Free Republic

I wish I would have known about it, but Sophia Nelson, who wrote the "Black. Female. Accomplished. Attacked." column in Sunday's Post hosted an online chat this morning on WaPo's website. As you can see from the transcript, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2008/07/23/DI2008072302382.html, a couple of people pressed her on the question of whether she was simply smearing anyone who criticized Michelle Obama as a racist and sexist. Her response was to accuse these people of engaging in a personal attack against her and then she just moved on. She will be on CNN's American morning tomorrow from 6:30 to 7 a.m. (she was...

Sunday's Washington Post ran a column by a woman named Sophia Nelson. The title of the column tells you everything you need to know about it: "Black. Female. Accomplished. Attacked." As little faith as I have in liberal newspapers such as The Washington Post, the fact that they would run this column is appalling. There are very real problems for America in having a first lady who has no problem calling America "downright mean" and saying she has never before been proud of America (youtube here--http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WNGjawtP48&eurl=http://www.notwrightforamerica.com/--watch it for yourself and decide if her explanation is believable). Not WRIGHT for America...

Welcome to the party boys. Maybe next they'll be calling for a grown-up like Hillary to take the helm.

Will there be a MORTGAGE-GATE controversy in the 2008 election? Judicial Watch has filed a complaint against the sweetheart deal that Senator Obama Barack has received in terms of a mortgage. So has Senator Christopher Dodd, D-CT, who is chair of the Senate Banking Committee. One must ask the question are these two Democrats: are they Dumb, Dishonest, or both -- to have accepted these sweetheart mortgage deals for their personal life? Should the US Justice Department start investigating these politicians and others for such deals to receive favorable treatment in legislation now that the mortgage industry is in serious...

Signaling a generational change at one of the nation’s most influential newspapers, the new publisher of The Washington Post on Monday selected an outsider as the paper’s top editor. Marcus W. Brauchli, a former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, will become the executive editor of The Post on Sept. 8, at a time of great upheaval in the industry. At age 47, he is young enough to remain in place in for many years, working alongside the publisher, Katharine Weymouth, who is 42 and has been in her job for five months. He will succeed Leonard Downie...

It is obvious to me that reporter Eli Saslow came to our city with an agenda -- to show that only unenlightened racists who believe wild and untrue stories about Sen. Barack Obama could possibly be against the candidate. Mr. Saslow chose an older portion of town with older residents and then ascribed their supposed views to our entire city.

First, here is a link to my post yesterday about this article: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2039487/posts To Whom It May Concern: When I first heard that Findlay, OH been chosen for an article by such a prestigious paper like the Washington Post, I was glad for our community to get the exposure. Then I read with disgust the article by Eli Saslow in our local paper. It is obvious to me that Mr. Saslow came to our city with an agenda - one to show how only unenlightened, racists believing wild and untrue stories about the candidate could possibly be against Obama. He...

The Washington Post published an article today in the Style section about researcher Danielle Allen's efforts to track down who is behind allegations that presumed Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Hussein Obama (Illinois) is a Muslim. Allen is an Obama supporter who works for the Institute for Advanced Study.The article was written by Matthew Mosk. A curious choice for The Post considering Mosk's involvement in the nefarious MD4Bush scandal in which Mosk claimed to have been given access to a Free Republic poster's account to expose a Maryland GOP government appointee who was alleged to have commented on rumors that...

Beckwith responds to The Washington Post. The first thing I have to say about "An Attack That Came Out of the Ether," published by The Washington Post on June 28th, is that at NO time was I ever contacted by this woman, Danielle Allen.  I spoke to two male Post reporters, who spoke to me over the phone for a period of months.  The first contact was in the fall of 2007.  They told me they were trying to track down the source of emails they considered negative to the Obamamessiah. Allen obsesses about the "Muslim" Obama stories, but steers...

Leonard Downie Jr. said today he is stepping down as The Washington Post's executive editor, ending a 17-year tenure in which the paper became a major online force and won a slew of prizes for high-profile investigations, including one that Downie published over President Bush's objections. Downie, 66, said his last day will be Sept. 8. The paper's new publisher, Katharine Weymouth, said she plans to announce a successor soon. "After 44 years, the notion of not working in the newsroom anymore brings a lot of emotions," Downie said in an interview. "I will really miss it . . ....

Uh-oh. Obama's fringe-left credentials are really starting to show. When his good buddies in the MSM start liking John McCain's ideas, something is really wrong. And do I smell the faint odor of the Post's approval of nuclear power as well?

Simple mistake, or wish fulfillment? Appearing on MSNBC this afternoon, a Washington Post reporter claimed the paper's latest poll results showed Barack Obama with a "big lead" over John McCain on the issue of handling Iraq. The only problem: the poll actually shows McCain with a small lead. David Shuster interviewed Ed O'Keefe of WashingtonPost.com at 3:03 PM EDT. DAVID SHUSTER: Ed, when asked who do you trust on the economy Barack Obama is ahead by 16 points. On women's issues he's ahead by 32 points. So where's John McCain making up the difference. ED O'KEEFE: Terrorism. He's ahead of...

Borderline Advocacy by: Bethany Stotts, June 11, 2008 Little seems to have changed about the illegal immigration debate within academic and media circles since the demise of “comprehensive immigration reform” in the last Congress. Opponents of strict border enforcement strategies continue to emphasize how enforcement strains government resources. Others continue to emphasize how illegal immigrants come to America merely to gain better jobs. Many of these issues came up in a recent Washington Post article by Spencer S. Hsu titled, “Immigration Prosecutions Hit New High.” The subtitle reads, “Critics Say Increased Use of Criminal Charges Strains System.” The article, which...

Washington Post: GOP tool? Might sound a tad far-fetched to you. But you're not Howard Dean. Appearing on today's Morning Joe, the DNC Chairman Dean claimed a Washington Post article about Jim Johnson, whom Barack Obama has chosen to head up the vetting of potential VP picks, was "planted" by the McCain campaign. Johnson's appointment has become an embarrassment to Obama because the former CEO of Fannie Mae has been linked to the mortgage crisis. As WaPo reported: The questions about Johnson began after the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that he received more than $2 million in home loans...

Publisher Peter Osnos, who admits to personally working with former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan on his new book, What Happened, began his career as an assistant to I.F. Stone, the pro-communist "journalist" named as a Soviet agent of influence who was the uncle of Weather Underground communist terrorist Kathy Boudin. But the connections don't end there. Boudin's son Chesa was raised by Barack Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were Boudin's comrades in the communist terrorist group, after Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an armed robbery and assault that took the...

Give novelist and sometime art critic John Updike credit. The 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecturer tried to answer the thorny question: "What is American about American art?"

A few days ago I had an opportunity to discuss the pithy but engagingly written book War and Decision with its author, Douglas Feith. The book is lengthy -- with endnotes it runs to 653 pages -- but has the virtue the other books about the internal processes on the Iraq war decision-making lack. It is well-detailed and superbly documented rather than the on-the-fly and off-the top-of-the-head self-serving and extensively reviewed accounts written by the other authors

More than 100 Washington Post reporters, editors, photographers, artists and other journalists will take early retirement packages offered by the company as a way to cut costs, reducing the newsroom staff by at least 10 percent. A number of familiar bylines will leave for good or no longer appear regularly in the paper, including those of military affairs reporter Thomas E. Ricks; feature writers Linton Weeks and Peter Carlson; health reporter Laura Sessions Stepp; science reporter Rick Weiss; the husband-and-wife foreign correspondent team of John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore; critics Stephen Hunter, Desson Thomson and Tim Page; Federal Diary...

Who doesn't love Ol' Blue Eyes? A veterans group irate about Frank Sinatra being honored on the House floor instead of GI Joe and Jane, that's who. Vets for Freedom, a group that espouses nonpartisanship, is bent out of shape over the legislation Congress is choosing to tackle this week in the waning hours before lawmakers take off for the Memorial Day holiday recess.

The Washington Post, a bit late for Democratic primary voters to consider, notes that despite Barack Obama's high-minded talk about rising above the Red state-Blue state divide, "his political program and his legislative record are almost entirely blue." Wait: he's really liberal? Who knew! Then the Post confesses that...

The day after Pope Benedict XVI departed the U.S..., Blaine Harden of the Washington Post lamented the Catholic Church’s influence in the Philippines, specifically, the government of Philippines "acceding to Catholic doctrine" by "supporting only what it calls ‘natural’ family planning," rejecting "modern contraception" as part of family planning." Throughout his article, titled "Birthrates Help Keep Filipinos in Poverty," Harden painted a bleak picture of "the fastest-growing segment of the Philippine population," which is "very poor people with large families," and sought to blame their poverty and backwardness on their following Catholic teaching, brushing aside corruption and other factors that...

I would imagine that you'd agree with me that Barack Obama has had a pretty rough last few weeks. Jeremiah Wright, bittergate, the steady stream punches from two Clintons and so on. You'd think he'd be losing a lot of ground. And yet out comes this Washington Post poll today that shows him just getting stronger and stronger - and Hillary Clinton weaker and weaker. The results, to me, are surprising to the point of being confusing: I can't quite figure it out or know what conclusions to draw from it. But I bet there's one group of people who...

It’s all the rage with Democratic presidential candidates – vilifying the haves to win over the have-nots. However, the class warfare card is also in play for recent Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Pearlstein, a Washington Post columnist. Pearlstein participated in an online chat on the Post’s Web site April 8. Although he did not advocate direct government action, he told reader it’s time ostracize CEOs “making obscene salaries.” “No, not time for government intervention, actually,” Pearlstein wrote. “But it surely is time for people to treat CEOs who behave in this way like social and political paraiahs [sic], which is...

NEW YORK - The Washington Post won six Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, including the public service medal for exposing shoddy treatment of America's war wounded at Walter Reed hospital, and the breaking-news award for coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. The New York Times received two Pulitzers: one for investigative reporting, for stories on toxic ingredients in medicine and other products imported from China, and one for explanatory reporting, for examining the ethical issues surrounding DNA testing. The Post's other awards were for: • National reporting, for its exploration of Vice President Dick Cheney's backstage influence; • International reporting, for...

BREAKING NEWS: Washington Post wins 2008 Pulitzer Prize for public service for its coverage of the mistreatment of veterans at Walter Reed hospital. Full story to follow shortly.

Washington Post's Curious Iran Reporting March 22, 2008 National Review Online Michael Rubin William Branigin and Robin Wright have a rather factually flawed Washington Post article on President Bush’s speech on Iran that suggests either extreme sloppiness or that integrity has gone out the window in the news section. (It wouldn’t be the first time with Robin Wright, who earlier turned a deeply-partisan Iran lobby group’s press release into a news story). In today's article, Branigin and Wright assert: In an October 2005 speech to a conference on a "World without Zionism," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted by a...

The Washington Post reports that their new poll shows John McCain trailing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — a result that contradicts Rasmussen’s polling this week. Instead of showing a five-point lead for McCain, the WaPo survey has Obama up by 12. How can that be? It helps to have a huge oversample of Democrats and a lot of unregistered voters (via Jim Geraghty): Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) leads McCain, who captured the delegates needed to claim the Republican nomination Tuesday night, by 12 percentage points among all adults in the poll; Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) holds a six-point...

Philip Bennett, the Washington Post’s managing editor, paid a visit to the University of California, Irvine for a little chat earlier this week. During his comments on the subject of religion and politics, Bennett claimed that the MSM should hire more Muslims because the media has too many misconceptions about Islam. Bennett told the UCI audience, "At the Post I want more Muslim readers and I want more Muslim journalists." One wonders how far this new understanding of Islam in the media will go for Bennett, though? Will his desire to be inclusive and to create a new politically correct...

ACTION NOTE: You can email the reporters here. Given the information below and their failure to be the least bit skeptical, you might want to do so. --------------- So much for your media friends, Senator McCain. The Washington Post piles on this morning in a most disingenuous way. In McCain's case, the fact that lobbyists are essentially running his presidential campaign -- most of them as volunteers -- seems to some people to be at odds with his anti-lobbying rhetoric. "He has a closer relationship with lobbyists than he lets on," said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics...

John Weaver has issued a statement that exposes the New York Times story on John McCain as a hack job. Part of their supposed corroboration of the gossip about an allegedly budding romance between McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman was his alleged intervention to stop it. Weaver, who no longer works for the campaign, says he told the Times that his intervention had nothing to do with an affair: "The New York Times asked for a formal interview and I said no and asked for written questions. The Times knew of my meeting with Ms. Iseman, from sources they didn't...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) appeared to soften his position on making abortion illegal in seperate interviews in recent days... McCain told the [San Francisco] Chronicle in an article published Friday. "But certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade... ... In A National Right to Life Committee questionnaire last year, he answered "yes" when asked if he supported the complete reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Last year, the Washington Post let itself be so badly misled by a "study" on military recruiting from a far-left think tank that WaPo ombudsman Deborah Powell felt obliged to write a lengthy column about the matter, diplomatically taking her paper to task for failing to "tell the full story." So when the same think tank came out with another recruiting study this year, surely WaPo would take it with a large grain of salt, right? Think again.

How often do the editorial boards of the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal not only agree, but coincide on foreign policy? Rarely enough so that today's twin broadsides on the Democratic presidential contenders is worthy of special notice. Both editorial boards scold the Democrats for not only getting Iraq wrong, but also for seriously misrepresenting the progress achieved through the surge. The Post's criticisms get tart indeed: A reasonable response to these facts might involve an acknowledgment of the remarkable military progress, coupled with a reminder that the final goal of the surge set out by President Bush --...

After catching Harold Meyerson's latest Washington Post hatemongering against religion in general, Christians in particular, and Republicans especially, all I could say was just WOW! This thing is nearly unhinged and if you took the word Christian out and replaced it with any of the favored, protected minorities that the MSM guards like mother hens, it would be indistinguishable from the kind of pure bigotry that would result in Meyerson's utter ostracizing should it have been written about those protected classes. Calling Republicans/Christians torturers, abusers of immigrants, members of the KKK, bigots and even mean, Meyerson skipped only the Nazi...

The Washington Post is accustomed to criticism of its coverage from the right and left blogospheres, but a Nov. 29 front page story about Barack Obama’s rumored Muslim ties came with a twist: Many voices within its own newsroom joined in the firestorm. Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles lampooned it on the editorial page last Friday, and media critic Howard Kurtz wrote Monday that he didn’t “believe the piece was well executed.” This Sunday, Deborah Howell will weigh in with her ombudsman column. Assistant Managing Editor Bill Hamilton, who oversees political coverage and edited the article, said that he was...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Washington Post correspondent in Iraq was shot and killed on Sunday while on assignment in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadiyah, the newspaper said on its Web site. Salih Saif Aldin, 32, joined the paper in his hometown of Tikrit in early 2004. He later moved to Baghdad, where he played a key role in the Post's coverage of Iraq. Details of the incident were still unclear, the Post said. Saif Aldin was the first Post reporter to be killed during the Iraq war, the newspaper said. "Salih's death reminds us once again of the central role...

Sure, Michael Vick has admitted involvement in dogfighting. But did you see how sharp he looked in that suit on the way to the courthouse? And yes, Mark McGwire bombed at those congressional hearings with his "I don't want to talk about the past" skate on steroids, but he's the epitome of what a XXXL Abercrombie & Fitch guy can be. Inane as those comments are, they at least have the merit of being made by me in jest. But what is Robin Givhan's excuse for her similarly silly glorification of the fashion sense of another disgraced athlete, Marion Jones?...

TuesdayÂ’s Metro section of The Washington Post covered a controversy at D.C.Â’s George Washington University, where posted appeared on campus blaring "HATE MUSLIMS? SO DO WE!!" Post reporter Susan Kinzie mentioned that the GWU chapter of the conservative Young AmericaÂ’s Foundation denied the posters were theirs, and Kinzie noted that it was probably a prank, since the fine print at the bottom had the words "'Brought to you by Students for Conservativo-Fascism Awareness' -- and a postscript recommending a BBC video on the politics of fear." But while WednesdayÂ’s article in Metro confirmed that it was a prank "produced by...

Justin Logan is a foreign policy analyst a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. Former White House chief of staff Andrew Card famously remarked that the reason the White House ramped up the case for the Iraq War in September was that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." To judge from recent developments, Americans may look back on August 2007 as the month the country again turned toward war—with Iran. The same network of think-tank analysts, media outlets, and government officials who brayed for war in Iraq have set their...

Washington Post Radio is gone but "3WT" takes its place with talk shows from "the left, the right, and whatever we want". Lineup is: Bud and Doyle 5:30-8 Tony Kornheiser 8-10 am and 2-4 pm Neal Boortz 10 am-noon Bill O'Reilly Noon-2 pm Randy Rhodes 4-7 pm (Air America) (Wash Nationals games... Wash.Capitals games...) Larry king Live 9-10 pm Jim Bohannon 10 pm-1 am Nightside project 1-3 am 3 am Phil Hendrie Libtalker Stephanie Miller coming in Nov Glenn Beck coming in Jan

You are just not going to believe this. The Washington Post has printed an opinion piece, bearing no name, that seeks to disprove and deny Fred Thompson's marvelous and powerful statement: "You know, you look back over our history, and it doesn't take you long to realize that our people have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world.'' -- Fred D. Thompson, stump speech in Des Moines, Sept. 7 The piece actually tries to assert that because the Soviet Union lost many more killed during World War II...

The District today asked the Supreme Court to uphold the city's ban on private ownership of handguns, saying the appeals court decision that overturned the law "drastically departs from the mainstream of American jurisprudence." Most legal experts believe the court will accept the case, which could lead to a historic decision next year on whether the ambiguously worded Second Amendment to the Constitution protects private gun ownership or only imparts a civic right related to maintaining state militias. The District argues in its petition for review that its law--one of the toughest handgun bans in the nation--should be upheld regardless...

CORAL GABLES, Fla. -- Founded in the 1920s as a fantasyland of Mediterranean architecture, this affluent Miami suburb, one of the nation's first planned communities, has a long-standing reputation for zealous aesthetic policing, ruling over everything from hedge heights to what colors residents may paint their homes. Now a guy in a pickup truck is threatening the social order. Lowell Kuvin, 44, wound up on the wrong side of the local code one night four years ago when he parked his forest-green 1993 Ford F-150 outside the house he was renting. The city defines pickup trucks, even those for personal...

The central meaning of the Second Amendment has long been settled in the courts. The last time the Supreme Court directly addressed the provision -- which reads, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" -- was in 1939, in a case called United States v. Miller. The court said that the Second Amendment's "obvious purpose" is to ensure the effectiveness and continuation of state military forces (the militia mentioned in the amendment), not to provide a private right to own...

But being in the closet uniquely assisted me in politics. From my first run for the state legislature until my election as governor, all too often I was not leading but following my best guess at public opinion. Politics was for me a way to secure the crowd's approbation while maintaining a busyness that obfuscated the desires of my heart. Despite being a moderately liberal governor, my stance on marriage was: "between a man and a woman." The position, in my mind, created a tension with the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender community that affirmed my bona fides as a "straight." Only after the...

From FOX News: Washington Post, Other Newspapers Won't Run 'Opus' Cartoon Mocking Radical Islam. A popular comic strip that poked fun at the Rev. Jerry Falwell without incident one week ago was deemed too controversial to run over the weekend because this time it took a humorous swipe at Muslim fundamentalists. The Washington Post and several other newspapers around the country did not run Sunday's installment of Berkeley Breathed's "Opus," in which the spiritual fad-seeking character Lola Granola appears in a headscarf and explains to her boyfriend, Steve, why she wants to become a radical Islamist. The installment did...

Bonneville International Corp. will launch radio station WWWT to replace WTWP, its radio-station venture with The Washington Post that will end next month. The new station will feature local and syndicated talk shows to replace programming provided by The Post. WWWT, dubbed "Talk Radio 3WT," will begin airing Sept. 20. WWWT will be simulcast on the same frequencies on which Washington Post Radio now airs: 1500 AM, 107.7 FM and 820 AM. Bonneville has lined up four nationally syndicated programs for the station: three featuring conservative-libertarian personalities -- Neal Boortz, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly -- and one with liberal...

The brave news/talk experiment involving a storied newspaper newsroom and radio operator Bonneville lasted 17 months and only occasionally reached its potential - of a seasoned reporter sharing insights and details that didn't make it in the morning paper, and in a compelling way. The ratings were low and and the venture lost money, and it will be replaced (says the Post's Paul Farhi) by a mostly syndicated talk lineup that could include Neal Boortz and Glenn Beck, as well as David Burd's local morning show. The Post's Marc Fisher has his own narrative of the history and demise of...

Advice to members of Congress: take the train. Our illustrious senators and congressmen seem to have a penchant for getting into trouble when they venture into airports. We're all familiar with how things went wrong for Rep. Patrick Kennedy in 2000 when he tried to barge his way past an airport screening employee. When just eight days ago Rep. Bob Filner (D-Ca.) was charged with assault and battery for his run-in with an airline employee at Dulles International outside DC, I noted here that CNN managed to get through its report on the matter without mentioning Filner's Democratic-party affiliaton. So...

Washington Post Radio, which brought the newspaper's journalists to the local airwaves, will go off the air next month after failing to attract enough listeners and losing money during its 17-month existence. Post Radio, which is broadcast regionwide on 107.7 FM and 1500 AM, was not able to draw even 1 percent of listeners during its first year. Although ratings have improved somewhat in recent months -- partly due to Nationals broadcasts and Tony Kornheiser's morning program -- the gains weren't enough to convince WTWP's owner, Bonneville International Corp., that the station could be profitable any time soon, executives said....