Free Republic

Things haven't gotten much better for Newt Gingrich ..... The former House speaker abruptly canceled a meeting with Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval ... Not even Gingrich's campaign advisers know why the campaign scheduler called it off, irking them and those in Sandoval's office who had helped set up the event. ..... Other signs of disarray appeared Wednesday. Gingrich's schedule called for a 1 p.m. rally in Reno, but volunteers put out word that the event would be at noon — and that supporters should show up at 11:30. .....

<p>January 30, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – After receiving letters from “antiabortion readers” complaining about his paper’s coverage of the March for Life, the Washington Post’s ombudsman has penned a column agreeing with many of their criticisms.</p> <p>Ombudsman Patrick Pexton says that the Washington Post gave an “incomplete picture” of the March for Life in both its print story and online photo gallery.</p>

Ezra Klein is a blogger/columnist for the Washington Post and an unabashed liberal. Klein has the good fortune of never having had to work a real day in his life. He is younger than my oldest son and hasn't half my son's brains. Klein is widely quoted by the left and he regularly pontificates broadly on a wide range of subjects with which he has neither familiarity nor experience. In a recent column, Klein made an astonishing assertion: A larger welfare state can mean a lower deficitIn his column he states: Speaking of things that the European crisis is not...

Today’s Washington Post carries a story about a “curious case in the annals of the FBI,” but the only curious aspect of the story is why the Post published it — with the headline FBI considered a sting aimed at Newt Gingrich in 1997. That implies that the arguable GOP frontrunner for President had committed some sort of conduct that was shady enough to get the FBI to propose an Abscam-like operation to take Gingrich down. However, that’s not the case at all, but you have to get past the lead paragraph to figure that out:

Just a few months after his campaign seemed to implode amid staff resignations, Newt Gingrich sits atop the GOP presidential polls. Yet 13 years have passed since Gingrich stepped down as House speaker — plenty of time for older voters to forget him, and for younger voters to not know him at all. So let’s dispel recurring myths about the new frontrunner’s politics, history and ambitions. 1. Gingrich is an academic. He earned a Ph.D. in history and taught college before winning a seat in Congress. He has often spoken of himself as an historian. In 1995, he told CNN’s...

Yes, Newt Gingrich has spiked in the polls. No, he’s not going to be the nominee. I’ve been trying to duck this one because it feels like laying out the obvious, but, briefly, three reasons: 1. The baggage he’s always had — the marital difficulties, the ethics troubles, a whole bunch of deviations from conservative orthodoxy over the years (such as that ad he shot with Nancy Pelosi: “Our country must take action to address climate change”) — just isn’t going to go away. Republican voters don’t have those things in mind at the moment, but no candidate is more...

We (read America) spent all day yesterday holding vigil over the presidential ambitions of Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R-Oops). Thanks to a brain hiccup during Wednesday’s debate, Perry, who has watched his savior status slip with each successive debate, now finds himself practically politically dead. All because he couldn’t remember the third federal agency he’d eliminate. Meanwhile, inexplicably, Herman Cain thrives.

Maybe we were reading these sexual harassment allegations wrong. They don’t seem to have hurt Cain at all. If anything, they’ve made him stronger. A Washington Post-ABC Poll found him still nearly tied with Romney in the polls — even after the allegations made news! The Monday after they surfaced was a banner day for fundraising Cain. More than a million dollars of donations reportedly poured in. Maybe the Rick Perry staffer who so cleverly traveled back to the past to seed these allegations more than a decade ago should have thought harder. So far, they seem to be having...

Last week, the Washington Post attacked Marco Rubio for “misrepresenting” his family’s story. The Post got called out by other newspapers for the Post’s egregious truth stretching to make its story fit. In the quotes the Washington Post cited, the reporter misrepresented the context of Marco Rubio’s remarks. It was true that Rubio had gotten some details wrong. But it was also very clear that they were the innocent mistakes of a son retelling his parents’ story. It was also true the Washington Post got parts of its reporting wrong. But the Washington Post has not stopped. Now the paper...

Presidencies can go through various stages in terms of their effect on the opposition – from eliciting respect and some amount of fear, to provoking anger, to becoming the object of ridicule. Barack Obama has reached the third stage.Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has written a column in which he cites passages from Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress last night and then chronicles the reaction among congressional Republicans, which included chuckles, guffaws and giggles. Hostility to Obama has given way to indifference to what he says; witness the fact the GOP did not even feel the need...

Translating the WaPo’s Bank-Talking-Point Editorial By Abigail Caplovitz Field | September 7, 2011 Yesterday the Washington Post ran a grotesquely bank-skewed editorial chastising New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman for his refusal to play ball with the hush money “50 state AG” settlement on the table. Matt Stoller pointed out that the Washington Post owns Kaplan schools, a for profit network of schools, and Schneiderman’s investigating for-profit schools, a fact that the WaPo didn’t disclose. But the Kaplan connection is important in another way too, as it probably explains why the WaPo had so much empathy for the banks...

The Washington Post has decided to close all its local bureaus except those in the capitals of Virginia and Maryland. The Post, whose parent company reported a 50 percent drop in profits for its second quarter in early August, closed all of its national bureaus in 2009.

I’m seeing so much biased bullcrap coming out of Politico these days, I thought it might be useful to revisit Journolist — the listserve of liberal journalists and leftist thinkers who work together to form a narrative and push it into the mainstream media. The ultimate goals: 1) Make conservatives look stupid and 2) help President Obama or the liberal du jour look fabulous. Read background here. If you think their coordinated efforts are a thing of the past, think again. On Twitter, it’s very easy to follow the Genesis of a liberal meme and to see that coordination is...

The Washington Post barely covered the Obama administration’s declaration to go all soft on deportations on Friday. They ran a 320-word Reuters dispatch on A-5 with zero opponents in it, and no suggestion this new policy was a bald-faced political move for Obama to improve his sinking approval ratings among Hispanics. But in a front-page story Monday, Post reporter Peter Wallsten calmly explained that this is exactly what it was: “While most of Washington was embroiled in the debt-ceiling drama last month, about 160 Hispanic leaders from across the country filed into the White House one day, largely unnoticed.

On April 8, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Boston conference on ''media reform.'' She was joined by four other congressmen, a senator, two FCC commissioners, a Nobel laureate and numerous liberal journalists. The 2,500-person event was sponsored by a group called Free Press, one of more than 180 different media-related organizations that receives money from liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros, who first made a name for himself in investing and currency trading, now makes his name in politics and policy. Since the 2004 election, the controversial financier has used his influence and billions to push a laundry list...

WASHINGTON - Like many members of Congress, Rep. Michele Bachmann has been a fierce critic of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, blaming the government-backed loan programs for excesses that helped create the financial meltdown in 2008. And like millions of other home purchasers, Bachmann took out a home loan in 2008 that offered lower costs to the borrower through one of the federally subsidized programs, according to mortgage experts who reviewed her loan documents. Just a few weeks before Bachmann called for dismantling the programs during a House Financial Services Committee hearing, she and her husband signed for a $417,000...

The Washington Post has lost it. Someone ought to study the Republican Party. I am not referring to yet another political scientist but to a mental health professional, preferably a specialist in the power of fixations, obsessions and the like. The GOP needs an intervention. It has become a cult. To become a Republican, one has to take a pledge... Read more here (if you can stand it) Just to add some balance to WaPo's opinion piece, here are some facts about what it takes to be a Democrat in today's world. You have to believe electing  man with a...

Today is the two year anniversary of Sarah Palin resigning from being Governor of Alaska. In the light of that resignation here is a piece written before the midterm election which highlights the impact that resignation had on the election and the future of the Republican party. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2590825/posts

The Washington Post is now claiming (as told by conveniently anonymous sources) that Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA, and Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee) was briefed on "Operation Fast and Furious" last year, and did not object: A chief Republican critic of a controversial U.S. anti-gun-trafficking operation was briefed on ATF’s “Fast and Furious” program last year and did not express any opposition, sources familiar with the classified briefing said Tuesday. Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), who has repeatedly called for top Justice Department officials to be held accountable for the now-defunct operation, was given highly specific information...

Selling arms to Mexican drug cartels? Misleading the Washington Post? It's all in a day's work for Obama's heavily politicized ATF. Thanks to Operation Fast and Furious, the incompetence and ineptitude that has infected the Holder Justice Department is becoming more obvious all the time. For department prosecutors (and senior ATF personnel) to approve the sale of firearms to Mexican drug cartels through straw buyers was a deadly misstep.It led directly to the tragic death of Border Agent Brian Terry. Mexican officials estimate that “150 of their people have been shot by Fast and Furious guns,” Fox News reports. The...

The Post prints an attack on Issa that no other paper saw fit to run: an anonymous hit job concocted by the Obama administration. And The Times finally talks Gunwalker ... by attacking the GOP. With a debunked lie. To date, Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Charles Grassley have led the investigation of Operation Fast and Furious: a multi-agency scheme that allowed known straw purchasers to buy an estimated 2,000 firearms and to smuggle them into Mexico, into the hands of the narco-terrorists of Mexican cartels. An estimated 150 Mexican police officers and soldiers have been killed by the weapons.Issa...

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle. He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was 1993, and I was 12. My mother wanted to give me a better life,...

There is no lack of antisemites today. But it is very hard to talk about the identity of the vast majority of them. Indeed, Yale University has just revamped its institute on antisemitism, apparently because it spent too much time talking about the overwhelming problem with antisemitism today–Islamic and especially Islamist antisemitism. In other words, the real antisemites are whitewashed, while those fighting antisemitism are called antisemites. The supporters of Israel are called enemies of Israel by those who themselves are generally enemies of Israel. The truth is the exact opposite of what Milbank wrote. Beck is the leading purveyor...

An attack on the right to vote is underway across the country through laws designed to make it more difficult to cast a ballot. If this were happening in an emerging democracy, we’d condemn it as election-rigging. But it’s happening here, so there’s barely a whimper. The laws are being passed in the name of preventing “voter fraud.” But study after study has shown that fraud by voters is not a major problem — and is less of a problem than how hard many states make it for people to vote in the first place. Some of the new laws,...

Corrupt Washington Post Hires Disgraced Former Palin Staffer As E-Mail “Expert” By Gary P JacksonYou just thought the Washington Post hit rock bottom with their Palin e-mail nonsense, which BTW, has produced the exact opposite results they intended. These e-mails are proving Sarah Palin was a hard working Governor, a solid reformer, and an incredible CEO. Liberals are stupid though, especially those in the media, so WaPo is doubling down. They’ve went out and hired disgraced former Palin staffer Frank Bailey to be their e-mail “expert.”If you remember, Bailey, the only Palin staffer to ever be forced to take ethics training...

SNIP Scores of journalists descended on Juneau this week in preparation for the release of the e-mails. MSNBC.com deputized 40 volunteers, chosen with the help of the League of Women Voters and the Retired Public Employees of Alaska. They were the reinforcements for the team of two journalists from the Web site and six more from NBC News who flew to Juneau. The New York Times and The Guardian sent reporters armed with scanners and then solicited readers’ assistance. Politico enlisted a dozen editors, reporters and interns who worked as a team from their Northern Virginia newsroom “plowing through” the...

Thousands of records detailing Sarah Palin's tenure as governor of Alaska were released Friday to a waiting throng of journalists at a state office building in the capital of Juneau. Palin's political action committee issued a statement as the documents were released to the public. "The thousands upon thousands of emails released today show a very engaged Gov. Sarah Palin being the CEO of her state," said the treasurer of SarahPAC, Tim Crawford. "The emails detail a governor hard at work. Everyone should read them." About 30 journalists, along with three camera crews, had been crammed into a small space...

THE MSM & THE LEFT ENLIST READERS TO HELP SMEAR SARAH PALINOR...OH HOW THEY HATE HER! By: Jeff Head, 6/10/2011 [SARAH 2012] - [SARAH-IMMIGRATION] - [BEST FRIEND] - [NOW,NOW,NOW] - [PALIN HIDING?] - [FAREWELL AS GOV] If you didn't need any more proof to the contrary, the left, the mainstream media (who in large represents the left), the DNC, and many establishment, RINO politicians are scared to death of Sarah Palin and will do anything in their power to keep her from becoming President of these United States, or even intertaining the prospect. Witness the actions today, the 10th of...

(Washington, D.C., 6/09/11) The following statement will be released tomorrow regarding the campaign to recruit 100 people to sort through the Palin e-mails: "We read with interest and amusement the comments left on our website by far right-wing Republicans accusing us of a liberal, anti-Palin point of view with regards to our request for 100 people to help us sort through thousands of e-mails generated by Palin during her partial tenure as Governor of Alaska. We are not looking for dirt, we are in search of the truth as we see it." "However, after careful consideration, we have decided to...

An unusual example of media efficiency. There’s a huge new supply available of her e-mails as governor and an eternally huge demand among Palin-hating liberals for new dirt on her. If you’re a cash-strapped editor, why not match one to the other and let the market do your work for you? Palin derangement is like the wind, or the sun: All the media has to do is harness it to provide a limitless supply of productivity.Just think, if she runs for president, they might be able to outsource whole stories to their liberal readership instead of just document analysis. Then...

Early Thursday afternoon, Derek Willis posted on the paper’s "Caucus" blog a request surely enticing to the paper’s online liberal readership: "Help Us Investigate the Sarah Palin E-Mail Records." Ken Shepherd at NewsBusters says enlisting newspaper readers to pore through the email trove "indirectly amounts to free oppo research for the 2012 Obama campaign." On Friday, the State of Alaska will release more than 24,000 of Sarah Palin’s e-mails covering much of her tenure as governor of Alaska. Times reporters will be in Juneau, the state capital, to begin the process of reviewing the e-mails, which we will be posting...

More than 24,000 e-mail messages sent to and from Sarah Palin during her tenure as Alaska's governor will be released Friday. Join The Post in digging through them. We are looking for 100 organized and dilligent readers who will work alongside Post reporters to analyze, contextualize, and research the emails. Think of it as spending some time in our newsroom. Our hope is that working together, we can efficiently find interesting information and extract new stories that will lead to further investigation. We don’t know what we’ll find, but we want you to be ready and open for the challenge....

Everyone has already had a grand old time mocking this video of Sarah Palin bungling her Paul Revere history, but I actually think it amounts to quite an eloquent statement. It’s as eloquent an argument as anyone could make that this woman really should not be treated by any of us as anything resembling a presidential candidate until it’s absolutely necessary — which is to say, until she actually runs for president.

Yes, the Washington Post has actually taken the stand that the Freedom of Information Act is "misused" by folks like me trying to get to the bottom of Climategate. The Washington Post has printed an editorial sniveling about a court order, prompted by a lawsuit, laying out how the University of Virginia must release certain records. These records relate to a former faculty member and pertain to the Climategate and “hockey stick graph” scandals.The editorial expresses umbrage with my seeking out the records on behalf of the America Tradition Institute, which I suppose is more palatable for the WaPo to...

From JunkScience.com WashPost: Freedom of Information Act not for skeptics’ useby Steve Milloy In a bizarre Memorial Day editorial, the Washington Post criticized climate skeptics for using the Freedom of Information Act to pry documents concerning Climategater Michael Mann from the University of Virginia. The Post labeled the skeptics’ FOIA efforts as “harrassing” and “nuisance tactics.”The Post, however, has been entirely silent on Greenpeace’s efforts to FOIA documents from the University of Virginia concerning Pat Michaels, University of Delaware concerning David Legates and from Harvard University concerning Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas — efforts that are truly “harrassing” and “nuisance” in...

VIRGINIA BEACH — Finding a Navy SEAL in this city should be easy. This is where hundreds of America’s most elite warriors are based. This is where their heroic exploits are celebrated and retold, especially since a team of Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in a bold raid on the al-Qaeda mastermind’s Pakistani hideout. But finding a real, active-duty SEAL in this beach resort — not to mention one of the 20 or so members of SEAL Team 6 who swept into bin Laden’s compound early this month — is like chasing echoes in a fun house. [snip] It’s...

Washington Post Company chairman Donald Graham told shareholders Thursday morning that he was unaware of the controversy surrounding the rapper known as Common, whom Michelle Obama has invited to a poetry event, until Cliff Kincaid of the watchdog group Accuracy in Media asked him about it. Graham apparently missed a story on the front page of his newspaper, which offered a defense of Common’s lyrics. “Mr. Kincaid, I thank you for informing me of something I didn’t know about,” Graham said. “You have brought our attention to an interesting controversy.”

The Washington Post’s Outlook section just gave ex-jihadi Moazzem Begg a half-page this Sunday to lament the U.S. war on jihadis, and Begg repaid the Post by showcasing a photoshopped image of a dead President Barack Obama on his advocacy website. Washington Post editors did not return The Daily Caller’s phone calls. The Outlook section is edited by Carlos Lozada, who reports to Marcus Brauchli, the Post’s executive editor. The Investigative Project on Terrorism directed TheDC to the photo on Begg’s website. Begg’s action came just before Thursday, when shareholders are expected to protest financial losses by the newspaper’s parent...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Washington Post Co. said Friday that revenue was flat in its newspaper publishing division in the first quarter but net profit fell by two-thirds on lower enrollment in its education business. The Post Co., which owns the Kaplan chain of schools and television outlets in addition to its flagship newspaper The Washington Post, said net profit was down 67 percent in the quarter at $15.2 million. Revenue was down seven percent in the quarter that ended on April 3 to $1.06 billion while earnings per share fell to $1.87 from $4.91 per share a year ago....

[snipets] When Beck’s show made its debut on Fox News Channel in January 2009, the nation was in the throes of an economic collapse the likes of which had not been seen since the 1930s. Beck’s angry broadcasts about the nation’s imminent doom perfectly rode the wave of fear that had washed across the nation, and the relatively unknown entertainer suddenly had 3 million viewers a night — and tens of thousands answering his call to rally at the Lincoln Memorial. But as the recession began to ease, Beck’s apocalyptic forecasts and ominous conspiracies became less persuasive, and his audience...

Washington Post “fact-checker� Glenn Kessler awards Rep. Paul Ryan two Pinocchios for statements like this: There’s a lot of misinformation about what we are proposing and what we are not proposing. We’re saying: Save Medicare by reforming it for people who are 54 and below by working like a system just like members of Congress and federal employees have. To claim that Ryan is misleading people about his plan, Kessler takes a page from the Politifact playbook, converting differences of opinion into factual disputes.What’s Kessler’s beef? Under a 1997 law, the government pays a set rate of 75 percent of...

Here’s a concession from a Democrat Party partisan in the Washington Post: The truth is that Palin remains the only real first-tier presidential candidate the Republicans have — the only candidate who has been on a national ticket. Should she decide to run an active campaign, she would likely recover a good bit of the ground she has lost…It’s still not too late for her to give a series of serious policy speeches; not too late for her to put together a real campaign staff; not too late for her to crisscross Iowa and New Hampshire; and not too late,...

Eleven years ago, one of Washington’s most tradition-bound companies placed a bet that would transform its fortunes. The wager, by The Washington Post Co. and its Kaplan division, took the form of a $165 million purchase of an Atlanta-based chain of for-profit vocational schools that catered to low-income students. The bet was big — the price equal to the profits earned that year by The Post Co.’s print-media pillars: this newspaper and Newsweek magazine. So was the payoff. The acquisition of the firm, called Quest Education, turbocharged the rise of Kaplan, a modest business that had until then mainly prepared...

In the April 6 print edition of the Washington Post, Jerusalem correspondent Joel Greenberg blames Israel for creating the Palestinian refugee problem. Palestinian families, he writes, were "pushed out of what is now Israel when the Jewish state was created in 1948." Thus, it was Israel's establishment that was responsible for the Palestinian refugee problem. However, on the April 6 Washington Post website, Jerusalem correspondent Joel Greenberg offers a completely different explanation for the Palestinian refugee problem. Some Arab families, he writes, were "displaced in the war that followed the establishment of Israel in 1948. So, it wasn't Israel's cration...

The Washington Post suspended one of its most seasoned reporters Wednesday after editors determined that “substantial” parts of two recent news articles were taken without attribution from another newspaper. Sari Horwitz, longtime Post investigative reporter, was suspended for three months for plagiarizing sections of stories that first appeared in the Arizona Republic. The stories concerned the investigation of...Jared Lee Loughner... Horwitz copied two paragraphs from a Republic story ... when she wrote an article that was first published on The Post’s Web site March 4. A second story...included 10 paragraphs from a Republic story about a search of Loughner’s home....

Blaming journalists for biased reporting isn't unique. Adherents to all political ideologies accuse the media of aligning with their opponents. However, Washington Post syndicated columnist Esther Cepeda gives conservatives a leg-up in proving leftist favoritism in the "mainstream" media. Either that or she's a total dunce. Ms. Cepeda has issues with the audience at Rep. Paul Broun's (R-GA) town hall meeting. Apparently, the audience laughed when one constituent asked, "Who's going to shoot Obama?" In perfect media fashion Ms. Cepeda parlayed the incident, which the Secret Service investigated and deemed a poor joke, into a blanket hatred for Obama...

Retired Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern was recently interviewed by Journolist organizer and Washington Post staff writer Ezra "the Constitution is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago" Klein. In response to a question from Klein about "the animosity between unions and workplaces" (that is what Klein says he said), Stern made an interesting assertion that most readers probably took at face value: We grew up in that culture. In the '30s, people didn't want us to exist. We had to do sit-down strikes . . . we had socialist and communist tendencies.

The Washington Post shamefully allows George Soros to run one of his op-ed screeds in its pages. This one focuses on the tumult in Egypt and sees a promising future of freedom in the Arab world. This is doubtful. A mere look at the history of the region is enough to reveal the overly optimistic cheerleading. When the Shah fell, Ayatollah Khomeini was described as some kind of saint by Andrew Young, America's Ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter. Elections in Gaza brought forth Hamas. The Cedar Revolution has been left to wither and now Hezb'allah is in...

M o n d ay,  January 24, 2011Ever wonder how the ultra-liberal Democrat supporting Washington Post survives?What WaPo doesn't want you to knowFrom Eric Dondero:In the age of the enormously successful cable giant Fox and internet news sources, Google News, Yahoo News, and Drudge, scores of print newspapers are going under. Just in the last two years: Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Philly Daily News, Ann Arbor News, and Rocky Mountain News have all called it quits. So, how does the grand old Washington Post survive in such an environment? From DailyCensored.com:the answer to how the Washington Post is surviving can be found in...

The Washington Post is engaging in online political activism by encouraging its readers to boycott news coverage of Sarah Palin. The Post has picked up the call initiated this morning by Post columnist Dana Milbank, adding a Twitter link on the column page. The link generates a message to be sent from a Twitter member’s page that reads, “I’m making February a Palin-free month. Will you join me?” The Post added the Twitter link to Milbank’s column this afternoon, several hours after running and pulling a Washington Post online poll about boycotting Sarah Palin news coverage. The poll initially accompanied...