Free Republic

Newsmax is out with our 2015 list of the 50 top conservative blogs. The Internet now allows anyone who cares to invest the time and trouble to become a political commentator with, potentially, many times the readership of the most long-established syndicated columnists. The media elite, from the Big Three Networks to the local newspaper, have suffered a collapse in influence and a hemorrhage of revenues as Americans simply click on their favorite bookmarks for informed opinions about the events around them. ....snip.... 5. Free Republic - “Working to roll back decades of governmental largesse, to root out political fraud...

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...

UPDATE: The images appear to be the work of a Los Angeles artist Leonard Sabo, who posted an attempt at the design back on March 9. I’ve reached out to Sabo for comment, and will update when I hear back. His political and artistic views are, uh, interesting, to put it mildly, most offensive of which is that he seems to think Cruz could actually be president some day.--- "Actually, kinda cool looking,” wrote one Free Republic commenter. “Maybe we can all get tats and stuff and form a ‘gang’. Call it the Patriot Gang or something. Put some drive-by...

House Democrats are blocking their Republican colleagues from using Obamacare in letters mailed on the taxpayer's dime to voters, but who made up the term in the first place? Lots of people are asking this question, getting answers like "Certainly a republican, potentially Glenn Beck" and "I am about 80% sure it was Rush Limbaugh" and "Hillary Clinton's campaign coined Obamacare." Iowa Rep. Steve King claimed President Obama himself made it up. Free Republic posters want to claim credit. Lots of liberals suspect an insidious plot by Fox News. But the answer appears to be: a lobbyist.

-snip- 24. Power Line From practically the day they sprang into existence, blogs have been denigrated as trivial, inaccurate, and derivative. Untrained writers could never match the accuracy and depth of newspapers and network news. Power Line, a scrappy right-wing blog, turned that perception on its ear when it took down one of old media’s most venerable figures: Dan Rather. In September 2004, Rather and CBS News aired an explosive story about George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. The report used military documents to show that Bush had received preferential treatment and performed poorly while failing...

Rush Limbaugh just spent about 5 minutes talking about Free Republic as being the forerunner to the TEA Party and a group rejecting the progressive leadership of the Republican Party during the Clinton administration. Very positive.

Karl Rove's American Crossroads has started a new group to make sure the 2014 Senate races produce zero Todd Akins. But it turns out some conservatives like Rove less than Akin. -snip- The Senate Conservatives Fund's Matt Hoskins told Politico the Crossroads group was the "Conservative Defeat Project." Free Republic posters mocked "Tokyo Rove." On Breitbart.com, Ben Shapiro called Rove and his cohorts, "The Bush insider team that helped lead to the rise of Barack Obama." RedState editor Erick Erickson said the Conservative Victory Project was sure to pick losers. "I dare say any candidate who gets this group’s support...

The White House is disavowing a statement from their own Cairo embassy that apologized for anti-Muslim activity in the United States. "The statement by Embassy Cairo was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect the views of the United States government," a senior administration official told POLITICO. The U.S. embassy in Cairo put out a statement early Tuesday that apologized for an anti-Muslim film being circulated by an Israeli-American real estate developer. "The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts...

Andrew Breitbart had a long history with Free Republic, from its early days and first FReeper gathering Los Angeles to the present.Using the screen name andrew, Breitbart joined FR on February 9, 1998 after lurking "long before" then.Andrew's posting history is captured back to September 8, 2001. His last post on FR was September 15, 2004. Even though he stopped posting to FR, Andrew maintained relations with people he met through FR and always had a kind word to say about the site when FR was brought up.I wrote for Andrew's Big sites and had limited dealings with him as...

I'm officially endorsing Newt Gingrich for president today. Was going to wait until after Florida, but see no reason to delay. We need Newt to win in South Carolina and Florida to stop any possible momentum building up for the establishment big government, statist, abortionist RINO!!

Over the weekend, FR broke the story about the newspaper pool reporter who was detained in a closet for a total of about two hours so he could not talk to attendees at a Joe Biden fundraiser. Other sites picked up the story, it went super-viral on the 'net, and now has become so big ABC and FOX both covered the story. At ABC, WNT covered the story with Jake Tapper last night, and this morning, this little jewel ran on GMA. The FR-inspired story also ran in traditional newspapers, such as the NY Post, NY Daily News, Times of...

The Internet's been buzzing with talk about how members of the U.S. Tea Party movement have been getting out the vote for Bristol Palin on Dancing With the Stars. The blog Jezebel had a post about it today, complete with quotes from conservative message boards about how Bristol's supporters were exploiting ABC's email voting system to cast multiple ballots for Sarah Palin's daughter. Jezebel quoted one site, FreeRepublic.com, that urged its members to "make liberal heads explode" by voting for Bristol, "even though she is not the best dancer." Well, my liberal head is kind of exploding right now because...

In a report released today entitled, Tea Party Nationalism, the NAACP falsely accuses Free Republic of being "an important space for...racist(sic)" and of having as a member the Holocaust Museum shooter James Von Brunn.In falsely accusing Free Republic of being a haven for racists, the NAACP report notes Free Republic's front page promotes the Tea Party Express. However, the report fails to note the front page also includes several statements warning that racism and violence are not welcome on Free Republic:"Please enjoy our forum, but also please remember to use common courtesy when posting and refrain from posting personal attacks,...

The Huffington Post has pulled an article published this morning targeting Glenn Beck with a $100,000 bounty after news of the threat was broken on Free Republic.The article, titled $100,000 For Glenn Beck's Sex Tapes has been replaced with the following message:Editor's Note: This piece was published directly to the Huffington Post by its author. It didn't meet our editorial standards and has been removed from the site.The URL for the pulled article reflects the title: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beau-friedlander/100000-for-glenn-becks-se_b_698724.html The author of the threat, Beau Friedlander, is the former editor-in-chief of Air America.Here is the text of Friedlander's call for information to...

AlterNet is claiming that it has uncovered a "widespread campaign of censorship" executed by a group of "influential" conservative and right-wing Digg members. The site - which defines itself as a viable "alternative to the commercial media onslaught" - refers to Digg as both a "behemoth" and a "powerhouse." "The [Digg] model [makes] it very susceptible to external gaming whereby users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to the front page to give them traction," claimed senior news editor "Oleoleolson." "But the inverse of this effect is more devastating, as Bury brigades could effectively remove stories...

If you’re at all web-savvy, you’ve probably heard of Digg.com. Founded in 2006, Digg is the reigning king of the social news ecosystem, cracking the top 50 websites in the U.S. and the top 100 worldwide. Its million-plus users democratically filter the torrent of online media, upvoting or “digging” desired content while “burying” rubbish and spam. The most popular content is promoted to the site’s highly-trafficked front page. The result is a peek into the consciousness of the internet: a mixture of comics, videos, sensationalism, and breaking news that is the growing face of new media.Digg’s popularity makes it...

Imagine for a moment your grandmother creating a blog to talk about her gardening. One of her friends leaves a comment on her blog with a news article about gardens in her area. Sounds innocent enough? Actions like this happen every second on the Internet. Now imagine the news source in the comment suddenly, without warning, suing your grandmother for the comment left on her blog, demanding high monetary compensation and possibly even control of her blog. Incidents like this happen all the time. The latest targets of these types of lawsuits include Jim Robinson, a disabled veteran, and his website FreeRepublic.com. Free Republic...

A conservative news-sharing website with plenty of experience in dealing with copyright issues has been sued for copyright infringement after Las Vegas Review-Journal stories allegedly were posted on its site. Free Republic LLC, James C. Robinson and John Robinson, who are associated with the website www.freerepublic.com in Fresno, Calif., were sued in federal court in Las Vegas on Monday over the postings.

So Jason Levin is the total moron who put together the “Crash the Tea Party” web site. Levin is not your garden variety moron though. I mean it takes a pretty impressive level of idiocy to attempt to covertly infiltrate the biggest and most widely covered political movement in the country at the moment using a publicly available web site to provide details and solicit support for your plan. This idea is so completely idiotic that when I first heard about it I figured Levin would turn out to be an internet marketer and that this was really just a...

A sign created by a poster at Free Republic, and then recreated in a Captain America comic, has led Marvel to admit a mistake. *updated "It looks like Marvel Comic's Captain America is throwing his mighty shield at the Tea Party Movement. Warner Todd Huston wrote on his Publius forum blog that the super-powered soldier who fought the Nazis in WWII observes with disdain Americans who are seemingly compared to Tea Party Movement protesters of today:"In preparation for the infiltration, Marvel Comics depicts the two super heroes out of costume and observing from a rooftop a street filled with what...