Free Republic

RUSH: Matthew Yglesias, no relation to Julio Iglesias, no relation to Enrique Iglesias and therefore no relationship to that blonde Russian tennis player. What's her name? Runs... (interruption) That's right, Anna Kournikova. Matthew is a lone Yglesias. He runs around with his buddies at Vox, which would be Ezra Klein and a number of other young Millennial types for the most part that grew tired of working for the old stand-by big guys, New York Times, Washington Post. They found some funding, which is what liberals do, and got this site that... I guess it's owned now by... I forget...

Just how bad is the movie 'Truth' that will be released tomorrow? So bad that even the notoriously liberal Vox is mocking it. Vox writer Todd VanDerWerff goes so far as to describe it as an example of why "so many people hate Hollywood liberals." As we shall see even Dan Rather in 2004 disagreed with the premise of "Truth."

In an attempt to dismiss the Benghazi Select Committee as a partisan witch hunt against Hillary Clinton, an ex-committee staffer has accused the panel of being obsessed with a political agenda. Bradley F. Podliska, an investigator and Air Force Reserves officer, told The New York Times that the Benghazi committee was becoming “primarily focused” on Clinton. His comments come on the heels of Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s controversial statement on "Hannity," when he said the Benghazi committee was directly responsible for sinking Clinton’s poll numbers. Chairman Trey Gowdy (S-SC), while accepting McCarthy's apology, insisted his words can't "fix the damage" done to the panel.Gowdy, again...

When Russia started bombing in Syria last week, it said it was targeting ISIS — a claim it's stuck to pretty consistently in the past week. But this map of Russian airstrikes in Syria so far, put together by the Levantine Group, tells a very different story. The Levantine Group's analysts used a proprietary network of sources, cross-checked with open-source media and information released by the Russian Ministry of Defense, to determine the locations hit by Russian planes. This map shows those strikes overlaid on territory controlled by Bashar al-Assad's regime, by anti-Assad rebels, by ISIS, and by Kurdish forces....

My name is Christine, and I get food stamps. I've had to apply off and on over the past 16 years in order to make sure my family was fed. I don't feel the least bit ashamed of myself for this, but apparently some people think I should. Some people think I, and people like me, am lazy. Or that we're taking advantage of other (smarter, harder-working) people. Those people seem to have an image in their heads of how someone who "deserves" assistance behaves, and a very narrow idea of how we should feel about it. Those people are...

On the day after Pope Francis spoke to Congress about the dangers of violent extremism in the name of religious fundamentalism, presidential candidate Ted Cruz, appearing at a Values Voter summit, threatened to murder Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Texas senator vowed that, if elected, he would “rip to shreds” the Iranian agreement deal recently passed through Congress, and kill the country’s leader if it didn’t give up its nuclear ambitions. “If the Ayatollah doesn’t understand that, we may have to help introduce him to the 72 virgins,” Cruz said to wild cheers from the audience of conservative Christians. The...

The spectacular rise of Donald Trump as leading presidential candidate should at last force Republicans in Washington to face the chronic ineffectiveness of their party: rank and file Republicans are turning to the Donald because he, unlike the party establishment, seems energetic, articulate, and determined to get something done. They have so long despaired of a party leadership that is inarticulate, somnolent, and inept that they are not deterred by the fact that Trump is dangerously unpredictable. The problem is not an insufficiently conservative party, as some conservatives think; a two-party system will always have a broad spectrum of viewpoints...

By now it should be clear to both sides of the Donald Trump–Fox News war that there never was — nor will there likely be — an enduring truce. Case in point: Earlier today, Fox News released a statement announcing that the network’s chairman, Roger Ailes, and Trump will meet next week to discuss “their differences of opinion regarding Fox’s coverage of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.” It’s the second time in a month that Ailes has attempted to broker peace with Trump after Trump took to Twitter to blast Megyn Kelly. One reason there likely won’t be peace in our...

When Donald Trump walked on to the presidential debate stage on August 6, he walked into a trap. Bret Baier began with a question designed to make sure every one of its viewers knew that Trump, and Trump alone, was refusing to rule out a campaign as an independent. He asked broadly if "anyone on stage" with that view would raise his hand, and once Trump did so, Baier hammered his heresy home: "Mr. Trump to be clear, you’re standing on a Republican primary debate stage. The place where the RNC will give the nominee the nod. And that experts...

To some he was an Islamist extremist, to others a radical feminist, to others a neo-Nazi. These are all online identities that seem to have belonged to Joshua Goldberg - but in reality he was none of these things. They were simply online aliases used to whip up ideological hatred, with seemingly dangerous and even violent real-world consequences. In reality he lives in Florida, spent huge amounts of time online - and has now been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). SNIP It seems Goldberg wasn't just posing as a racist neo-Nazi. Earlier this year an Australian journalist,...

“The fallacy that President Obama is a Muslim has tripped up many a politician,” said NPR’s Jessica Taylor hopefully on Friday, “and on Thursday night, GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump was its latest victim.” Trump’s presumed faux pas was his failure to correct a questioner who asserted that Barack Obama was a Muslim. Taylor’s real error as a reporter, like that of all her mainstream colleagues, was to dismiss the questioner’s assertion as a “fallacy” without providing any evidence to the contrary. Strange but true, reporters pride themselves on knowing nothing about Obama’s roots. Last month, for instance, Catherine Thompson...

2015 Emmys host Andy Samberg delivered the only Donald Trump take that matters Donald Trump has received an incredibly high level of media coverage compared to other presidential candidates. So much so that the Washington Post's John Sides and others have gone so far as to say we should blame (or credit) the media for Trump's high standing in the polls. But in his opening monologue for the Emmys, Andy Samberg delivered a brief joke that does a brilliant job illustrating what that account leaves out — the Trump coverage has largely been of Trump saying and doing horrible things.

Donald Trump canceled his appearance Friday evening at a major campaign stop for the GOP presidential field in South Carolina as he faces criticism from both Republican and Democratic candidates over his failure to address claims that President Obama is a Muslim and "not even an American." Trump’s campaign announced in a statement Friday he no longer plans to speak at the Heritage Action Presidential Forum at the Bon Secours Arena in Greenville.

The abortion-friendly media are having a heyday challenging Carly Fiorina’s assertion during Wednesday’s debate that on the Planned Parenthood videos you can: “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’” Planned Parenthood calls her a liar. Politico adds, “…at no point do they include footage of an entire aborted fetus.” Huffington Post said, “That footage doesn’t exist…” Vox said Fiorina’s claims are “pure fiction.” George Stephanopoulos told Fiorina to her face “…the harrowing scene you describe isn’t actually in those tapes.”...

Florida Jew arrested for posing as online jihadist, encouraging terrorism Joshua Ryne Goldberg faces 20 years in jail; same man reported to have posted foul, hoax blog on Times of Israel in April The FBI arrested a 20-year-old American Jewish man for posing as an Islamic State extremist, calling for terrorist attacks, claiming to be planning attacks in Australia and the United States, and providing information on bomb construction to a second party. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the same man, who it named as Florida resident Joshua Ryne Goldberg, also posed as a respected Australian lawyer in April...

Late in the second Republican debate, "high energy" Donald Trump was sounding sleepy. When moderator Jake Tapper asked him about his history of flubbing it on basic foreign policy issues, he just sounded tired. "The world is blowing up around us," Trump rotely responded. "We will have great teams and great people." Sen. Marco Rubio, whose campaign trail attack on Trump prompted Tapper's questions, pounced. "You should ask him questions in detail about the foreign policy issues our president will confront, because you had better be able to lead our country on the first day," Rubio said to Tapper. "Not...

When Sen. Rand Paul launched his presidential campaign, he promised to be a Republican who wouldn't just support criminal-justice reform as a policy platform (as some other presidential candidates, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Ted Cruz, have) but talk openly about mass incarceration and the war on drugs as racial issues. He was supposed to be running to reach out to non-traditional Republican constituencies: young voters and African Americans. During most of the campaign, that Paul hasn't been much in evidence. Over the summer, when he has talked about race, he's sounded more like a typical Republican:...

Defending his brother's record as president at CNN's Republican presidential debate, Jeb Bush had a simple answer: "He kept us safe." It's an answer Jeb has given before and that conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer has cited as George W. Bush's main legacy. But it's not true. For one thing: The vast majority of people killed on American soil by terrorists throughout the entirety of American history were killed during George W. Bush's administration. It's not even close. And this was followed up by the deaths of an even larger number of Americans during Bush's invasion of Iraq.It would be a...

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the terrible ultra liberal “news” sites Daily Kos and Vox, took to Twitter on Saturday morning to criticize Breitbart for employing Joshua Ryne Goldberg who was arrested for allegedly plotting to commit a terrorist attack on Friday’s anniversary of 9/11. -snip Only one problem Goldberg didn’t actually write for Breitbart.  Not only that, he was a contributor for many left wing sites including the Daily Kos, Moulitsas’ own site.

A MAN who claimed to be an Australian-based jihadist terrorist and encouraged attacks on local Jews has been exposed as an online troll who is in fact a young Jewish-American. The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force swooped on Joshua Ryne Goldberg’s Florida home, where the 20-year-old lived with his parents, early Thursday, US time, after a joint investigation with the Australian Federal Police into his online activities supporting Islamic State. Mr Goldberg, under the persona “Australi Witness”, had ... boasted about inspiring the May 3 attacks on the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland, Texas, where two mujahideen were...