Free Republic

On Tuesday, Media Research Center founder and president Brent Bozell, along with more than two dozen pro-life leaders, sent letters to the network news chiefs at ABC, CBS, and NBC, protesting their lack of coverage of shocking Planned Parenthood sting videos. ABC News, in particularly, was particularly egregious, as it "has not even aired one second of video footage (with audio) of the Center for Medical Progress's investigative videos," Bozell noted. "This is outrageous and inexcusable," adding: Your network’s censorship of this taxpayer-funded house of horrors is eerily reminiscent of its censorship of abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s murder trial. Both cases...

Meanwhile, Hillary and Josh Earnest are already using it to push gun control. We haven’t been all over this story all day because we didn’t figure you needed one more conservative news site presuming to give you up-to-the-minute updates. But we’re shaken like everyone else by the murders of Adam Ward and Alison Parker on live television this morning in Virginia. And we’re now learning more about the motives and the twisted mind of Vester Flanagan, who died this afternoon of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Flanagan had worked for a year as a reporter at WDBJ - the very same...

Prompting media nonsense that he "compared Muslims to Nazis." I’m glad I don’t work for ESPN, because I don’t know how anyone can understand the rules there. If you’re an on-air personality there, are you allowed to use your personal social media accounts to express opinions about non-sports matters? Yes? No? Or, as appears to be the case, are you permitted to do so as long as someone doesn’t arbitrarily decide after the fact that what you said was “controversial” and thus unacceptable? HTML5 video is not supported! That appears to be the trap Curt Schilling stuck his foot in...

Trump is “the best of the lot,” Duke says of GOP frontrunner GOP frontrunner Donald Trump can count on at least one die-hard fan: former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Self described “racial realist,” Duke, praised Trump during a recent rant during his online radio show, calling the business mogul a “good salesman.” Duke, who ran unsuccessfully for president as a Democrat in 1988 and later served in the Louisiana House of Representatives, also said he liked Trump because of “the fact that he’s come out on the immigration issue,” adding, “he’s an entrepreneur and he has a...

Warped TV reporter Vester Lee Flanagan exasperated bosses with his 'stiff and nervous' delivery, his inability to use a teleprompter - and by wearing a President Obama badge during an election report, Daily Mail Online can reveal. Management at WDBJ dubbed the failed newsman the 'human tape recorder' because he frequently parroted what interviewees had told him rather than doing his own journalism. Flanagan, 41, clashed repeatedly with photojournalists, belittling them in public and intimidating them with his violent temper, according to internal reports. He was also censured for wearing an Obama sticker while recording a segment at a polling...

So now Megyn Kelly is a RINO squish intent on doing the liberal media’s dirty work. (SNIP) That Trump has been trashing her for so long, and the best her coworkers and boss can do is tweet a few cowardly lines asking him to pwease, pwease stop, Mr. Trump, pwease, suggests that Fox’s audience has sided with Trump on this one and has lost a certain amount of faith in Megyn Kelly. What Trump’s campaign has done, then, is give other candidates an excuse to blow off questions from Megyn Kelly. Considere this exchange between Kelly and Ted Cruz last...

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump may be ready to finally call it quits on the Megyn Kelly trash talking. Trump said in a radio interview with Laura Ingraham on Wednesday that he watched Kelly's Fox News show the previous evening and that he liked it "very much." "Actually I watched her show last night, she was very nice and I appreciated it," Trump said of the Fox anchor he has criticized since the network's GOP presidential debate in early August. Asked if he was done with the fight, Trump said that he is and that he had spoken with Fox...

Nothing like a racially charged killing to bring out the worst in George Zimmerman. The Florida man, cleared of charges in the 2012 slaying of black teen Trayvon Martin, used a pair of homophobic slurs and ripped President Obama after a black gunman killed a Virginia television reporter and her cameraman — both white. He also managed to misspell the first name of the killer, Vester Lee Flanagan, and the word “condemning.” “Pansy Fester lee Flanagan, too much of a daisy to deal w/racism,” tweeted Zimmerman on Wednesday. “Murders 2 whites. Hate crime, 100%. Racist Obama says nothing condeming.” Hours...

Even though the gunman is still on the loose, The New York Post’s Bart Hubbuch wasted no time in exploiting the murders of reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward for political purposes. Hubbuch blamed the shootings on the NRA and then, quite bizarrely championed New York’s strict gun control claws. The reason this is bizarre is because Bedford County, where the murders took place, is much safer than New York City, where crime is on the rise.

Before his bombastic concert-in-the-park performance in Mobile, Donald Trump had come across chiefly as an amusing amateur whose total lack of basic political knowledge and essential reasoning ability had rendered him unwilling to do interviews that he could not phone in from the confines of his office. In Alabama, he broke out, transforming himself in the process into something else altogether. One part Alan Ginsberg, one part Jim Morrison, and one part Roderick Spode, Trump strode onto the Southern stage as might a troubled rock star. This, his insolent upper lip told the camera, was show time. All of which...

As the world population grows, we have a pressing need to eat better and farm better, and those of us trying to figure out how to do those things have pointed at lots of different foods as problematic. Almonds, for their water use. Corn, for the monoculture. Beef, for its greenhouse gases. In each of those cases, there’s some truth in the finger-pointing, but none of them is a clear-cut villain. There’s one food, though, that has almost nothing going for it. It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing...

There may be a very long-shot pathway to the presidency for Vice President Biden in 2016, but running as a vulture candidate — whose candidacy would be premised on the bet that the partisan vendetta of personal destruction being waged against Hillary Clinton by Republicans succeeds — is not that pathway. (snip) Had Biden announced his candidacy many months ago and articulated a powerful progressive rationale for his candidacy, I might have supported him. He didn’t, and the sole premise driving talk of a Biden campaign today is a negative premise that is unlikely to happen, i.e. that the campaign...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — “Nothing disqualifies Trump.” That was the takeaway of Frank Luntz, the public opinion guru, after leading a focus group Monday night of supporters of Donald Trump’s Republican presidential campaign.(VIDEO-AT-LINK) For two and a half hours, Luntz quizzed a group of current and past ardent Trump fans about their views on the businessman. He discussed the candidate’s past liberal stances and played past video of Trump saying provocative things about women. Yet when the focus group was over, not a single person who was planning to vote for him said they had changed their mind. At one point,...

After overseeing a focus group of 29 fervent Donald Trump supporters, Republican pollster and consultant Frank Luntz told a group of reporters that, “My legs are shaking.” Although the Middle East is in chaos, our Southern border is in chaos, and our inner-cities are in chaos; although we are entering our seventh year of economic malaise as the national debt tops $18 trillion, the so-called Smart People in politics and media still can’t quite figure out why a wildly successful businessman promising change and to stick it to these same Smart People, is so danged popular.

Republican pollster Frank Luntz reported wobbly legs after hearing from a group of Donald Trump supporters, according to TIME. Luntz conducted a focus group of 29 people from Washington, D.C. and its suburbs that either like or adore the GOP front-runner, paying each participant for the more than two-hour session Monday night, the magazine reported. “I used to sleep on my front porch with the door wide open, and now everyone has deadbolts,” one man said during the session, according to TIME. “I believe the best days of the country are behind us.” “I’m frustrated beyond belief. I feel like...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A new focus group commissioned by GOP pollster Frank Luntz shows Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump is virtually invulnerable to attack by rival 2016 candidates and the media, leading Luntz to say that it is now "totally conceivable" that Trump will become the Republican Party's nominee for president.

... the worst fears of the Republican establishment, that Trump's unapologetic condemnations of immigrants will scuttle their shot at retaking the White House, so far aren't revealing themselves in polling. If Trump's comments were hurting him and/or Republicans with voters, we'd expect to see them faring worse after the June/July period in which the comments became public -- and Trump rose in the polls. The opposite happened. Trump's position among non-white voters improved, substantially, when you look at how he fared in a head-to-head match-up with Hillary Clinton. In a CNN/ORC poll conducted in late June, Clinton led Trump by...

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump fired back at Fox News on Tuesday after the network's head and several of its star personalities criticized him in an ongoing feud over anchor Megyn Kelly. The celebrity real estate tycoon said he "totally" disagreed with a statement from Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes that defended Kelly's "tough but fair" questioning of Trump at the GOP debate Aug. 6. "I do not think Megyn Kelly is a quality journalist. I think her questioning of me, despite all of the polls saying I won the debate, was very unfair," Trump said in his...

... Watching Donald Trump bluster and bluff his way through a presidential campaign, I wonder if we underestimate the ways in which Internet vitriol has broadened the parameters of political debate. We are "shocked, shocked" by Trump's language, but all of it is exactly the sort of thing anyone can encounter in the normal course of reading about politics online. John McCain isn't a war hero? I'll bet he finds worse insults than that on his Facebook page, and so does everybody who writes about him. All Mexicans are rapists? I open my Twitter account every morning to find similar...

On Friday night, while the political media was transfixed watching Donald Trump's in-all-ways-secular stump ramble in Mobile, Ala., Ted Cruz was holding a deliberately religious rally in Des Moines. Evangelical voters were always meant to be a linchpin of Cruz's presidential bid, and as our Katie Zezima and Tom Hamburger write, the Des Moines event was not shy about making that pitch. Blasting Planned Parenthood and lamenting the "persecution" of business owners sued for denying services to same-sex couples, Cruz was clearly trying to do two things: Plant his flag as the Republican crusader -- and prompt religious voters to...