Free Republic

Would you want to cite someone who has been thoroughly discredited in the very field he is supposed to be an expert in? Well, that is exactly what several news organizations did yesterday including Charlie Rose on PBS, the New York Times, and Bloomberg when they cited Gary Sick as an expert on Iran in stories about the nuke "deal" which was actually more of an agreement on the framework to discuss the...well, you get it. It really wasn't an actual deal but Gary Sick was chirping away like it was some sort of positive development.. Of course none...

Two women living in Queens have been charged with planning to build a bomb that they wanted to detonate in the United States. The women, Noelle Velentzas, 28, and Asia Siddiqui, 31, who until recently were roommates, were named in a complaint unsealed on Thursday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, and were expected to appear in court on Thursday afternoon. Ms. Velentzas and Ms. Siddiqui, who are American citizens, appeared to be interested in jihad, according to the complaint, which said that they had been communicating with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and had been viewing violent videos...

Mayor Bill de Blasio excoriated a controversial Indiana religious freedom law, telling reporters today that it is “deeply disturbing” and “doomed to failure.” Following the lead of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mr. de Blasio also said he would ban non-essential city travel to the Hoosier State. “It’s a deeply disturbing reality right now in Indiana and I hope before it’s too late, they turn back,” Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, said at an unrelated press conference in Brooklyn. He promised that the law, which critics say will allow businesses to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, will backfire on the...

Ted Cruz is being called a Republican Obama, but he has not exactly gotten an Obama-like reception from the mainstream media. Liberal commentators have, predictably, beclowned themselves in the wake of Cruz’s presidential announcement. Chris Matthews (the guy who “felt a thrill going up his leg” when Barack Obama spoke during the 2008 campaign) compared Cruz to Sen. Joe McCarthy, even showing pictures of McCarthy and Cruz in the same pose. Ebony magazine Senior Editor Jamilah Lemieux told MSNBC that Cruz likes country music because “nothing says ‘let’s go kill some Muslims’ like country music.” On “Morning Joe,” Donny Deutsch...

Here we go again. One of the High Priests of the so-called "reality-based community" has for the umpteenth time pronounced Obamacare a great success, asserting that people who believe otherwise (like, for example, the majority of the American people) have either been deceived, or are liars. Paint-by-numbers acerbic Leftist, reactionary smear artist, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls Obamacare horror stories "imaginary disasters," made up from whole cloth to scare people and undermine a law that's working and helping people.  We've spent quite a lot of time refuting variants of this argument in recent years, producing detailed responses to President Obama, Harry Reid, and two...

Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of the Germanwings plane who deliberately crashed in the Alps on Tuesday killing 150 people, retweeted (actually looks more like shared on Facebook) the photo above, with the caption "A Germany in which religious feelings have more rights than the meaning of freedom - is not my Germany." (Hat Tip: Mike K). And the New York Times reported on Friday that Lubitz "lived, at least part time, with his parents. Mr. Lubitz’s mother was an organist at a Protestant church near the town center.” Mike K adds: Here is the sad, but probably true story....

Facts and logic are two things notable for their absence in the op-ed pages of the New York Times. The Times has to pander to its ultra-liberal readership, and facts and logic are just two things these people can’t grasp, that’s why they’re liberals. And the flip side of this is an appalling combination of dishonesty and unbearable smugness. In Governor Jindal’s Implosion, Charles Blow wants us to believe Louisiana’s Republican governor political career is doomed. Blow gloats over a poll showing Jindal with negligible support among Republican primary voters. For someone who originally was billed as an expert in...

he Clinton campaign has issued a list of words and terms to the Drive-By Media in the form of a threatening e-mail to a New York Times infobabe telling them, "These are the words you cannot use to describe Mrs. Clinton." One word that's not on the list is "cankles." I guess everybody in the media is free to use the word "cankles." ... [snip]Here are the words that the Hillary Clinton campaign sent out to the New York Times reporter Amy Chozick is telling her she can't use. "Polarizing." You may not use the word "polarizing" to describe Mrs....

Despite the fact that feminists attacked Monica Lewinsky during the Clinton-era, calling her “slutty” and a “trashy bimbo” among other things, feminists are now embracing her as an “inspiring” figure against the tide of “slut-shaming.” The change of tune came after Lewinsky gave an interview to Vanity Fair last year, where she called feminists out for attacking her in the 90s. Jessica Bennett wrote a piece on Lewinsky in the Style section of The New York Times, March 19, describing the phenomenon: "Feminists who had stayed silent on the first go-round were suddenly defending her, using terms like “slut-shaming” and...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took time to hang out with the press Monday night, joking with a room packed with national political reporters about their sometimes-testy relationship. "I'm well aware that some of you may be a little surprised to see me here tonight. My relationship with the press has been at times, shall we say, complicated,'" Clinton said to laughs at a dinner for the Robin Toner Program in Political Reporting in downtown Washington, D.C. "But I am all about new beginnings: A new grandchild, another new hairstyle, a new email account, a new relationship with the...

WASHINGTON — President Obama said he has told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the Israeli leader’s remarks in the closing days of his re-election campaign had upended the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and ran counter to the very nature of Israeli democracy, an unusually forceful and public condemnation of the top official of a vital United States ally. In his first public comments on the matter since Mr. Netanyahu’s victory in Tuesday’s elections, Mr. Obama said the prime minister’s pre-election statement that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch had all but foreclosed the chance for negotiations to resolve...

Netanyahu Tactics Anger Many U.S. Jews, Deepening a Divide By LAURIE GOODSTEIN MARCH 20, 2015 Long before the latest election in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu was a polarizing figure among American Jews. But even many of his supporters said this week that they were appalled at his last-minute bid to mobilize Jewish voters by warning that Arabs were going to the polls in droves, and his renunciation of a two-state solution to the Palestinian crisis. Mr. Netanyahu’s party won the election and cheers from harwkish American Jews. But in interviews this week, rabbis, scholars and Jews from across the country and...

Sound the trumpets. The New York Times announced on March 18 that is bringing in 20 new online-focused writers as contributors for its op-ed and Sunday Review sections. In an interview, Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal claimed, "We were looking for a broad range of viewpoints and subjects and backgrounds and geographical locations and every kind of form of diversity that you can think of." Lower the trumpets. Bring in the fact checker. It seems the viewpoint-diverse Times can't seem to locate a conservative acceptable to executives prowling the halls in the snooty Times offices in midtown Manhattan. Some...

WASHINGTON — President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had a poisonous relationship long before Mr. Netanyahu swept to victory on Tuesday night in elections watched minute-by-minute at the White House. But now that Mr. Netanyahu has won after aggressively campaigning against a Palestinian state and Mr. Obama’s potential nuclear deal with Iran, the question is whether the president and prime minister can ever repair their relationship — and whether Mr. Obama will even try. On Wednesday, part of the answer seemed to be that the president would not make the effort. In strikingly strong criticism, the White...

The U.S. government suppressed information about chemical weapons it found in Iraq, and several servicemembers were injured by their exposure to those weapons, The New York Times is reporting. In an article published late Tuesday, the newspaper says it found 17 American servicemembers and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to mustard or nerve agents after 2003. They were reportedly given inadequate care and told not to talk about what happened. "From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam...

Israel’s election has done a lot to reveal the challenges facing the country and the intentions of the men who seek to lead it. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s outright rejection of a Palestinian state and his racist rant against Israeli Arab voters on Tuesday showed that he has forfeited any claim to representing all Israelis.

Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s initial hope for a more stable coalition, and the Israeli left’s later hope that it would score an upset, the balance of power in the Israeli Knesset is almost exactly the same as it was after the last elections in 2013: 2013: Likud+Lieberman+Bennett = 43 (right-wing Zionist bloc) 2015: Likud+Lieberman+Bennett = 43 2013: Labor+Meretz+Tzipi = 27 (left-wing Zionist bloc) 2015: Labor+Tzipi+Meretz = 28 2013: Lapid+Kadima = 21 (centrist Zionist bloc) 2015: Lapid+Kahlon = 21 2013: Haredim = 18 (Ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties) 2015: Haredim = 14 2013: Arabs (divided) = 11 (Arab parties) 2015: Arabs (united)...

TEL AVIV — After a bruising campaign focused on his failings, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel won a clear victory in Tuesday’s elections and seemed all but certain to form a new government and serve a fourth term, though he offended many voters and alienated allies in the process. With 99.5 percent of the ballots counted, the YNet news site reported Wednesday morning that Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party had captured 29 or 30 of the 120 seats in Parliament, sweeping past his chief rival, the center-left Zionist Union alliance, which got 24 seats.

IT is time to talk about President Obama’s contingency plan for health care. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments earlier this month in King v. Burwell, a case challenging the provision of tax credits on federal insurance exchanges. While the legal issues are dry lawyers’ fare — how to interpret several interconnected phrases of the Affordable Care Act — the practical stakes are high. The government estimates that millions of Americans will be left without affordable health insurance if it loses. While the administration may well prevail, it has expressed remarkable pessimism about its options if it does lose. The...