race to keep us divided as a people and to manipulate voters. This is about...

New York must require microstamping of all semiautomatic handguns —the criminals’ weapon of choice —that are made or sold in the state. Manufacturers would etch a number on each gun’s firing pin, which would stamp that number onto the shell casing when the weapon is fired. Two years ago, California passed a similar law that has yet to take full effect. If microstamping were in force, shell casings found at crime scenes would become calling cards —easily traced back to the gun that shot them and, therefore, to its registered owner. The technology in no way interferes with anyone’s Second...

From Remington Arms to The Daily Caller NBC continues to attack Remington and the firearms industry through sensational and factually inaccurate reporting. On April 11, 2012, Brian Williams again demonstrated NBC’s anti-gun agenda with the claim that the Model 870, Model 1100 and other Remington firearms have a design flaw. That claim is demonstrably false and Remington stands fully behind the safety and reliability of the most popular shotguns in the world. It wasn’t enough for NBC to attack over 20 million Remington firearms; they also called the Second Amendment into question by suggesting that there is a need for...

Few prominent economists have a worse record predicting the impact of Obama’s economic policies than Paul Krugman. Writing for the New York Times and touting his close “genuine contact” with the “smart” economists and others in the Obama administration and the Democratic congressional leadership, Krugman has been, and remains, Obama’s most important champion. Not only has he been defending Obama’s Keynesian-type deficit-spending, but he has been advocating still more of these same failed policies. The economy just can’t gain ground. Thirty-four months since the "recovery" started in June 2009 and the actual number of jobs have increased by just 0.4%....

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- Two Kentucky men have been charged with a federal hate crime in a beating attack on a gay man in an Appalachian park, marking the first time the law has been applied in a U.S. case alleging bias over a victim's sexual orientation, authorities said. The U.S. attorney's office in Lexington announced the charges against cousins David Jason Jenkins, 37, of Cumberland, and Anthony Ray Jenkins, 20, of Partridge.

The Fox News employee hired by Gawker to write about his experience inside the network has revealed himself as an associate producer on “The O’Reilly Factor.” Joe Muto, who joined Fox News in 2004, says he has been suspended, with pay and was escorted out of Fox News headquarters today by “two nice gentlemen from security.”

When NBC's "Today" show played the audio of George Zimmerman's call to a Sanford, Fla., police dispatcher about Trayvon Martin, the editors made him appear to be a racist who says: "This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." What Zimmerman actually said was: "This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. It's raining, and he's just walking around, looking about." The 911 officer responded by asking, "OK, and this guy -- is he black, white or Hispanic?" Zimmerman replied, "He looks black." NBC says it's investigating the doctoring...

The Media Research Center is calling upon Congress to investigate Comcast/NBC News for the intentional editing of the George Zimmerman audio that was broadcast multiple times and subsequently flamed the fires of racial hatred and animosity: NBC is laughing at the public. Last week we said we would have more to say if their behavior in this matter didn’t change. Given their continued irresponsibility, today we open up a new front. To review: From March 19th to March 27th, NBC used their doctored versions of the Trayvon Martin audio clip to give the impression that Zimmerman was a racist. The...