Free Republic

John Avlon’s dishonest column on the cop-killers in Las Vegas should be studied by journalism students as an example of how to exploit a tragedy for political purposes. It is a shame he gets on CNN as an “analyst,” which gives him undeserved authority and prestige, when he deliberately confuses and misleads people. jerad miller In this case, he tried to blame conservatives for the murders of two policemen. His Daily Beast column carried two titles, one of them being, “The Bonnie and Clyde of Ultra-Right Hate.” He said Jerad and Amanda Miller killed two metro cops while shouting, “This...

On Monday, only CBS This Morning reported Friday's stunning revelation that the IRS somehow lost two years worth of emails from Lois Lerner, the official at the center of the agency scandal in which conservative groups were unfairly targeted. Neither NBC's Today nor ABC's Good Morning America bothered to cover the shocking development. However, both broadcasts did manage to find time for full reports on Britain's baby Prince George learning to walk. Cordes then concluded her report with more IRS spin suggesting the congressional investigation of the scandal was just a waste of time and money:

National Baraq Channel On Friday's NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams strongly hinted that the recent Islamist blitzkrieg in Iraq was completely former President Bush's fault: "Make no mistake: what's happening in Iraq right now is a direct outgrowth of the U.S. decision to invade the country over a decade ago." However, he glossed over the Obama administration's failure to negotiate a continued U.S. presence and pulling out all American forces in late 2011 as a factor in the crisis. Williams repeated his point to David Gregory: "How does the President sell any action at all to the component of the...

It’s now clear why the primary defeat of the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, came so completely out of the blue last week: Beltway blindness that put a focus on fund-raising, power-brokering and partisan back-and-forth created a reality distortion field that obscured the will of the people. But that affliction was not Mr. Cantor’s alone; it is shared by the political press. Reporters and commentators might want to pause and wipe the egg off their faces before they go on camera to cluck-cluck about how Mr. Cantor, Republican of Virginia, missed signs of the insurgency that took him out. There...

Former first child (now with child) Chelsea Clinton had a $600,000 annual contract at NBC News, Politico reports, where she served as a "special correspondent" and was deemed to be mostly useless, if not "one of the most boring people of her era." That deal is over now, but Clinton is still being paid by the network (which has also hired Luke Russert, Meghan McCain, and Jenna Bush ... ) on a month-to-month basis, with complicating factors including her pregnancy and the good odds her mother is running for president. -snip- That work included little of note, either journalistically or...

Washington (AFP) - President Barack Obama renewed his campaign to curb carbon emissions Saturday, saying the debate over climate change is over. Obama, who made the battle against climate change a core promise of his 2008 election campaign, has been stymied at the federal level by opposition from lawmakers. Congress "is full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the scientific evidence," Obama told a crowd of more than 30,641 people, including thousands of graduates at the University of California, Irvine. "They'll tell you climate change is a hoax, or a fad. One says the world might actually be cooling."...

President Obama, appearing emboldened after his recent move to cut carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, on Saturday ridiculed members of Congress who deny climate change or plead scientific ignorance as an alibi for avoiding an inconvenient truth. Speaking in gleefully sarcastic terms to a commencement ceremony at the University of California, Irvine, Mr. Obama likened those who deny climate change to people who would have told John F. Kennedy, at the dawn of the space program, that the moon “was made of cheese.” He saved his most scathing words for lawmakers who say they are not qualified to judge...

The president is expected to issue a call to action on global warming in a commencement address Saturday at the University of California, Irvine. Earlier this month, he announced a contentious plan to cut pollution from power plants. While in Orange County, Obama also raised money for the Democratic National Committee at a closed-door fundraiser at the Laguna Beach home of Getty oil heiress Anne Earhart. About 25 people paid up to $32,400 to participate in a roundtable discussion with the president. He's spending the rest of the Father's Day weekend on vacation at the Rancho Mirage home of White...

ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) — President Barack Obama said denying climate change is like arguing the moon is made of cheese, as he issued a call to action on global warming to Saturday's graduates of the University of California, Irvine.

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.sctimes.com/story/news/local/2014/06/13/rick-nolan-minnesota-bergdahl-veterans-hospitals/10447371/

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/how-can-we-understand-benghazi-without-probing-the-cias-role/275781/

Lots of tense, awkward laughter on NPR today! Hillary Clinton's book tour took her to "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross this afternoon, where the two got into it a bit over if and when Clinton "evolved," as they say, on the issue of gay marriage, or whether she held her personal opinions in favor of equality until they were politically viable. The answer is: Clinton is not telling. But it wasn't for Gross's lack of trying. "So what's it like when you're in office and you have to do all these political calculations to not be able to support something...

Sen. Lindsey Graham spent his summer testing out lines on global warming. As the Republican hit the town halls in South Carolina, a state with a major military presence and one of the country's highest unemployment rates, Graham would ask people if they thought climate change was a problem. Few did. But Graham quickly followed with another question, asking for a show of hands from those concerned about energy security. The response was strong, and Graham wasted little time making the connection. "You can't look at it in isolation," Graham said in an interview last week. "I'm trying to say,...

On Saturday, Bowe Bergdahl was a hero, and the five members of the Taliban being freed in exchange for him were the worst of the worst. By the end of the week, it seemed that neither is actually true. The parade in Bergdahl’s Idaho hometown was canceled. Four of the five aren’t nice guys, but they aren’t war criminals, either. As for Bergdahl, I don’t pretend to know whether he deserted his unit. That is a question that can only be answered in a properly and fairly conducted court-martial. But the account that broke my heart was the interview with...

Doing his best to keep the Obama administration’s front line from falling into retreat, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz sprayed rhetorical cover fire all over the place on his June 5 program, defending Team Obama’s much-criticized deal to release Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five deadly Taliban leaders.

Four months ago, Sen. John McCain said he would support the exchange of five hard-core Taliban leaders for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. "I would support ways of bringing him home," he told CNN, "and if exchange was one of them I think that would be something I think we should seriously consider." But the instant the Obama administration actually made that trade, McCain, as he has so often in the past... SNIP Though we criticized the administration for ignoring the law in not informing Congress of the transfer of the Taliban detainees 30 days in advance, leave it...

One-time presidential candidate Hillary Clinton refused to go along with an Obama campaign attack against Sarah Palin in 2008 that she saw as gender baiting, according to an except from her new memoir reported Friday. NBC News’ Kelly O’Donnell said during a morning segment on “The Today Show” that despite reconciling with the Obama camp after the primaries, Clinton didn’t endorse the campaign’s anti-Palin line upon her selection as John McCain’s vice-presidential nominee. “When Sarah Palin was picked by John McCain, Clinton refused to back up a ‘dismissive statement’ from Obama’s campaign,” O’Donnell reported. “‘I was not going to attack...

Talk along the lines of Hillary, Hillary, Hillary dominated the network news shows Sunday, as hosts and their guests mulled Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, excerpts from her forthcoming memoir Hard Choices and her potential 2016 presidential bid. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace countered praise of Clinton from Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., by listing some of Clinton’s troubles as President Barack Obama’s top diplomat. Wallace singled out developments in U.S. relations during Obama’s first term with Russia, Iran and Syria."She defended Syria’s President Assad as a possible reformer at the start of that country’s civil war," he...

President Obama’s record of lawlessness is prodigious. There is the assumption of a power to rule by presidential decree — unilaterally amending ObamaCare provisions, immigration statutes, and other enactments in flagrant disregard of Congress’s constitutional power to write the laws. There is rampant fraud on the American people — think: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, period,” just for a start. In the Benghazi massacre, we see the arc of administration malfeasance: In the absence of congressional authorization, the president instigated an unprovoked and ultimately disastrous war in Libya, empowering virulently anti-American...

When the history of this presidency is written, it will record that bold, progressive reforms dramatically reshaped the face of government, thanks to the vision, creativity, and political will of one man. And that man is Mitt Romney. President Obama already has Gina McCarthy, who designed Romney’s cap-and-trade program in Massachusetts, running the Environmental Protection Agency for him. Coral Davenport reports today that the administration’s new regulations of power plants, due for release Monday, will be designed to expand the structure Romney built: As governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney was a key architect of a cap-and-trade program in nine northeastern...