Free Republic

Wow. This was warped and offensive. New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman sited a debunked study to compare global warming deniers to Trotsky Marxists – then blames the Syrian revolution on global warming, not on Bashir Assad’s brutality. Let me put this in personal terms. Your son or daughter has a disease. And you go to 100 doctors. 97 out of a hundred say, “This is a cause and this is a cure,” and three percent say, “This is a cause and this is a cure.” It’s like 97% of experts say this. 3% say that. And, conservatives...

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) appeared on CBS Face the Nation on Sunday morning and was met with a barrage of questions from host Bob Schieffer about his involvement in the government shutdown. Apart from being the victim of Schieffer’s accusations that the Tea Party senator was to blame for the shutdown, it also appears that Mr. Cruz was the victim of editing by CBS. Based on video from Senator Cruz’s YouTube page and what aired on today’s Face the Nation broadcast, the senator’s comments surrounding President Obama’s “abuse of power” were edited from the program. Instead what aired was a...

Marco got Bob lost in the debate.

President Obama is scheduled to give his sixth State of the Union address on January 28, and CBS’s Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer decided to bring on the man who will give the Tea Party response, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). Rather than focus primarily on the failures of the Obama Administration over the past 5 years, the veteran CBS reporter chose to use his interview with Cruz as an opportunity to attack the Tea Party favorite and spew White House and Democratic talking points at the Republican. Schieffer began his interview with Cruz by saying that the senator “led...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation yesterday in part to face the music. Bob Schieffer led off this portion of her appearance by noting that the Obama administration has failed to deliver on many promises of ObamaCare, not the least of which was “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Feinstein tries to explain that the promise was true … up until the bill passed.

Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer interrogated Representative Tim Huelskamp (R-KA) on the House Republicans’ tactics to shutdown the government and test the breaching of the debt ceiling, challenging Huelskamp to name what, if anything, such measures had accomplished or were intended to accomplish. “At the end of the day, what we have accomplished?” Huelskamp said. “Not much yet. But we have to focus on Obamacare, and we have to focus on the underlying problem that’s been ignored for years, and that’s too much spending.” “But congressman, don’t you have to focus on keeping the government running?” Schieffer asked. When...

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – The Senate has taken the lead from the House in attempting to devise a plan to reopen the government and avoid a potential default in the coming week. Speaking with Bob Schieffer on Sunday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said he is “cautiously hopeful” that the Senate can pick up where House negotiations have become deadlocked, and hopefully avoid the continued government shutdown through bipartisan Senate discussion. “I’m cautiously hopeful, optimistic that we can come to an agreement and open up the government and avoid default based on the bipartisan meetings that are going on,” Schumer said...

Remember when the media rushed to talk about transparency in the Barack Obama “Hope and Change” era? Good times, good times. Leonard Downie, who once worked as the executive editor of the Washington Post and wrote a novel about Washington corruption and the Iraq War, finds a bigger and non-fictional problem in the successor to George W. Bush. Downie gives the Post a preview of his report from the Committee to Protect Journalists which outlines the Obama war on reporters and their sources: “A memo went out from the chief of staff a year ago to White House employees and...

Leonard Downie, a former executive editor of The Washington Post, is the Weil family professor of journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. This article is based on his report “The Obama Administration and the Press,” forthcoming Thursday from the Committee to Protect Journalists. In the Watergate era, the Nixon administration’s telephone wiretaps were the biggest concern for journalists and sources worried about government surveillance. That was one of the reasons why Bob Woodward met with FBI official Mark Felt (a.k.a. “Deep Throat”) in an underground parking garage in Arlington, and why he and Carl...

Latest dispatch from the Department of Pot-Meet-Kettle. On today's Face the Nation, Texas state senator Wendy Davis, who overnight went from being a national unknown to a rising star who today appeared on count-em three Sunday talk shows, has accused politicians of using the abortion issue "to boost their own political aspirations." Davis also accused Texas Governor Rick Perry and Lt. Governor David Dewhurst of putting thousands of Texas women "in harm's way in order for them to step up the political ladder." Bob Schieffer never called Davis on her hypocrisy. View the video here.

Vice President Joe Biden will not be throwing his annual beach party for journalists this summer, POLITICO has learned. Since 2010, Vice President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden have invited top journalists to their home at the Naval Observatory for a beach bash that has included Super Soaker fights, face painting, and a moon bounce. Past guests have included then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, CNN's Wolf Blitzer and Candy Crowley, MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, CBS's Bob Schieffer, ABC's Ann Compton, PBS's Gwen Ifill and New York Times reporter David Sanger, among many others. The Vice President's...

Bob Schieffer somehow topped Chris Matthews during CBS News's special coverage of President Obama's gun control press conference on Wednesday, as he became the worst caricature of a foaming-at-the-mouth cheerleader for the chief executive. Schieffer lauded "one of the best speeches I've ever heard him [Obama] deliver", and compared Obama's new gun control agenda to Lyndon Johnson's push for civil rights legislation in the 1960s. The CBS veteran even went so far to liken the President's cause to the ten-year hunt for 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and the difficult endeavor of winning World War II [audio available here; video...

On CBS’s Face The Nation this week, host Bob Schieffer asked Ben Affleck point blank, “Have you ever thought about running for public office?” Although he attempted to deflect the question by noting “the state of Massachusetts currently has two extraordinary Senators,” he ended up saying, “well, one never knows.” Schieffer noted there might be a vacancy for him soon, with Senator John Kerry being tapped to be President Obama‘s next Secretary of State. Affleck said, “I’m not one to get into conjecture,” but then said, “I like to be involved.”

CBS's Bob Schieffer made a comment Sunday about the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, that's likely to raise eyebrows on both sides of the aisle. During a Face the Nation panel discussion about the incident, Schieffer said, "If [shooter Adam Lanza] had had an Arab name, people would be going nuts about what we ought to do right now" I guess Schieffer forgot how when U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan murdered thirteen people while injuring 29 at Fort Hood in November 2009, much of the media initially buried his Islamic affiliation. This included the CBS Evening News that day....

In the final debate, liberal CBS anchorman Bob Schieffer did it right. He moderated without asserting his own political opinions. Indeed, if this was all you had as a compass, you'd never know where he leaned. It was a welcome change from the Raddatz and Crowley libfests. On the morning after the debate, CBS invited Fox's Bill O'Reilly to discuss the debate performances. Interestingly enough, he faulted them all, while CBS's Charlie Rose defended them all. Rose tried to suggest these debates reveal something more than policy differences, they reveal demeanor and temperament. "Well, then let's have Dr. Phil interview...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: My question, who from the Obama team is meeting with Bob Schieffer today? Why would I ask? Because I think somebody from the Obama team met with Candy Crowley and reminded her -- see, if you go back, if you look, two weeks before the debate, Candy Crowley herself knew that Obama did not call Benghazi a terror attack, and then somebody, two weeks before the debate, called her attention to the fact that he had and gave her that transcript. I watched the debate, and Romney hears Obama say that he called it a terror attack,...

In August, I blasted the Commission on Presidential Debate’s choices of three Beltway lib journo-tools — CNN’s Candy Crowley, PBS’s Jim Lehrer and CBS’s Bob Schieffer. So far, they’ve acted just as expected and predicted. As I noted: While the debate panel trumpeted the gender diversity of its picks, the chromosomal diversity is far outweighed by the political uniformity, class conformity and geographical homogeneity of the group. ... The presidential debates are the last bastion of “mainstream” media self-delusion in the 21st century. They are a ritual laughingstock for tens of millions of American viewers who have put up with...

When CBS’s longtime Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer sits down in Boca Raton, Florida, tonight to moderate the final 2012 presidential debate, he’ll be following three journalists who became targets for criticism over how they handled their moderating duties. Upset liberals scorned PBS’s Jim Lehrer for taking a hands-off approach in the first debate on October 3, with MSNBC analyst Howard Fineman slamming him as “practically useless” for not jumping into the debate on behalf of President Obama. Such criticism may have encouraged the activist approach taken by ABC’s Martha Raddatz in the vice presidential debate October 11, and...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Doug in Sunbury, Pennsylvania. Hello, sir. CALLER: Hello, Rush. This is truly an honor. RUSH: I appreciate that, sir. CALLER: I just want to throw this out. I expect Obama to try to pull something, and I want to know: Is he gonna try to pull something like foreign policy-wise before the debate on Monday, like a possible attack on Iran? RUSH: People have been thinking he would do something like that sometime this month. That would appear very suspicious, timing-wise. With this guy, anything's possible, but the way I'm looking at it honestly here, Doug, I...

After watching the national media's performance since the party conventions, one can only hope that college students are out on a summer safari or some Third World Peace Corps mission. Anything to avoid this mess. Sean Hannity is right. The establishment news media is dead. Whatever remains has only one standard. If it helps Obama, it's "news." If it doesn't, reporters should move on. There's nothing to observe here. Our media doesn't just report "news" unfavorable to Romney. They obsess over it; complete with repetitive and thoroughly useless incantations that Romney's campaign is hopeless. On September 17, perhaps not accidentally...