Free Republic

The standoff between rancher Cliven Bundy and federal agents, which escalated into a national news story earlier this year as armed supporters of Bundy gathered at his Nevada ranch, “invigorated an extremist movement” in the country, according to a report issued Thursday by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

What is visible to all men is that a young man of enormous energy and great journalistic instinct has dedicated a fortune as great as that of Monte Christo to the creation of a newspaper which, instead of confining itself to the function of chronicling other men’s deeds, boldly asserts its determination to supersede the journalism that chronicles by the journalism that acts. Other newspapers may write about things. The Journal is determined to do them. William Thomas Stead from "A Romance of the Pearl of the Antilles" Stead wrote this in reference to William Randolph Hearst's and Karl Decker's...

The four main news organizations in the most powerful nation on earth have missed the opportunity to cover the most important breaking news in history. The famed WMD of Bush administration renown have been found in Iraq. Proof that Bush in fact did not lie and that the basis for the war in Iraq was in fact justified.

He brands himself, ever so immodestly, as "America's Lawyer" -- though conservative Americans would be well advised to seek legal counsel elsewhere. More accurately, he is "Liberal Americans' Unhinged Barrister." Papantonio, who co-hosts the "Ring of Fire" radio show with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Sam Seder, gave a textbook example of why he such rebranding is necessary when he was more over the top than usual while a guest on "The Ed Show" earlier this week.(VIDEO-AT-LINK) As if reading from a script they'd shared before the show, guest host Michael Eric Dyson and Papantonio were in vigorous, head-nodding agreement...

The platoon was, an American military official would assert years later, “raggedy.” On their tiny, remote base, in a restive sector of eastern Afghanistan at an increasingly violent time of the war, they were known to wear bandannas and cutoff T-shirts. Their crude observation post was inadequately secured, a military review later found. Their first platoon leader, and then their first platoon sergeant, were replaced relatively early in the deployment because of problems. But the unit — Second Platoon, Blackfoot Company in the First Battalion, 501st Regiment — might well have remained indistinguishable from scores of other Army platoons in...

An Obama administration official has floated the idea that Bowe Bergdahl was justified in deserting his platoon in Afghanistan and joining the Taliban over disagreements with the platoon's leadership. Brandon Friedman, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs for the Department of Housing and Urban Development posted a series of tweets Wednesday evening in which he speculated that Bergdahl deserted over bad leadership of his platoon and that is why his fellow soldiers were smearing him."Here's the thing about Bergdahl and the Jump-to-Conclusions mats: What if his platoon was long on psychopaths and short on leadership? (1/5)"" What if he grew...

The Taliban prisoner swap for Bowe Bergdahl might do some good, but fear and anger are getting in the way of a realistic appraisal.Richard Hofstadter opened his 1968 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," with this line: "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds." He continues, "Behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." One wonders...

WASHINGTON – Hillary Clinton is firing a preemptive blast at her fiercest critics on the Benghazi issue, accusing them of “flat-out deceit” in her forthcoming book. Moving to confront a lingering issue that is certain to draw attacks in any 2016 presidential contest, Clinton is training fire on Republican lawmakers who have launched a series of probes into the attacks that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including U.S. the late Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens. “Many of these same people are a broken record about unanswered questions. But there is a difference between unanswered questions and unlistened to...

“Our journalism advantage is shrinking,” a committee led by the publisher’s son warned. A call to get rid of the metaphor of “Church and State.” A 96-page internal New York Times report, sent to top executives last month by a committee led by the publisher’s son and obtained by BuzzFeed, paints a dark picture of a newsroom struggling more dramatically than is immediately visible to adjust to the digital world, a newsroom that is hampered primarily by its own storied culture. The Times report was finalized March 24 by a committee of digitally oriented staffers led by reporter A.G. Sulzberger....

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson was abruptly fired from the paper on Wednesday, sources familiar with the news informed POLITICO. Managing editor Dean Baquet will take over as executive editor, effective immediately. The news of her departure was met with shock throughout the newsroom. Senior editors were unexpectedly summoned to a 2 p.m. leadership meeting at the Times headquarters in New York. The news was then announced in a staff-wide meeting by publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. In his announcement, Sulzberger said Abramson’s departure was related to “an issue with management in the newsroom,” and had nothing to do...

A Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Oregon was thrown out of a meeting with the alternative weekly newspaper Williamette Week after he confronted a reporter for writing “blah blah blah” on his notepad while another GOP candidate was talking.

Bill O’Reilly said there’s no question that the White House misrepresented the Sept. 11, 2012, terror attack in Benghazi. Five days after the attack, then-Ambassador Susan Rice told the world that the attack was not pre-planned and was a spontaneous reaction to a YouTube video. “That was not true, that was not even close to being true,” O’Reilly said. According to a White House memo obtained by Judicial Watch, Ben Rhodes sent an email to prep Rice about the attack, listing the following two goals:

I stand by every word of it. And it’s even worse today. Of the thousands of Clinton presidential records released to the public last week, one among them has received of the bulk of attention: a 332-page memo from 1995. The memo, which offers an in-depth analysis of the right-wing media, describes how conservative conspiracy theories about the Clintons passed from the fringes to the mainstream. (...) Let’s go all the way back to the summer of 1995. At the time, my then colleague (and current business partner) Mark Fabiani and I were working at the White House as lawyers...

The Times led its print edition Monday with an article based in part on photographs that the State Department said were evidence of Russian military presence in popular uprisings in Ukraine. The headline read: "Photos link masked men in East Ukraine to Russia." ... The Times has published a second article backing off from the original [link at URL] and airing questions about what the photographs are said to depict, but hardly addressing how the newspaper may have been misled. ...

Original Title:Here’s What CBS Had to Say in Response to Sharyl Attkisson’s Claims About Network’s Reporting Bias CBS News on Monday responded to its former employee Sharyl Attkisson’s claims that the network indirectly discouraged her from doing investigative reporting critical of the Obama administration. Attkisson reported extensively on Benghazi and the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal. The ex-CBS reporter later revealed that she didn’t run into the same roadblocks while reporting on issues that hurt former President George W. Bush. She blamed a lot of the bias problems on special and corporate interests. n response to Attkisson’s public comments, CBS...

Without mentioning reports that the man accused of shooting up a Jewish Community Center over the weekend was apparently a fan of the left's Max Blumenthal, CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen exploited the murders to claim the American Right is more deadly than jihadists.

A new Facebook meme paints two leading Republicans as anti-science because of their alleged views of the age of the Earth. The Facebook group Being Liberal posted a picture March 10, 2014, featuring side-by-side images of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., looking somewhat sheepish. Bolded text under the images describes the senators’ views on the age of the Earth and the extinction of the dinosaurs. According to the meme, Rubio "believes Earth (is) 9,000 years old," and "humans hunted dinosaurs to extinction." Paul, the image proclaims, says the Earth is 10,000 years old and believes "God...

CNN’s Don Lemon has been entertaining all sorts of theories about the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, including the chance something “supernatural” happened, but on Wednesday night, he actually asked panelists about the possibility a black hole was involved. Lemon brought this up along with other “conspiracy theories” people have been floating on Twitter, including people noting the eerie parallels to Lost and The Twilight Zone, and wondered, “is it preposterous” to consider a black hole as a possibility? Mary Schiavo, a former Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Transportation, said, “A small black hole would suck in our...

In his speech last January at the Conservative Forum in Silicon Valley, Evan Sayet addressed the question of “Why the Mainstream Media gets Every Major Story Not Just Wrong But as Wrong as Wrong Can Be.” The short answer to the question about the media’s utter, complete and total failure, Sayet claims, is that to today’s “journalists,” “It’s an act of bigotry, to be an objective reporter.” This is the line that Rush Limbaugh, in his hour-long rhapsodizing on the speech, called “brilliant,” saying “I wish I’d thought of it myself.” Rush’s plaudits aside (indeed, he has cited Sayet’s speech...

On Friday, March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens, Winston Moseley murdered Kitty Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager, in Queens. In a March 10, 2014 column (HT Instapundit) in the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann reviewed two recently published books on the murder and its aftermath, one by Catherine Pelonero and the other by Kevin Cook.