Free Republic

Published on Oct 16, 2013 During late-night Capitol lawn coverage of the debt ceiling, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper mocked GOP strategist Alex Castellanos for being "high" after the commentator likened Ted Cruz's shutdown strategy to the rabbit mating rituals. Castellanos agreed with his Democratic counterpart Paul Begala that Cruz is behaving in a short-sighted manner by shutting down the government to expand the conservative base. As such, the GOP strategist recalled a bizarre analogy. "A friend explained to me today, finally, what Ted Cruz is doing," he said. "And I finally understand: He's having bunny sex." While Begala let out...

On Tuesday’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, the bombastic host observed what he termed an “evil dishonesty” regarding the debt ceiling negotiations. Here’s the real evil dishonesty here. The same people who are saying […] it doesn’t matter if we go over the debt ceiling, if it was a Republican president would be out there fighting to protect it. The same people. While he made not overt mention of it on the program, Matthews undoubtedly applies the same standard to those in the inverse position – those who were against raising the debt ceiling the last time a president from the...

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Tuesday he would vote for a “clean CR” to end the government shutdown. “I’ll vote for a clean CR," Issa told CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. “Republicans in the House have always been for a clean CR increase if it meant we began the serious negotiations on the kinds of reforms that need to happen…entitlements as a shortcut for it. That's what the deal is about right now.” Democrats have pressed Republicans to bring a continuing resolutio to the floor that funds the government and does nothing else for weeks. GOP leaders have...

PAYSON, AZ - Republican Rep. Brenda Barton of Payson compared President Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler on her Facebook page Monday in a post urging county sheriffs to revoke authority from the National Parks Service “thugs” who are enforcing the federal shutdown on national parks lands. “Someone is paying the National Park Service thugs overtime for their efforts to carry out the order of De Fuhrer… where are our Constitutional Sheriffs who can revoke the Park Service Rangers authority to arrest??? Do we have any Sheriffs with a pair?” she wrote. Fuhrer is a German term for leader that is...

On Tuesday, Mediaite White House correspondent Tommy Christopher added another chapter to his ongoing self-promotional crusade masquerading as a career in journalism. And this time, it didn’t involve a shameless ploy to be an invited guest on whatever incarnation of Chris Hayes’ show MSNBC is currently airing. During Tuesday’s White House briefing on Tuesday, Christopher, whose name isn’t really “Tommy Christopher,” asked a question about President Barack Obama’s health-care reform law that incorporated his personal experiences with health insurance after his 2010 heart attack. ...more (w/video)...

Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer interrogated Representative Tim Huelskamp (R-KA) on the House Republicans’ tactics to shutdown the government and test the breaching of the debt ceiling, challenging Huelskamp to name what, if anything, such measures had accomplished or were intended to accomplish. “At the end of the day, what we have accomplished?” Huelskamp said. “Not much yet. But we have to focus on Obamacare, and we have to focus on the underlying problem that’s been ignored for years, and that’s too much spending.” “But congressman, don’t you have to focus on keeping the government running?” Schieffer asked. When...

BOB COSTAS: Think for a moment about the term Redskins and how it truly differs from all the others. Ask yourself what the equivalent would be if directed toward African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians or members of any other ethnic group. When considered that way, Redskins can't possibly honor a heritage or a noble character trait, nor can it possibly be considered a neutral term. It's an insult, a slur, no matter how benign the present day intent. It's fair to say that for a long time now, and certainly in 2013, no offense has been intended. But if you take a...

WASHINGTON — Next year was supposed to be a prime opportunity for Republicans to retake the Senate. And for a while, everything seemed to be breaking their way: a wave of Democratic retirements, a fluke in the electoral map that put a large number of races in states that President Obama lost, a strong farm team of conservative Senate hopefuls from the House. Then the government shut down. Now, instead of sharpening their attacks on Democrats, Republicans on Capitol Hill are being forced to explain why they are not to blame and why Americans should trust them to govern both...

CNN.com covered Sunday’s “Million Vet March” in Washington D.C. against the Obama administration’s closure of military memorials by castigating the marchers as Tea Party kooks and fringe crazies. “At tea party-like rally, Obama told to ‘put the Quran down,’” the headline read. CNN derided the size of the crowd: --snip-- CNN focused on one speaker, Larry Klayman, whom it quoted as stating, “I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his...

The Republican Party is at war with itself. It's divided over how best to shrink the federal budget and how to undo President Obama's healthcare law. Behind the GOP crackup over the government shutdown lies a much bigger battle for control of the party. And the most important actors aren't Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and the tea party members of the House who brought us the government shutdown. The party rift's chief driver is a constellation of hard-line conservative fundraising groups, led in part by a former senator most Americans couldn't pick out of a lineup, Jim DeMint of South...

House Republicans were furious with Senate Republicans and President Obama on Saturday for trying to cut a debt ceiling deal that leaves them out in the cold. Members emerged from a conference meeting saying Obama had double-crossed them by breaking off talks in order to shop for a better deal from the Senate GOP. “Clearly the president can't be trusted,” said Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.). “It is up to Senate Republicans to grow a backbone and stand with House Republicans like they said they were going to do.”

<p>Need evidence of Cruz's gains of late? He won the 2016 straw poll at the Values Voter Summit on Saturday with 42 percent of the vote and his speech at that gathering of social conservatives was received very warmly. He has become the center of gravity for a certain not-insignificant element of the Republican party. Cruz has proven that he will be “the Tea Party’s one true standard-bearer in the Republican presidential primary,” according to Evan Smith,the CEO and editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune,a independent media outlet covering the Long Star State.</p>

I hadn't seen this posted before. Really, really funny...Leno's getting better and better as he nears the end of his show. He's also far more willing to criticize Obama. Link below...

Numbers are slowly emerging, and they aren’t good for the president’s “signature piece of legislation.” The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, has been an unmitigated disaster. After three years and $634 million, healthcare.gov has proven itself unable to handle even the traffic a local supermarket website would get. In other words, it’s not a problem of too much traffic crashing servers, the problems lie in the code itself. Just like the problems with the website, the flaws in the program itself are structural. And this fact, provided they don’t screw it up, will be the greatest asset of Republicans going...

House Republicans, now seeking a way out of the current fiscal impasse, fear that the government shutdown robbed them of a chance to highlight the problems in ObamaCare's rollout. Oct. 1 should have been a layup for Republican opponents of President Obama’s signature healthcare law, who watched as new insurance exchanges were beset by a slew of technical snafus. But in a harsh bit of irony for the GOP, that was also the first day of a government shutdown driven largely by their own efforts to defund ObamaCare – a standstill that has dominated headlines all month. To make matters...

[With video] Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert got into a tense back-and-forth Saturday with Fox New’s Arthel Neville over who is to blame for the partial government shut down and the frightening possibility of a debt-ceiling breach. The Republican Congressman insisted that President Barack Obama and his Democrat allies in the U.S. Senate are responsible for the current mess in the nation’s capital. [SNIIP] The Fox News anchor wasn’t satisfied with Rep. Gohmert’s analysis. “You’re not saying that either, Congressman?” Neville said. “Let’s have some honest talk here.” The Congressman repeated that it’s the Democrats, especially Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid,...

The Gallup poll that tracks the approval rating of Republicans in Congress looks like the bend of a hockey stick. Whether this is a permanent condition or a temporary one depends on getting Sen. Ted Cruz off the stage and Rep. Paul Ryan on--substituting a bristly champion of an unpopular strategy that divides the party with a congenial representative of the GOP's traditional views on taxing and spending. That's why House Republican leaders are trying to craft a deal with the White House to reopen government and start budget negotiations where House Budget Committee Chairman Ryan will be the key...

Skeptics warned from the start that it was a suicide mission for Republicans to shut down the federal government in a long-shot attempt to defund Obamacare. Now that such dire predictions have come to pass, the lawmakers who engineered the shutdown are getting the conflagration — and the martyrdom — they sought. Call it the Cruzifiction of the GOP. At least so far, the standoff has been a political bloodbath for Republicans. And maybe that’s exactly what was needed to right the political system: The effort to gut Obamacare had to crash like this so that Republican leaders and lawmakers...

During the “Overtime” online edition of HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher posited that President Obama moderates his political positions out of fear of being assassinated, leading to a panel-wide battle over whether Americans are “subconsciously racist” against the president. While lamenting with Oliver Stone about the short political career of John F. Kennedy, Maher suggested that bold leaders like JFK “always seem to, at the end of the day, get cut out of the picture, violently or otherwise. And maybe that is why Barack Obama is more of a centrist than we want him to be?” “You think that?”

“Ex-Marine Asks Soviet Citizenship” — Washington Post headline, Nov. 1, 1959 (concerning Lee Harvey Oswald) “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It’s — it had to be some silly little Communist.” — Jacqueline Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963 She thought it robbed his death of any meaning. But a meaning would be quickly manufactured to serve a new politics. First, however, an inconvenient fact — Oswald — had to be expunged from the story. So, just 24 months after the assassination, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Kennedys’ kept historian, published a thousand-page history of the thousand-day...

It’s three years away, but the ongoing government shutdown and debt ceiling debate makes it clear that Democrats need to be thinking now about a candidate able to effectively counter the Tea Party caucus in Congress — which thanks to gerrymandering, isn’t going anywhere until 2020. While the Republican field is already loaded with possible candidates — Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush III and Bobby Jindal – the Democratic field is apparently sealed: Hillary Clinton. RealClearPolitics finds Hillary getting 61 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary against Joe Biden (11), Elizabeth Warren (7),...

Trashing the "excessive secrecy" of the Bush administration, Barack Obama came into office pledging open government, but he has fallen far short of that promise. Former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie released their tough report at the Committee to Protect Journalists on the Obama administration’s tight control and aggressive prosecution of leaks. The first sentence: "In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press." What sets the Obama administration apart from others, said Downie, is not its attempt to control the media narrative but rather its shameless ability to do so.What’s significant here is...

The Obama-loving media couldn't wait to report findings from an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll concerning how the public are giving far more blame for the government shutdown to Republicans than the President. What they chose not to report was that 51 percent of respondents in the very same poll said of Barack Obama, "He is putting his own political agenda ahead of what's good for the country": I guess the majority of the nation feeling the President is putting his political agenda ahead of what's good for the country wasn't considered newsworthy by American so-called "journalists." Nor was it...

Recently, Peter King, the court jester of the House of Representatives, had this to say to PMSNBC's Andrea Mitchell about Tea Party heroes Rand Paul and Ted Cruz: *** "I'm really more concerned about why more Republicans around the country didn't join me in denouncing Ted Cruz. We now have people on the sidelines coming forward who we have to take a stand here. We cannot allow our party to be taken over by the likes of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. I mean, these are people, isolationists, I consider them RINOs, because they don't represent traditional Republican principles. Ted...

Rtightened his handcuffs. “I thought I’d be treated better ep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) said police who arrested him Tuesday by the Capitol Police than I was,” Rangel said on FOX Business Network Friday. Rangel was one of several Democratic lawmakers arrested by U.S. Capitol Police at an immigration reform rally on the National Mall. “I think they were trying to help me, but the cuffs were so tight that when I said loosen up the cuffs — and I wasn’t cursing then — in an attempt to loosen it up, one of the rookie cops actually tightened it,” he said....

So far more than 16,000 people have signed up for health insurance on Covered California, which is the state's way to access Obamacare.Right now Rakesh Rikhi pays $950 a month to insure himself, his wife and two children with Kaiser. He came to the health trust in San Jose to get help determining if the new affordable care act truly will be affordable. Rikhi was stunned to learn that through covered California he can get a similar Kaiser plan for his family for $400 less a month. He quickly did the math and found he had just saved $5,000 a...

Jonathan Bernstein considers what the pointless shutdown fight has done to Ted Cruz’s political prospects: It’s one thing to have a reputation as a loudmouth; it’s quite another to have a reputation as a loser. That’s what the shutdown fight has done to Cruz. Among true believers he’ll be the one who was a leader in a fight that surely would have won if the squishes hadn’t sold them out. But for most party actors, including many sympathetic to Tea Partyism, he’s going to be the guy who ran up the wrong hill. It would have been different if Cruz’s...

Talk about your government shutdown. Conservatives would have enjoyed watching liberal TV reporters sputter if President Bush had completely skipped the first row of reporters and picked only friendly reporters, even writers for conservative blog sites. But the media elites would have thrown a major tantrum about censorship -- including Jay Carney in his tenure at Time magazine. Put the shoe on the other foot, and the liberal media is pretty quiet. President Obama failed to call on TV reporters at his Wednesday press conference, even though he came to The Huffington Post for a shoe-shine question. Then Tommy Christopher...

One would think reports like this would be more than a worrisome to any reporter who prides themselves on even making a moderate attempt to report the truth. When President Obama first took office, he made the following claim. We were told that his administration would be the most honest and open presidency in modern American history. He made that statement in response to what he felt was far too much secrecy from the Bush administration. During his first four plus years in office, I wonder how Obama is doing with making good on that claim. My impression is not...

The Republicans are winning the fight over the government shut down. This, at any rate, is the conclusion that must be drawn from both the latest Associated Press poll as well as the terms in which it is described. The headline of the AP article is: “Poll: GOP gets the blame in shutdown.”Yet in the very first paragraph, the very first line, it is said that while Republicans are being held as “primarily responsible” for the (partial) shutdown, “public esteem” has soured on every player in this “struggle with no heroes.” In the following paragraph, we are told that, just...

That's been my impression of the coverage of the shutdown: The folks you see on TV are much too sure of themselves. They've been making too much of thin slices of polling and thinner historical precedents that might not apply this time around. There's been plenty of bullshit, in other words. We really don't know all that much about how the shutdown is going to be resolved, or how the long-term political consequences are going to play out.

Will Obamacare become plot fodder for CBS’ Hostages and Under The Dome? A $500,000 grant awarded this week to USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center’s Hollywood Health & Society program certainly suggests it’s a possibility. In the latest push to get Tinseltown to promote President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, the decade-old program has received the money from the private California Endowment to give Hollywood producers, writers and execs details about the newly launched health insurance initiative. “Our experience has shown that the public gets just as much, if not more, information about current events and important issues from their favorite television...

Quoting the NBC/Wall Street Journal Pollster, who says, "This is SHOCKING! You only see this once or twice in a lifetime." They follow with sob stories and fear-mongering, and haven't mentioned that it is OBAMA'S CHOICE that the death benefits are not being paid, and that VA offices are closed. Now, they are fear-mongering "VETERANS WON'T GET PAID!!!". Andrea Mitchell, "15 million people might not get checks!"

As Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sat down to be interviewed, the Comedy Central host opened his laptop and issued a challenge: "I'm going to try and download every movie ever made, and you're going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we'll see which happens first." The website for people who don't have health insurance through their employers opened on Oct. 1, but has been plagued with glitches. The administration said that was because the program is so popular, but even defenders such as Stewart didn't buy the explanation. HHS has declined to give numbers for...

Susan Reimer is a columnist for the the Baltimore Sun- a paper so liberal that Chris Mathews of MSNBC once laughed when a Philadelphia paper was incorrectly called centrist and he commented "About the only paper more liberal in America is the Baltimore Sun!" Her latest piece for the Sun is an article entitled "The moral consequence of watching football" In her column, she asks: "Is it morally acceptable to watch football when it is clear that the game is irretrievably harmful to those who play it?" and "How can you watch football when you know — and the players...

Update: ‘T-Hadists R Cancer’; Update: Total Twitter meltdown! In her latest anti-Tea Party rant, elderly pop star Cher tell her fans about a cartoon portrayal of “t-hadists,” which is Cher-speak for “Tea Party jihadists.” Grammar, spelling, punctuation, and logic have never been Cher’s strong points, but the message is clear enough: Cher believes American citizens who advocate for limited government are morally equivalent to the Islamic terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center buildings. * * * In related news, Twitchy reached out to Cher’s record label, Warner Brothers Music, and The X Factor, alerting them to Cher’s recent...

...........During an appearance on ABC’s Sunday program “This Week,” Boehner was asked what will happen if Obama maintains his position not to negotiate over raising the debt limit. “If he [Obama] continues to refuse to negotiate, the country is going to default?” a stunned George Stephanopoulos asked Boehner. “That’s the path we are on,” he replied. “I’m willing to sit down with the president, but his refusal to negotiate is putting our country at risk,” he added, reiterating it multiple times throughout the interview.......

<p>The story is being shushed around the family dinner table &#8212; and in newspaper city rooms &#8212; but all the neighbors are talking about it.</p> <p>What the neighbors are talking about are rumors of marital infidelity by Democratic White House front-runner John Kerry, and they have learned about them from the Internet, talk radio and the foreign press.</p>

Posted on Fri, Feb. 13, 2004 Kerry sex scandal lurking?Internet report cites suspicionsBy WILLIAM BUNCHbunchw@phillynews.com Here we go again?The worlds of politics and the media were all atwitter yesterday over a report on the popular Internet site, the Drudge Report, that Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry - the Democratic presidential front-runner - may be brought down by a sex scandal.Six years ago, it was a similar item on the Drudge Report that brought the world's attention to the affair between then-President Bill Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky - sparking the scandal that led to Clinton's impeachment.Late last night, Matt Drudge...

Arnold Groped Us! Six Women's Horror Stories" "Schwarzenegger Shocker: I Admire Hitler." No, these scoops did not appear first in the supermarket tabloids The National Enquirer, The Star or The Globe. The news breaks, albeit with significantly more subdued headlines, actually came from mainstream news organizations like The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and ABC News. The top supermarket tabloids, as of Sunday morning, had let such news about Mr. Schwarzenegger alone, content in the last seven weeks of the California recall campaign to stick to the ups and downs of Ben and J. Lo or Demi and...

<p>CARVILLE: Welcome back to CROSSFIRE. It's said the pen is the mightier than the sword. Then our next guest wields a mighty deadly weapon. Through is writings, he introduced us to Paula Jones and took on Anita Hill. Now he says he was blinded by the right.</p>

Washington, DC – Traditional Values Coalition Executive Director Andrea Lafferty complained today that an article in the Washington Post about the clothes worn by Supreme Court nominee John Roberts’ children was “unfair and disappointing.” Mrs. Lafferty said in a letter sent to Post Editor Leonard Downie, Jr. that the Post has now set a new pecking order for “unfair journalism which ignores substance and slides right into chortling about form.” “If you can’t come up with something disgusting about the actual nominee or his wife then rough-up the kids some and see what happens,” Mrs. Lafferty said today. Post fashion...

Has anyone else noticed that the silent majority seems to be involved in a silent boycott of all the biased news outlets that have been attacking President Bush, our military and the nation's Christian heritage this past year? If we believe a new report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations[1], which collects and monitors circulation data for newspapers and magazines, the liberal press is in deep doo-doo. Some of the nation's largest daily newspapers reported steep circulation declines and overall circulation is down across the industry. The top 20 papers suffered the biggest weekday and Sunday declines, among them the...

Media: As newspapers and TV networks struggle and the administration presumes to define a proper news organization, what does the journalism establishment demand? No fair if you guessed a government bailout. The dead giveaway answer came this week as Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor and current vice president at large of the Washington Post, along with Michael Schudson, a professor at the mission-fatigued Columbia Journalism School, debuted their role-playing as cash-strapped bankers and auto execs. The news business' tenuous hold on profitability, they lamented, has threatened its sustainability. They demanded massive government involvement. The duo released their full report,...

One more story about whether Paula Zahn is sexy, or how the bags under Greta Van Sustren's eyes vanished, or the size of the pistol in Geraldo Rivera's pocket, and Peter Jennings might scream. ''I find it a bit tedious,'' the longtime ABC News anchor said Wednesday of the burst of journalists-as-celebrities news coverage touched off over the past few months as Fox News and CNN raid one another's talent barns. ''I recognize that those of you who write about TV have to write something every day,'' Jennings said. (Observe the endless chain: Viewers blame everything on TV, which in ...

It was September 19, 1996. I woke early, hurriedly dressed for a long day at the office during campaign season, walked out the front door of our townhouse, opened the Washington Post and beheld a vast, above-the-fold, picture of Bob Dole falling off a stage at a campaign rally in a Little League field in Chico, California. It was so patently wrong, so unfair, so mean-spirited, so petty that anger, pity and sadness all fought inside me for equal time. I was not alone. Washington Post executive Leonard Downie Jr. received more than 150 irate calls that day. His response...

On April 8, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Boston conference on ''media reform.'' She was joined by four other congressmen, a senator, two FCC commissioners, a Nobel laureate and numerous liberal journalists. The 2,500-person event was sponsored by a group called Free Press, one of more than 180 different media-related organizations that receives money from liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros, who first made a name for himself in investing and currency trading, now makes his name in politics and policy. Since the 2004 election, the controversial financier has used his influence and billions to push a laundry list...

"WHERE HAVE ALL THE READERS GONE?" headlined the August edition of Washingtonian magazine's Post-watch page, in reporting that the Washington Post's average daily circulation has – in just one year – dropped 23,814 – or 64 losses per day. "We can guess. We can speculate. We can estimate," said Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie, who did not deny circulation was dropping. Newspaper analyst John Morton noted: "Theoretically, this is the best newspaper market in the country. It's surprising that the Post is losing ground like this." The Post, now down to 772,553 daily, is this nation's fifth largest. Washingtonian magazine...

Pincus: Woodward 'Asked Me to Keep Him Out' of Plame Reporting By Joe Strupp Published: November 16, 2005 12:45 PM ET NEW YORK Walter Pincus, the longtime Washington Post reporter and one of several journalists who testified in the Valerie Plame case, said he believed as far back as 2003 that Bob Woodward had some involvement in the case but he did not pursue the information because Woodward asked him not to. "He asked me to keep him out of the reporting and I agreed to do that," Pincus said today. His comments followed a Post story today about Woodward's...

The book appears to be meticulously researched and reported. It is replete with copious footnotes, a detailed index and two appendices. First-hand witnesses are named and quoted verbatim to support each specific, shocking charge. Each charge of false heroics is logically presented. Theauthors quote the official Navy citation and then present the purported eyewitnesstestimony that refutes the official finding. The witnesses who are summoned forth are officers and men who served simultaneously with Mr. Kerry in Coastal Division 11 and purport to be eyewitnesses to the events in question. And yet, there is another group of men, the sailors who...