Free Republic

So far, I have heard nothing in response to my email to Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson about their possible coordination with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Congressman Henry Waxman or other Democrats in writing the article about the Keystone pipeline that I critiqued here> and here. I will follow up with them in due course. In the meantime, I have written the following letter to Whitehouse and Waxman: Dear Senator Whitehouse and Congressman Waxman: On March 26, you wrote a letter to David Robertson, President of Koch Industries, about Koch’s ostensible relationship to the Keystone Pipeline. I found

On Thursday, the Washington Post published an article by Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin titled “The biggest lease holder in Canada’s oil sands isn’t Exxon Mobil or Chevron. It’s the Koch brothers.” The article’s first paragraph included this claim: The biggest lease holder in the northern Alberta oil sands is a subsidiary of Koch Industries, the privately-owned cornerstone of the fortune of conservative Koch brothers Charles and David. The theme of the article was that the Keystone Pipeline is all about the Koch brothers; or, at least, that this is a plausible claim. The Post authors relied on a report...

 Which is it? Are the Koch brothers the largest land owner in Canada’s oil sands or not? The two reporters who worked on the same article don’t seem to agree. In fact, the original article was such a mess, the Washington Post today ran a follow-up piece headlined, “Why we wrote about the Koch Industries and its leases in Canada’s oil sands.”Credit for that critical second look goes to John Hinderaker of Powerline, who thoroughly debunked the Post’s original piece, concluding that the Post “relied uncritically on a goofball far-left report” provided by the anti-Keystone XL pipeline activist group the...

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus suggested former President Bill Clinton was not entirely culpable for his affair with Monica Lewinsky Monday on MSNBC. The comment came in the context of a discussion about Sen. Rand Paul’s (R., Ky.) comments yesterday where he accused President Clinton of “predatory behavior” toward his former White House intern. Marcus said Republicans seem to address female sexuality only in the contexts of victimization or promiscuity. To evidence her point, Marcus added she did not believe Monica Lewinsky was an entirely “innocent victim” in the scandal. “I recall some thong flashing there,” she said. Full exchange:...

On Friday, as I noted on Saturday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told public radio's Susan Arbetter that "extreme conservatives" – that is, people who are pro-life, understand the clear meaning of the Second Amendment, or wish to keep marriage as it has traditionally been defined – "have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are." Note well that Cuomo's remarks are still not news at the Associated Press's national site. On Sunday, Cuomo's people sent and released an "open letter" containing a very inaccurate transcription of the original interview accusing the New...

White people are racist. All white people all the time. If there’s any case ever of a white person not being racist, it’s probably because he’s racist. Are you white? Do you pay attention to black murderers? It must be because you’re racist? Wait, you don’t pay attention to black murderers? It’s because you’re racist. Why aren’t you paying attention to black murderers? We’ve moved on, apparently. Barely 48 hours after a gunman murdered 12 people and injured others in another U.S. bloodbath, the national news media had other things on their minds. … Some of the mystery of the...

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...

The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations. Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses. Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60...

Let´s start by going through the Post´s article to create a list of journalists married to or closely related to officials within the Obama administration. The size and scope of this is bad enough. But what is most troubling is how high up this incest occurs in the worlds of both the media and the Obama administration: •ABC News President Ben Sherwood, who is the brother of Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a top national-security adviser to President Obama. •His counterpart at CBS, news division president David Rhodes, is the brother of Benjamin Rhodes, a key foreign-policy specialist. •CNN’s deputy Washington

Washington Post reporters Karen DeYoung and Scott Wilson (prompted, undoubtedly, by Team Obama) find that David Petraeus is to blame for the trouble in which the administration finds itself over the Benghazi talking points. It’s not exactly a case of “blame the dead guy” — more like blame the unfaithful guy, even if he is an American hero. In the Post’s telling, Petraeus drafted talking points that exceeded the scope of what the House Intelligence Committee asked for. Thus, the talking points had to be changed, and that led to Benghazigate. Team Obama’s defense has thus come full circle.

The debauchery at the Huffington Post knows no bounds. On Monday, the website actually offered readers a slideshow of the best places to lose one's virginity in San Francisco, and coming in seventh was under the Mount Davidson Cross, one of the city's most beloved religious landmarks: To the right of this slide was the following: For those unfamiliar, here's how this landmark is described at MountDavidsonCross.org: Set atop the highest geographical point in San Francisco, the Mt. Davidson Cross is one of the world’s tallest crosses and among the city’s most cherished landmarks. Today, the Council of Armenian-American Organizations...

**SNIP** This is already clear on the budget, as Mr. Obama insists on a second tax increase that Republicans can't accept. We're also increasingly worried about White House sabotage on immigration reform, as it pushes the bill left on a guest-worker program and enforcement. Mr. Obama is doing exactly what you'd expect if he doesn't want a deal and plans to use the issue to drive minority turnout in 2014. It's important to understand how extraordinary this is. Presidents typically try to secure major bipartisan deals in their fifth or sixth years, before their political capital ebbs. That's what Bill...

The governor on Monday sidestepped a decision about whether a condemned inmate was too fat to be humanely executed by sparing the prisoner on the grounds that he had poor legal representation. Gov. John Kasich's decision to grant clemency to Ronald Post mirrored the recommendation of mercy by the state parole board, which said it didn't doubt Post's guilt but said there were too many problems with how he was represented 30 years ago. Post, who weighs 450 pounds, never raised the issue of his size with the board. And Kasich, who commuted Post's sentence to life with no chance...

Remember that distant time so long ago when Obama promised that he would end our old backward policy of supporting tyrants in order to win over the Arab Street. And here we are, four years later, and Obama is supporting a tyrant in Cairo, a problem that has even broken into the normally supportive pages of the Washington Post. How did Washington become the best friend of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, even as President Mohamed Morsi was asserting dictatorial powers and his followers were beating up secular liberals in the streets of Cairo? It’s a question many Arabs ask...

The Board of Directors of The Washington Post Company (WPO) today announced ... an accelerated cash dividend ... This accelerated dividend is intended by the Board to be in lieu of regular quarterly dividends that the Company otherwise would have declared and paid in calendar year 2013

<p>A federal judge said on Monday that an Ohio death row inmate weighing more than 450 pounds cannot be given a stay of execution because of his obesity.</p> <p>Ronald Post, 53, is scheduled to be executed January 16 for the 1983 aggravated murder of hotel clerk Helen Vantz in Elyria, Ohio.</p>

In recent months, the Huffington Post entered the world of video news with its debut of “HuffPost Live.” One might suspect that it was little more than a video version of the leftist website founded seven years ago by Arianna Huffington. Yet a blog known as HuffWatch has been documenting the content at both websites and has discovered a grim, though unsurprising reality: both Huffington Post and HuffPost Live are repositories of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel vitriol. Leading the charge at HuffPost Live is host/producer Ahmed Shihab-Eldin. Shihab-Eldin’s bio asserts he has Palestinian heritage and is a former producer and co-host...

Many of us had great hesitation about Romney as a candidate. He just was too centrist for our liking. THEN... the debates hit. I personally saw a man I could join with him in his race.Suddenly we had the benefit of actually really liking the man we all wanted to defeat Obama. However, please remember this....... We want to get Obama out of office as priority number 1. It was our impression that shifted towards him. In all likely hood he will not govern from the right. I am saying this because I do not want people to have the...

A detailed CIA timeline of the assault on U.S. facilities in Benghazi paints an anguishing picture of embattled Americans waiting for Libyan local security forces that didn’t come and courageous CIA officers who died on a rooftop without the heavy weapons they needed, trying to protect their colleagues below. It’s a story of individual bravery, but also of a CIA misjudgment in relying on Libyan militias and a newly formed Libyan intelligence organization to keep Americans safe in Benghazi. While there were multiple errors that led to the final tragedy, there’s no evidence that the White House or CIA leadership...

Huffington Post chose some rather odd rhetoric to identify Romney's Jewish fans that were eager to get the candidate's photo at a Wednesday appearance. The Aug. 8 HuffPo posting carries the odd headline, "Mitt Romney's Motorcade Chased By Pack Of Orthodox Jews." Apparently a wedding party made up of Orthodox Jews spied Mitt Romney's motorcade arriving at the hotel where their celebration was being held and a group of them ran to the procession hoping to get photos of the GOP candidate. Huffington Post highlighted the story as related by a member of the Romney press pool but the border-line