Free Republic

The two previously unpublished pictures were given to Time magazine by the girl who was escorted by Barak Obama’s best friend. NBC’s Ann Curry reports....

KMOV (Channel 4) fired Larry Conners after a social-media controversy, prompting St. Louis' longest-tenured anchorman to defend his claim that IRS "pressure" followed his 2012 interview of President Barack Obama. Freed from a KMOV gag-order Wednesday, Conners said his statements on Facebook were simply questions about the possibility of an Internal Revenue Service vendetta in the wake of national stories about the agency. "I never said that's what happened, and I'm still not saying it," Conners said. "I'm only asking that question." Conners also said a televised statement he made about the situation last week — which he conceded damaged...

Looking at the morning news shows, I see stories about a Liberace impersonator, roaches in an apartment, a kayak rescue in Washington state, and tornado relief in Oklahoma. NOTHING I have seen speaks to the destruction of God given freedoms by the Obama administration. All four tv stations worked overtime to destroy the Bush administration from 2001 to 2008.

Under the direction of Lois Lerner, the Federal Election Commission sued the Christian Coalition in the 1990s. She harassed the Christian Coalition for three election cycles. She lost her case. Lerner even asked one conservative during the case if Pat Robertson prayed over him. (Sound familiar?) These actions landed her at the IRS where she used the same tactics against conservatives and Christians – only on a much larger scale. 500 conservative and Christian groups were illegally targeted by the Obama IRS during her tenure. For twenty-seven months the Obama IRS refused to approve any Tea Party applications for tax-exempt...

KMOV anchorman Larry Conners has been “advised” by KMOV’s parent company Belo Corp. to not make statements, post on Facebook, or participate in interviews concerning a recent controversy over Facebook comments he made about the Internal Revenue Service. Conners has hired St. Louis attorney Merle Silverstein. Silverstein issued a letter to media outlets claiming that the corporate order “is the only reason for his silence.” Conners wrote Monday night that shortly after he interviewed President Obama and his wife in April of 2012, the IRS “started hammering” him.

Now that everyone is paying attention to the scandal stories Republicans have been pushing for months against President Obama, they have a bit of stage fright. They're trying really, really hard to be cool and not let the trio of scandals slip away like they did during Bill Clinton's second term, when a congressman shot a melon to prove the death of a White House lawyer was murder, not suicide.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who has made job creation his top priority since coming into office, has rejected a proposed deal to bring major Internet retailer Amazon to the state. After months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, Scott ultimately said no to a deal that would have led to the construction of at least one Amazon warehouse in the state and brought jobs along with it. Amazon's arrival in the state, however, would have meant that Floridians would have to pay sales tax on Internet purchases made through the company.

After keeping the White House press corps waiting for more than 40 minutes in the rain... Obama finally emerged from the West Wing to hold a press conference with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Obama took the first question from Bloomberg’s Julianna Goldman, whose parents contributed at least $5,400 to Obama during the last cycle. Today was not the first time Goldman has received preferential treatment from Obama. Obama personally served birthday cake to Goldman during an Air Force One flight from Afghanistan last May. Goldman’s employer is currently facing a scandal. The company was caught granting its journalists...

... putting Benghazi, the IRS's Tea Party targeting and the Justice Department's leak-hunting seizure of Associated Press phone records in the same basket is like comparing a mirage to a dishwasher to a diamond. There is no common thread. Benghazi is a scam, not a scandal. It began as a political ploy during the 2012 presidential campaign. Republicans tried to pin a cover-up on the President.... The Justice Department's secret seizure of AP phone records is more a policy dispute than a scandal..... The irs's targeting of Tea Party groups is, however, an actual full-blown scandal. In fact, it is...

Two Southern California offices were named Tuesday in an Internal Revenue Services scandal where offices singled out Tea Party organizations during the 2012 election. Offices in El Monte and Laguna Niguel came under fire after allegedly targeting conservative social welfare groups with the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their names in the national scandal. IRS officials sent questionnaires to the groups, probing about their donor lists and requesting other information after the groups filed for tax exempt status.

Conservatives are not often fierce defenders of the media. But Monday’s news that the Justice Department obtained phone records for several Associated Press reporters as part of a national security leak probe raised a furor on the right, causing numerous Republicans to harshly criticize the Obama administration. While some may have genuine concerns about First Amendment protections, the right’s response also spotlighted an emerging Republican critique of Barack Obama as a Big Brother-style tyrant in charge of a power-abusing surveillance state. Before the AP news broke, conservatives were already up in arms over word that the IRS had targeted conservative...

...Obama said...has "no patience" for reports that the [IRS] singled out conservative groups....

Decided to graze all four local stations today.....with ALL the news that happened yesterday....here is (are?) the leads..... ABC: Miami Heat won. CBS: Angelina Jolie. FOX: High school students late to prom because of crash. NBC: Child abused by local man. Epic fail.

Angelina Jolie says that she has had a preventive double mastectomy after learning she carried a gene that made it extremely likely she would get breast cancer.

A quick review this morning of the LOCAL news reports for this morning show.....NOTHING being done by the "journalists" in Miami regarding the two big me national stories over the weekend. Nothing on Benghazi, nothing on Obama targeting Tea Party and Jewish groups... Instead, we have seen breathless stories about OJ Simpson asking for a new trial and more talk about the women in Cleveland..... That Miami media....refusing to do any story that might reflect badly upon their hero BO.

Victoria Toensing, attorney for Benghazi whistleblower Gregory Hicks, says Hicks is a Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries, and President Obama twice for President. Toensing also said that NBC News "spiked" the story this week, prior to Hicks' dramatic testimony before Congress. Toensing appeared on WMAL-FM in Washington DC Saturday with host Steve Malzberg. "He voted for Hillary in the primary and Obama twice. NBC spiked the story where I told it before the hearings......It’s just amazing what the press is still trying to do to cover this up. So they try to make this partisan...

In the real world, when you cover up four murders after the fact, you likely go to jail. In government, you retire with dignity and run for president with full media support. Up until yesterday, that was the Benghazi scenario following the death of four Americans including our ambassador to Libya. The Obama administration has lied, stonewalled, bullied, and intimidated – the true marks of an open and transparent administration. And, with a few notable exceptions, the American media haven’t just let them get away it. Heck, they’ve helped. Hill testimony of State Department whistleblowers might change that, but it’s...

Been doing some quick looks at the local news coverage....ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC..... Basically NOTHING on the murder of our people in Libya....about 30 seconds worth among all the stations...... How did YOUR stations do?

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice speaks for President Obama, as Vice President Joe Biden pointed out on Tuesday night. But what was surely intended to be a nice pat on the back for the ambassador has created an awkward position for the administration in regard to the Benghazi attacks. “[Rice] also has … the absolute, total, complete confidence of the president of the United States of America,” Biden said, as POLITICO reported. “So when she speaks, when she speaks in the discordant world we reside in right now, no one wonders, no one wonders, whether or not she’s...

As new facts are uncovered about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya last September, it’s become increasingly clear that many in the mainstream media really did cover up the severity of the attack during their initial reports, choosing instead to paint it as a overreaction by Washington Republicans. Here are examples of the cover-up: 1) National Journal’s Michael Hirsh: Benghazi: The Real Libya Story Is No Story “No evidence has surfaced to indicate the administration is guilty of anything other than looking flat-footed” “It sounds very plausible. There’s only one problem with that view: No evidence has surfaced...

A few days before the hearing, it was disclosed that a top U.S. diplomat had said "everyone" at the consulate thought "from the beginning" that the attack was an act of terror. And even before that, Johnson had reminded citizens at least twice of what Clinton told him about the attack during a Senate committee hearing in January 2013. "Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans," Clinton said. "What difference – at this point, what difference does it make?" So that was...

Nowhere is [the result of mainstream media bias] more obvious than in the relentless imploding viewership of once financial media titan, CNBC, which lately has become a sad, one-sided caricature of its once informative self, whose only agenda is to get the most marginal Joe Sixpack to dump his hard-earned cash into 100x P/E stocks, and where according to data from Nielsen Media Research, the total and demographic (25-54) viewership during the prime time segment (9:30am - 5:00 pm) just tumbled to 216K and 40K - the lowest recorded viewership since mid 2005 and sliding. So why the relentless collapse...

In the latest example of how the mainstream media is clueless to the online democratization of journalism, a CBS Miami reporter, who makes a living standing in front of the camera, confronted me about video recording him in public while on assignment. Brian Andrews accused me of interfering with his job when I was not even talking to him or standing in his shot. All I was doing was attempting to video record him interviewing my girlfriend, Rachel Mestre, about a brewing scandal involving a local towing company that she has been documenting on her blog. My plan was to...

In the wake of the Boston Bombings, media commentators, academic experts and Obama administration officials exhibited classic signs of the five stages of liberal grief when faced with a mass casualty terrorist attack:Stage 1 — Anger: Whoever did this was obviously a right wing, Tea Party-affiliated, patriot, militant, white, religious, Republican, tax-protesting, NRA-loving gun nut.Stage 2 — Self Righteousness: Anyone who assumes that this tragedy was perpetrated by Muslim extremists is engaging in the worst form of racial profiling, jumping to conclusions based on no evidence whatever, and is undoubtedly a racist Islamophobe.Stage 3 — Bargaining: The fact that the...

<p>World Press Freedom Day recognizes the value of freedom of expression, and the sacrifices journalist have made to attain this freedom. It was created, and is sponsored, by the United Nations. While we enjoy this freedom in the United States, freedom of the press, and freedom of expression, is not a given right in many countries.</p>

The FBI has begun examining the relationship between Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen and the chief executive of a nutritional supplements manufacturer that is the subject of a federal investigation, two people with knowledge of the review said Monday. Federal authorities began questioning people close to the McDonnells as an outgrowth of a securities probe of Virginia-based Star Scientific Inc., said the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because their roles in the case preclude them from speaking publicly.

NBC and ABC completely skipped a scathing new report that singles out Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for blame after the September 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. CBS, in contrast, offered full reports on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Evening News anchor Scott Pelley announced, "House Republicans fired off a blistering report today criticizing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton." On CBS This Morning, Norah O'Donnell trumpeted, "House Republicans issued a scathing report on the Benghazi attack. U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed last September." Yet, the ABC programs World News, Nightline and Good Morning...

Their accusing and blaming conservatives was as predictable as a sunrise. As always, they were wrong.

Former Baltimore Ravens reserve linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo is taking his support for gay marriage to South Florida, where his career started. The 36-year-old Ayanbadejo was making his announcement alongside the civil rights organization Equality Florida on Tuesday in Fort Lauderdale. He says focusing on this "bigger calling" is the "right thing to do." An open proponent of gay marriage....

A cross trampled. WASHINGTON, D.C., April 18, 2013 (Acton Institute) - The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has been studying the steady rise of hostility towards religious expression and religious liberty worldwide. In fact, they found that restrictions on religion rose in every major area of the world, including the United States, since the study began in 2009. Citing what the Pew Forum calls “social hostilities� (as opposed to government hostilities), the study found that Pakistan, India, and Iraq were the most hostile countries to religious freedom. The Social Hostilities Index (SHI) measures acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations and...

Angered by the British media’s coverage of Brussels, the European Commission says it wants to be a “moral compass” against press misconduct, seeking new national and Europe-wide regulatory powers over journalists. The EU has spent £2.3 million on the previously unpublicised “Mediadem” project to “reclaim a free and independent media”. In a “policy brief” co-authored by its lead British researcher, Rachael Craufurd Smith, Mediadem says it is “simplistic” to “see state influence [over the press] as inherently stifling”. Dr Craufurd Smith, an Edinburgh University academic, said that it was also “simplistic” to believe that “market-driven media” were now “free and independent”....

It's downright dangerous. And oh yeah, never let a serious crisis go to waste. The victims of the Boston bombing hadn't even been identified when democrats began exploiting the tragedy. The clown known as Barney Frank blamed tax cuts for the disaster: "I'm glad you raised that, because it gives me a chance to make a point I've felt strongly about," said Frank. "In this terrible situation, let's be very grateful that we had a well-funded, functioning government. It is very fashionable in America, and has been for some time to criticize government, belittle public employees, talk about their pensions,...

$20 million budget under Bush became $11 million under Obama Barack Obama's administration has cut the budget nearly in half for preventing domestic bombings, MailOnline can reveal. Under President George W. Bush, the Department of Homeland Security had $20 million allocated for preventing the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) by terrorists working inside the United States. The current White House has cut that funding down to $11 million. That assessment comes from Robert Liscouski, a former Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15 that killed three Americans and...

Many of us have noticed how the media--national and local Florida--have ignored how the prosecution's "star witness" (the "girlfriend" supposedly on the phone with Martin before the teen attacked George Zimmerman) has been apparently discredited. So I wondered how the local Miami so-called news organizations would cover the latest report regarding St. Trayvon. While it appears EVERY station in Miami has NOT done extensive coverage on the problems regarding Benjamin Crump and the "star witness", THREE of the FOUR network affiliates *did* cover the "paper target" story....in which a silhouette of Trayvon, that was NEVER shot, was printed on paper.

A Salon writer demands to know "where were conservatives before this week?" on the Gosnell case. Apparently the writer searched for a few minutes and couldn't find any evidence that any conservative had paid attention to the case. Curious isn't it that when the shining spotlight is pointed at the liberals, at their bias and hypocrisy, they try to turn it into "conservatives are just as bad" debate. Curious, but not surprising. Alas, I searched for just a few minutes and found the following: Mark Steyn two years ago: This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is...

Having differences of opinion is one thing. But if you ask Meghan McCain, Ann Coulter's brand of over-the-top rhetoric went too far. The Daily Beast columnist took to Twitter to slam the conservative firebrand for jokingly suggesting she should be murdered in Coulter's latest online screed. " Apparently, Ann Coulter made a joke about me being killed in a recent column," she tweeted yesterday. "I should expect nothing less but disgusted regardless." The blog post in question titled, "Liberals Go Crazy for the Mentally Ill," focused on gun control and was originally published on the Fox Nation website. In it...

None of this is should come as a surprise. Tuesday, CNN came out of the closet with an open declaration that "The Most Trusted Name In News" would use two full days of programming as a propaganda push for legislation tightening background checks. CNN has been so good about keeping that promise that this morning a pro-gun control Senator thanked a CNN anchor for his support. Wednesday morning on "Starting Point," anchors John Berman and Christine Roman hosted Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), one of the two senators responsible for the compromise legislation on background checks. The segment was disgraceful. Neither...

Attorney General Eric Holder began his tenure by calling Americans cowards regarding racial issues. Newly released documents reveal that Holder’s schedule shows a preoccupation with racial issues: he spends an inordinate amount of time meeting with race-centered organizations. Recently, the Department of Justice began making Holder’s daily schedules available online. Although the schedules are far from complete and heavily redacted, the compiled summary below (links to documents provided) shows how much time and access the office of the attorney general allocates to ethnocentric lobbyists and race-based associations. For 2009, Holder’s first year as AG, over just a nine-month period (the...

So how many dead American babies does it take to make the news? I wrote two-and-a-half weeks ago about the U.S. media’s determination to ignore a story that’s inconvenient to their biases. But, given the gun-banners’ ceaseless grief-feasting on Sandy Hook, at some point doesn’t the corpse count in Philadelphia merit maybe, oh, a thousandth of the attention?

Gasoline prices, which have been on a near-relentless surge since late 2012, may be showing tentative signs of easing, data from the AAA showed on Tuesday... prices are barely 40 cents below a record high set in July 2008.

Well, not intentionally. But Jim Ragsdale of the Minneapolis Star Tribune attended a conference in Chicago on covering gun issues, which he describes this way: “Covering Guns” brought reporters with front-line experience covering mass shootings in Tucson, Ariz.; Aurora, Colo.; Newtown, Conn., and Red Lake, Minn., to meet with gun experts and advocates and gun trainers. Sponsored by the Poynter journalism center and funded by the McCormick Foundation of Chicago, we gathered in a city that witnessed 506 homicides last year. The idea, I take it, was to educate reporters so they could do a better job of covering news...

Late last night, I made reference to a tweet Governor Palin sent out with a link to last week’s Tony Lee article taking on John Avlon. Somehow I missed the fat that the Governor also posted a note to Facebook on the matter. I apologize.Via Facebook: CNN: it’s no wonder your ratings still aren’t matching competitors. American viewers are smarter than you assume, and we simply want truth in reporting.Please see the article linked below. Wolf Blitzer’s recent coverage of this story really was blisteringly dishonest. First, because he didn’t reach out to me or the SarahPAC staff for rebuttal....

On taxpayer-subsidized NPR's All Things Considered on Saturday, host Laura Sullivan did a lengthy piece about the messaging of Obamacare. Despite running for eleven minutes, no one in the piece viewed Obamacare negatively. Sullivan started out lamenting that the public was "confused" about Obamacare: "just 37 percent of people say they like the law." She then argued that people actually do like Obamacare, since they are in favor of certain provisions. Sullivan brought in health policy correspondent Julie Rovner to explain why the public was "confused": because "there has been a very commanding misinformation and disinformation campaign." After Rovner described...

Sorry, no link...just saw this reported on local news....one of the Miami stations just giddily told viewers their hero is "slashing his salary".... No mention in the story about federal debt soaring and huge numbers of lost jobs during the clown's tenure....nope. Just talk about the clown and his "solidarity" with federal workers. I wanted to hurl an ashtray at the screen.

In a time of severe budget constraints, two factors explain why the White House can afford to welcome more than 30,000 people Monday for the 135th annual Easter Egg Roll: corporate sponsors and souvenir eggs. Nearly a century ago, Congress empowered the National Park Service, which oversees the Easter Egg Roll, to accept private donations for its operations. So when her twin boys came home from kindergarten and told her the Easter Egg Roll might be canceled, Victoria Knight-McDowell, owner and chief executive of Pine Bros. Softish Throat Drops, wrote a check for $25,000 to make sure that would not...

Is the mainstream media biased against gun owners? You bet it is. Are gun owners aware of this fact? Yes. Do we care? I suspect most of us don’t. At this point, it’s pretty much expected. With that said, we do get irked from time to time at the media’s portrayal of gun owners, which frequently hews to the narrative that we’re all a bunch of paranoid zealots, blood-thirsty and pernicious, who horde supplies and hideout in subterranean bunkers awaiting a zombie apocalypse. Naw, that might be overstating it. It’s probably more accurate to say that the media propagates or...

Unless you're living in a cave, by now you probably heard that we have a new Pope. Personally, I'm glad he arrived for no other reason than we no longer have the continuous coverage filling the news cycle. Yes, I understand the importance of the event, but I don't think that it needed to dominate the news as it did. Hopefully there were no aliens (sorry, undocumented Americans) from outer space monitoring our airwaves, because if there were they are probably wondering why the Catholic Church is allowed to exist. From my informal, completely unscientific observations, had I known nothing of...

On March 22 ABC's Nightline did a segment focused on how Glock handguns are the scourge of the anti-gun world. Before the segment started, anchors teased it as being framed around America's love for the Glock. But once it began, they criticized the way Glock advertises it pistols and the way Glock refurbishes and sells used pistols. Throughout the segment, every time legal uses of a Glock were highlighted, the anchor made sure to point out facts like "Congressman Gabby Giffords was shot by a Glock in Tuscon," and "Adam Lanza carried a Glock into Sandy Hook Elementary." The segment...

Is Fox News going soft? That is what a number of Tea Party activists are saying and they are organizing a boycott to protest the conservative station’s coverage, especially what they view as the network’s relative silence in investigating the attacks on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. “Particularly after the election, Fox keeps turning to the left,” said Stan Hjerlied, 75, of Fort Collins, Colo., and a participant in the boycott. He pointed to an interview Fox News CEO Roger Ailes gave after the election in which he said that the Republican Party and Fox News need to modernize,...

The number of Americans who applied last week for new unemployment benefits rose slightly but clung near a five-year low, another indication that fewer people are losing their jobs. Initial jobless claims rose by 2,000 to a seasonally adjusted 336,000 in the week ended March 16, the Labor Department said Thursday. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch forecast expected claims to rise to 340,000 from a revised 334,000 in the prior week.