Free Republic

On Saturday, all three broadcast morning news shows talked about the National Enquirer allegations against GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz, allegations for which there is still no on-the-record source or any other supporting evidence. CBS, which took the high road and skipped the tawdry allegations on Friday’s Evening News, this morning offered a 68-second item read by CBS This Morning: Saturday co-anchor Anthony Mason, which cast the matter as a “he said, he said,” between the two candidates. ABC’s Good Morning America offered a full report from weekend political correspondent Devin Dwyer, in which Dwyer unfortunately cast both Cruz and...

Journalist Jane Mayer issued another twisted attack on her own Enemy No. 1, the libertarian industrialist Koch brothers, from her New Yorker magazine perch. “Who Sponsored The Hate?”, posted March 15, left no doubt as to who she thinks is responsible for the current Trumpian climate of political vituperation. Mayer recently released Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, which focuses on the Koch brothers. For years she has issued dark, often conspiratorial threats about the Midwestern oil and chemical industrialists, guilty of trying to convince voters of the rightness of their...

The New York Times did its best to begin the Supreme Court debate by mainstreaming Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee, as a “brilliant” “centrist” and moderate voice of reason. Reporters Michael Shear and Gardiner Harris treated the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit with kid gloves in the paper’s initial reporting Wednesday, with the same kind of pro-Democratic labeling slant the paper has always shown toward Supreme Court nominees. A 2010 Media Research Center report, Supremely Slanted, exposed the Times stark disparity in labeling “conservative” justices nominated by Republicans compared to “liberal” ones...

Layers of editors and fact-checkers at the Columbus (OH) Dispatch and others involved in its production "somehow" failed to detect the creation of an obviously false caption to a campaign rally photo of Donald Trump taken by a St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographer. The photo, taken on Friday at Trump's St. Louis appearance by the Post-Dispatch's David Carson, had the following caption, apparently added surreptitiously, when it appeared in print at the Columbus Dispatch: "Donald Trump addresses a campaign rally in St. Louis. He was scheduled to go to Chicago for a rally, but canceled as his supporters became violent."  If any press...

ON AN AIRPLANE FROM L.A. TO MIAMI--Donald Trump isn't the only billionaire in the eye of a seemingly treacherous Florida hurricane that threatens to destroy us all or at least change our world as we know it. Two others -- one or more of them far richer than Trump -- are singing "Bye, bye, Miss American Pie." Only it's not a Chevy they are taking to the levee. It's a Tesla.They are Linda Pritzker of Hyatt Hotels, the late Peter B. Lewis of Progressive Corp., and, of course, George Soros of practically everything. These three billionaires were (and in the...

On Friday's Real Time on HBO, host Bill Maher joked about having a fantasy that an apparently unstoppable Donald Trump will unexpectedly drop dead on stage, and, moments later, joked about the possibility that discussing former Vice President Dick Cheney on his show might result in his death as he recalled the coincidental passing of Antonin Scalia and Nancy Reagan right after Maher had mentioned them on the air. Maher Fantasizes Trump Dying on Stage, Jokes About Cheney DyingThe HBO comedian set up his Trump death fantasy by recalling that people often ask him if the GOP candidate could really...

It seems that Marco Rubio simply can’t win when it comes to ABC. Back in February, Good Morning America derided the “ugly” and “strange” attacks he employed against Donald Trump. On Friday, the morning show’s journalists worried he was too mild and didn’t “try” in the debate. GMA’s Stephanopoulos wondered if “you do anything to slow Donald Trump down?”  In a follow-up, the former operative to Bill Clinton wondered, “Anything you wish you would have said [in the debate]?” In a previous segment, reporter Jon Karl derided, “Last night may have been the last big chance to take him [Trump]...

Reports of journalism's death may have been exaggerated. The Chicago Tribune, ahead of the Illinois primary next Tuesday, has explained why they will not endorse a candidate in the race for the Democrat presidential nomination. Politico summarizes: "This being a free country, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are welcome to pander however feverishly they wish, promising vast new expenditures by a federal government already committed to wildly more spending than its taxpayers and its low-growth economy can afford," the newspaper's editorial board wrote Wednesday, hitting Clinton in particular for scrambling "to mimic" Sanders on proposing costly programs unlikely to make...

>CNN’s dedicated Hillary Clinton fan, Van Jones, on Wednesday praised the Democrat’s performance at the debate as “dazzling” and a “tour de force.” During post-debate coverage, he cheered, “ Hillary Clinton just, at times, displaying just a dazzling mastery of policy nuance.”  Jones rhapsodized, “Hillary Clinton's response on the clean energy question, talking about resilience and how that could be a bipartisan issue and how she could use that, that was just a tour de force.” Van Jones Raves Over ‘Dazzling Hillary’s Debate Performance: ‘Tour De Force’Jones’s enthusiasm for Clinton and Democrats is well documented. On October 14, he compared the...

Humorist Dave Barry hammered the media on Wednesday's New Day for their "daily obsession with Donald Trump: "We keep asking why he's doing so well — and he's on TV all the time. He's on more than the GEICO gecko." When CNN's Alisyn Camerota defended the press coverage of Trump by using his front-runner status, Barry countered that "you can't deny the incredible impact...at this point, Kim Kardashian also could run for president and would do okay if we gave her the same level of coverage that we give to Donald Trump." [video below] Camerota first prompted the Miami Herald...

In the early moments of CNN’s Super Tuesday 2 coverage, Atlantic contributing editor and CNN political commentator Peter Beinart encouraged viewers to consider “how brilliant was Hillary Clinton” to accept President Obama’s offer to become his secretary of state and “politically de facto his vice president” even though “[a] lot of people at the time didn't see” this so-called “wisdom.” Not long before a commercial break, Beinart chimed in to exclaim: “If you think about it, how brilliant was Hillary Clinton. Let’s go back to becoming Obama's Secretary of State. Let’s think about it now. She is running as the...

On Friday, the NBC, CBS, and ABC morning shows all blasted Thursday’s Republican presidential debate as “vulgar” “silly” and “childish.” The same networks that have routinely provided ample airtime to Donald Trump’s personal attacks on his rivals, lectured the GOP contenders on civility. Co-host Matt Lauer began NBC’s Today: “Vitriol and vulgarity. The Republican race reaches new lows during last night's debate....Is this any way to elect a president?” Minutes later, fellow co-host Savannah Guthrie lamented: “New nastiness, new lows in the Republican presidential race.”Nets Slam ‘Vulgar’ and ‘Childish’ GOP Debate Reaching ‘New Lows’In the report that followed, correspondent Peter...

he Washington Post's obsession over Donald Trump is a sight to behold — but not a pretty one. On Monday, following two week-earlier Trump-demonizing columns, one comparing the billionaire to medieval emperor Charlemagne, and another claiming that Trump's electoral progress thus far had helped her understand "exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany," the Post issued a house editorial directly comparing Trump's "assault on democracy" to Hitler's rise to power. In other words, last week's columns were merely appetizers for the paper's institutional assertion that, as far as they're concerned, the "authoritarian" Trump should be rejected because of the likelihood...

On Wednesday's CNN Tonight, W. Kamau Bell claimed that white supremacy is the new ideology of the Republican Party: "If the Republican Party is a gumbo...the roux of that gumbo is white supremacy, and the core of that is the Ku Klux Klan." Bell later asserted that the Obama birther issue was when white supremacy supposedly became dominant in the GOP: "It came from the first four years of Barack Obama's presidency...where they allowed Donald Trump to demand the President show his birth certificate — and they just stood by and went, maybe he's not born here." [video below] Host...

It may not be good for America, but it's good for CBS." That's how network executive chairman and reliable Democratic donor Les Moonves described Donald Trump's frontrunner status in the GOP primary, noted the Hollywood Reporter's Paul Bond today. "Bring it on, Donald," cheered Moonves in remarks to the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference being held in San Francisco.  While Bond didn't note as such, a quick check of the FEC's donor database – see screenshot below – shows Moonves has a long track record of contributing to Democrats John Kerry and Al Gore as well as Democratic political action committees...

Conservative and center-right columnists often have to do far more digging than their liberal counterparts, simply because overwhelmingly left-leaning beat journalists, aka "Democrats with bylines," provide such unbalanced reporting on current events on a daily basis. Fortunately, the Washington Post's Marc Thiessen did the entirely necessary work of rummaging through available information about federal court nominations in 1988 and 1992. Any beat reporter could have done the same thing, but either didn't, or decided not to report what was found. What Thiessen unearthed makes an argument-ending mockery of Vice President Joe Biden's claim, made in a Monday evening tweet, that when he...

Continuing to operate at full speed well past the 1:00 a.m. Eastern hour on Tuesday (10:00 p.m. Pacific), MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews attempted to analyze Donald Trump’s victory speech after winning the Nevada caucuses by comparing his interaction with supporters to the late Johnny Carson’s relationship with Tonight Show viewers.  Matthews repeatedly claimed that his supporters recognize much of what Trump tells them is “nonsense” and “all shtick” and he “shar[es] with the audience” in the way that “Carson used to do that, Letterman did that” because “[i]t was always the jokes you share” plus “[t]he connection with the...

On Wednesday's edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews, a shouting match about how the black community views Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan was brought to a screeching halt when Matthews insisted: “You’re right about Reince. I agree with your one point or a lot of what she says. But when Reince Priebus’—his number one goal is to keep blacks from voting.” Both of Matthews's guests, Republican strategist Matt Schlapp and April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks, who is liberal and African-American, were caught off guard and shocked by his comment. “No, no, no, no, no. He’s talking about getting...

What a surprise it's not that ex-MSNBC action hero Ed Schultz just served up a textbook example of why Godwin's Law -- he who first invokes the Nazis in making an argument, loses -- still applies. When he's not toiling away at his new Kremlin-backed Russia Today "news" show, Schultz does a podcast weekdays that's available at YouTube and his website. Right out of the gate in Monday's podcast, Schultz mocked GOP frontrunner Donald Trump's repeated claims that, once elected, he'll build a wall to secure the border with Mexico -- while getting Mexico to pay for it. Based on...

They say "honesty is the best policy" but apparently Democratic presidential candidate frontrunner Hilary Clinton didn’t get that memo either. Nevertheless, comedian Stephen Colbert tried passing along the message to her this past Friday on The Late Show when he joked, “lying should be the easiest part of campaigning,” reacting to the cringe-worthy, face-palm inducing statement the former secretary of state made to interviewer Scott Pelley of CBS: Well, but, you know, you're asking me to say, "Have I ever?" I don't believe I ever have. I don't believe I ever have. I don't believe I ever will. I'm going...