Free Republic

Bloggers of the world, relax - the Federal Trade Commission is not out to get you. That was the message from Mary Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Welcome to the new Justice.gov. If you’re a regular visitor to our site, you’ll notice some changes today. If you are joining us for the first time, welcome. The Department of Justice launches Justice.gov today in an effort to increase openness and transparency in government. Utilizing a variety of online tools, we will be able to share news and information, not just on our own web site, but through popular social networks Twitter, YouTube and MySpace and Facebook. The Justice presence on these social networks will allow Americans to interact with the Department in entirely new ways. The new Justice.gov...

Various conservative blogs are talking about the existence of a "blog squad" at the U.S. Justice Department. The website, the Muffled Oar writes that a blogging unit formed within the Department of Justice to counter websites with posts, articles, and user comments critical of the Obama administration. Matthew Miller Director of Public Affair at the Justice Department told the Washington Times,: "There is no 'blog squad'. There is Tracy [Russo] who handles online media. It’s the policy of the office of public affairs to not post anonymous comments. We have not seen any evidence that anyone does post comments, and...

Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, has apparently hired a cadre of left-wing, Democrat campaign bloggers to troll through the Internet looking for news stories and blog posts that denigrate the Obama agenda. After such websites are found it is the job of these secret lefty bloggers to leave comments that come to the support of Obamaism in the comments sections. It seems that Eric Holder has created his own little propaganda unit in a valiant effort to become the Bloggi Riefenstahl of the Obama era. As reported at The Muffled Oar, a blog that first broke the story of Holder’s...

Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, has apparently hired a cadre of left-wing, Democrat campaign bloggers to troll through the Internet looking for news stories and blog posts that denigrate the Obama agenda. After such websites are found it is the job of these secret lefty bloggers to leave comments that come to the support of Obamaism in the comments sections. It seems that Eric Holder has created his own little propaganda unit in a valiant effort to become the Bloggi Riefenstahl of the Obama era. As reported at The Muffled Oar, a blog that first broke the story of Holder’s...

Various conservative blogs are talking about the existence of a "blog squad" at the U.S. Justice Department. The website, the Muffled Oar writes that a blogging unit formed within the Department of Justice to counter websites with posts, articles, and user comments critical of the Obama administration. Matthew Miller Director of Public Affair at the Justice Department told the Washington Times,: "There is no 'blog squad'. There is Tracy [Russo] who handles online media. It’s the policy of the office of public affairs to not post anonymous comments. We have not seen any evidence that anyone does post comments, and...

Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, has apparently hired a cadre of left-wing, Democrat campaign bloggers to troll through the Internet looking for news stories and blog posts that denigrate the Obama agenda. After such websites are found it is the job of these secret lefty bloggers to leave comments that come to the support of Obamaism in the comments sections. It seems that Eric Holder has created his own little propaganda unit in a valiant effort to become the Bloggi Riefenstahl of the Obama era. As reported at The Muffled Oar, a blog that first broke the story of Holder's...

Obama yesterday expressed concern at the sorry state of the news industry and said that he will look at a news paper bailout, because otherwise, blogs will take over the world, and that would be a threat to democracy, The Hill reports. "I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding," he said.

September 8, 2009The Blogger Who Nailed Van Jones Cliff Kincaid If the Van Jones resignation is blamed on his statements about Republicans and 9/11, a great lesson will have been lost. As we argued in a previous column, “It’s the communism, stupid.� If people don’t recognize the dangers of having a communist in the White House, then the nature of the scandal will not have been understood. Blogger Trevor Loudon of New Zealand broke the story on April 6th and has some thoughts on what happened and where this story is heading.   His main point is that Van...

A Vogue cover girl has won a precedent-setting court battle to unmask an anonymous blogger who called her a “skank” on the internet. In a case with potentially far-reaching repercussions, Liskula Cohen sought the identity of the blogger who maligned her on the Skanks in NYC blog so that she could sue him or her for defamation. A Manhattan supreme court judge ruled that she was entitled to the information and ordered Google, which ran the offending blog, to turn it over. Ms Cohen, a tall, Canadian blonde who has modelled for Giorgio Armani and Versace, went to court after...

The popular Pittsburgh blogger formerly known only as PittGirl said she was fired from her job today, one day after she revealed her identity. "As I feared would happen, I am no longer working at NEED," a college access program for minorities, wrote Virginia Montanez, 35, on her new blog, thatschurch.com. ~~~SNIP~~~ "Listen. It's okay," Montanez wrote today about losing her job. "NEED is a wonderful organization doing what it needs to do, look after its rich history and stellar reputation. They don't need me there as a distraction." Montanez started Burgh Blog in 2005, often posting critical comments about...

US courts have generally been pretty good at protecting the anonymity of online speech from forced exposure -- in fact, as we're posting this story, we've come across yet another ruling protecting anonymous speech online. However, every so often a judge goes in the other direction. Earlier this year, we wrote about a case involving a model, Liskula Cohen, who was so upset about a blog that had a grand total of four posts insulting her, that she filed a lawsuit to uncover the anonymous blogger, claiming that it was defamatory to call her a "skank." Of course, most of...

As you may have heard, there is among certain people a controversy as whether Barack Obama was really born in the United States.

An attorney for Sarah Palin has delivered a letter threatening legal action against an anti-Palin blogger who was the source of a divorce rumor that the attorney for the former Alaska governor called "categorically false." Publication of the letter at a Web site that repeated the rumor has uncovered circumstantial evidence that the anti-Palin blogger "Gryphen" is a kindergarten teacher at an Anchorage elementary school.... CNN stringer/anti-Palin blogger Dennis Zaki published ... a copy of a letter from Palin attorney Thomas Van Flein, ordering "Gryphen" to retract the allegations -- calling them "complete fabrications, false and defamatory" -- or face...

Liberal blogger Mike Stark filmed an online video that portrayed eleven Republican members of Congress as being evasive when asked whether or not they believe President Obama is an American citizen. In it, Stark attempted to prove that Republican politicians are held hostage by conservative conspiracy theorists who believe Obama's certificate of birth is invalid, and is thus unqualified to be President. The video received wide attention, and was seen to be a smoking gun by critics who relish in ridiculing what they have titled the "birther" conspiracy movement. A closer look at the video reveals that much of the...

David Axelrod's son is following his father's career path -- that is, the one he had before becoming a political strategist. Ethan Axelrod is joining the Huffington Post, the liberal Web site that has been largely supportive of President Obama. His dad, now a White House senior adviser, was a Chicago Tribune reporter until he quit in 1984 to help run a Senate campaign (and still has a soft spot for newspapers, though his old one is in bankruptcy). "I've been interested in journalism for a while," the 22-year-old Axelrod said Tuesday. "I heard through my father that they were...

http://theobamaforum.com/

BAGHDAD — Army family member Katie Glenn has created a cool way for kids of deployed military personnel to express their feelings about their parent being away or who have lost a parent from the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan. With the assistance of Families United, a non-profit organization, Glenn created www.militarykidsblog.com . She said she got the idea after taking a “new media� course at American University in Washington, D.C., where she is a senior.“I read a lot of articles on how political campaigns, charities and social activism organizations were learning to use new forms of media like Twitter,...

<p>I'm scheduled to be on MSNBC this afternoon to talk about the controversy over the pulled Free Republic thread about Malia Obama.</p> <p>The segment should air live around 3:30 p.m. EDT barring any breaking news, etc.</p> <p>David Shuster and Tamran Hall will be co-hosting the segment.</p>

from the seems-to-leave-a-lot-of-leeway dept Back in May we wrote about a lawsuit questioning whether or not a blogger could use journalism shield laws to protect a source who sent her info she used for a blog post. The company the info was about is suing her for slander (which is odd, since slander is usually spoken, while libel is written). The woman, Shellee Hale tried to claim that she was protected under New Jersey's shield law, which allows a journalist to protect sources. In writing about this case originally, we pointed out that the judge in question clearly did not...

Media types often have a habit of masking their true beliefs in their online blogs in attempt to maintain the fiction that they are "unbiased." One such blog that comes to mind is the Daily Nightly blog of Brian Williams in which he attempts (not always successfully) to hide his liberal bias to an extent that it comes off as quite inane. In fact, your humble correspondent has labeled the Williams blog as the Daily Dully. In stark contrast to the Williams ennui is the new John Stossel blog of ABC News, John Stossel's Take, which began less than two...

Bloggers updating from inside Iran: http://crowdstatus.com/iranelectioncrowd.aspx

JAILED music legend Phil Spector has posted a string of astonishing internet blogs before and after being sentenced to 19 years for murder. The producer, who has been allowed to keep a laptop computer and iPod in his cell at Los Angeles County Jail, has been rattling off revealing messages via the chat site Twitter. In them, Spector, 69, who was convicted by a retrial jury last month for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson, tells how: The authorities took his wig; He has befriended a cockroach – “I’m naming him Wilson” – and is playing air chess with him;...

Pundit Tucker Carlson publicly announced Tuesday that a right-leaning news site resembling the Huffington Post he's been planning will go live within weeks. Carlson will launch TheDailyCaller.com, which he said would focus on reporting on the Obama administration and "adding facts to the conversation." "We are a general-interest newspaper-format style site," Carlson told conservative bloggers at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday. "There just aren't enough people covering this administration and telling the people what's going on." Carlson, a former conservative and libertarian pundit (most notably on CNN), touted his site as a home for basic reporting. "Tell the truth, and...

I added the question mark to be on the safe side but there’s really no doubt about it. Josh Marshall, writing at TPM on Thursday: More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq. And Dowd, today: More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the...

Since the landmark 2008 ruling in DC v. Heller, the courts have recognized what we have always known, namely that the right to keep and bear arms is a specifically enumerated, individual right, on par with freedom of speech and religion. Given this judicial environment, if we allow the government to impose a prior restraint upon the 2nd Amendment, then the 1st is no longer inviolate.

Conservative strategic visionary Andrew Breitbart hits the target again. In his Washington Times op-ed today the Internet news entrepreneur warns of the apparently coordinated proliferation of left-wing, pro-Obama Internet trolls out to stifle dissent and demoralize conservatives:

A digital war has broken out, and the conservative movement is losing. Read the comment sections of right-leaning blogs, news sites and social forums, and the evidence is there in ugly abundance. Internet hooligans are spewing their talking points to thwart the dissent of the newly-out-of-power. We must not let that go unanswered. Uninvited Democratic activists are on a mission to demoralize the enemy - us. They want to ensure that President Obama is not subject to the same coordinated, facts-be-damned, multimedia takedown they employed over eight long years to destroy the presidency - and the humanity - of George...

The Alexandra Pelosi (daughter of Nancy) documentary, "Right America: Feeling Wronged," premeried on HBO last night. One word perfectly describes it: "tedious." Over and over and over again, Pelosi tries to hammer home the point that conservatives are angry because they just don't know what is best for them. And what is best is Obama...at least in Pelosi's opinion. Overall, her documentary offers very little insight except for the fact that Pelosi thinks socialism is misunderstood by the "unenlightened" yahoos. However, a Salon.Com interview with her about the documentary reveals quite a lot of insight into the incredible elitism of...

The Finalists are: India Uncut Savage Politics Truthdig Foreign Policy Watch Thurber's Thoughts No Quarter From the Left American Thinker Pajama Pundit The Hook FiveThirtyEight Townhall Daily Kos Politico Polls close Tuesday January 13, 2009 at 10:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is 5:00 p.m. (EST) and 2:00 p.m. (PST).

The stature of the blogs is a striking feature of the American elections. There are more of them, and some of the best journalists now working exclusively online (which means there are several news cycles in a day, and newspapers are outdated by 9am). Sites like Politico have done a talent swoop; the Drudge Report is checked several times a day by most American journalists, used as a radar. Now there are attack dog sites: scores of them, eager to tear into the other side. The Daily Kos – described as “extreme left” by Fox – is one. But others,...

Are liberals more profane than conservatives? Online, the answer seems to be yes. Profanity, those taboo words banned from the broadcast airwaves, is a feature of many people's daily lives. It's much less so in the establishment media world. TV and radio broadcasts are legally prohibited from using it, most newspapers (including this one) have traditionally refrained from its usage. That's not the case with the Web, where bloggers and readers face no such restrictions. That likely comes as no surprise; what may be surprising, however, is to what degree profanity seems to be a feature more common on one...

Sen. John McCain's campaign is urging supporters to spam blogs and forums with official talking points, according to the Washington Post. If you do a good job, you can even win prizes. "That, in essence, is the McCain campaign's pitch to supporters to join its new online effort, one that combines the features of 'AstroTurf' campaigning with the sort of customer-loyalty programs offered by airlines, hotel chains, restaurants and the occasional daily newspaper." "People who sign up for McCain's program receive reward points each time they place a favorable comment on one of the listed Web sites (subject to verification...

An official blog website set up by US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign team has become a clearinghouse for some of the most virulent anti-Semitic rhetoric found anywhere on the Internet. WorldNetDaily reported that the website, titled MyObama, allows registered users to set up conversation groups and community blogs where they can post their own content. That has opened the flood gates for the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories and incitement that characterize so many of Obama's supporters. Many of the posts are of typical fare, including accusations that Israel was behind the 9-11 terrorist attacks, that Israel and...

***NEW CNN POLICY REGARDING PERSONAL WRITINGS ONLINE*** We’ve gotten a number of questions from CNN staff wanting clarification of CNN policy on communicating publicly about our work, or on news or public affairs -- on the internet. In Blogs. In Chatrooms. On video sharing sites. On social networking sites. Below are some of the typical questions -- and our answers. We hope this is helpful to everyone, After reading -- please don’t hesitate to call or email anyone at Standards and Practices if you have further questions. (See contact info below). MOST IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER: UNLESS GIVEN PERMISSION BY CNN...

Web loggers who are campaigning against Senator Obama's presidential run are accusing Google and Obama supporters of silencing them after their Web logs were marked as spam and their accounts temporarily frozen. On Thursday, hours after publishing a post about an online petition demanding that Mr. Obama publicly produce his birth certificate, an associate professor of business administration at Brooklyn College, Mitchell Langbert, found that he could no longer access his Web log.

Last week, we published Babba Zee's Anti-Obama Blogs Shut Down by Google, Obamabots. Thurday, Blogger locked our original (and still quite robust) site, DBKP at Blogger for being a spam blog. One would think Blogger would have a system in place before shutting down blogs with any kind of Google Page Rank. After all, your average spam site doesn't acquire much of a page rank. But, apparently, one would be wrong. Our original site is PR-5. Were Obama supporters behind this latest round of blog shutdowns, as they were last month? In Obama's Netroots Supporters Continue "Blog Burning", Confederate Yankee...

Hi everybody, I’m excited to be posting on BlogHer. Not only because blogging is something I’ve actually been able to beat my daughters to; but because it gives me the opportunity to tell you a little bit about them, my husband, myself, and our experiences traveling all over this great country. Over the course of this campaign, I’ve been hosting roundtable discussions with working women all across America. I’m there to talk about my husband, of course – but more importantly, I’m there to listen. We talk about what it’s like to play multiple roles at once and what it’s...

Usually when I write “Grandmom’s guide to computer” series, I get a geek who corrects my ignorance. That’s fine: I’m a doctor, not a geek, and the series is trying to explain basic computer stuff that I had to learn painfully on my own to others who might, like me, be from the stone ages of snailmail and dead wood news. However, when an article about computer security and the danger of opening spam (using a WaPo article on Obama spam as an example) resulted in a personal attack by an Obama supporter, well, it got me wondering. Usually I...

HARTFORD, Conn. -- Comments from bloggers that say, "Hartford is a piece-of-scum city populated by animals," and, "It is the African/ Latino people that have ruined our country,” are the kind that Mayor Eddie Perez said he no longer wants to see on www.hartford.com. Perez and community leaders held a rally Friday afternoon in front of the Broad Street headquarters of the state's largest newspaper, the Hartford Courant. Perez said he's asked the Courant to better monitor comment from readers

In reading a small slice of the coverage of the AP - Drudge Retort contretemps it struck me that a lot of the more breathless coverage in the blogosphere stems from the rather larger misperception that one day last week, out of the blue, Rogers Cadenhead got slapped with a lawsuit by AP. As one of the few people who has seen all the legal documents in the case and has actually read the Digital Millennium Copyright Act I can see it would be wise for some folks to cool down and acquaint themselves with the rather prosaic facts in...

The Associated Press took a grandiose Facebook-style faceplant last week when it attempted to impose strict guidelines on the blogosphere. Now, just like Facebook’s initial unapologetic enthusiasm for its privacy-violating Beacon program followed by Facebook’s effusive apology for its privacy-violating Beacon program, the AP is bowing to the will of the angry Internet masses and backing off. Sort of. [snip] [snip]To citizen journalists out in cyberspace, AP’s proclamation against one little aggregate site (much smaller in comparison to, say, Digg, etc.) rang like a shot across the bow of fair use, especially after an AP spokesperson announced that, from here...

The Associated Press is at it again. Not content with attempting to bring about the end of Snapped Shot, my little wire-photo-critiquing hobby, they’re now going after the dastardly news commentators over at the Drudge Retort for alleged copyright violations. Will they ever learn how this Internet thing works? Back in March, I was delighted to receive a love letter from the AP’s legal department, which kindly informed me that they didn’t particularly care for me. You can read all about those travails in the piece I wrote for Pajamas Media back then. (Pun intended.)[snip] [snip]This harkens back to memories...

The Associated Press is trying to back out of an Old Media-New Media fight that it didn’t quite mean to pick. The 162-year-old news service will sit down with representatives of a bloggers group Thursday to devise guidelines allowing Internet commentators to use excerpts from AP stories and broadcasts. The AP provoked outrage in the blogosphere last week when it issued a blunt legal demand that the Drudge Retort, a small online news and commentary site, remove seven posts containing snippets –- all less than 80 words long –- from AP stories. The website, named in satirical homage to the...

As anybody with high-speed Internet knows, MyDD and Daily Kos sit at the top of the liberal Netroots movement, which over the last five years has made astonishing strides in its campaign to transform the Democratic Party into a hard-fighting, proudly liberal, and, most importantly, victorious entity. Though their websites offer distinct communities and commentaries, and though they have very different personalities, MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong (a former astrologer) and Kos's Markos Moulitsas (a former Army man) have always gotten along--the two co-authored a 2006 book, Crashing the Gate, about the rise of their movement. Their bond has been rooted...

Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign is trying to tap a new audience of potential voters by taking his campaign message straight to liberal and nonpolitical issues-based blogs, which reach millions of readers but don't often delve into conservative politics. The strategy was in full swing yesterday when Mr. McCain invited non-conservative bloggers to join his regular blogger conference call, just hours after he delivered a major speech previewing his war strategy and other priorities for a first presidential term. It already has started a war among liberal bloggers over how to react to Mr. McCain's overture. In answering the first...

The move on the Left from Hillary to Obama has all the characteristics of a nasty divorce. A few days ago I wrote about one of my associates who transferred his affection from the Clintons to Obama. He spoke about Hillary like she was a wife who had slept with his best friend. The expressions of loathing are especially graphic in the blogosphere. Thanks to Powerline we get a glimpse of what the Left is saying when they are not using four letter words to describe Hillary. Posts like this one from John Aravosis, with the title "Go away you...

The recent offensive operations taken by the Iraqi government against the Mahdi Army (Jaish al-Mahdi - JAM) of Muqtada al-Sadr have received much analysis and commentary since the onset. Each of the ensuing analysis and commentary offerings have agreed that the Maliki government’s military actions and the Mahdi Army response are revelatory in nature. But that is where the agreement seems to end, as there appears a divergence regarding precisely what has been revealed: Who has operated and enjoys the position of strength, Maliki and the Iraqi government and military forces, or the Mahdi Army forces of Muqtada al-Sadr, which...

SAN FRANCISCO — They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home. A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment. Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create...

It's a bummer when an online slime machine is outed.Media Matters was an extremely effective leftwing propaganda outfit until it was found out that they were linked directly to Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as billionaire leftist George Soros.Copious Dissent explains what happens to a liberal slime machine like Media Matters after being exposed. It looks like Think Progress may be following in their footsteps.