Free Republic

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...

Former Govs. Mike Huckabee (Ark.), Sarah Palin (Alaska) and Mitt Romney (Mass.) make up the top tier of the 2012 Republican presidential field, according to a new poll from the Washington Post and ABC News. Huckabee took 21 percent of the vote while Palin received 19 percent and Romney 17 percent among Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. No other potential candidate made it into double digits, although former House Speaker Newt Gingrich received 9 percent and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie took 8 percent. The rest of the field received 3 percent or less support. The results were largely consistent across...

The Washington Post had better refrain from telling other media outlets to tone down their rhetoric, for on Sunday, one of the paper's longest running columnists asked on national television, "How much time do we have left to talk about how stupid Sarah Palin is?"Such was said by Richard Cohen, a man that has been with the Post since 1968, towards the end of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" (video follows with transcript and commentary):FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST: Richard Cohen, do you have answers?RICHARD COHEN, WASHINGTON POST: I have nothing but answers.

In reporting the collapse of the Lebanese government following resignations of Hezb'allah cabinet members, the Washington Post, in its Jan. 13 edition, recites a long history of such Lebanese crises ("Political Crisis Shakes Lebanon" front page, by Leila Fadel and Moe Ali Nayel). To emphasize the gravity of the situation, the article reports that "The situation could destabilize this key Middle Eastern nation and perhaps spill over into a regional sectarian conflict. In 2006, Israel waged a devastating war in Lebanon, leveling much of the southern part of the country and the southern suburbs of Beirut."

Obama has proven to be a polarizing figure in office, but on Wednesday he sought to unify. Palin ended up dividing. On a day of scripted messages, presumably carefully considered, Obama made the most of his. Palin did not.

On Monday morning, the Washington Post decried the "hideous display" of Tea Party protests, but it sounded pretty foam-flecked on Wednesday as Post Metro columnist Courtland Milloy was expressing violent rage on the front of the Wednesday Metro section against the Tea Party protesters: I know how the "tea party" people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their "Obama Plan White Slavery" signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads....

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and Washington Post associate editor Eugene Robinson said on national television Thursday that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has a history of saying "crazy-ass things." After doing so on MSNBC's "Countdown," Robinson was offered $100 by Keith Olbermann if he would title his next article using exactly those words (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Yes, the Constitution is binding By Ezra Klein This morning, I gave a quick interview to MSNBC where I made, I thought, some fairly banal points on the GOP's plan to honor the Constitution by having it read aloud on the House floor. Asked if it was a gimmick, I replied that it was, because, well, it is. It's our founding document, not a spell that makes the traitors among us glow green. It's also, I noted, a completely nonbinding act: It doesn't impose a particular interpretation of the Constitution on legislators, and will have no practical impact on how...

Now that asking and telling has ceased to be problematic in military circles, ROTC has resurfaced as a national issue: Will universities such as Harvard, Yale and other Ivy League schools be opened to Reserve Officers' Training Corps since colleges can no longer can argue that the military is biased against gays and therefore not welcome? The debate reminds me of an interview I conducted over parents' weekend at the University of Notre Dame in 1989. I sat down with Theodore Hesburgh, the priest who had retired two years earlier after serving 35 years as the university's president... [Snip] I...

A new ABC-Washington Post poll found ObamaCare sunk to its lowest popularity yet: 52 percent opposed, and only 43 percent in favor. ABC mentioned the poll without fanfare at the end of a Jake Tapper report on Monday’s World News, and Tapper added this was the health law's "lowest level of popularity ever." But Tuesday’s Washington Post reported not one sentence on the poll in the paper – even as they reported in the paper that the same survey found Obama’s tax-and-unemployment-compensation deal has “broad bipartisan support.

The Washington Post features a lengthy article  by Paul Farhi on the front page its Style Section about Media Matters, a liberal press watchdog, and its relentless campaign against Fox News and its conservative commentators ("Outfoxed by Fox News?  No Way. -- Liberal group Media Matters relentlessly, obsessively fights conservative network" Dec. 3). To give readers the other side of the coin, will Farhi's editors now ask him for a follow-up article about media monitors and critics who perform a similar function in exposing the persistent anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian reporting bias in the news pages of the Washington Post ?   To name a few of these watchdogs, they include Newsbusters, The Media...

Janine Zacharia, the Washington Post's Jerusalem correspondent, spins a fanciful, sky-is-falling doomsday scenario for Israel: if you don't hurry up and bend over backwards to get a peace deal with Mahmoud Abbas on almost any terms, then get ready for a Hamas takeover of the West Bank and a third intifada that will rock the Jewish state to its foundations. ("Warnings in Israel of need for peace deal -- West Bank Crisis Feared -- Some in military foresee Hamas rise to power" Nov. 17, page A8). Zacharia attributes her dire warning to a couple of unidentified senior Israeli military and...

During the Bush administration, the media made much of political appointees supposedly editing and otherwise interfering with the integrity of the work of career federal government scientists, particularly on studies pertaining to global warming/climate change. Well now the Associated Press is reporting that an inspector general's report from the Interior Department released yesterday found that the Obama White House "edited a drilling safety report in a way that made it falsely appear that scientists and experts backed the administration's six-month moratorium on new deep-water drilling."

Last week's election was bad for Democrats. The next one could be worse. Senate Democrats running in 2012 will be trying to hold their jobs in states where Republicans just scored major congressional and gubernatorial victories - Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Virginia. The Democrats' problems don't end with senators. President Barack Obama carried those states in 2008, and he will need most of them to win re-election in two years. But this time they all will have Republican governors. These GOP governors can try to inhibit the president's policies and campaign operations. They also can help...

The front-page headline in the Sunday Nov. 7 edition of the Washington Post paints a grim picture of the IDF -- "Israel's military faces loss in recruits, status -- Growing number of exempt citizens, recent scandals are among the reasons cited."  The lengthy article, by Jerusalem correspondent Janine Zacharia, jumps to an inside page with an equally gloomy headline -- "Israeli military grapples with decline in recruits, loss of status." Zacharia's first half dozen paragraphs on the front page are in sync with the headline's negative assessments of the IDF -- Growing numbers of young Israelis are avoiding conscription, military planners worry...

The Washington Post has, over the course of this week, run what they're calling an "investigation"--a multi-part hit piece on gun dealers, blaming them for "gun crime." The series starts with Sunday's five-page article about Realco guns, in Forestville, Maryland, which has, according to the article, sold more than 2,500 "crime guns" over the last eighteen years. What the article does not do, however, is present any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the owners/operators of Realco--just the opposite: State and federal regulators have documented only minor problems in numerous inspections. We are then treated to this Orwellian quote,...

Moody's Investors Service downgraded Washington Post Co. (WPO) by a notch, saying new government rules to reduce student-loan default rates will hurt earnings at Kaplan, its biggest operating segment. The firm cut its ratings on Post Co.--publisher of the namesake newspaper--to A2, leaving it midway between Aaa and junk territory. The outlook is negative, meaning another downgrade isn't out of the question. The company was put on watch for downgrade in August. The for-profit education sector faces new rules from the U.S. Department of Education that would penalize individual programs for graduating students with high debt loads. The regulator, though,...

The deranged bending-over-backward by business and other leaders in the West to avoid offending the Islamists has gotten to the point of ridiculousness. The latest example of bowing to the intimidation of Islamic goons is by the Washington Post, which, Sunday before last, on October 3rd, decided not to run a daily cartoon because it contained the name Muhammad--no picture, mind you--just the name. It was Wiley Miller's "Non Sequitur" cartoon. The cartoon in question is a single-panel that shows a park scene with all sorts people engaged in various activities like feeding birds, flying a kite, sailing a remote-controlled...

I still ride a bike. I do 12 miles, several days a week, and as I do so I listen to music -- the Pandora service on my iPhone. I have created a station that plays folk rock. Lately, it has repeatedly played the Neil Young song "Ohio": "What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?" On the bike, I have to repress a tear. "Ohio" has been around for 40 years, and I have heard it over and over again. It's about the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State University during a demonstration...

Richard Cohen, from whom Frank L. Baum got the inspiration for Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, has completely veered off the Yellow Brick Road more than normal today. From the Washington Post: On the right, hateful words are fired like bulletsIt seems that if Scarecrow had a brain, he'd also have memories of the hatred from the Left during George W. Bush's presidency - things like death threats against him and an actual assassination movie. Fired like bullets. How does Scarecrow start his tripe-filled column? By reliving the liberal glory days of the sixties: I still ride a bike....

The Washington Post Co. says its board of directors has authorized a stock repurchase of up to 750,000 shares of its Class-B common stock, or close to 10 percent of its Class-B common shares outstanding. The company did not announce a ceiling price for the shares to be bought back or a time limit for the repurchases. At its current price, the buyback would represent about $274.5 million. There are currently 7.24 million Class-B shares out. The Washington Post’s Class-A shares, owned by the Graham family, carry more voting heft than its Class-B common shares. Washington Post stock (NYSE: WPO)...

Not every American who marches behind a hateful crackpot is a hateful crackpot. The peaceful, thoughtful throng that assembled for Louis Farrakhan at the Million Man March in 1995 -- including a young Barack Obama -- proved that point. Notwithstanding some commentary, I tend to feel the same way about the much different (and rather smaller) assemblage that gathered at the behest of Glenn Beck in Washington last Saturday. Certainly, if you’re president of the United States, the most prudent course is to draw a distinction between the leader and the anonymous masses and treat the latter with at least...