Free Republic

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said on [March 25, 2008, that] she made a mistake when she claimed she had come under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia in 1996 while she was first lady. In a speech in Washington and in several interviews last week Clinton described how she and her daughter, Chelsea, ran for cover under hostile fire shortly after her plane landed in Tuzla, Bosnia. Several news outlets disputed the claim, and a video of the trip showed Clinton walking from the plane, accompanied by her daughter. . . "I did make a mistake in talking...

The waters have been choppy for NBC News in recent years, with its “Today” franchise having ceded ground to ABC’s “Good Morning America” and its Sunday-morning mainstay “Meet the Press” struggling to find a new identity after the death of longtime host Tim Russert. Amidst that chaos, Brian Williams was supposed to be the anchor – in both senses of the word. Now Williams, whose “NBC Nightly News” is the most watched evening newscast in the United States, has added to the challenges facing the NBCUniversal news division. [Snip] What makes Williams’ admission worse, according to one person familiar with...

President Obama was shocked and irritated by Mitt Romney's concession call in the 2012 presidential election - and claimed Romney insinuated that Obama won only by getting out the black vote, according to a new book by presidential campaign strategist David Axelrod. Obama was "unsmiling during the call, and slightly irritated when it was over," Axelrod writes. The president hung up and said Romney admitted he was surprised at his own loss, Axelrod wrote. "'You really did a great job of getting the vote out in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee,' in other words, black people,'" Obama said, paraphrasing Romney....

"In “Believer: My 40 Years in Politics,” former senior Obama adviser David Axelrod writes that the GOP candidate implied on the call that Obama had won because of his popularity in black communities, according to the New York Daily News, which acquired an advance copy of the book. Obama was “unsmiling during the call, and slightly irritated when it was over,” according to Axelrod. “‘You really did a great job of getting out the vote in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee,’ in other words, black people. That’s what he thinks this was all about,” Obama said after he hung up...

ulture: An unlikely issue has entered the infant 2016 presidential campaign: Vaccines and required vaccinations. Let's hope the fact there's no scientific link to autism or anything else isn't lost in the political fray. Candidates will often look for an edge over their opponents. Thus, both New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky recently suggested that, while vaccinations are good, forcing parents to vaccinate their children might be too much. We believe vaccines are safe and should be routine, but concern about parents' rights is not unreasonable. What really gripes us, however, is listening to the...

Say what you will about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but the man can deliver a joke. Speaking at Washington’s tony Alfalfa Club dinner on Saturday night, the Republican spared few targets, the New York Times reports. McConnell poked fun at himself, new inductee Mitt Romney, and fellow members of the U.S. Senate, including a particularly incendiary Tea Party Republican from Texas. McConnell noted that Cruz — the anti-Obamacare crusader who spearheaded the 2013 government shutdown, thereby earning the enmity of many fellow Republicans — had once proclaimed that he would throw himself in front of a moving train, if...

The New York Times has a breathless announcement: Most Republicans Back Climate Action! Except, it's not most Republicans; by the Time's own numbers, it's only 48%, and even that number is very suspect. If they can't honesty portray their own cooked up numbers, how honest can the underlying poll be? This is the classic way that the Left shifts public opinion; they cook up a poll, produce results they like, and then use it as a club to make whatever they want. They can get the results they like either by leading questions, asking unrepresentative samples, or just by plain...

Ed. Note: The biggest Hollywood box office hit these days is “American Sniper,” the hagiography biopic of Chris Kyle, the sniper from Texas who had 160 confirmed kills and possibly many more in Iraq. Two of the most passionate antiwar activists in the country over the past few years have been Celeste Zappala, of the First United Methodist Church of Germantown and Gold Star Families Speak Out, whose son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was killed in Baghdad on April 26, 2004, and Cindy Sheehan, whose son, Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, was killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004. The following article...

correction appearing in the New York Times quietly unravels what has become a major story as phony agitprop, intended to discredit the leaders of Israel and the House of Representatives. Of course, the story is still believed by many, and has well served those in the White House and media who created and disseminated it. Omri Ceren spotted the correction and explained on Twitter: NYT tries to promote anti-Netanyahu talking point that #Israel blindsided Obama. They got just 1 tiny detail wrong.

Last year, government scientists tell us, was the hottest year on record. This news is terribly — what's the word? — inconvenient. No, not for polar bears or drought victims or coastal dwellers. It's inconvenient for politicians across the country who, despite whatever data or overwhelming scientific consensus might be proffered, insist on denying global warming. In recent weeks, West Virginia has snatched national headlines for its attempts to doctor school science standards to discredit climate change. The sixth-grade science curriculum, for example, was amended so that, rather than having students "clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the...

Bill Maher is throwing some shade on President Obama's credentials as a supposed champion of freedom of the press. The host of HBO's "Real Time" sat down Friday to discuss media coverage of secret government work with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, one of the journalists centrally involved in bringing revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to light. "I don't understand why he is perhaps the worst president we've had on clamping down on the press," Maher said. "He's used the Espionage Act more than any other president, right?" Maher added. Other members of the media have blasted...

Title only:"Obama Signs Executive Order Closing Congress" But that says enough

You say "Jeb Bush," Thomas Roberts says "the Kouachi brothers." It's got to be one of the strangest political Rorschach test results of all time. MSNBC's Roberts believes that Jeb Bush would have a "big onus" around his neck if he runs for president "because if we hear 'Bush' we're automatically going to go to people bringing up the Kouachi brothers and their photos of Abu Ghraib that radicalized them about Iraq." View the video here.

Media Yawn at Obama and Biden Snubbing Auschwitz Anniversary; Mocked Cheney’s Appearance in 2005 By Curtis Houck | January 28, 2015 Tuesday marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and, naturally, the event attracted plenty of media coverage. In addition to each of the three major networks devoting segments to it on their evening newscasts, the Associated Press, The New York Times, and The Washington Post and published stories on the topic. Over on cable, CNN covered it multiple times throughout the day for a total of 10 minutes and 27 seconds worth of airtime. At the other...

CNN Host Kisses De Blasio Before Interview; Chris Cuomo Complains About Waiting for Hot Cocoa

It would not surprise me if, at the next Republican National Convention, Benjamin Netanyahu took a seat in the delegates-from-abroad section. The Israeli leader has both allied and associated himself with congressional Republicans who differ with President Obama over whether to impose additional sanctions on Iran and who also — let’s not beat around the bush — hate his guts. Their foreign policy is actually a domestic one: to destroy the president. Whether this is political or personal — or a combination of the two — is beside the point. Whatever the case, when Netanyahu accepted John Boehner’s invitation to...

The usually grim-faced media mogul practically swooned in his seat. Moments after Jeb Bush delivered what many in the audience described as an unremarkable talk at a conference in Washington, Rupert Murdoch turned to his seatmate, Valerie Jarrett, the White House adviser, to gush over its content and tone. Mr. Murdoch was pleased that Mr. Bush, the former governor of Florida, had listed the economic benefits of overhauling the nation’s immigration system, confiding in Ms. Jarrett that Mr. Bush, a likely Republican presidential candidate, had said all the right things on the fraught issue, according to three people with firsthand...

The self-important Boston Globe ran an editorial that is a microcosm of how the Left manages to be so consistently wrong on so many substantive issues. The piece had to do with the supposed wrongheadedness of Republican House Speaker John Boehner. It seems that according to the Globe, Boehner has committed some kind of treasonous act by inviting Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, to address a joint session of Congress without asking permission from their boss President Barack Obama. The writer moans that such an undercutting of Obama’s authority will damage the delicate negotiations Obama is in with the Iranians;...

The New York Times launched some weapons grade stupidity on Sunday with an article by Rod Nordland and Eric Schmitt citing “experts” claiming that the Iranian-backed Houthi militias in Yemen that have swept though critical parts of the country, including the capital Sanaa, are not just moderates, but possible U.S. counter-terrorism partners.Because of the ongoing Houthi offensive, Yemen’s Information Minister admitted last week that the government had lost effective control of the country. JUST IN: Yemeni Info Minister @NadiaSakkaf tells me government control in Yemen is "almost non-existent". Intv airs 8pm CET // 2pm ET— Christiane Amanpour (@camanpour) January...

It's official: Nicolle Wallace really doesn't like Sarah Palin. On today's Morning Joe, Wallace—who was Palin's chief handler during the 2008 campaign—took the occasion of Palin's speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday to jab at the former veep candidate. Wallace had been asked to comment on conservative columnist Byron York's panning of Palin's speech as "long, rambling, and at times barely coherent." York's column also passed along criticism of the speech by a number of Iowa Republicans. Wallace said that it was interesting to see York come "full circle," since back in 2008 he had been a staunch...