Free Republic

Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country's already bloated deficit. Greeks aren't very welcome in the Rue Alphones Weicker in Luxembourg. It's home to Eurostat, the European Union's statistical office. The number crunchers there are deeply annoyed with Athens. Investigative reports state that important data "cannot be confirmed" or has been requested but "not received." Creative accounting took priority when it came to totting...

NAACP leader of Washington state chapter lied about being black, parents say BY JASON SILVERSTEIN An NAACP leader and prominent civil rights activist in Washington state has been pretending to be black for years, her parents told local media Thursday. Rachel Dolezal, who heads Spokane’s NAACP chapter and teaches Africana studies at Eastern Washington University, refused to directly answers any questions about her alleged racial ruse after it was reported. A KXLY reporter bluntly asked her, “Are you African-American?” After a stunned pause, she replied: "“I don’t understand the question."

The latest scorecard from the American Conservative Union is out, and the voters of Virginia might want to file a complaint about truth in advertising with the press corps. Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner have routinely been portrayed in news reports as "moderates" and "centrists." But after two years in the Senate, Tim Kaine has a perfect zero on the conservative scale. Mark Warner has a lifetime score of 10.33 percent conservative, but his last two annual scores have been a 4 and an 8. They could be mistaken for Barbara Mikulski. Far-left is middle of the road on...

A study that purported to show gay marriage opponents can easily be convinced to change their minds if they talk to gays was retracted after finding it used fake data. The study, "When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality," was published in the December 2014, issue of the journal Science. It was widely reported in the media and cited as evidence that support for gay marriage is inevitable. Donald P. Green, professor of political science at Columbia University, retracted the study after learning that his co-author, Michael LaCour, a UCLA graduate student, had used...

Despite past claims by Hillary Clinton that she only used one email address as secretary of state, previously unseen email records show there was at least one other email address in use. The New York Times published new emails that were sent using the private email server set up by Clinton while she was secretary of state, and the Republican National Committee discovered that that multiple emails were sent from the “hrod17@clintonemail.com” address that Clinton’s attorney’s had previously said do not exist. In a letter to Rep. Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) responding to a subpoena from the Benghazi Select Committee,...

ABC News actually responds to Free Beacon inquiry ABC News policy required that George Stephanopolous disclose his contributions to the Clinton Foundation to management before covering stories related to it, according to an ABC spokesman who responded to a Washington Free Beacon inquiry. (snip) “Staff need to disclose personal donations to a charitable organization to us before covering a story related to that organization,” said Julie Townsend, who heads ABC’s news communications. “He had not disclosed the Foundation donations to us before he interviewed Peter Schweizer,” the author of Clinton Cash.

USA Today articles can be posted to FR using the headline and link only.. Peter Schweizer digs deeper into Stephanopulos' deep ties to the Clinton foundation showing year after year after year involvement.

"Rolling Stone’s fundamental mistake, Mr. Dana said, was in suspending any skepticism about Jackie’s account because of the sensitivity of the issue." ... “We didn’t think through all the implications of the decisions that we made while reporting the story, and we never sort of allowed for the fact that maybe the story we were being told was not true,” ...

Happy National Hate Week! Today, we're all hating on Indiana. Who will be the left's Emmanuel Goldstein next week? Evidently, the sole function of the media these days is to subject the public to a steady stream of manufactured events: "Hands Up, Don't Shoot"; nuclear power kills; Lena Dunham's rape by a college conservative at Oberlin; the "mattress girl" raped at Columbia University; Jon Stewart is funny; a fraternity gang-rape at the University of Virginia; and a law protecting religious freedom will lead to separate water fountains for gays in Indiana. Happy National Hate Week! Today, we're all hating on...

The New York Times has been accused of bias by conservative US media after cropping George W Bush and his wife Laura out of its front-page image of the Selma anniversary march. The former Republican president took part in Saturday's march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama to mark 50 years since one of the bloodiest episodes in America's civil rights movement. But the photograph on the front page of Sunday's New York Times, which showed Barack and Michelle Obama leading the anniversary march, appeared to cut the Bushes from the right-hand side of the image.

At precisely the time Mr. Obama was campaigning on the imminent death of al Qaeda, those with access to the bin Laden documents were seeing, in bin Laden’s own words, that the opposite was true. Says Lt. Gen. Flynn: “By that time, they probably had grown by about—I’d say close to doubling by that time. And we knew that.” This wasn’t what the Obama White House wanted to hear. So the administration cut off DIA access to the documents and instructed DIA officials to stop producing analyses based on them. Even this limited glimpse into the broader set of documents...

If Hillary Clinton succeeds Obama as president, expect four to eight more years of nonstop lying and deceit. Hillary, like Obama, is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth. Democrats are circling the wagons to shield their likely 2016 presidential nominee after it was revealed that Hillary Clinton transacted sensitive government business using her personal email during her time as America’s top diplomat. The Benghazi bungler, the nation has learned, set up an email system worthy of a James Bond movie villain when she became U.S. secretary of state in 2009. Mrs. Clinton used private instead of government email and even...

A New Jesuit Approach to Higher Education?Gonzaga University graduate Autumn Jones asks a provocative question in a December 30 piece for The Atlantic, “The New Brand of Jesuit Universities.” Jones chronicles a rebranding effort by Jesuit universities across the country, and considers “whether this rebranding attenuates the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church.” In search of an answer, Jones solicits comments from Jesuit faculty members, students, and administrators. Running throughout the piece is a straw man argument, expressed by some interviewees, namely: Catholic universities can either “fall in line” with the Church, or they can be “places where young adults...

NBC’S Brian Williams finally admitted that after 12 years of bragging about how he faced death while reporting on the Iraq War in 2003 that he had lied. Real soldiers flying in the helicopter transporting Williams to the war zone unanimously attested that, contrary to Williams’ heroic story, the aircraft was not hit and landed safely. Williams characterized his lie as “a mistake made in good faith. It was my way of bonding with the men and women who risked their lives in the battle against Saddam Hussein. It was also an attempt to make the war seem more real...

Update, 11 p.m.: Brian Williams apologized on-air tonight for claiming that he was in a helicopter hit by an RPG in Iraq, but the version of events he gives in his apology is vague in a way that avoids addressing the main accusation of the soldiers quoted in Stars and Stripes questioning his accounts of events. Those soldiers, in Stars and Stripes' telling, say that not only was Williams not in a helicopter that was hit by an RPG, but that he was nowhere near the helicopters that were actually fired upon. Said Williams tonight: "I made a mistake in...

Anahita Mukherji, TNN January 9, 2015 MUMBAI: Two of three scientists at a session on climate change and society at the Indian Science Congress on Tuesday felt fears of man-made global warming were greatly exaggerated. Their presence at the conference was particularly significant in light of the current 'development-versus-envir- onment' debates. "While I agree that glaciers are melting because of global warming, if this is because of man, then what was the reason for the melting of the glaciers in the Gondwana period long before man arrived on the planet?" asked Dhruv Sen Singh, Centre of Advanced Study in Geology,...

Poster girl representing hard-working, low-paid 'American' in President Obama's minimum wage ad is actually a British woman on a LONDON Tube

When the depth of corruption, deceit and red tape bureaucracy reach such astronomical levels, it is time for a complete overhaul! Fire them all!! Both the Congress and the Senate passed a 2015 spending bill, in record time, that has been labeled a “Cromnibus.” But where was the fight? Where were our representatives who swore they would not fund amnesty, Obamacare, taxpayer-funded abortion, and more irresponsible spending? No where to be seen! About Obama’s illegal amnesty, “We are going to fight the president tooth and nail if he continues down this path. This is the wrong way to govern. This...

“Lack of transparency was really critical to getting it passed,” former Obamacare consultant Jonathan Gruber explained. The Democrats cleverly exploited the American voters’ “lack of economic understanding.” Now President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is using secretive, duplicitous science, and exploiting people’s lack of scientific understanding, to impose punitive regulations cleverly labeled the “clean power plan.” The agency claims the clean power plan will prevent “dangerous manmade climate change” by reducing carbon dioxide and “encouraging” greater use of renewable energy. Its real goal is forcing coal-fired power plants to reduce operations significantly or shut down entirely. The EPA also claims that...

While there are plenty of Bible verses to mention while discussing immigration, President Obama on Tuesday quoted one which isn't so great, mainly because it's not real. "The good book says don't throw stones at glass houses, or make sure we're looking at the log in our eye before we are pointing out the moat in other folks eyes," Obama said during a speech in Nashville. One problem, though: The Bible never mentions glass houses. In addition to his biblical misquote, Obama also tied his immigration policy to the Christmas story, saying, "If we're serious about the Christmas season, now...