Free Republic

ABC News Vice President Jeffrey Schneider has apologized for a story on his network that connected a CEO who supports traditional marriage to the Westboro Baptist Church and their offensive "God hates fags" signs. Mr. Schneider contacted the Media Research Center on Thursday after our social media department requested members call and complain about the comparison.

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents. Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in...

Representative Charlie Rangel (D-NY) recently expressed his puzzlement over the conservative wing of the Republican Party. In between incoherent ramblings and fragmented sentences, the congressman explained that the tea party is a “cult” group that suffers from an apparent “illness”. “Politics is (sic) changing for me at this late age, to have to deal with a cult-type of group of people,” said the man who recently allocated millions of taxpayer dollars to a New York library named in his honor. (Maybe he’s speaking out of jealousy?) “When a handful of people [I assume he is referring to the tea party...

After being chastised by Sarah Palin, defender of Phil Roberton's homophobic and racist remarks, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry is now apologizing for joking that Mitt Romney's grandchild might marry Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's daughter. “As black child born into a large white Mormon family I feel familiarity w/ Romney family pic & never meant to suggest otherwise," Perry said over Twitter. "I apologize to all families built on loving transracial adoptions who feel I degraded their lives or choices," she added. Perry was the target of Palin's, RNC chair Reine Priebus's, and many others' ire after she and guests...

Beyond repugnant. As Twitchy reported, Edie Littlefield Sundby is a Stage IV cancer survivor. She is losing her current insurance plan due to Obamacare. She cannot keep her plan, nor the doctors, that have helped her beat all odds and live for almost seven years. Greta Van Susteren and Brit Hume brought her story to the attention of the boot-licking hacks at the New York Times who claimed that President Pants on Fire “clearly misspoke” when he said you could keep your plan. No biggie. Those with a soul (does not include the NYT editorial board) are repulsed by the...

Several dozen U.S. Army active duty and reserve troops were told last week that the American Family Association, a well-respected Christian ministry, should be classified as a domestic hate group because the group advocates for traditional family values. The briefing was held at Camp Shelby in Mississippi and listed the AFA alongside domestic hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam. A soldier who attended the briefing contacted me and sent me a photograph of a slide show presentation that listed AFA as a domestic hate group. Under the AFA headline is...

Tony Perkins and a coalition of allies have urged support for Rep. John Fleming’s military religious freedom amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. The Catholic League joins with them. But we are doing more than that: I am calling attention today to the way Mikey Weinstein, the president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, has smeared Evangelicals. In a report released yesterday, FRC detailed some of the irresponsible comments made by Weinstein, the man who has been leading the fight to censor religious speech in the military. Last month, we prepared our own report: to read “Mikey Weinstein’s Inflammatory...

Members of Congress have expressed astonishment that the U.S. Army Reserve would use a training brief that slams Catholics, evangelical Christians and others and are demanding the practice come to a halt – now. “Our nation needs to have an honest conversation about religious extremism and what we can do to avoid religious violence. However, labeling these major world religions as extremists is wrong and hurtful,” said a letter by Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., that was signed by dozens of other members. It was addressed to Army Secretary John. M . McHugh at the Pentagon. “We call on you to...

When Benedict XVI was pope, the New York Times ran a scurrilous, distortion-infested campaign intended to link the former Joseph Ratzinger with the awful abuse scandals that have so harmed the Catholic Church. These pieces were manifestly dishonest and substance-free when you read them through. But the Times editors know most people don’t read the articles — they read the headlines and the first paragraph. So this morning, the pseudo-journalists at the Times began their campaign of lies against the new pope, Francis, under the damning (and damnable) headline: “Starting a Papacy, Amid Echoes of a ‘Dirty War’”: One Argentine...

Tweets on Elaine Chao: 'They will not get away with attacking my wife,' Mitch McConnell says WINCHESTER, Ky. -- Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell lambasted a liberal group on Saturday for criticizing the Asian heritage of his wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, calling its Twitter messages "racial slurs" and "the ultimate outrage." "They will not get away with attacking my wife in this campaign," McConnell told about 100 home-state supporters at a Republican dinner in Winchester. "This woman has the ear of @McConnellPress — she's his #wife," the group Kentucky Progress tweeted on Feb. 14. "May explain why your...

A group of anti-Israel activists and journalists are engaged in a coordinated campaign to stifle criticism of controversial secretary of defense nominee Chuck Hagel by attacking the former Republican senator’s critics, according to emails obtained by the Free Beacon. Fenton communications chief executive officer David Fenton, the Atlantic’s national correspondent James Fallows, former diplomat Charles ‘Chas’ Freeman, Just Foreign Policy director Robert Naiman, and American Conservative founding editor Scott McConnell participated in a recent email exchange dedicated to silencing Hagel’s critics, the emails reveal. The emailers targeted recent comments made by Elliott Abrams, a former Bush administration National Security Council...

Law: A quarter of a century ago, a good and great man was slandered to maintain liberal judicial power. It was Vice President Joe Biden, who as a senator, led the injustices committed against Judge Robert Bork. The Wednesday morning death of Bork, Ronald Reagan´s failed 1987 Supreme Court nominee, should make us think how much freer and better this country would be if Bork´s intellectual power and constitutional integrity had been present within the justices´ deliberations over the past 25 years. Had Reagan nominated Bork to replace retiring Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1986, when Republicans

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Dingy Harry continues to smear Mitt Romney. Ann Coulter has a good column today. She points out, if I could summarize real quick, she says the reason that they are making a beeline for Romney's tax records is because he's too straitlaced. He doesn't have a divorce that they can go look at. And she recounts the history of every Obama campaign, every opponent had either divorce or custody records unsealed shortly before the election, which resulted in high embarrassment or even resignation of the opposition candidate. Her point is that Obama has never won an election...

Several critics, most of them conservatives, have complained that Game Change, the new HBO movie made from the best-selling 2008 presidential campaign book, portrays Sarah Palin as profoundly stupid. And it does. Those critics have also complained that the picture sometimes portrays John McCain and his top advisers as deeply craven. It does that, too. And then there's the fact that Game Change, the movie, focuses on a negative portrayal of Palin while ignoring the dramatic and divisive primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that made up the biggest part of the book. So there's a lot of...

Soledad O’Brien and her CNN panel manage to stumble into Contessa Brewer territory in this appearance by attempting to paint Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak as a racist for making a point about Barack Obama’s support for a proponent of “critical race theory” during his days at Harvard Law School. Joel ends up in an argument with a woefully unprepared O’Brien on the theory itself, but the actual facepalm moment goes to one of her panelists, who asks Joel why he’s so afraid of black people:

Gingrich Archives Show His Public Praise, Private Criticism of Reagan By Jerry Markon February 19 CARROLLTON, Ga. — In an unnoticed 1992 speech, Newt Gingrich in a single utterance took aim not only at a beloved conservative icon but also at a core tenet of the conservative movement: that government must be limited. Ronald Reagan’s “weakness,” Gingrich told the National Academy of Public Administration in Atlanta, was that “he didn’t think government mattered. The Reagan failure was to grossly undervalue the centrality of government as the organizing mechanism for reinforcing societal behavior.” A review of thousands of documents detailing Gingrich’s...

Tuesday, we published this story about a bizarre attack launched against Governor Sarah Palin at, of all places, Glenn Beck’s site The Blaze. It was an attack made up of whole cloth, the kind of thing we’re used to seeing from the mainstream media and leftists, not from those who claim to be on our side. Palin’s not above criticism, but when Newsweek asks her to write about life with her son Trig, a Down Syndrome child, and she writes about life with her son Trig — what’s the problem?

The Obama-Biden reelection campaign, which just announced it banked $224 million in 2011, is stepping up fundraising as it steels for an expected fall "smear" machine from GOP front-runner Mitt Romney. In an email to supporters this morning, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina warned that the Republicans will have a fat bank account to tap for negative ads, something both Romney and Newt Gingrich did in Florida. "They're going to try to spend and smear their way to the White House," Messina said about Republican groups and candidates.

The Republican establishment is pulling out all the stops to try to keep Newt Gingrich from becoming the party's nominee for President of the United States -- and some are not letting the facts get in their way. Among the claims going out through the mass media in Florida, on the eve of that state's primary election, is that Newt Gingrich "resigned in disgrace" as Speaker of the House of Representatives, as a result of unethical conduct involving the diversion of tax-exempt money. Mitt Romney is calling on Gingrich to release "all of the records" from the House of Representatives...

It won't shock AT readers to learn that the Left is deceitful, but here's another piece of evidence: a fundraising letter from Ralph Neas's People for the American Way (PAW) arrived in the mail today. The outside of the envelope and the letter inside display a large photo identified as "Demonstrators at Presidential Inauguration." The signs held by these "demonstrators" read: "God Hates Obama," "Fags Love Obama," and "Hell to the Chief." Anyone paying the slightest attention knows that signs with the word "fag" and "God hates..." most likely originate from the despicable Westboro Baptist Church, and sure enough, a...