Free Republic

Remember when George Stephanopoulos declared during an interview with Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer that the book had found no “smoking gun” against the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons themselves? Guess what Stephanopoulos didn’t declare — his own financial contributions to an organization that Sunlight Foundation official Bill Allison said operates like “a slush fund for the Clintons.” Dylan Byers at Politico discovered a smoking gun aimed at the credibility of Stephanopoulos as a journalist: ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos has given $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation in recent years, charitable contributions that he did not publicly disclose...

GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz said today that ABC News anchor and former Clinton White House staffer George Stephanopoulos has no business moderating any 2016 presidential debates. Cruz was asked in the Senate hallway this afternoon whether Stephanopoulos should host any debates following today’s revelation that he gave $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation without it disclosing it while officially covering the organization for ABC News. “Of course not,” Cruz responded, according to a transcript provided to The Federalist by one of his campaign communications staffers. “Debates should not be moderated by partisan Democrats who are actively supporting one of...

ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos got deeper in hot water Thursday with his network, which revised upward to $75,000 the amount of money he contributed to the Clinton Foundation without full disclosure to the network or viewers -- while he was covering Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and foundation controversies. Stephanopoulos apologized Thursday and said he should have revealed the contributions, which were initially reported at $50,000. But an ABC official told Fox News on Thursday afternoon the anchor has changed that number, to $75,000. He is also pledging not to moderate any presidential debates, Fox News has learned. The...

This entire phony genre of journalism is now well beyond embarrassing. Do you know what a fact is? That’s easy. Of course you do. Fact is an objective truth not subject to interpretation or dispute. Water is liquid if it’s above 32 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s a fact. Thursday comes after Wednesday. That’s a fact. The address of the White House is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. People who deal in actual facts can recognize that an assertion is either fact-based or its not. It’s really not that complicated. That’s for normal people who understand what a fact is. But there are other...

This weekend, a dozen Republican presidential hopefuls showed up at the South Carolina Freedom Summit. They were there to court primary voters who will winnow the presidential field next February. Judging from the speeches, it’s going to be an ugly race. What the candidates are selling, and primary voters are buying, is vituperation against people who don’t look, talk, or pray like the Republican base.............. [SNIP of stuff that sounds good to me - Santorum was on fire] ...............Mexicans, Muslims, gays, rats, roaches. Christian superiority, military contempt for the president, and gauntlets thrown down to queer-loving CEOs. It’s going to...

By Ben Kamisar - The former Navy SEAL who says he killed Osama bin Laden is slamming a new report that challenges the White House’s account of the mission, calling it “garbage.” “The story that I read, the part from [Seymour] Hersh, was full of lies,” Rob O’Neill said on Fox News's "Shepard Smith Reporting." “It took me a long time to read it because I had to put it down — I couldn’t read the nonsense.” Hersh on Sunday published in story in the London Review of Books that says Pakistani intelligence officers played a significant role in the...

Welcome to day 29 of the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign! In those 29 days -- including April 12, the day she announced, and today -- Clinton has taken a total of eight questions from the press. That breaks out to roughly one question every 3.6 days. Of late, she's taken even fewer questions than that.

On Saturday, Michelle Obama gave the commencement speech at Tuskegee University in Alabama. Although she is the first black first lady married to the first black president who was elected twice by a majority white electorate, with a cabinet that includes the the first (and second) black Atorneys General, a black Secretary of Homeland Security, a black National Security Advisor, a black Senior Advisor to the President and a black Supreme Court Justice (although he doesn’t count), listening to her comments, you’d think we were still living under (the Democrat-supported) Jim Crow laws before the Civil Rights Act (which more...

Ted Cruz issued this statement on his Facebook today in defense of Mark Halperin for his apology over stereotypical Cuban questions he asked in an interview: Mark Halperin is a serious and fair-minded journalist. Today he kindly issued an apology for some silly questions he…Posted by Ted Cruz on Monday, May 11, 2015   Below is Mark Halperin’s apology: We wanted to talk with Senator Cruz about his outreach to Latino voters the day after he spoke at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. My intent was to give the Senator a chance to speak further about his heritage and personal...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Bloomberg Television's "With All Due Respect," hosted by Game Change co-authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, is probably the object of more ridicule from Beltway and Manhattan insiders than any other news show on television. That's not an opinion, it's a fact. The vast majority of the Gang of 500, a term coined by Halperin many moons ago, thinks the show is really bad. Which is a problem, because the Gang of 500 is Halperin and Heilemann's target audience. The rest of America doesn't watch the show. Although Ruben Navarette, a San Diego-based columnist, did happen upon Halperin's interview with...

In March 2014, pioneering Internet company Mozilla announced the appointment of co-founder Brendan Eich as CEO. That same day, a Twitter mob exploded with criticism of Eich. Gay rights supporters were angry about a 6-year-old donation of $1,000 to the “Yes on 8” campaign, which sought to ban same-sex marriage in California in 2008. It’s OK to be angry about Eich’s donation. Screaming for Eich’s head on a pike for his failure to conform to Mozilla’s majority view on same-sex marriage is not. Liberals are supposed to believe in protecting minority views, even when they disapprove of those views. Instead...

Comedian, actress, singer and San Francisco native Margaret Cho is tackling topics like police brutality and racism on her upcoming tour. Cho's "psyCHO Tour" is scheduled to stop at San Francisco's Castro Theatre on October 15. "This show is about insanity, and about the anger I feel about everything happening in the world right now, from police brutality to racism to the rising tide of violence against women," Cho said in a statement. "When men go off on something - they are 'passionate' and 'driven' and when women go off on something we are 'hysterical' and 'crazy.' I'm trying to...

For sustaining evidence of a world gone nuts with the media’s steady, selective and frightened compliance, there’s Delmon Young — now with the Orioles, who spent the week here playing the Mets, then Yankees. But first the lasting legacy of John Rocker — the big, white, not too bright Braves pitcher quoted in Sports Illustrated making bigoted, ethnic and racist remarks about NYC’s inhabitants. Though he broke no laws or jaws, Rocker, at 24, became a national symbol of hate, a pariah, too. On TV, radio and in print — “Saturday Night Live” to “The CBS Evening News with Dan...

RUSH: This is from the "Monkey Cage" section of the Washington Post: "Blacks Die Sooner than Whites. How Many Votes Has This Cost Democrats?" This is an honest-to-God story by Dean Robinson. "Black people in the United States continue to be sicker and die sooner than whites. ... [T]hey suffer from 'excess mortality' -- that is, black deaths that would not have occurred had the death rate among blacks been the same as that among whites." So we have here, as now documented in the Washington Post, yet another terrible inequity that is distinctly American: The death rate inequality. So...

Pobody's Nerfect. On Monday afternoon, Bloomberg Politics editor and MSNBC senior burrito correspondent Mark Halperin apologized for an interview two weeks ago in which he ham-handedly quizzed Senator and 2016 presidential hopeful Ted Cruz (R-TX) on his Cuban heritage. In the interview Halperin questioned Cruz on his Hispanic appeal, even his consumption of Cuban dishes, and offered to let Cruz welcome Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders to the race en Español. The interview flew under the radar until it was torn to shreds by San Jose Mercury-News columnist Ruben Navarrette this weekend. “As a Hispanic, I felt like I was watching...

George Zimmerman was involved in a shooting incident in Lake Mary on Monday afternoon, according to Lake Mary Police Chief Steve Bracknell. The shooting involved two men and happened on Lake Mary Boulevard, police said. Officers at the scene said it appeared Zimmerman suffered a minor gunshot wound, Bracknell said. In January, Zimmerman was accused of assault by his girlfriend, but no charges were filed after she recanted her allegation. He was also arrested in November 2013 on domestic violence allegations after his girlfriend called police. His girlfriend later recanted her story and charges were never filed. Zimmerman was acquitted...

Experts estimate there will be less than a year's worth of drinking water in California reservoir's at the end of 2015 Yet the rich and famous of Los Angeles continue to water their lawns with apparently no concern for conservation Photographer John Chapple recently went out in a helicopter to photography the ever-green lawns of Kim Kardashian, Barbara Streisand and Petra Eccelstone among others

As these aerial photos from The Post prove, Hollywood celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Barbra Streisand and Jennifer Lopez continue to suck up water to keep their gardens fresh and lawns green, while Southern California withers from a devastating drought. Experts predict California reservoirs have less than a year’s worth of drinking water left. An emergency law passed last week forces local cities to conserve water immediately. The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which supplies many of these elite enclaves north of Los Angeles, will have four weeks starting next month to cut water use by a staggering 36 percent. But the mandate is...

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina apparently has learned something about registering website domain names. Shortly after the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive announced her campaign last week, she found out that a cybersquatter had bought the rights to carlyfiorina.org and was using it to criticize her record. Chuck Todd of NBC News brought up the issue while interviewing Fiorina on "Meet the Press" and showed the website, which features row after row of frowny-face emoticons representing 30,000 people laid off during her Hewlett-Packard tenure from 1999 to 2005.

Broadcast networks have taken their cues from The New York Times, except when it publishes stories about babies that they don’t like. A study released Wednesday by The New England Journal of Medicine documented thousands of premature births to discover a small number of babies born at 22 weeks, with medical treatment available to them, survived with few health implications. The findings that could “affect the abortion debate” landed on the front page of the May 7 New York Times and garnered attention from NBC’s Today. Other media, like ABC and CBS, stayed silent during their morning and evening news...