Free Republic

Among the worst disasters for progressivism in recent decades has been the work of Aaron Sorkin, whose impossibly articulate ratatat dialogue made it way too easy to imagine sexy technocrats saving the world. It’s great entertainment, but normalized unreasonable expectations of the flawed human beings who happen to have high IQs and impeccable credentials. As a child of the New Left, I never missed The West Wing: it was irresistible catnip for my adolescent hopes and dreams, and so much more satisfying than whatever was on the news—except for the eloquent public intellectuals on the Bill Moyers show on PBS....

The man who allegedly shot and killed a deputy has been arrested, authorities in Nassau County, Florida said on Tuesday.. Patrick McDowell, 35, was taken into custody - and another man is saying that authorities mistook him for the suspect and beat him up. McDowell shot and killed Deputy Josh Moyers, 29, in a traffic stop on Friday, according to authorities. He struck the victim in the face first, then again in the neck while Moyers was on the ground, said Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper. McDowell, a U.S. Marine veteran, also allegedly used a rifle to shoot a K-9...

From an interview with Bill Moyers, circa 1988.

It's absolutely amazing the lengths that progressive liberals will go to in order not to give any credit to a group or movement that they despise, even if the topic they're talking about is actually impacted by such entities. The most recent example of this that I've come across occurred last Sunday while I was flipping back and forth between two football games on the tv. The two games were only a few channels apart, so would just manually go up or down the channels to catch the action. Between the two channels lies one of the many channels that...

With the first heart-breaking headlines out of Colorado, gun-rights advocates just had to know that leftist lecturers in our media would mount their soap boxes and trash this country for its gun culture and trash the National Rifle Association as an "enabler of death -- paranoid, delusional, and as venomous as a scorpion." But it's additionally sad that the soap box in this case is paid for by taxpayers -- in the form of taxpayer support for every PBS station that spews out this leftist loathing. On his show Moyers & Company, 78-year-old PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers reached back to...

Longtime PBS news commentator Bill Moyers said Friday that billionaire George Soros has “been the victim, of course, of Glenn Beck and the right-wing, the Fox News assassins.”

Former PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers is at it again, agitating against Republicans for daring to oppose National Public Radio subsidies. In the latest installment (with Michael Winship) on The Huffington Post, Moyers concluded with a quote illustrating "the importance of a public media whose obligation is not to a political or corporate paymaster, but to the integrity of the work and the trust of the listener." NPR, he claimed, was like Kennedy's tribute to the poet Robert Frost: "The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an...

If NPR wanted to establish that they’re not liberals, they probably wouldn’t send out radical left-wing ranters like Bill Moyers on their behalf. At Salon.com and at The Huffington Post, Moyers (and Michael Winship) drag out all the rhetoric about how conservatives are unloading another “fierce and often unscrupulous” attack, seeking “to extinguish the independent reporting and analysis they find so threatening to their phobic worldview.” Just as public radio struggles against yet another assault from its long-time nemesis -- the right-wing machine that would thrill if our sole sources of information were Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and ads paid...

Sad but true: Bill Moyers Journal has shuffled off the air and into the archives of PBS and the Paley Center for Media. From a story in the Columbia Journalism Review: In 1948, when he was fourteen years old, Bill Moyers heard Lyndon Johnson give a rousing speech at a courthouse in Marshall, Texas. Without a megaphone or a loudspeaker, LBJ mesmerized the crowd. “I remember the sheer presence of the man,” Moyers has recalled. “And I thought, ‘That’s what power is. And this man is reaching this audience. And he’s got this audience. And he’s telling this audience something...

Journalist Bill Moyers retires from PBS and his weekly show, the Bill Moyers Journal, on Friday. In honor of the public broadcasting legend, Fresh Air is rebroadcasting segments from several Moyers appearances over the years, including conversations about his time in the Johnson administration and his thoughts on religion, war and the future of journalism. Moyers, who has spent the past 40 years in broadcast journalism, started working for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1954, after writing the then-Senate majority leader a letter. He would later serve as a special assistant and a press secretary to the president. Moyers left the...

Something's not right here. One year after the great collapse of our financial system, Wall Street is back on top while our politicians dither. As for health care reform, you're about to be forced to buy insurance from companies whose stock is soaring, and that's just dandy with the White House. Truth is, our capitol's being looted, republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that's pulling the heist. This is not capitalism at work. It's capital. Raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and...

Bill Moyers to Leave Weekly TelevisionBy ELIZABETH JENSEN; Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF Published: November 20, 2009 The PBS mainstay Bill Moyers, left, said he was retiring from weekly television and would end his Friday night public affairs show, “Bill Moyers Journal,” on April 30, 2010. That date will also be the last for “Now on PBS,” which has been canceled. Mr. Moyers said he had been planning for some time to retire the program on Dec. 25 but was asked by PBS to raise the funds to continue through April, which he did. “I am 75 years old,” he said...

PBS's Bill Moyers issued a tough critique of the Democratic Party on Friday night on HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher." Moyers said that "too many Democrats have had their spines surgically removed." "The problem is the Democratic Party," said Moyers. "This is a party that has told its progressives — who are the most outspoken champions of health care reform — to sit down and shut up. Moyers said that, over the years, the Democratic Party "has become like the Republican party — deeply influenced by corporate money." "I think Rahm Emanuel understands that the money for Obama's reelection...

video 17:45 Video shows opposition to the current health care plans kicking around Congress

BILL MOYERS: Bill Black was in New York this week for a conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice where scholars and journalists gathered to ask the question, "How do they get away with it?" Well, no one has asked that question more often than Bill Black. The former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the...

Transcipt of Bill Moyers interview of William Black. Below is the video. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal. For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." In fact, the man you're about to meet wrote a book with just that title. It was based upon his experience as a tough regulator during one of the darkest chapters in our financial history: the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s. WILLIAM K. BLACK: These numbers as large as...

On August 17, 2007, Bill Moyers closed Bill Moyer’s Journal, his weekly show on the taxpayer-subsidized Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), by bidding farewell to Karl Rove, a top aide to President Bush who was leaving his job as deputy chief of staff at the end of the month: Using church pews as precincts Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat — a battering ram, aimed at the devil’s minions, especially at gay people. Interesting how Moyers, a former Democratic White House press secretary under Lyndon Johnson, singles out an aide to a Republican president for using gay people...

What we do know from the tapes was that Hoover thought he had flawless gaydar. Beschloss writes that Hoover believed, based on a report from liberal columnist Drew Pearson, that the Republicans were about to drop a "bombshell" on a Johnson administration official on Oct. 31, a bit of intelligence that he had passed along to Johnson. On the morning of Oct. 31, Johnson telephoned Hoover for new gossip, and the conversation ambled toward a Navy employee. LBJ: … They raised the question of the way he combed his hair and the way he did something else, but they had...

Bill Moyers is a sanctimonious jerk who piously ran a series of broadcasts that excoriated the Bush Administration for violating the American people's right to privacy by initiating programs to protect the nation from a terrorist attack. Now it turns out that Moyers likes peeping through keyholes into people's bedrooms. The Washington Post reports on the unearthing of some FBI documents from the 1960's when Moyers worked for LBJ: Bill Moyers, a White House aide now best known as a liberal television commentator, is described in the records as seeking information on the sexual preferences of White House staff members....

FEBRUARY 21, 2009. J. Edgar Moyers The TV moralist's government record. One of the darker periods of modern American history was J. Edgar Hoover's long reign over the FBI, as we have learned since he died in 1972. So it is more than a historical footnote to discover new records showing that prominent public television broadcaster Bill Moyers participated in Hoover's exploits. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Washington Post has obtained a few of the former FBI director's secret files. According to a Thursday front-page story, Hoover was "consumed" with exposing a (nonexistent) relationship between a gay photographer...