Free Republic

SNIPPET: "There are some good reasons for allowing at least a few jihadi forums to operate." SNIPPET: "However, there are limits to our ability to exploit all the intelligence opportunities a forum may present. To put it another way, jihadi forums contribute to future terrorism in ways that are unpredictable and/or beyond our ability to control. This would be the view held by those other government agencies who prefer to seek out and destroy forums and to take down forum activists. For my part, I can live with keeping online those forums we have sufficient access to monitor and resources...

And you thought this weekend was going to be all about Donald Trump! Probably only one other lightening-rod VIP could have stolen the mogul’s buzz in the pro-am zeitgeist tournament known as the White House Correspondents’ weekend, and darned if she didn’t pull a surprise appearance. You betcha, she did. Sarah Palin walked into the Georgetown home of Mark Ein shortly before noon Saturday to dazzle a brunch crowd of Washington insiders and visiting luminaries. Black bell-sleeved summer dress, shiny hair. She and a clean-shaven Todd Palin posed for a few photos with hosts Wendi Murdoch and Susan Axelrod, then...

Guess who came to brunch? The hockey mom herself, Sarah Palin, attended Tammy Haddad's annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner brunch on Saturday. The former vice presidential candidate was immediately enveloped by a large crowd on a patio after making her entrance with Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren. Palin spent some time posing for pictures with both Dems and R's alike. About an hour later, she took off with Van Susteren.

Last night on my radio program, I read an open letter to Fox News president Roger Ailes written by Sharon Rondeau of The Post & Email, taking him to task for not reporting on and investigating Barack Obama's background and Constitutional presidential eligibility.It reminded me of another letter written nearly two years ago by John Hemenway, Esq. to Rupert Murdoch, CEO of NewsCorp., parent company of Fox News...May 14, 2009Dear Rupert,

In the wake of the tragic shooting in Tuscon, Ariz. that left six dead and 14 injured, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Fox News President Roger Ailes is saying that his network and others in politics and the media need to "tone it down." In an interview with Russell Simmons, published today by Simmons' website Global Grind, Ailes addressed the tragedy and the partisan rhetoric some say is to blame for the incident. Ailes to some extent defended Sarah Palin's use of crosshairs imagery during the 2010 campaign, arguing that such rhetoric was not uncommon in politics. Palin has come under...

I'm going out on a very short limb with a prediction for the new year: Sarah Palin will announce later in the coming year her intention to seek the GOP nomination for the presidency in 2012. And, oh, how the talking heads will talk, for days on end, upstaging disasters natural and man-made. The world will watch in amazement as this femme of Facebook, this whiz of Twitter, this marionette of Murdoch who has become the Paris Hilton of politics – famous for being famous and little more – will hijack endless hours of broadcast media and spill the ink...

New Orleans It’s amazing how we become inured to the ridiculous, even when it is abusive and preposterous. That’s my cut on Glenn Beck and his ranting, especially when he evokes me as anti-christ and revolutionary. Over the last couple of years, whenever I would mention the absurdity of it all, too often it would end up on Beck’s show on another whiteboard of whackiness, so I followed Huey Long’s old dictum that there is no real defense for a public attack and let it all run off of me like water off a duck’s back. When I flew into...

When people see a Jewish prime minister treated badly by an American president, they see a more isolated Jewish state. We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews. For the first decades after Israel’s founding, this war was conventional in nature. The goal was straightforward: to use military force to overrun Israel. Well before the Berlin Wall came down, that approach had clearly failed. Then came phase two: terrorism. Terrorists targeted Israelis both home and abroad – from the massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich to the second intifada. The terrorists continue to target...

Evidence accrues that Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News and a favorite target of venom-spewing liberals, is actually a liberal himself. Here he is joining forces with über-moonbat Michael Bloomberg to endorse amnesty for the up to 38 million "law-abiding" illegal aliens who have invaded our country in contemptuous violation of our laws — thereby rolling out the red carpet for tens of millions more: Communist thug Maxine Waters just can't seem to figure out why one of her fellow leftists would be running the opposition media, instead of using Fox News to bludgeon us with the exact same propaganda...

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier. Vive la révolution! There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous...

As you may know, FOX News’ second biggest shareholder, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal–an Islamic terrorism financier–is also a big financier of the Ground Zero Mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Back in 2005, I was the first to report that the Prince bought 5.46% of FOX News parent company, News Corp. Since then, he increased his stake and ties with FOX News owner Rupert Murdoch, as I’ve also noted on this site. As I’ve also reported, Al-Waleed was a large donor to Palestinian homicide bomber telethons, hates America, etc. That’s why I call FOX News Channel, “PAWNN”–the Prince Al-Waleed News...

News Corp., which owns Fox News and the New York Post, gave $1 million to Haley Barbour's Republican Governors Association this year, according to the RGA's most recent filing. The company's media outlets play politics more openly than most, but the huge contribution to a party committee is a new step toward an open identification between Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and the GOP. The company's highest-ranking Democratic executive, Peter Chernin, recently departed. The $1 million contribution this June 24 was first reported by Bloomberg and appears on the RGA's July 15 filing with the Internal Revenue Service. The group's other...

Winds howl over the deserted moonscape behind Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper paywallsCory Doctorow at 7:45 AM Friday, Jul 16, 2010 Newser's Michael Wolff has a report from behind Rupert Murdoch's notorious UK paywalls which went up this month around The Times and Sunday Times's sites, which are apparently ghost-towns, unpeopled even by the print subscribers who get free access but can't be arsed to log in (and never follow links to Times stories, since chances are anyone in a position to make such a link doesn't have an account for the site). The wider implications of this emptiness are only...

Eighteen months in, the Obama presidency is in as dreadful shape as one can imagine. He’ll almost certainly lose the House in the fall elections; and now it’s looking like he could lose the theoretically impregnable Democratic majority in the Senate. What’s more, he has, to an astonishing degree, been unable to communicate even the remotest sense of who he is to the nation: a middle-of-the-roader, by any estimation, and yet a majority of the country thinks he’s a “socialist.” In the summer before his election, Obama had a secret meeting with that dark master of realpolitik, Rupert Murdoch, who...

Chief executives of several major corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney and News Corp., are joining Mayor Michael Bloomberg to form a coalition advocating for immigration reform — including a path to legal status for all undocumented immigrants now in the United States. The group includes several other big-city mayors and calls itself the Partnership for a New American Economy.

There's no question Fox News is killing its competition in the ratings. And the reason is quite simple according to Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWSA), the parent company of Fox News. On Fox News Channel's May 4 "Your World with Neil Cavuto," Murdoch credited the success of Fox News to the void it fills as people are concerned about the political direction of the nation. He explained with that, his network draws viewers since other networks lean liberal, which is the dominant view of those in power in Washington, D.C. "Well, I think as Fox News...

A rebirth for Rupert Murdoch? By having his children baptised in the River Jordan, perhaps the head of News Corp is signalling his own conversion This week's Hello Magazine has a cover so Hello-ishly Hello-esque that one ought to wear sunglasses before picking it up. Royalty, in the shape of Queen Rania of Jordan, rubs shoulders with celebrity (Nicole Kidman), in a composition of flowing white robes and surrounded by decoratively angelic children. But wait, who is the outsize leprechaun in the corner? Surely not Rupert Murdoch, looking like he has wandered into a Broadway revival of Hair! The photographs...

Murdoch has decided to block the 20m online readers of The Times from accessing the paper free of charge on the internet. From June, anyone wanting to read The Times or The Sunday Times online will have to pay £1 a day or £2 a week for the privilege. Those who subscribe to the printed edition will be able to access the paper’s planned thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk websites as part of their subscription. Analysts warned that The Times risks losing “almost all” of its online readers when it erects the so-called “pay walls”. Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of The...

It’s official now. This explains a lot of what’s happened recently. Rupert Murdoch is moving his NewsCorp headquarters to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. You can kiss fair and balanced FoxNews good-bye. Breitbart has the story here: “News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch announced on Tuesday that the Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi is to become the headquarters of his global media empire in the Middle East. Addressing some 400 delegates at the opening of the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, Murdoch said his corporation had started out as a small Australian firm to become a US-based international company that employs 64,000...

Rep Issa said: I am most concerned about ownership of companies including broadcast companies by countries that may have another agenda.