Free Republic

Former President Donald Trump lost three major legal challenges in the past week, including his efforts to dismiss a racketeering case on First Amendment grounds. Here is a look at the rulings in three separate cases this week in Georgia, Florida, and New York. New York judge denies Trump’s attempt to delay hush money trialNew York Judge Juan Merchan denied the former president’s attempt to delay his criminal hush money trial on Wednesday, after Trump claimed he was protected under presidential immunity. Merchan said that Trump had plenty of opportunity before March to claim presidential immunity in the case. Trump...

The Virginian Pilot reacted with hate and bigotry to the evidence that the fable about coed “Jackie” gang raped by the fraternity brothers at UVA was a lie from beginning to end. They ran a cartoon showing a “right wing” couch potato ranting about rape to his TV set while his daughter enters the room, apparently the victim of rape. It’s the kind of thing you expect from the “cool kids gang” in junior high taunting their classmates after they are exposed as fakes. It’s what the little bastard do to reclaim their superior status. There is a great takedown...

It appears, per Bud Norman, that with the exception of FOX News and the editorial pages of the Wall street Journal, the MSM really isn't bothered by the FCC's announcement that they're going to be checking up on what stories are being reported and how they are covered. Well, when your already the organ of the ruling party, that doesn't bother you. The Fox New Network is on the story, possibly because they’re the ones whose reporters have treated as criminal co-conspirators and excluded from the White House news pool and routinely criticized by every level of the administration, and...

Famed baseball player Yogi Berra is quoted as saying "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.” There’s a lesson there for anyone who is in competition. It’s hard to stand out if you’re following the crowd. One of our favorite complaints is that the MSM is in the tank for Democrats. The problem is that people who get their information from the CorruptMedia will make political choices based on lies. And that’s true, up to a point. But it also provides an opportunity. If people begin to see that reality doesn’t correspond to the images provided by the MSM, they...

On Fox and Friends this morning, Geraldo Rivera claimed that it was definitely the video that was the cause of the terrorist attack on the consulate in Benghazi. Not Team Obama spiking the football over killing bin Laden, not the drone attacks, just the video. I suspect that this is going to be the new spin coming from the Obama administration. The video was so inflammatory that - while it did not inspire a demonstration outside the consulate in Benghazi, it so enraged the Islamists that they staged a terrorist attack on our consulate and killed our ambassador and three...

From the Associated Press: Cuban missile crisis beliefs endure after 50 years In the five decades since the nuclear standoff between Washington and Moscow, much of the long-held conventional wisdom about the missile crisis has been knocked down, including the common belief that Kennedy's bold brinksmanship ruled the day. On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, historians now say it was behind-the-scenes compromise rather than a high-stakes game of chicken that resolved the faceoff, that both Washington and Moscow wound up winners and that the crisis lasted far longer than 13 days. In the spirit...

Fact-checking is evolving from a newspaper dominated activity to a favorite sport on the Internet. After all, all it takes is a computer and a search engine. One of the most popular activities is fact-checking the fact-checkers in the media. I thought I would give it a go after reading the fact-checkers at FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, a blatantly Liberal organization. This should not surprise anyone since higher ed lists so far Left that Columbia Professor Nicholas De Genova only made news on the Right when he proclaimed "The only...

took a road trip with my daughter this week and she tuned in NPR for a few minutes. The section that caught my attention was a report on the upcoming Republican convention. Here is what NPR believes is important for you to know about the Republican convention: · It’s a gathering of fat cat lobbyists · Buying the allegiance of Republicans · By renting out a whole restaurant for an entire week · With costs running into tens of millions of dollars · The Democrats are the good guys who tried to keep costs down and refusing to accept corporate...

Answer: it reduces the competition. Donald Luzatto is inveighing again. This time it’s about third party ads. He’s terribly upset that the Chamber of Commerce is running ads against the Democrat, Tim Kaine, running for the open Senate seat in Virginia. They're cheesy ads built around a cheap animated train trip through a Virginia that looks nothing like Hampton Roads, but for pure bald partisan hackery, they're undeniably effective. Kaine is, in the Chamber's crude iconography, a tax-raising, health-care-reform supporting, Obama-loving child of Satan. Like the bootlegger denouncing the “demon rum” Donny - and the whole MSM establishment – is...

Just by living we run into little lies all the time. “I forgot” is replaced by “the check’s in the mail.” Or there’s this one from the Internet you can see every day “If they tried to do that to me, I would punch them out.” It’s the would-be “Macho man” behind a computer keyboard. But these are little lies. Everyone knows that and everyone can see through them. Glancing through my copy of the Virginian Pilot today I came across an example of the “Big Lie.” The Big Lie is designed to make a political point that isn’t true....

As the FTC seeks to tax you and the alternative media to give support to the dinosaur media, the MSM, The MFM (whatever you want to call it) make your voice heard. Why does the FTC want to do any of this? I am not a mind reader, but the FTC is an “independent” agency run by people appointed by the Obama Administration, which has been antagonistic to an Internet it cannot control and nostalgic for the good old days when the news was controlled by a handful of mostly liberal newsmen. The FTC is merely suggesting these proposals. It...

Stacy McCain points out that Liberals are forever putting themselves out as "centrists" so that they can then call everyone else as "extremists." That, for example, is why Liberals will denigrate and vilify the overwhelimg majority in this country who want to end illegal immigration from Mexico, calling them "racists." "Fascists" and as bad as Hitler. This is why I roll my eyes whenever anyone employs the term “center-right” to describe the political aims of conservatism. Chasing a ”center-right coalition” is to pursue a will-o’-th’-wisp into a swamp of confusion. It’s a snipe hunt, because so long as liberals have...

U.S. News & World Report is a leading contender for the bootlicker of the week award in the MFM. It seems that the U.S. News & World Report is in some serious competition with the Associated Press over who can put the most positive spin on April's increase in unemployment. So the unemployment figure rose last month from 9.7% to 9.9%? Great news according to Rick Newman in his U.S. News blog titled, "Why a Rising Unemployment Rate is Good News." And why is it good news? Newman explains...sort of:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Liberal Lion, signed a bill in 1940 that required aliens to carry identity papers or be arrested and jailed. That law has been on the books for 60 years without causing a bit of outrage. Arizona has now made FDR’s law a state law. As a result, the MSM has suddenly discovered that the law that the “Sainted FDR” signed is identical to the laws passed in Nazi Germany against he Jews. Since an overwhelming majority of the American people support both the FDR law and the Arizona law, Americans are now called racist for demanding that...

For forever, Republicans and Conservatives have cowered as they were accused of racism. A popular governor of Virginia, George Allen, was defeated for using the term "macaca" which was interpreted by the Liberal press as a racist term. Do you know what "macaca" means? Have you ever heard it used as a racist term? Me neither. But no matter. If the Liberal press calls you a racist, you had to bow down and apologize. And you had to hope that people would forget, which the MSM would not allow, until after their particular battle, be it an election or issue...

Toyota announced that sales were up 41% for March. Better than Ford, GM, and several other Asian brands. What’s going on? Toyota has been the object of mass media vilification for months. Not only have their cars been accused of causing thousands of accidents and dozens of deaths, the hysterical articles accused the company of not caring if its customers died. Toyota management has been accused of cover-ups and using undue political influence to get special breaks from the NHTSA. Black columnist Bob Herbert accused Toyota of “corporate treachery” for closing its Fremont California plant in the face of declining...

I have been blogging about the hateful way the Virginian Pilot and it's editorial page editor Donald Luzatto has depicted conservatives. Richard Fernandez analyzes this phenomenon and explains why dehumanization of your opponent is primarily an occupation of the Left. Who makes monsters? Mostly the Left: because of its huge presence in the media and the arts, the Left has traditionally manufactured the most hate-objects. They’ve done it for so long that it has become almost a birthright. The photographer Zombie has documented dozens of calls from the left, from demonstrators to celebrities, for the assassination and murder of President...

These are the people that Donny Luzatto calls the victims of Glenn Beck, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. [click on the links to see video of the attack on Breitbart] These are the people that the Virgnian Pilot is "egging" on to bloody violence.

By now it’s an axiom that the Tea Party people are racists, bigots and homophobes. That they shout racial slurs, spit on blacks and call Barney Frank a fag. This is done in the old fashioned way, the same way that in times past black men were accused of raping white women and then strung up. All that was needed was an accusation, it was passed around in gossip, amplified via the press megaphone and … we have another lynching. We don’t lynch blacks any more; we go in for a more high tech lynching in this wired world. We...

Saying that Obama's first casual reaction to the Christmas bombing was exactly the right one, he blamed the 24/7 news media for forcing the President and the government to focus on this issue. Click on the link for the interview on the BBC. For someone who virtually created the news programming that focused on a single issue, it's more than a little hypocritical.