Free Republic

Thousands of emails prosecutors collected during the first secret investigation into Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's former aides and associates when he was a county executive were released Tuesday, prompting allegations from Walker and other Republicans that the timing two weeks before the election was politically motivated. Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele's office made public the nearly 16,000 emails and attachments that prosecutors seized from county and personal computers during the investigation that ended in 2013. Walker was never charged but six of his aides and associates were convicted on charges ranging from theft to misconduct in office. The documents' release...

This Texan takes bumper stickers to a whole new level. A photo of a truck with Texas tags that features on the tailgate one the most racist decals, complete with a real (and fresh) banana, that targets President Barack Obama was posted to Reddit on Thursday. "Does this Socialist a** make my truck look too big," the decal, which appears to be professionally done, reads. It also includes photo of Obama dressed in Somalian garb from a 2006 meeting in the country. The image was taken in the East Texas town of Tyler at the intersection of Loop 323 and...

Together, Charles and David Koch control one of the world's largest fortunes, which they are using to buy up our political system. But what they don't want you to know is how they made all that money. The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and...

With the recent break-in at the White House, in which a man scaled the mansion's fence and made it inside, people across the nation are discussing its implications. Do we need a second fence? How could security be so lax? Is the President and his family safe? On the Left, however, the questions are different. Namely, they are: How can we blame Republicans for this? Are tea partiers behind this? And, of course, is the racist right-wing pushing for the President's assassination? A number of liberals on twitter and liberal websites such as Daily Kos and Democratic Underground shout a...

Last week, Breitbart News revealed a secret video game journalist mailing list used by a clique of influential writers, editors, and bloggers, some of whom attempted to bully their colleagues with it in an attempt to shape the news agenda for political purposes. We can today reveal the complete list of journalists, some 150 key industry figures, on the list. Outlets with representation span the entire video games journalism universe and include Polygon, Ars Technica, Wired, Eurogamer, Destructoid, Kotaku, Joystiq, TechRadar, and many other well-known brands in games publishing. But they also include freelancers and staffers for publications as solidly...

James Vanderbilt's Truth, the high-profile movie chronicling the scandal that derailed Dan Rather's career, has gotten the greenlight to begin shooting this fall. Brett Ratner's RatPac Entertainment and Echo Lake Entertainment will finance the movie, starring Robert Redford as the iconic news anchor and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, Rather's producer. At the same time, FilmNation has come aboard to represent international rights and will pre-sell the project to foreign buyers at the Toronto Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday night (based on the cast, it's sure to whet appetites). Mythology Entertainment is the driving force behind Truth, which was...

Geoff Sherrington writes: National Geographic Magazine had a Global Warming issue in September 2004. New instruments have given new data. By planning now, NatGeo can make a revised issue 10 years later, in September 2014. The 2014 edition should aim to correct what is now known to be wrong or questionable in the 2004 edition. We can help. Here are some quotes that need attention. The first three have some commentary, as is suggested for the remainder.1. “The famed snows of Kilimanjaro have melted more than 80% since 1912.” P.14 This might have been correct at the time of...

Dead bodies of illegal immigrants are turning up in south Texas as Central Americans pour across the U.S.-Mexico border, and a veterinarian who ranches cattle 70 miles from ground zero has the photos to prove it. Dr. Mike 'Doc' Vickers of Brooks County, Texas showed some of the grisly images to MailOnline, all of them far too grotesque to publish unedited. One picture shows a corpse propped up against a tree near his ranch in Brooks County, his eyes missing and dried blood cascading down his shirtless body. 'This guy, obviously, had to lay down up against that tree, and...

Everyone is exactly who he or she says on the internet – at least according to one Washington Post writer. That conclusion is her rationale to say Christians are awful people. Sally Quinn, Washington Post columnist and OnFaith founder, claimed that, “When it Comes to Hateful Internet Speech, Christians Are the Worst.” In her July 17 article, Quinn examined a white-supremacist site and comments on her articles to conclude that Christian “haters” “need a place to unleash their dark sides.” For her introduction, Quinn pointed at white-supremacist Stormfront to note how the site targeted others: 39 percent Jews, 33 percent...

The celebrating began before the coroner could collect the bodies of Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo, the Las Vegas patrol officers ambushed and executed while eating at a pizzeria last month. “The good news is, there are two less police in the world,” read an entry on the Facebook page for CopBlock.org. The post was visible for less than a day, but it attracted at least 6,300 likes and comments by the time the page’s administrators removed it. Jerad Miller — who along with his wife, Amanda, gunned down the Vegas police officers before dying during a shootout with police...

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...