Free Republic

In February, Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) was asked during a panel what he thought about Washington Post conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin saying negative things about him. Amash dismissed it and suggested people should go look at how often Rubin criticizes Rand Paul instead. So I did. Jennifer Rubin mentioned Senator Rand Paul’s name 143 times in the first three weeks of March (March 1-21) on her Right Turn blog. The only other political figure mentioned more often than Paul was President Obama at 206 times (not including “Obamacare,” but just President Obama specifically). The most frequently mentioned named after Sen....

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: There's a story here by Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post: "President Obama Got Elected on Competence. Now People are Starting to Wonder." You see, ladies and gentlemen, the Drive-Bys are beginning to get worried. The very low approval numbers, around 40 -- I don't know how it's that high, frankly. But the disapproval number is almost at 60%. Six out of 10 disapprove of the way Obama's doing the job. That is really bad. Really worrisome, because, remember, these people back in 2007 and 2008 promoted Barack Obama as the single greatest living human being to...

Former President Jimmy Carter isn’t exactly known for withholding his opinion, so it wasn’t surprising on Wednesday to hear him say he typed out and mailed a letter to Pope Francis challenging the pontiff on the status of women in the Catholic Church. “He promised me he thought women should have a greater role,” the 39th U.S. president told an audience during an appearance at The Washington Post. Carter was promoting his new book “A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power.”Answering questions from journalists David Ignatius and Sally Quinn, Carter talked about the intersection of religion and gender...

A major development occurred today in the scandal surrounding the Washington Post’s attempt to advance Democratic Party talking points by falsely linking Koch Industries to the Keystone Pipeline. In the unlikely event that you are not already familiar with the story, you should begin by reading this post and this one, as well as the one from last October where I dismantled the International Forum on Globalization report that was the basis for the Washington Post’s story of March 20. The facts, very briefly, are these: Koch Industries has no interest in the Keystone Pipeline; it has not lobbied in...

Rand Paul is the most intriguing — and for Democrats, perhaps the most frightening — figure in today’s Republican Party. The Kentucky senator, who is more than flirting with a 2016 presidential run, is making a smart play for the millennial generation that was key to President Obama’s twin victories and that his own party has convincingly repelled. Paul’s unlikely pilgrimage to the progressive precincts of the University of California at Berkeley offered the most convincing evidence so far that he is serious about carving out this (sorry, President Clinton) third way space — and a demonstration of his potential...

The video above is from the Washington Post titled “Here’s How You SupportPersonally Benefit from the Koch Brothers,” with a little editing of the title and one segment of the video below, to reflect the fact that voluntary market exchanges are “win-win” or “positive-sum” outcomes, meaning that they benefit both the buyer and the seller: And whether or not you agree with the Koch Brothers, you’ve probably contributed to their fortunegreatly benefited personally from the products and services they provide. Ever use Brawny paper towels?  They’re made by Georgia Pacific, a Koch company. Another Georgia Pacific product – Angel...

Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire (via Amazon.com) new owner of the Washington Post has got a messy situation on his hands, and unless he steps in, it appears that his new property is in danger of losing the prestige that was its primary asset. After a false hit piece on the Koch Brothers claiming they were the largest holder of Canadian oil sands land rights was devastatingly debunked by John Hinderaker of Powerline (see also: Washington Post busted!), the authors of the incorrect article responded conceding nothing, not apologizing or retracting their falsehoods, but only made their situation worse. As Jonah...

The Left’s obsession with the Koch Brothers is so out of control that the Washington Post, once a respected newspaper, now nothing but a shill for left wing causes, has made itself a laughing stock with its latest article entitled, “The biggest lease holder in Canada’s oil sands isn’t Exxon Mobil or Chevron. It’s the Koch brothers.” [snip] The main point of the Post story, which relied uncritically on a two-page report by the far-left International Forum on Globalization (“IFG”), is dead wrong. The Post story itself acknowledges that the tar sands encompass 35 million acres, so Koch’s 1.1 million...

 Which is it? Are the Koch brothers the largest land owner in Canada’s oil sands or not? The two reporters who worked on the same article don’t seem to agree. In fact, the original article was such a mess, the Washington Post today ran a follow-up piece headlined, “Why we wrote about the Koch Industries and its leases in Canada’s oil sands.”Credit for that critical second look goes to John Hinderaker of Powerline, who thoroughly debunked the Post’s original piece, concluding that the Post “relied uncritically on a goofball far-left report” provided by the anti-Keystone XL pipeline activist group the...

A Washington Post story purporting to expose the Koch brothers as behind-the-scenes beneficiaries of the Keystone Pipeline has been exposed as an utterly false propaganda operation, hilariously wrong and politically malicious. Even worse, one of the writers behind the story is married to a political operative in the left wing Koch-demonization machine.Hinderaker’s work is thorough, grounded in fact, and devastating. I urge you to read the whole thing. Here is a small sample: ...an article by Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin headlined, “The biggest lease holder in Canada’s oil sands isn’t Exxon Mobil or Chevron. It’s the Koch brothers.” The article...

GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. In computer science, GIGO means that a faulty input will result in a faulty output. Perhaps GIGO in the specific area of Obamacare enrollment projects should be Gaba In, Gaba Out since many leftwing sites are currently singing the praises of one Charles Gaba, a blogger who is projecting incredibly high Obamacare numbers. And now the Washington Post's Wonkblog writer, Jason Millman, is the latest person to be enthralled by the very convenient Obamacare numbers served up by Gaba. Here is Millman singing his Gaba paean:

If former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is going to run for president in 2016, his campaign is going to have to run through the Forza coffee shop in Parkland, Wash. That’s where one of Huckabee’s many parolees, Maurice Clemmons, assassinated four Lakewood police officers in 2009, depriving nine children of a parent and setting a national perception that Huckabee abused his powers of clemency. Huckabee told The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin (the other Jonathan Martin) that he views a 2016 presidential bid as “a real opportunity for me.” The Washington Post quickly called Huckabee “a long shot” because he...

Since then, Putin increasingly has referred to Russia as distinct from the West. He promotes an “orthodox morality” that rejects Western notions of tolerance and inclusive societies — seen domestically in the imprisonment of Pussy Riot, new “anti-propaganda” laws targeting gays and a crackdown on any media deviating from the Kremlin line. The West discounted much of this exceptionalist narrative until it was used in Crimea. Putin’s soldiers-of-no-nation are branded “local self-defense forces” to underscore native pro-Russian support. The relentless information war propagates perceptions of ethnic-religious divisions and Western “hypocrisy.” Financial weapons underscore Putin’s reliance on oligarch-princes to revitalize orthodoxy...

The well-organized Crimea operation also suggests improvement in the quality and training of the Russian military. Their troops had operated with far less precision a decade ago in Chechnya and in the 2008 invasion of Georgia . A botched attempt to free 850 hostages in a Moscow theater in 2002 resulted in the deaths of 130 of the captives. Russia evidently has been getting results for increased spending on its military: The 2012 edition of an annual survey by the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated that Russia would spend 3.78 percent of its GDP on defense in 2013, by...

Dear friends, we have gathered here today in connection with an issue that is of vital, historic significance to all of us. A referendum was held in Crimea on March 16 in full compliance with democratic procedures and international norms. More than 82 percent of the electorate took part in the vote. Over 96 percent of them spoke out in favour of reuniting with Russia. These numbers speak for themselves. To understand the reason behind such a choice it is enough to know the history of Crimea and what Russia and Crimea have always meant for each other. Everything in...

Five-Thirty-Eight's Nate Silver mocked New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as a "hedgehog" who "only knows one thing." When asked to describe what a hedgehog is, Silver pointed to Friedman specifically and the op-ed columnists at the Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal: ... They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column. You can...

Why do Washington and Moscow keep talking past each other? Prospect theory offers a plausible explanation. At its core, prospect theory argues that people are willing to take greater risks to avoid losses than they are to achieve gains. Instead of making decisions that maximize their overall expected utility, people focus on a particular reference point and give more weight to losses from that reference point than comparable gains. .... This explains why the United States and Russia keep talking past each other: U.S. leaders have ‘renormalized’ their reference point after the Maidan revolution, accepting the West-leaning interim Ukrainian government...

Robert McCartney slimed a Northern Virginia Catholic priest in a Sunday column in the Washington Post for his decision to end his parish's relationship with the Boy Scouts for letting openly-homosexual youth to join as scouts. McCartney blasted Father John De Celles, pastor of St. Raymond of Peñafort parish in Springfield, for his supposed "diatribes against gay behavior, liberal activists and similar targets in his weekly columns." The columnist later touted how "De Celles is in the minority" in disbanding his parish's Cub Scout pack and Boy Scout troop, and bringing in an alternative youth group that "discriminates against boys...

The Obama administration’s indictment of critic Dinesh D’Souza on campaign finance law violations is a reminder that it’s dangerous to be in the opposition when the president is a lawless strongman who knows the media will protect him no matter what. Democratic malefactors remained at large on Friday as D’Souza pleaded not guilty to charges that he directed two individuals to each make $10,000 donations to the campaign of Wendy Long, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, on the understanding he would reimburse them, which he did not long after.The court in New York reportedly imposed unusually tough...

In a shocking declaration on her 1 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show Tuesday, host Andrea Mitchell asserted that one of America's fiercest enemies was actually a friend to the U.S. before George W. Bush came along: "Up until that moment, Iran was cooperating with the United States on the border of Afghanistan, it was post-9/11, Iran was more or less an American ally. By being included in the Axis of Evil, it turned the Iranian government in a completely different direction." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] The topic came up when The Washington Post's...