Free Republic

Amid reports that the Obama administration is refusing to share information regarding Iran with Israel as “punishment” for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s upcoming speech before Congress, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius on Monday provided new details into the tensions between Jerusalem and Washington. According to Ignatius’s column, the mistrust between the Obama administration and Netanyahu has widened even further in recent days because of suspicion in the United States that the Israeli prime minister has authorized leaks of details about the U.S. nuclear talks with Iran. “The decision to reduce the exchange of sensitive information about the Iran talks was...

PHILADELPHIA – President Obama on Thursday asked wary House Democrats to hold their fire, while the administration negotiates several trade deals opposed by scores of liberal lawmakers. “Keep your powder a little dry,” he told the Democrats assembled here for an annual retreat, according to a source in the closed-door session. "Get informed," Obama also advised, "not by reading The Huffington Post." The president has long sought pacts expanding trade with both Asian and European nations, as well as trade promotion authority, known as "fast-track," from Congress. The issue has sharply divided the Democrats, as centrists tend to support the...

Post Holdings will buy Lakeville-based MOM Brands for $1.15 billion, combining the nation’s third and fourth largest breakfast cereal makers. The deal, announced Monday morning, will give publicly traded Post a presence in the growing bagged cereal and hot cereal businesses, two of MOM Brands’ strongholds. Privately-owned MOM Brands, which has a big cereal plant in Northfield, is known for its Malt-O-Meal brand. The 95-year-old company has grown steadily over the past 15 years, particularly capturing share in the low-price or “value” segment of the cold cereal business.

Can't see how you would repeat an already posted article on Free Republic.

Thank God for the Wonk Book (WB) run by the Washington Post.For readers who have no idea what the Wonk Book is, it’s a blog run by some Poindexter types at the Post, who get use the amazing and changing D.C. buzzwords like “narrative,” “meme,” “optics,” and “pivot” to make themselves sound important and in-the-know. “Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important?” asked the Simpsons character forever to be called “Writer,” about his generation of “wonks,” known back then as “TV executives”.Yes. Yes, they are.At times the Wonk Book is insufferable, and at times it’s hilarious-...

I've had this problem for quite some time but have never bothered to find out why. I occasionally try to post a line or two in font sizes larger than 4, but I have found I am unable to do so. Is there any specific reason for this? Is there any way I can post in font sizes larger than "4" on a regular basis? Any help or assistance on this matter is greatly appreciated.

Some years ago, when I moved overseas, someone very kindly showed me how to change a setting for the forum that allowed me to display the article post times in the overseas timezone. Now I'm back in the US, but have lost the set of instructions for changing it back. Can someone help?

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...