Free Republic

During his Wednesday appearance on Jay Leno's "Tonight Show,' President Obama made three factual gaffes; one of them involved the claim that cities not found along the Gulf of Mexico are. Were Obama a Republican, these gaffes would have led news coverage for the next forty-eight hours. Not only did most of the media ignore or downplay these gaffes; the Associated Press went so far as to cover one of them up.

Ted Koppel Writes the Dumbest Op-Ed About Terrorism You Can Imagine August 10, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield When you saw the name “Ted Koppel�, your first reaction was probably to wonder if he was still alive. The answer is, yes. He is.Your second reaction was probably to wonder if he was still the same smug boring media personality reciting liberal truisms at the speed of a snail.The answer also yes.And for some reason the Wall Street Journal gave Ted Koppel editorial space to write one of those “The only real danger from terrorism is if we hit terrorists too hard�...

President Obama in 2010 signed a law requiring large employers to offer health insurance to their employees. Earlier this Summer, President Obama announced his administration wasn’t going to require large employers to offer health insurance to their employees. Perhaps there is some explanation why it’s okay for Obama to do this. But if you ask Obama for that explanation, he gets pretty pissed at you. Here’s what Obama said when a New York Times reporter asked: If Congress thinks that what I’ve done is inappropriate or wrong in some fashion, they’re free to make that case. But there’s not an...

The chill in relations between the US and Russia grew still frostier yesterday as President Vladimir Putin's foreign minister told the White House to start behaving like "grown-ups". Sergei Lavrov chided the US administration two days after President Barack Obama scrapped a summit with Mr Putin when Russia granted asylum to Edward Snowden, the fugitive US spy.

President Obama today made clear that he rejects growing calls for the U.S. to boycott the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi over Russia’s new anti-gay law. “I want to just make very clear right now: I do not think it’s appropriate to boycott the Olympics,”

President Barack Obama on Friday urged people not to boycott the 2014 Winter Olympics taking place in Sochi, Russia over the country’s new law against gay rights activism. “I want to just make very clear right now: I do not think it’s appropriate to boycott the Olympics,” Obama said. “We’ve got a bunch of Americans out there who are training hard, who are doing everything they can to succeed.” …

Move over, Reverend Al. You're not the only MSNBC host who moonlights as a liberal activist. On today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski announced that she will be not merely be covering a pay protest by fast-food workers in Detroit on August 29th--she'll be an active part of it. Joe Scarborough tried—in vain—to school Mika on Econ 101. But she did the equivalent of covering her ears and nattering "nah, nah, nah: can't hear you!" Scarborough said he'd be at the protest--on the sidelines, with a bullhorn. View the video here.

How's the left-wing, ivory-tower, we-know-best elitist Obamanomics working for you? Here's the news. First-quarter gross domestic product numbers for 2013 were recently revised -- downward from 1.8 percent to 1.1 percent. For perspective, four years into the recovery from the last deep recession in '81-'82, the economy grew at 4.1 percent. What about the declining "labor force participation rate"? This counts the percentage of civilians 16 years and older working or actively looking for work. When President Barack Obama took office, the labor force participation rate was 65.7. Today it is 63.4, up 0.1 from April's 34-year low. Frustrated, many...

Barack Obama told Marines at Camp Pendleton Wednesday that the United States "will never retreat from the world" merely a day after his Administration warned American citizens to flee the country of Yemen. According to The Hill, Obama said, "Al Qaeda's top ranks have been hammered," and "the core of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on the way to defeat." "We do not get terrorized," he boasted. "We're going to keep standing up to our enemies." Just two days before Obama made these claims, his Administration closed 20 embassies and/or consulates around the world for fear of an...

Maybe it was the upbeat mood of a man about to go on vacation, but President Obama seemed feistier than usual in making the case today for his policies on surveillance, health care and immigration reform. During his second term, Obama has sometimes seemed back on his heels in defending his policies against Republican attack, but that wasn’t the case in his White House news conference Friday. He argued for what he called, at one point, “common sense” solutions, with seeming confidence that he has the upper hand politically against the GOP. Obama’s attempts to hold the middle ground, and...

Last year NewsBusters repeatedly made the case that members of the press – in particular ABC’s George Stephanopoulos – aided and abetted President Obama’s claim that the Republicans were engaging in a so-called War on Women. In a radio interview with Geraldo Rivera Wednesday, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said this might have been the case (video follows with transcript and commentary): GERALDO RIVERA: Reince Priebus, the RNC chair was on the Republican, top politician on the Republican side, just saying that if CNN and NBC don’t cancel their planned films about Hillary Clinton, that he’s not going to allow any...

MSNBC's Chris Matthews made a bold prediction on Wednesday's Hardball. "The hard-right is going to take over the Republican Party in 2016 and the nomination is going to Rand Paul" (video follows with transcript and commentary):CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me finish tonight with this. I’ve been offering a prediction of late. Let me nail it down now. I believe the Republican Party is going to go hard-right in 2016. It’s going to run someone from the growing hard-right wing of the Party, something it hasn't done since 1980. And here's the thinking which works equally...

Jobs at Walmart don't pay a lot. Someone at The Nation recently noticed this, and decided to make up a new hourly wage for workers at the mega-uber-superstore chain—$12/hour—and declare their desire to see this wage implemented in an open letter to the CEO. The retail company has issued reams of press releases, funded and touted economic studies, taken to the airwaves, and made other serious efforts to address the criticisms about their compensation practices over the years. But it looks like someone in Bentonville finally snapped: Steven Restivo, a Walmart senior director of communications, sent out a email yesterday...

First Chuck Todd, now Andrea Mitchell and even former Obama spox-turned-NBC-analyst Robert Gibbs agree: NBC's decision to produce a miniseries about Hillary Clinton is a "bad idea." Gibbs and Mitchell lamented the series on Andrea's early-afternoon MSNBC show today. View the video here.

In his latest book, Collision 2012, Dan Balz, a Washington Post writer, expresses his incredulity over “the inability” of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign to “humanize” its candidate. This is one reason why, in Balz’s estimation, Romney lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama. Yet there are two other reasons that he supplies to account for Romney’s defeat. The one pertains to the “technically superior” character of his rival’s campaign. The other is in regard to Romney’s “ambivalence” concerning his bid for the presidency. The first thing that should be noted is that if Romney’s consultants had difficulty in “humanizing” their...

Money line: “This is what I do for a living.” Didn’t he predict a Bush/Clinton race in 2016 just nine months ago? If he believes what he says here about the parties swinging like “pendulums” from moderate nominees to ideologues and then back again, why would he have named Jeb as a strong contender last November? In fact, the roots of the counterargument are in Matthews’s own shpiel here: Most of the time, they head to the center. This is what Republicans did most successfully in 1952 – when, after twenty years of Roosevelt and Harry Truman – they wanted...

In a remarkable admission that is likely to rock the Internal Revenue Service again, testimony released Thursday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp reveals that an agent involved in reviewing tax exempt applications from conservative groups told a committee investigator that the agency is still targeting Tea Party groups, three months after the IRS scandal erupted..

Rep. Darrell Issa's demand follows CNN report of contact between the IRS and FEC House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa demanded Wednesday that the Federal Election Commission turn over records of more than five years of communications with the Internal Revenue Service -- a move that significantly expands the California Republican's ongoing probe of alleged federal targeting of conservative groups. In a letter to FEC Chairman Ellen Weintraub -- a Democrat -- Issa cited CNN reporting on Monday that raises "the prospect of inappropriate coordination between the IRS and the FEC about tax-exempt entities." Among other things, Issa asked for...

“If you thought the IRS targeting — scandal, controversy, whatever you want to call it — was forgotten, think again,� said CNN’s Jake Tapper, introducing Dana Bash’s report last night on House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa’s expansion of the probe. Issa requested information from the Federal Election Commission after leaked e-mails suggested that coordination may have taken place between the two agencies in pursuit of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. That may increase the focus on one particular figure in the scandal, as well as potentially add more to it: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO House Oversight Committee...

Former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, the nation's first openly gay member of Congress and liberal darling, implied in a recent interview that he is also a "pot-smoking atheist." Frank, a Democrat who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013, made his comments last Friday while serving as a guest on a talk show hosted by Bill Maher, a stand-up comedian known for his atheist, liberal-slanted comedy routine. Maher then went on to say that Frank was lucky to have worked in a "safe district" which didn't receive the kind of media...

Joe Scarborough has yet again scaled his soap box to mock those of us in the conservative blogosphere. He described us today as a bunch of "very stupid people" living in their mama's basement who write "really stupid things" about him. The thin-skinned Scarborough has often derided his blogging critics as Cheetos-chewing cellar-dwellers. He was at it again this morning, depicting them as people who if not in mama's basement would otherwise be wandering the streets in their pajamas. View the video here.

This wasn't the revolution the Tea Party had in mind. Four years ago, the movement and its potent mix of anger and populism persuaded thousands of costumed and sign-waving conservatives to protest the ballooning deficit and President Obama's health care law. It swept a crop of no-compromise lawmakers into Congress and governor's offices and transformed political up-and-comers, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, into household names. But as many Tea Party stars seek re-election next year and Rubio considers a 2016 presidential run, conservative activists are finding themselves at a crossroads. Many of their standard-bearers have embraced more moderate positions on...

This wasn’t the revolution the tea party had in mind. Four years ago, the movement and its potent mix of anger and populism persuaded thousands of costumed and sign-waving conservatives to protest the ballooning deficit and President Obama’s health care law. It swept a crop of no-compromise lawmakers into Congress and governor’s offices and transformed political up-and-comers, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, into household names. But as many tea party stars seek re-election next year and Rubio considers a 2016 presidential run, conservative activists are finding themselves at a crossroads. Many of their standard-bearers have embraced more moderate positions on...

In the past week, The New York Times Co. announced it was selling the Boston Globe to Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry, and Washington Post Chairman Donald Graham announced Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was buying the paper that Graham's family has run for decades. Both papers went cheap. The Times bought the Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion and is now selling it for $70 million. The price tag on the Post was just $250 million. The combined $320 million market value of these two big-city dailies is about as much as the federal government now spends in...

Merlin Media has sold News/Talk "IQ 106.9" WWIQ Philadelphia to EMF Broadcasting. More details coming... (see below for more)

I don’t like to plug, honestly, but my anthology Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade includes an essay written twelve years ago, upon the death of Washington Post proprietor Kay Graham. Excerpt: The media’s sense of proportion is never more out of whack than when bidding farewell to one of its own, but even so the passing of Katharine Graham set impressive new standards of risibility: “The Most Powerful Woman In America,” “The Most Powerful Woman In The World,” “America’s Queen,” “Kay’s Amazing Grace,” “Oh, Kay,” “Special Kay”… No “Kay, Why?”, funnily enough, though the question is certainly worth asking...

Former Democratic pollster and Fox News contributor, Pat Caddell, appeared on Fox News Channel over the weekend where he alleged that there is a White House-led cover-up of the details surrounding the Benghazi attacks. Furthermore, he added, that cover-up of information regarding the White House’s response to that attack is being aided by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). “We have John Boehner, who has been purposely suppressing anything about Benghazi because he knew what we found out this week,” Caddell alleged. “And he approved it.”

What’s Nancy Pelosi doing right? While the other top congressional leaders are fading, the House minority leader and former speaker is on the rise, according to the latest Quinnipiac University Thermometer poll, which shows the California Democrat is gaining popularity as one of the nation’s top political figures. **SNIP** While Democrats give her a 64.2 percent warmth rating, the best among the four leaders, self-identified Republicans score her at 19.8, the lowest of the group.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told Matt Lee of the Associated Press Tuesday that the U.S. had “determined that we do not need to make a determination” over whether or not the ousting of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt was a coup. Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) called it a coup Tuesday, but the Obama administration has deliberately avoided using the word:

A scientific controversy erupted this week over claims that methane trapped beneath the Arctic Ocean could suddenly escape, releasing huge quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas, in coming decades, with a huge cost to the global economy. The issue being debated is this: Could the Arctic seafloor really fart out 50 billion tons of methane in the next few decades? In a commentary published in the journal Nature on Wednesday (July 24), researchers predicted that the rapid shrinking of Arctic sea ice would warm the Arctic Ocean, thawing permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea and releasing methane gas trapped in...

SAN DIEGO - A nurse who takes care of an injured Marine came forward Tuesday with attorney Gloria Allred to say she had been sexually harassed by Mayor Bob Filner in his office. At a news conference Tuesday, Michelle Tyler said she arranged a meeting with the mayor, her Marine friend and a veterans representative who was not identified. Tyler said the purpose of the June 11, 2013, meeting was to try to get the mayor to help the Veterans Administration to give help to her friend. Once the meeting wrapped up, Tyler said the mayor asked everyone but her...

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...

"People always say to me, they say, `Hey, Letterman,' they say. `Why don't you make jokes about Obama?' And I say, `All right, I'll tell you why. I don't make jokes about him because I don't want the FBI tapping my phone,"' he said. Leno tapped into the same idea with a different story: "I was going to start off tonight with an Obama joke, but I don't want to get audited by the IRS, so forget that."

"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...

The progressive assault on the American way of life continues under Obama and his anti-capitalist cronies. The latest job numbers continues to show their progress in reducing working Americans into full-time serfs of the State, bereft of individual liberty or choice. While the media lapdogs are proclaiming that the recovery is still going strong and that nearly 200,000 jobs were created in July, the real numbers tell a starkly different story. First, the 200,000 jobs doesn't even keep ahead of population growth. Even some liberal economists (which are a rare species) admit that actual recovery is 350,000 to 500,000 new...

<p>My hometown — Port Clinton, Ohio, population 6,050 — was in the 1950s a passable embodiment of the American dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for the children of bankers and factory workers alike.</p> <p>But a half-century later, wealthy kids park BMW convertibles in the Port Clinton High School lot next to decrepit “junkers” in which homeless classmates live. The American dream has morphed into a split-screen American nightmare. And the story of this small town, and the divergent destinies of its children, turns out to be sadly representative of America.</p>

(CNN) -- This is the day San Diego Mayor Bob Filner enters a behavior counseling clinic for two weeks of what he describes as intensive therapy. The 70-year-old is battling a tide of sexual harrassment allegations, and is hoping that voluntarily subjecting himself to the counseling will quell the mounting calls for his resignation. He has repeatedly said he'll not leave the office he was elected to barely eight months ago. San Diego's city charter does not require him to appoint an interim mayor during his temporary absence. His decision is unlikely to appease his opponents.

In this case, the old saying, "Better late than never" really shouldn't apply. In June, when the government's Household Survey used to determine the unemployment rate reported that there were 240,000 fewer full-time workers and 360,000 more part-time workers than there were in May, the establishment press, particularly the Associated Press, largely ignored or downplayed the result. The AP's Christopher Rugaber broke the ice a bit in early July after June's jobs report, and the wire service has finally gone full-bore into noting the trend towards part-time work in the past two days. But while the press slept for months,...

HBO’s Bill Maher thinks the Department of Homeland Security has outlived its usefulness. On Friday’s episode of “Real Time,” Maher and his guests debated the DHS’s usefulness during a discussion of the debate between Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul and New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie. “There was a huge verbal slap by the Republican Party this week between Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, and Rand Paul,” Maher said. “And it was sort of I think a fight for the soul of the Republican Party — where they’re going to go because, OK, next month is the 12th...

The barbs are personal, the differences are multiplying among Republicans, a party divided over spending, foreign policy, a willingness to risk a government shutdown in order to defund the health care law and more. “I didn't start this one and I don’t plan on starting things by criticizing other Republicans,” Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said recently as he and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie likened one another to various cuts of a butchered pig. “But if they want to make me the target, they will get it back in spades.” …

As NewsBusters has often reported, the folks at MSNBC have a disturbing habit of deceptively editing videos to radically change their meaning. Maybe that's where MSNBC's Toure Neblett learned this, for on Friday, he dramatically edited a Magic Johnson tweet about Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper: Touré ✔ @Toure RT @MagicJohnson: Riley Cooper's teammates will never forgive him, I don't care what they say publicly. 10:09 PM - 2 Aug 2013 For those unaware of the controversy, Cooper was videotaped at a Kenny Chesney concert saying, "I will jump that fence and fight every n---er in here." He has...

The lame-stream media obviously views Sarah Palin as a threat and is reporting with glee that 77 percent of Alaskans believe that Sarah Palin should not run for President in 2016; but, in typical fashion, the media is ignoring key data in the poll by the far-left Public Policy Polling (PPP) company that indicates that bias was built into the poll and that conservatives and Republicans are responding well to the idea of a Palin run... Leading the anti-Palin charge is the left-wing Politico which is reporting: "Despite it being her home state, only 18 percent of Alaskans think Palin...

With tea party Republicans threatening to shut down the government in an effort to roll back President Obama's healthcare law, several progressive groups are teaming up in a new effort to convince skeptical voters of the benefits of the new law. During the August recess, Americans United for Change and Protect Your Care plan to counter efforts by Republicans to disparage the law. The groups will stage protests at GOP events, organize their own town halls to publicize its perks, and provide “air cover” to the law’s defenders. Republicans “have overplayed their hand and that gives us the opportunity to...

Contrary to statements made by former Free Press editor Drew Johnson and national media reports, Johnson was told on multiple prior occasions not to make material changes to editorials or headlines once they were approved by the editor responsible for the page. On Monday night, Johnson changed the approved headline on his Tuesday editorial from, “Keep your jobs plan to yourself, Mr. President: Your policies have harmed Chattanooga enough already” to “Take your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President: Your policies have harmed Chattanooga enough.” However, he waited until his editor had left for the day before changing the...

Epic reporter chase starting at 2:50. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Inbki8pbou0&feature=youtu.be Shocked CNN cares about fraud. Thought that was a Republican issue...

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir has fingered the main culprits behind Detroit’s bankruptcy. According to him, it’s none other than Fox News host Sean Hannity and all his fellow racist conservatives who were threatened by Smokey Robinson. In his July 27 screed for Salon headlined “Why the Right Hates Detroit” O’Hehir claimed the fall of big cities like Detroit and New Orleans had less to do with longtime Democratic rule and more to do with the right’s desire, as seen in the “coded racism of Sean Hannity” to punish the cities that spawned “the worldwide revolution symbolized by hot jazz, Smokey Robinson...

Media: A Tennessee newspaper fired an editor over a hard-hitting editorial denouncing President Obama's jobs plan on the very day the president came to town to tout it. This has the odor of White House revanchism. ngbfThe Chattanooga Times Free Press insists that its firing of Drew Johnson for the title of his editorial, "Take Your Jobs Plan And Shove It, Mr. President," was unrelated to content, and merely a case of an insubordinate editor changing his headline to a riff on a song by Nashville singer Johnny PayCheck over another headline. Frankly, it's hard to believe. For one thing,...

Video at link

A Marine operations commander told lawmakers Wednesday he gave troops in Libya permission to respond to a September 2012 attack on a U.S. mission in Tripoli. Testifying in closed session before the House Armed Services Committee, Col. George Bristol contradicted claims by some congressional Republicans he had issued a stand-down order following the attack, in which U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stephens and three other Americans were killed, The Hill reported. Bristol, who commanded Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahara at the time of the attack, said he gave the Tripoli security team leader, Lt. Col. S.E. Gibson, permission...

Drew Johnson, the editorial page editor of the Chattanooga Times Free Press was fired after 14 months on the job for publishing an editorial with a headline that read: "Take your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President." The editorial ran Tuesday, the same day Obama visited Chattanooga. The powers-that-be posted a notice Thursday explaining the firing: The headline was inappropriate for this newspaper. It was not the original headline approved for publication, and Johnson violated the normal editing process when he changed the headline. The newspaper’s decision to terminate Johnson had nothing to do with the content of the...