Free Republic

It was, perhaps, the day the media died. Next week marks the fifth anniversary of the bitter night-January 21, 2011-when progressive Americans, and indeed Americans of all political persuasions who value honor, truth, respect, intelligence and decency, were shocked to learn that MSNBC had decided to end Countdown with Keith Olbermann, perhaps the single best news program ever to air on cable television in the United States. The abrupt cancellation of Countdown was a victory for the dishonest political forces Olbermann had forcefully condemned during his nearly eight-year run-and a demoralizing defeat for democracy. Things just haven't been the same...

This morning, NARAL Pro-Choice America PAC announced their endorsement of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for President of the United States. The timing of the endorsement is particularly striking, with the Iowa caucuses—the first primary-type event to occur nationwide for the 2016 Presidential election—is now less than one month out. Real Clear Politics has Clinton leading her main opponent for the nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, by 12.8 points in Iowa, 49.8 to 37 percent in the state. (The third contender for the nomination, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, is currently standing at an average of 6 percent in...

Since 1998, there has been an unexplained "standstill" in the heating of the Earth's atmosphere. Writing in Nature Geoscience, the researchers say this will reduce predicted warming in the coming decades. But long-term, the expected temperature rises will not alter significantly. The slowdown in the expected rate of global warming has been studied for several years now. Earlier this year, the UK Met Office lowered their five-year temperature forecast. But this new paper gives the clearest picture yet of how any slowdown is likely to affect temperatures in both the short-term and long-term. An international team of researchers looked at...

No matter what Mitt Romney wanted this week to be about, it's clear that it's going to be about one thing: A campaign that is off message and in disarray. The series of stories Monday morning that laid bare latent tensions within the Romney campaign, and in particular, displeasure with the one of the GOP candidate's trusted advisers, Stuart Stevens, turnout out to be just the beginning. But it was the late-day hidden camera dump by Mother Jones' David Corn and video researcher James Carter that turned out to be the day's real atomic bomb. The leaked videos showed a...

CNN was called the 'Clinton News Network' during the 90s for a reason. After letting Bill Clinton get away with his ridiculous excuse for supporting a temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts, Wolf Blitzer kissed up to the former president by fawning over his daughter Chelsea in the Thursday interview. And Blitzer had a sugary introduction ready. "[W]hen we spoke about the President's daughter, Chelsea, his face lit up with pride," Blitzer cooed. Are journalists supposed to sound like next-door neighbors marveling over how the kids on the block are all grown-up? "I have known her since she was...

Whatever Scott Walker's fate, Barack Obama may drag some bragging rights out of the Wisconsin governor's recall election: Voters in preliminary exit poll results today say they favor Obama over Mitt Romney in November's presidential election by a slight 6-point margin (51-45 percent). These results are preliminary so it remains to be seen if that result will hold in final exit poll results later tonight. If so, it might provide Obama forces with pushback should Walker, the incumbent Republican, prevail in the recall election against Democratic candidate Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee. Barrett lost to Walker when the two...

Funny really is money. Bill Maher, the host of HBO's "Real Time," announced on Sunday at Citi Field that he had purchased a minority stake in the Mets earlier this year — and the sometimes controversial, always funny comedian wasn't kidding. Maher, a lifelong Mets fan, says he thinks he made a "great investment" by purchasing a share in the team. "I think people sometimes forget there's only one National League franchise in New York City, and they're not making anymore," he said. "I just thought it would be a great place, especially after I've seen some of the ways...

While, in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” Mark Antony said that the evil men do lives beyond their deaths, we now also see how quickly mean spirits can be exposed in the wake of the wickedness they have committed. The result is “Hell to tell the captain,” as they used to say down South. In jangled visions of entitlement, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, former Gov. Eliot Spitzer and those of President Obama’s Secret Service men who pulverized their careers in the Colombian prostitution scandal, all showed us something we need to know. They proved they were fools who were crushed for...

Chelsea Clinton did her second report for NBC's "Rock Center with Brian Williams" Wednesday night, and it was just as flawed as the first. The learning curve does not appear to have bent one degree in the direction of growth. This one-dimensional, under-reported, naive celebration of a charter school in Rhode Island was just as much of an empty-headed puff job as Clinton's first report on an after-school program in Little Rock. And before you take to your computer to send an email telling me how mean it is for me to criticize this 31-year-old woman who has been given...

Newt Gingrich isn't exactly chasing the gay vote. The Republican presidential candidate told a homosexual Iowa man at a campaign event on Tuesday to vote for President Obama. Scott Arnold, a Democrat and associate professor of writing at William Penn University, approached the ex-House speaker in Oskaloosa wanting to know how Gingrich would represent him as President, according to the Des Moines Register. "I asked him if he’s elected, how does he plan to engage gay Americans. How are we to support him? And he told me to support Obama," Arnold told the newspaper. The Gingrich campaign did not immediately...

MSNBC has a new addition to its staff — Sen. John McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain. On his Wednesday program, MSNBC host Thomas Roberts introduced McCain and asked her to address her back-and-forth with presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. “Can you believe that?” McCain asked. “Former Speaker of the House I’m getting in fights with, I can’t believe it.” In a specific incident addressing some remarks McCain made about his presidential bid, Gingrich said, “How would she have a clue?” “I think he’s delusional,” McCain said. “And him calling me clueless I think is so sexist...

Manhattan and the Bronx would be uninhabitable if the accident-prone Indian Point nuke plant suffered a Chernobyl-like disaster, an environmental group charged Monday. A massive radiation release similar to the 1986 catastrophe in Ukraine could also contaminate Brooklyn and chunks of Queens and Staten Island, according to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The more you learn about Indian Point, the more you know it must close," said Robert Kennedy Jr., a senior attorney at NRDC. "It's too old, it's near too many people, and it's just too vulnerable to fire, earthquake and attack." The doomsday scenario comes...

Fresh on the heels of announcements by Chris Christie and Sarah Palin that they were not running for President, members of the media panicked while waiting for Rudy Giuliani to decide. Then it happened. Amanda Knox came to the microphone. She held a tearful press conference, where she did not announce that she was running for President. Given this late stage of the game, she would have said something if she was. She also failed to mention what she thought of Casey Anthony as a potential running mate, and if they would be willing to enjoy drug fueled sex orgies...

American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, as if they were corralling livestock. The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Gaze up the Hudson River and hope, hope, hope our regulators are right. Hope they could not possibly be as wrong as the regulators in Japan who said their nuclear reactors could withstand any calamity. Hope we never, ever have an out-of-control reactor just 35 miles north - a Chernobyl-on-the-Hudson. We are assured the Indian Point nuclear plant, which has had its share of problems, is designed to shrug off an earthquake under a magnitude 6.1. That's a bit above the most powerful one on record in New York - a 5.25 way back in 1884. We are also told...

<p>They've been portrayed variously as angry fringe elements, often inarticulate, potentially violent and merely Republicans in sheep's clothing or disgruntled pockets of conservatives blindly lashing out at a left-handed President Obama and the same side of his Democratic Party finally getting its chance to drive home a liberal agenda after eight years of Republican rule and six under a centrist Bill Clinton.</p>

Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann are engaged in one of the most visible rivalries of the decade — a conflict that may be rooted more in their similarities than differences. Both talk show hosts are former straight news reporters who share not only a formula for talk-show success, but a mutual respect for Tom Snyder, whose 1970s talk show Tomorrow set the bar for thoughtful, entertaining talk. Olbermann and O'Reilly make our Players list for best epitomizing the transformation of news in the 2000s. While CNN ruled the '90s with an emphasis on breaking, opinion-free reports, The O'Reilly Factor helped...

Sept. 19 is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Courageous Captain Rescued by Navy Seals View SlideshowCaptain Richard Phillips, who has been held by Somali pirates since Wednesday in a small life boat off of Africa, has been freed. After this weekend, April 12 might become International Keelhaul A Pirate Day. With a rescue of captured Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama -- and killing the Somali pirates holding him hostage -- the US Navy created a feel-good Easter story. Even more significantly in a political sense, President Barack Obama suddenly makes himself look rather different on the national...

The pressure's on for Barack Obama, orator. History wants something for the ages in his Jan. 20 inaugural speech. Not just pretty words that melt like gumdrops but something that will settle in the nation's soul and be worth making schoolchildren memorize 100 years from now. Americans want something for the dispiriting times they live in. They have their first extraordinary speaker in decades taking the oath of office. They know how good he's been. Time for great. How tall is the order? "The great task of Barack Obama is to be a John F. Kennedy or to be a...

Terrorist strikes on four American cities. Russia rolling into Eastern Europe. Israel hit by a nuclear bomb. Gay marriage in every state. The end of the Boy Scouts. All are plausible scenarios if Democrat Barack Obama is elected president, according to a new addition to the campaign conversation called "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America," produced by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family Action. The imagined look into the future is part of an escalation in rhetoric from Christian right activists who are trying to paint Obama in the worst possible terms as the campaign heads into the...