Free Republic

Via the Examiner and NRO, a few more credible, confidence-inspiring breadcrumbs from this morning’s Ways and Means hearing. It’s starting to make sense now why protesting Planned Parenthood might present a risk to your tax-exempt status, isn’t it?The second clip is of Miller saying that he did indeed ask his underlings who was targeting conservative groups, and they told him, but now he can’t remember the answer. Really. The disdain this guy harbors for the proceedings is palpable, but that’s probably in his best interest: The more antagonistic he is, the more liberal support he’ll have when the administration inevitably...

Prince Harry has laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery on the latest leg of his US tour. The Prince, who has served twice in Afghanistan, was taken around some of the cemetery's 70 sections where military casualties from the US civil war to Afghanistan are buried. He also placed a wreath with a personal note next to the gravestone of Michael L Stansberry Jr, who died in July 2010. Dressed in the uniform of the Blues and Royals, it appeared a sombre and poignant moment for the Apache co-pilot gunner, acutely aware...

Gun Store Running AR-15 Giveaways on Facebook Sees Page Shut Down —And Facebook Hasn’t Contacted Him to Say Why When TheBlaze first spoke with Erik Lowry, he was running a contest on Facebook to give away an AR-15. Now, a couple months later, the fan page for Pittsburgh Tactical Firearm, Lowry’s store, has been shut down, along with a secondary page he established to replace it a couple days ago. “I still don’t know what’s going on,” Lowry told TheBlaze in a phone interview Sunday afternoon. Lowry said three days ago he awoke to calls and emails from fans...

Mark Levin opened his show tonight saying that a certain Republican Congressman who doesn’t like what he’s saying is trying to get the local affiliate in their district to stop running the Mark Levin Show. And apparently they are trying to do it behind the scenes. But Levin says EVERYTHING gets back to him and he will not tolerate fascism.

On his Friday show, syndicated talk show host Mark Levin said that a Republican congressman is attempting to persuade one of his affiliates to remove his show from the airwaves.Although Levin would not offer the congressman’s name on air, he has been a vocal critic of various members of the House Republican leadership in the past. But Levin called the situation “fascism.”“Well, it has come to my attention that there is a Republican congressman out there who doesn’t like what I’ve been saying,” Levin said. “It has come to my attention that there is a Republican congressman out there, a fairly...

Mark Levin opened his show tonight saying that a certain Republican Congressman who doesn’t like what he’s saying is trying to get the local affiliate in their district to stop running the Mark Levin Show. And apparently they are trying to do it behind the scenes. But Levin says EVERYTHING gets back to him and he will not tolerate fascism. He gives this unnamed Republican Congressman a warning below noting that if they succeed in getting him silenced, he will expose them: Click excerpt link for audio!

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy is pleading with Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of News Corporation, which owns the Fox Sports channel, not to air a National Rifle Association-sponsored NASCAR race scheduled for this weekend. The race "is inappropriate in the immediate wake of the Newtown massacre," Sen. Murphy wrote on Thursday in a letter to Murdoch, referencing the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that took place in Murphy's home state last December. The NASCAR Sprint Cup, which is set to take place at the Texas Motor Speedway on April 13, will be the first top-level NASCAR race the NRA...

Since Monday, school district officials in Grosse Pointe, Michigan have canceled a decision to allow Rick Santorum to speak at Grosse Pointe South High School, then reversed that cancellation. There is a catch, though: students who want to see the former U.S. senator and presidential hopeful must first obtain permission from their parents. A local chapter of the group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) had originally invited Santorum to speak at the high school on April 24, explains the Detroit Free Press. The group raised $18,000 for the speech — presumably to cover costs and pay any fees to Santorum....

Citing the recent controversy over his comments on same-sex marriage, neurosurgeon and rising conservative star Dr. Benjamin Carson has voluntarily stepped down as commencement speaker at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The Baltimore Sun reported that Carson, who heads the department of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, informed medical school Dean Paul B. Rothman in a letter that he didn't want to "distract from the celebratory nature of the day." "Given all the national media surrounding my statements as to my belief in traditional marriage, I believe it would be in the best interest of the students for...

"Plain and simple, The Obama Administration does not want us to be in Washington on May 25th to honor all of the brave veterans who died for the Bill Of Rights and is now violating our First Amendment Rights to assemble in a place of our choosing."

Four Nebraska cops were fired over an incident in which they tried their best to conceal, including beating a man and chasing his brother into a home to steal his camera all while unknowingly being recorded by another citizen from an upstairs window. And another three officers were placed on leave and an additional officer was reassigned, according to the Associated Press. However, Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer refused to release any of the officers’ names, meaning they will likely get hired at another police department in the near future.

He brutally killed unborn babies by jamming medical scissors in the back of their necks, but the major network television stations have engaged in a blackout of coverage of his murder trial. To response, 20 prominent leaders of the conservative movement have joined Media Research Center President Brent Bozell in demanding the broadcast networks stop censoring coverage. They are also upset at the lack of coverage of the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates lobbyist who testified in favor of allowing the killing of children who survive botched abortions. MRC’s Culture and Media Institute finds that ABC, CBS, and NBC...

Just hours after a new UKIP poster ad was spotted in Levenshulme, Manchester, a trade unionist-led campaign to have the advertisement removed has apparently led to success, in what opponents have called "a sad day for freedom of speech". Campaigners online are boasting about the impending removal of a UK Independence Party poster positioned in "deep-red Labour territory". The poster which reads, "Stop Open Door EU Immigration: Enough's Enough" has recently been posted in Levenshulme, an area of Manchester populated by around 12,000 people. Described as a 'multi-ethnic' area, Leveshulme has a significant immigrant population, with 2001 census figures showing...

<p>I came across this article from 1998 and I wanted to get some input from the fine folks at FR on the subject of censorship.There is more to this article at http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/30/nyregion/student-says-catholic-college-censored-her-published-poem.html but I was not sure about posting stuff from the NYT.</p>

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Anti-Muslim activist and blogger Pam Geller said Saturday at a CPAC panel of rouge conservative activists that a board member of the group that puts on the annual conservative conference is worse than a terrorist killed by an American drone strike in Yemen. Geller said the reason she and the other panelists — including fellow anti-Muslim activists Frank Gaffney and Robert Spencer — were barred from CPAC because of the nefarious influence of board members Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan. The three anti-Muslim activists have for years accused Gaffney and Khan of being members of the Muslim Brotherhood and secret...

I was aced out of the CPAC People's Choice Blog Award by those who were desperate to avoid discussion of the Islamic supremacist ties of Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan. Well, they're going to get it anyway: "'The Uninvited': A Session of Controversial Speakers and Topics," from Breitbart News, March 14: March 14, 2013 (Los Angeles, CA) – Breitbart News Network announced today that it will host a special two-hour session of controversial speakers and topics. The session will also include active audience participation. Among the topics covered: Crony Capitalism, Global Jihad, Illegal Immigration, the ongoing global persecution of Christians,...

For anyone going to the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), I’m sure by now you’re aware that there will be no panels conducted regarding the threat of Islam this year.  All of our leading experts on Islam–Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney and others–have been banned from speaking and/or holding panels.Unfortunately, many Conservatives still aren’t aware that two of the most influential organizers of CPAC—seemingly innocuous tax guru Grover Norquist and former aide in the Bush administration Suhail Khan—are fighting together to eliminate any dissenting voices about the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.  Why is this?Last year, I...

Singapore likes to promote itself as a business-friendly country where the government has a soft touch. But by firing a professor known for criticizing the government's censorship strategies, ruling elites have demonstrated that they still have a firm hand in controlling political conversation. It should make U.S. universities rethink their research partnerships with universities in Singapore, because such relationships actually help launder the regime's reputation.As one of Singapore's most high profile censorship critics, Cherian George is guilty of several things. In his teaching, he is guilty of corrupting several cohorts of young journalism students with ideas about press freedoms. In...

Illinois State Senator Ira Silverstein (D-Chicago) has introduced legislation that would require Internet websites to remove anything posted by an anonymous poster if someone complains about the content. Under the proposed bill, to avoid having his content removed a poster would have to attach his legal name, IP address, and home address. “As it stands now, pretty much anyone can post anything he wants,” Silverstein complained. “If he does it anonymously someone who is offended by the posting has no recourse other than to try to rebut it in his own post. This may be acceptable for a person who...

Syracuse, NY -- A national Muslim organization headquartered in the Southern Tier has filed a libel lawsuit against the author of a book that describes the group as the host of terrorist training camps. Muslims of America, based in Hancock, Delaware County, sued Martin Mawyer and his Christian Action Network for $3 million in federal court in Syracuse, seeking to halt the continued publication of his book, “Twilight in America: the Untold Story of Islamic Training Camps in America.” The book takes aim at Muslims of America with false claims that have put the group's members in fear of violent...

Campaign To Get Orson Scott Card Fired From Superman BeginsPosted on February 9, 2013 by Rich Johnston What if Jack Chick wrote Superman? Courtesy of Kat Rocha. So, yesterday I wrote an article in response to requests I’d had to promote an organised campaign to boycott DC, Superman and to get Orson Scott Card fired off the Superman Adventures book for being an anti-gay marriage activist and holding virulent homphobic views. Instead I wrote a piece taking issue with that concept. That I found the idea of campaigning to get a writer fired because you disagreed with his beliefs, however...

When Nkosi Thandiwe shot three white females in Atlanta, the “mainstream” media went into extreme CENSORSHIP mode. It was a top secret in the media that the victims were all beautiful, young white ladies. The Atlanta Journal Constitution even lifted information about one of the victims from a website that contained numerous pictures. The newspaper pretended like the pictures didn’t exist. During his testimony Wednesday, Thandiwe suggested that his reason for even purchasing the gun he used in the shootings was to enforce beliefs he’d developed about white people during his later years as an anthropology major at the University...

Ruh-Ro! Seems 'Two-buck Chuck's Senate confirmation hearing was such an unmitigated disaster, NBC actually censored the live event when it started to get ugly for Hagel... In their -and their brain-dead viewers'- minds, Hagel's getting crispy-fried by GOP senator Lindsay Graham yesterday didn't even happen... you know, just like Bob 'Young-n-Fresh' Menendez's little (lil') girl problem (that also doesn't exist): Doug Ross: NBC is America's answer to the Soviet Union's Pravda. It serves as an unofficial public relations arm of the Obama administration.  It has been caught -- on numerous occasions (e.g., here and here) -- editing video and audio...

In his 1980 graduate thesis at the University of Texas at Austin, John Brennan denied the existence of “absolute human rights” and argued in favor of censorship on the part of the Egyptian dictatorship. “Since the press can play such an influential role in determining the perceptions of the masses, I am in favor of some degree of government censorship,” Brennan wrote. “Inflamatory [sic] articles can provoke mass opposition and possible violence, especially in developing political systems.” Brennan serves as President Barack Obama’s national security advisor. Obama has nominated him to lead the Central Intelligence Agency.

A French judge will decide this week if Twitter must hand over the identities of users sending anti-Semitic tweets. The case, brought against Twitter by a Jewish student organization, pits America's free speech guarantees against Europe's laws banning hate speech.The controversy began in October, when the French Union of Jewish Students threatened to sue Twitter to get the names of people posting anti-Semitic tweets with the hashtag #unbonjuif, or "a good Jew.""If I type 'un bon Juif' ... I can see it was full of tweets against Jews," says Eli Petit, vice president of the Jewish student organization. "It was...

Internet service providers could be sued for allowing their customers to read defamatory comments online, under a new law proposed by the lead counsel to the Leveson inquiry. Robert Jay, QC, who led the questioning of key witnesses including David Cameron and Rupert Murdoch, has suggested a solution for regulating the internet after Lord Justice Leveson largely ducked the issue in his 2,000-page report. Acknowledging that he was “entering a hornets’ nest that Lord Justice Leveson wisely avoided”, Mr Jay said that increasingly imaginative solutions were needed to make dissemination of defamatory content online subject to civil law.

The Miami Herald is reporting Hugo Chávez early demise was recognized long before the rest of the world was privvy to the details of a late diagnosed and lethal cancer. With the help of Cuban brothers Fidel and Raúl, and Chávez' hand-picked successor Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan presidential election was moved from December 2012 to October 2012, two months that the report says were crucial. In October Chávez could still stand before his supporters to applaud his re-election, but there was no certainty that he could do so in December. He returned to Cuba for a fourth round of cancer treatments in early...

“Fatah couldn’t stop me, Hamas couldn’t stop me, not even Facebook will stop me from continuing my work,” is what Arab Israeli journalist Khaled abu Toameh told The Jewish Press Tuesday morning, January 15, in a lengthy interview about Facebook’s bizarre treatment of his Facebook page. In the space of less than 24 hours, abu Toameh’s page was shut down, parts of it were scrubbed, and then it was back, without a word of explanation. For everyone who breathed a sigh of relief that this journalist hasn’t been censored, who hoped it had just been a glitch – the truth...

Stanley Strangelove By Pauline Kael From The New Yorker Magazine, January, 1972. All Rights Reserved Literal-minded in its sex and brutality, Teutonic in its humor, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange might be the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi Comedy. Is there anything sadder -- and ultimately more repellent -- than a clean-minded pornographer? The numerous rapes and beatings have no ferocity and no sensuality; they're frigidly, pedantically calculated, and because there is no motivating emotion, the viewer may experience them as an indignity and wish to leave. The movie...

It shouldn’t be news to anyone who has followed politics for the past few years that the new battleground is located in the online world. ‘Get out the vote’ organizations have focused their efforts on social networks for some time now. Virtual campaigning has already influenced elections. Once in a while a type of ‘online revolution’ occurs, the kind of thing that begins as an innocuous idea which catches on and grows exponentially. I was fortunate to be a part of the latest wave.

Few ideas have done as much damage throughout history as empowering the government to criminalize opinions it dislikes Writing in the Guardian today, Jason Farago praises France's women's rights minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, for demanding that Twitter help the French government criminalize ideas it dislikes. Decreeing that "hateful tweets are illegal", Farago excitingly explains how the French minister is going beyond mere prosecution for those who post such tweets and now "wants Twitter to take steps to help prosecute hate speech" by "reform[ing] the whole system by which Twitter operates", including her demand that the company "put in place alerts and...

Set aside for now the troubling changes in the Obama administration’s position on whether former Bush officials should be prosecuted for suggesting tough interrogation tactics against terrorists. Set aside the manifest unfairness of prosecuting lawyers merely for doing their job of giving legal advice. Set aside the raft of other reasonable objections to the proposed prosecutions, including a justifiable aversion to witch-hunts. Instead, consider how flagrantly President Barack Obama violated his repeated promises that he would run a transparent and honorable administration. His administration’s selective and highly prejudicial release of only partial information about CIA interrogations clearly was designed to...

President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists. “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday. -snip- Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo...

(New Braunfels, TX) --  A banner that was hanging across South Seguin Avenue reminding drivers to “Keep Christ in Christmas� has been taken down by NBU, after NBU realized the message was more religious in nature and not a non-profit group advertising an upcoming fundraiser.   NBU, which is the agency that is tasked with hanging such banners over the roadway, released a statement yesterday saying that human error led to the hanging of that banner, which was purchased by the local Knights of Columbus organization.   NBU says that regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the religious...

Russia’s Vladimir Putin has declared war on the Internet, and not just within his country’s own borders. Putin’s war may be coming soon to a laptop or smart phone near you. For years we’ve been told by Putin’s apologists that his moves against traditional media didn’t matter because it was impossible to strangle Russia’s feisty Internet. But for a KGB dictator, “impossible” is a meaningless term. Putin’s campaign consists of a three-part pincer movement, and now that he has essentially been made “president for life”, he is pursuing it with greatly renewed vigor. … Throughout Putin’s first twelve years in...

The world now depends on the free flow of information. What is about to happen at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from December 3-14 2012, will surely change the world in ways that most of us cannot imagine. Google is taking a lead in objecting to this massive invasion and grab for control over the now self-controlled Internet; the EU is none too happy either. Some national governments like China, Russia, and Middle Eastern countries, and certain power-hungry agencies such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) want to wrest control of the Internet...

Next week the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union will meet in Dubai to figure out how to control the Internet. Representatives from 193 nations will attend the nearly two week long meeting, according to news reports. "Next week the ITU holds a negotiating conference in Dubai, and past months have brought many leaks of proposals for a new treaty. U.S. congressional resolutions and much of the commentary, including in this column, have focused on proposals by authoritarian governments to censor the Internet. Just as objectionable are proposals that ignore how the Internet works, threatening its smooth and open operations," reports...

A Rock Hill, South Carolina, a middle school teacher was placed on administrative leave after her school received a complaint about remarks she posted on her personal Facebook page. The remarks criticized the Food Stamp program. Rawlinson Road Middle School spokesperson Elaine Baker said the suspension was initiated after the school heard from a local Democratic Party official. “In our view, the teacher used poor judgment,” Baker said. “It is inappropriate for a person employed by a public school to be observed criticizing any duly authorized public policy, especially right now. The country has been through a contentious election campaign....

Who is blocking comments on the Free Republic I used to love. (Used to being the KEY WORD here). Has Jim been warned not to let anything controversial (anti Obama - anti government) pass? Have we lost our right of free speech? Yes. It definitely has been or is being enforced on FR this past month or so.

London - One teenager made offensive comments about a murdered child on Twitter. Another young man wrote on Facebook that British soldiers should "go to hell". A third posted a picture of a burning paper poppy, symbol of remembrance of war dead. All were arrested, two convicted, and one jailed - and they're not the only ones. In Britain, hundreds of people are prosecuted each year for posts, tweets, texts and e-mails deemed menacing, indecent, offensive or obscene, and the number is growing as our online lives expand. Lawyers say the mounting tally shows the problems of a legal system...

A Facebook page that I "like", Chicks on the Right, is reporting that they have just received a little warning from Facebook: "Just got a notice that we may be in violation of Facebook's policies. Whizzuh whuzzah? FYI - if you notice this page going down, make sure to get the word out any way you can, because we may not be able to. Wow. Big Brother works quickly, huh?" A poster answered: "Noticing that SAME trend on ALL republican pages.." Another poster was more specific: "The same is happening over at Barack Insults My Intelligence. The crackdown has begun...

Perhaps this one of the most important discussion threads ever regarding Legacy Media manipulation. We sincerely hope you will take the time to digest the content, think about the ramifications to what is here, and then share the information with others. This is not a matter of opinion, the CNN stories are documented, attributed and cited. They are factual. Everything is verifiable within the embedded links and citations. Believe it or not, just creating this discussion thread is risky. We are unable to expand. Before getting to the CNN Amber Lyon expose’ (which is incredible and troubling) let’s first back...

A Christian university blocked conservative students from forming a Young Americans for Freedom chapter on campus last week.Azusa Pacific, a private Christian university near Los Angeles, California, took issue with “divisive language” on the website of YAF, an advocacy group for college-aged conservatives. University officials also feared that replacing the existing conservative student club with a YAF-affiliated one would limit membership options for students.A spokesperson clarified that while students were free to associate with YAF, no official relationship would be permitted to exist. “They can associate with YAF, we’re just not wanting a formal chapter on our campus,” said Rachel...

ABC News, on its website that claims it represents the whole transcript of last Wednesday’s debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, decided that they would help Obama out once again. This time, they did it by completely removing Romney’s opening statement.

At the height of early-1990s conservative backlash over political correctness and “speech codes” on U.S. college campuses, Barack Obama participated in a panel event geared toward denying that restrictions on free expression were problematic, or happening at all. The 1991 Harvard Law School yearbook quoted the future President of the United States virtually shrugging his shoulders at the thought that non-liberal white students might take offense at restrictions on speech that minority students found objectionable. “I don’t see a lot of conservatives getting upset if minorities feel silenced,” Obama said, flipping the argument around.

President Barack Obama appointed Cheryl Saban, wife of the owner of Univision, as U.S. representative to the United Nations, according to reports from various news blogs. According to the Politico blog, Haim Saban, owner of the television network, backed Hillary Clinton in 2008, but during the summer donated $1 million to groups supporting the campaigns of Democrats. And according to another blog in Spanish of Yahoo, the appointment of Cheryl Saban to the diplomatic post was made last Wednesday, the day before Obama appeared at a forum at the University of Miami hosted by Univision.

What do Hillary Clinton and Algerian Islamists have in common? No … they don’t both report to Muslim bosses. Hillary and Algeria's foreign minister both recently showed a preference for institutionalized ignorance. By perverting or masking information contrary to their respective religions, both have subjugated fact, theory and freedom. Granted, Hillary’s God is socialism evangelized via class warfare whereas the Algerian’s God is more organic and promoted using traditional warfare. Both are about controlling you. While speaking her alleged mind, Hillary warned some of her fellow United Nations nightcrawlers about the vaporous “elites.” Reclassifying the term as “people with means”,...

Over the past couple of weeks, most of the drive-by media's attention has been focused on events in Libya and the American responses to it. For a quick recap -- Christopher Stevens, an American diplomat assigned to Libya, and some others in the consulate were violently attacked without warning and ended up dead...on 9/11. Ignoring the significance of the date, the Obama administration acted curiously: denying any possible connection to terror, and stonewalling with a pre-programmed chorus of disgust over a low-budget film (I've only just seen snippets on YouTube, and it made the movies spoofed on Mystery Science Theater...

Secretary Janet Napolitano told a Senate committee that the Administration is drafting an Executive Order that would grant her Department of Homeland Security “sweeping new powers over the Internet.” “As we saw this past week, irresponsible use of the Internet by anti-Islamic bigots spawned riots against US embassies throughout the Muslim world,” Napolitano explained. “The Administration needs the authority to interdict inflammatory and dangerous messages before they can cause trouble.” Napolitano told Senators that “the Executive Order is necessary because Congress has neglected its responsibility to pass appropriate enabling legislation. The President isn’t going to sit by and allow threats...