Free Republic

WEST DES MOINES, IOWA Ask someone like Sam Banks about the tax plan President Donald Trump signed into law Friday, and you hear something other than the effusive joy Republicans in Congress put on display this week. The $1.5 trillion plan cuts taxes broadly while bestowing its richest benefits on companies and wealthy individuals. It is the first major legislative achievement for a president who rode to the White House with the full-throated backing of people like Banks who felt America's economic policies needed a drastic overhaul. Yet Banks, a 50-year-old farmer in sparsely populated southwestern Iowa, regards the tax...

Now that federal telecom regulators have repealed net neutrality, it may be time to brace for the arrival of internet “fast lanes” and “slow lanes.” The net neutrality rules just voted down by the Federal Communications Commission prohibited such “paid prioritization,” as it’s technically known. That’s when an internet provider such as Verizon or Comcast decides to charge services like YouTube or Amazon for faster access to users. Firms that decline to pay up could wind up in bumper-to-bumper slow lanes. The Associated Press queried seven major internet providers about their post-net-neutrality plans, and all of them equivocated when asked...

'This stuff makes my head hurt'In the world of the politically correct, where Associated Press news-style gurus say a man who calls himself a woman is a woman and woman who calls herself a man is a man, it’s easy to see how mistakes could happen.As AP found this week when it had to delete a tweet promoting a gender story because it misgendered a transgender.“We’ve deleted a Wednesday tweet about two transgender city council members elected in Minneapolis because it misidentified one of them as a woman. A replacement tweet is upcoming,” the wire service said. We’ve deleted a...

Who's right — President Donald Trump and Sen. Bill Cassidy, or late-night host Jimmy Kimmel? None has really captured the complexity of the debate over who might lose insurance protections in the latest Republican health care bill. But of the three, the TV guy is the hardest to refute.

The Associated Press shirked their own style guide in a recently published article, using “undocumented citizens” in lieu of their usual “undocumented immigrants.” The article with the strange reference was published on September 5 and discusses Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s response to President Donald Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “The Chicago Sun-Times reports that school officials say about a third of the school’s students are undocumented citizens,” the AP wrote.

Since Imran Awan's arrest in late July, the Daily Caller has published roughly two dozen follow-up stories on various aspects of the scandal involving the longtime rogue Democrat IT staffer and his inexplicably enriched family members. The Associated Press and the New York Times have, from all appearances, published nothing since July 28. At APNews.com, the site which has replaced the wire service's old "Big Story" site but which also theoretically includes important coverage from other AP-subscribing sources, the last story on Awan, the IT staffer for former Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was on July 26, the...

A widely spread photo that appears to show an anti-fascist activist beating a police officer is a doctored image. The image showing a man wielding a club and wearing an "antifa" jacket while standing over a downed officer was widely shared after the deadly violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The image has been circulating for several months among those opposed to the antifa movement, which is comprised of far-left-leaning militant groups that resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

On Friday, the United Auto Workers failed in yet another attempt to organize an auto plant in the South. This time it was a Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi. Unlike in the 2014, when workers at a Chattanooga, Tennessee Volkswagen plant narrowly rejected the union, Friday's result was a 62 percent to 38 percent shellacking. Coverage of the UAW's defeat at the Associated Press overnight was reasonably measured, with one exception: a barely mentioned and completely unexplained Fiat Chrysler-UAW corruption scandal in Metro Detroit which influenced the voting. Reporter Jeff Amy's dispatch shortly after midnight Saturday morning (also saved here...

The AP Stylebook, published by The Associated Press, is intended to provide universal guidelines for journalists when it comes to stylistic things like punctuation, capitalization and using certain words over others. The 2017 edition of the stylebook directs writers to avoid words like "pro-life," "migrant," "refugee," "Islamist" and "terrorist." Rachel Alexander, an opinion contributor for The Hill, said on "Fox & Friends" this morning that this is an attempt to promote language that liberals tend to favor. Judge Releases Man Accused of Trying to Steal NYPD Cop's Gun She explained that the guide instructs writers to use "anti-abortion" instead of...

"We deleted a tweet about a Fresno slaying suspect shouting "God is great." It failed to note he said it in Arabic. A new tweet is upcoming."

The Associated Press edited the words of a Muslim man who allegedly killed three white people in downtown Fresno Tuesday afternoon and shouted “Allahu Akbar!” The suspect, 39-year-old Kori Ali Muhammad holds fervent anti-Trump beliefs according to his social media profile, and he told police afterward that he hates white people. Rather than reporting the gunman’s literal words, however, the AP reported the gunman as saying “God is great.”

The old way of doing business in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House is now over — and the Associated Press is not happy about it. The legendary wire service, founded in 1846, is usually the press secretary’s first pick at White House briefings. “In the Trump administration, mainstream media is about to see its long-standing media monopoly broken up and they’re petrified.” But under President Donald Trump’s new administration, White House press secretary Sean Spicer has so far not called on AP for the first question. On Monday, Spicer called first on a reporter from the New...

He was just looking for a better life. It’s not his fault. ------------------- "In what might possibly be the fakest news headline in this era of "fake news," the Associated Press delivers a whopper of a headline that actually sympathizes with a vicious murderer." “Troubled Berlin attack suspect sought better life in Europe.” The article then drips with compassion: "Desperate and drifting, Anis Amri took the path trodden by countless other North African teenagers: an illegal boat journey to Europe in hopes of a better life. He fell into crime instead — and is now suspect No. 1 in the...

Donald Trump's disavowal this week of white supremacists who have cheered his election as president hasn't quieted concerns about the movement's impact on his White House or whether more acts of hate will be carried out in his name. Members of the self-declared "alt-right" have exulted over the Nov. 8 results with public cries of "Hail Trump!" and reprises of the Nazi salute. The Ku Klux Klan plans to mark Trump's victory with a parade next month in North Carolina. Civil rights advocates have recoiled, citing an uptick in harassment and incidents of hate crimes affecting African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Muslims, Latinos,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department has agreed to turn over all the detailed planning schedules from Hillary Clinton's time as secretary of state to The Associated Press by mid-October. It is an abrupt reversal from U.S. government lawyers' warning last week that hundreds of pages would not be released until after the presidential election. The minute-by-minute schedules offer a detailed look at Clinton's daily routine during her four-year tenure as secretary of state between 2009 and 2013. The department has so far released about half of her more complete daily schedules. The new agreement announced Thursday was drawn up...

On Monday night - the day before California’s primary election - the Associated Press announced Hillary Clinton had finally secured enough delegates to win the Democratic Party nomination. [Snip] But now there is evidence that this announcement the night before the nation’s largest primary was planned days in advance.

Today word spread like wildfire that Vice President Joe Biden had, at the memorial for four Marines and one sailor killed in Chattanooga last month, referred to their killer as a "perverted jihadist." The AP was the fastest to produce video of the event, which the quickly put on YouTube and which began to be shared across social media. The tweets all contained the phrase "perverted jihadist." The video had the words in the title. The only problem? They aren't in the video above. Was the VP censored? Hard to say. Take a look. You can hear Biden's say the...

Some conservatives are criticizing what they say is a media double standard after The Associated Press ran a photo of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) with the picture of a gun in the background pointing directly at his head.

 “Imagine the outcry were he a Democrat,” said an editorial at the conservative news website Breitbart. “How many think pieces about violent imagery and responsible reporting would we see? How many more if he were a woman? Keep this in mind for the 2016 campaign. This is the playing field.”

A search of APImages.com for “Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)93% ” no longer yields a handful of photos from photojournalist Charlie Neibergall wherein the barrel of a gun on a poster points to the U.S. Senator and presidential candidate’s head.(snip) UPDATE: AP Vice President and Director of Media Relations Paul Colford confirms that the news organization has decided to prevent future licensing of the photos showing guns pointed at Cruz. Breitbart News asked whether AP had encountered any outside pressure from politicians to remove the photos. Colford replied, “this was entirely an in-house decision.”

The Redskins nickname has been the forgotten NFL controversy of the past several months. With concussions and domestic violence dominating the off-field headlines, the nickname debate circling around the Washington NFL franchise has moved to the backburner recently. However, some interesting developments from The Associated Press could move it back front and center. The organization is considering whether to make a ruling against the polarizing nickname when it comes to the influential AP Stylebook.