Free Republic

It is with great sadness that we must report the loss of our dear friend Tony Blankley. Tony passed away Saturday after a long battle with stomach cancer. Tony was a longtime friend of our parent organization the Media Research Center, serving as one of MRC's DisHonors Awards judges in the past few years. Tony's syndicated column was also published on NewsBusters. Tony was a veteran warrior for the conservative movement having served as a speechwriter for the Reagan administration, as press secretary to Speaker Newt Gingrich, as editorial page editor for the Washington Times from 2002-2007, and as a...

Tony Blankely, a noted conservative author and commentator and former editorial page editor of The Washington Times, died Sunday morning, according to family sources. He was 63 and had been battling stomach cancer. Mr. Blankley was an executive vice president of the Edelman public-relations firm in Washington, a visiting senior fellow in national-security communications at the Heritage Foundation, a syndicated newspaper columnist and an on-air political commentator for CNN, NBC and NPR. He was also a regular weekly guest on “The McLaughlin Group.” Mr. Blankley was editorial page editor of The Times from 2002 to 2007, and from 1990 to...

A familiar voice is back. Veteran radio host and newsman Andy Parks will return to the Washington airwaves with an afternoon program that combines his inimitable personality with a powerful news source and established media brand. “Andy Parks Live From The Washington Times” debuts Aug. 22 from a studio overlooking the newsroom of The Washington Times. The afternoon drive-time show from 3 to 6 p.m. will be heard on Metro Radio Inc. stations WTNT-AM (730) and WKDL-AM (1250), and streamed live on washingtontimes.com and 730wtnt.com.

The owner of the Washington Times entered into an agreement Tuesday to sell the paper to another entity affiliated with its parent, the Unification Church, which would return funding to the cash-strapped conservative publication, POLITICO has learned. The agreement was made Tuesday afternoon between News World Communications, the paper’s parent company, chaired by Preston Moon, and News World Media Development, a Delaware-registered LLC tied to other factions of the Unification Church, according to sources close to the negotiations. It sets forth a 30-day period for both sides to conduct due diligence, after which the paper will be sold, if both...

Washington Times executives are negotiating to sell the newspaper, after the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's family cut off most of the annual subsidy of about $35 million that has kept the Unification Church-backed paper afloat, company officials said. Nicholas Chiaia, a member of the paper's two-man board of directors and president of the church-supported United Press International wire service, confirmed that the paper is actively on the market: "We recently entered into discussions with a number of parties interested in either purchasing or partnering with the Washington Times," he said in a statement to The Washington Post. Current and former...

Judging by recent Washington Times coverage, the Republican National Committee is a hotbed of dissension — even after big GOP wins in Virginia, New Jersey, and most recently Massachusetts. But at the RNC winter meeting in Honolulu, in a series of key RNC ballots on party fundraising and candidate selection, there was not a single dissenting vote. Read more: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/washington-times-trolls-gutter-for-rnc-critics/

President Obama's response to the catastrophic political failures of his freshman year in office is to fight harder for more of the same. Presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett made the point explicitly on Sunday, asserting that the White House is "not hitting a reset button at all." -snip- The White House claims it hasn't reached out enough to the American people, but the real problem is that Mr. Obama's vaunted oratorical skills have had a short shelf life. In the administration's first months, the president regularly took to the airwaves to push his agenda, attempting to mimic President Reagan's effective use...

President Obama said Monday that he would "rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." He will be lucky if he's not an abject failure. There's usually a reason for a presidency lasting a single term, as Mr. Obama's slow-motion train wreck is demonstrating. Mr. Obama took office with historically high approval ratings based on a combination of hope for his administration, reaction against President George W. Bush's second-term unpopularity and a degree of irrational exuberance, best illustrated by Newsweek editor Evan Thomas' cultish imageof Mr. Obama "standing above the country, above - above the world,...

Jonathan Slevin, acting publisher and president of the Washington Times, outlined a new plan for the beleaguered newspaper and spoke of "significant staff reductions" at a meeting this afternoon. Staff are receiving notices at the meeting, but it's unclear who will be laid off at this time. However, management is putting the number at around 40 percent, according to sources. A release went out after the meeting began that outlines some of the changes taking place in the first quarter of 2010. The news operation, according to the release, will focus on what it considers core strengths—“exclusive reporting and in-depth...

In the wake of a top management shakeup, the Washington Times plans to lay off about 40 percent of its staff and make other changes as it battles falling circulation and advertising revenue. The reorganization will include laying of about 40 percent of the newspaper's staff of 370 people, according to Don Meyer, principal of Rubin Meyer Communications, which is handling communications for the company. The Washington Times will also expand its relationship with United Press International, including sharing online sales, the Times said in a statement issued Wednesday. “We have developed plans to secure our position and advance our...

Acting Publisher Jonathan Slevin on Wednesday announced plans for a "new" Washington Times that will focus more narrowly on its core areas of coverage while operating with a deeply reduced work force. "We will focus on our strengths -- exclusives, in-depth reporting, politics, enterprise stories, geostrategic and national news, plus cultural reporting based on traditional values," Mr. Slevin said at a meeting of the newspaper's editorial and support staff who were warned to expect "significant staff reductions" within 60 days. All employees were handed letters advising them that at least 40 percent of the workforce will be laid off in...

Things seem to be going from bad to worse at the Washington Times. And the continued operation of the newspaper, which is owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, seems to be in serious doubt. There's already been plenty of speculation that the paper might fold or go online-only. Sources at the Times said they fear major changes and that the Moon family feud that's driving the paper's turmoil could lead to the Times shutting down in the coming months -- with some suggesting that Preston Moon, the reverend's son who serves as chairman of News World Communications, the...

Things seem to be going from bad to worse at the Washington Times. And the continued operation of the newspaper, which is owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, seems to be in serious doubt. There's already been plenty of speculation that the paper might fold or go online-only. Sources at the Times said they fear major changes and that the Moon family feud that's driving the paper's turmoil could lead to the Times shutting down in the coming months -- with some suggesting that Preston Moon, the reverend's son who serves as chairman of News World Communications, the...

The only way to support Creigh Deeds for governor of Virginia is to believe in a fairy tale - call it Three Little Governors. Once upon a time, the voters of Virginia elected a moderate Democratic problem solver to fix the state's transportation problems, but the first little governor, Mark Warner, didn't solve the problem. The voters decided to try again, but the next little governor, moderate Democratic problem solver Tim Kaine, didn't solve the problem, either.

The Washington Times has launched TheConservatives.com, a Web site with technology that allows activists to talk up to ideological and party leaders and interact in innovative ways. TheConservatives.com - run by The Washington Times with contributions from the Heritage Foundation and other organizations - is a tool to "reinvent the right" and help move the public discourse. "TheConservatives.com creates a cutting-edge new marriage between the social publishing world of bloggers and the social networking world of Twitter, YouTube and the like," said John Solomon, executive editor and vice president for content of The Times. "Most opinion sites today enable thought-leaders...

On Friday, the New York Times ran a front-page story about the origins of what they called the "stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama's health care proposals would create government-sponsored 'death panels' to decide which patients were worthy of living." The article listed The Washington Times editorial board as one of the sources of the "death panel" notion. The New York Times noted two of our editorials. Neither of those articles used the expression "death panels."

If you haven't noticed, a lot of media outlets have gotten worked up into a tizzy over the mere mention of death panels. The New York Times got so worked up, it went after a few conservatives outlets by name in its Aug. 13 issue. "But the rumor [that Obama's health care proposal would create death panels] - which has come up at Congressional town-hall-style meetings this week in spite of an avalanche of reports laying out why it was false - was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists," Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes wrote...

BAQUBAH — Addressing complex issues ranging from journalistic license to the independence of the press, Mr. Richard Tomkins recently gave a media class to local journalists at the Diyala Governance Center in downtown Baqubah, the capital city of Diyala province, March 11. A veteran journalist currently writing for the Washington Times, United Press International, and the Middle East Times, Tomkins has a career that spans more than 36 years, four continents, and a multitude of different publications across the globe. Recently, while embedded with the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, in Diyala, Iraq, Tomkins indicated that he...

Bill Gertz discusses his new book "The Failure Factory," on C-span. [VIDEO]

In a year of housing foreclosures, bank and automaker meltdowns, bailouts and layoffs, we can almost forget that we still have heroes amongst us -men who make us want to stand at attention and salute. The leader of American troops in Iraq from Jan. 2007 to Sept. 2008 implemented a counterinsurgency strategy that significantly reduced the levels of violence in a nation on the verge of civil war. To the surprise of many, America - with Iraqi and some international help - suddenly began winning the war in Iraq. Bring out the champagne and raise a toast to the man...