Free Republic

NEW YORK (AP) - Mix blatant bigotry with poor spelling. Add a dash of ALL CAPS. Top it off with a violent threat. And there you have it: A recipe for the worst of online comments, scourge of the Internet. Blame anonymity, blame politicians, blame human nature. But a growing number of websites are reining in the Wild West of online commentary. Companies including Google and the Huffington Post are trying everything from deploying moderators to forcing people to use their real names in order to restore civil discourse. Some sites, such as Popular Science, are banning comments altogether.

In addition to my career as a PhD chemist, I am one of a select few who enjoy the privilege of moderating content on reddit.com’s science forum. The science forum is a small part of reddit, but it nonetheless enjoys over 4 million subscribers. By comparison, that’s roughly twice the circulation of The New York Times. The forum, known as /r/science, provides a digital space for discussions about recent, peer-reviewed scientific publications. This puts us (along with /r/AskScience) on the front line of the science-public interface. On our little page, scientists and nonscientists can connect through discussions on everything from...

Earlier Tuesday, NBC News reported that President Barack Obama had shaken hands with Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe. However, the UK Telegraph's Josie Ensor reported that Obama "was asked to take his seat just before reaching Mugabe." Complicating matters, another article in the UK Telegraph also claimed that Obama had shaken hands with Mugabe--in very similar terms to those used in the NBC article. Breitbart News caught the discrepancy--and suddenly the NBC News article was corrected, with no notice. Before: On his way to the rostrum, Obama also shook the hand of Robert Mugabe, the strongman ruler of Zimbabwe, and hugged...

Professor Admits Hiding Obama College Video By Todd Starnes Harvard University Law School professor Charles Ogletree admitted that he hid controversial video footage featuring a college-age President Obama speaking at a campus rally in support of a radical professor. "I hid this during the 2008 campaign," Ogletree said in the video. "I don't care if they find it now." The entire video was aired exclusively on Hannity by Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak and contributor Ben Shapiro. The unedited video shows Obama speaking at a 1991 rally for Professor Derrick Bell. Bell has been described as the Jeremiah Wright of academia....

Dan Rather excluded from CBS' anniversary coverage of Kennedy assassination Published: November 5, 2013 1:57 PM By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS The 50th-anniversary coverage of the Kennedy assassination on CBS News won't include the recollections of its longtime anchor Dan Rather, further proof of the lingering bitterness following Rather's messy exit and subsequent lawsuit against the network. Rather helped organize CBS' plans for President John F. Kennedy's visit to Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and as a young reporter was a key component of assassination coverage. Now 82, with his own show on AXS-TV, he's one of the few reporters on...

On Thursday, Ken Shepherd at NewsBusters noted that Kansas University journalism professor David Guth, in the wake of Monday's Navy Yard murders, tweeted, "The blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters. Shame on you. May God damn you." In an update which now also includes a defense of Guth by a former student, Ken noted that he has placed on administrative leave. Yesterday, I noted that the headline at the Associated Press's national site after Guth's suspension ("KU Professor Takes Heat Over Twitter Comment") avoided mentioning KU's discliplinary action against...

On Wednesday September 12, 2012 blogger Speak With Authority discovered that five days before 9-11, the US State Department sent out a memo announcing no credible security threats against the United States on the anniversary of 9-11. The Overseas Security Advisory Council, who posted the memo, is part of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security under the U.S. Department of State. The OSAC memo said: Terrorism and Important Dates Global 9/6/2012 OSAC currently has no credible information to suggest that al-Qa’ida or any other terrorist group is plotting any kind of attack overseas to coincide with the upcoming anniversary of September...

It appears Snopes.com scrubbed their "report" on Obama's mom posing nude. When Snopes originally published their article they tagged the claim "undetermined" and then sometime later tagged it as "false" claiming the nude woman in the photos was Marcy Moore. Now Snopes pulled the article altogether and had the URL excluded from the Wayback Machine. Wonder why?

The online hoaxbusting website Snopes.com has changed its reference to the purported attending physician at Barack Obama's birth. WND reported just days ago that the site, along with a Buffalo newspaper, referenced a Dr. Rodney T. West as the physician at the birth. However, since that report was published, the passage has been edited to remove a section saying the woman interviewed, talking about the "obstetrician who delivered him," was "referring to Dr. Rodney T. West, who died in February at the age of 98."

Paging Captain Obama!....Paging Captain Obama! How are your buddies in the media gonna spin this one Shirlock?

A Trip Down Memory Lane 31 March 2010 Not too long ago, taking to the streets to protest your government was considered a patriotic act.It’s true!But it seems that publicly airing your grievances stopped being patriotic right around noon on January 20th, 2009.Once President Obama was sworn in, protesting became incitement to violence.If you’ve opened up a newspaper or watched a cable news program in the past week or so, you’ve probably seen members of the media painting Tea Party activists as dangerous bigots. That’s because disagreeing with President Obama on issues like government spending and high taxes makes...

NEW YORK (Reuters.com) --The Obama administration's plan to cut more than $1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade relies heavily on so-called backdoor tax increases that will result in a bigger tax bill for middle-class families. In the 2010 budget tabled by President Barack Obama on Monday, the White House wants to let billions of dollars in tax breaks expire by the end of the year -- effectively a tax hike by stealth. While the administration is focusing its proposal on eliminating tax breaks for individuals who earn $250,000 a year or more, middle-class families will face a...

<p>Those who read the New York Times's coverage of the unsuccessful results of Barack and Michelle Obama's attempt to seal the 2016 Summer Olympics bid for Chicago on Friday afternoon ('For Obama, an Unsuccessful Campaign") might want to read it again.</p>

(CNSNews.com) - After Cybercast News Service reported Wednesday that MoveOn.org had removed from its website a television advertisement stating that "150,000 American men and women are stuck in Iraq," the liberal group restored the spot to its site -- but without an accompanying picture that had been altered to cover the fact that one of the soldiers in the ad was wearing shorts, which are not part of the American combat uniform. As Cybercast News Service previously reported, the 30-second spot begins by stating: "Some folks won't be home this holiday season." The ad then pans across a group of...

<p>I have never posted anything here, as I prefer to soak up tons of information and concepts...but something has been bothering me about the coverage on Iraq even on FreeRepublic: where are the reports of this Sunni leader and that Sunni tribal chief murdered in the middle of the night? We just heard about "election workers" murdered on Haifa Street (the Palestinian street) in Baghdad and the killers then walking around in broad daylight bragging about what they did. Where were our snipers? No work for an American sniper on Haifa Street? Why won't the CIA know the identities of today's Haifa Street killers by sundown...and then make sure that everybody on Haifa Street knows that they didn't live until sunrise? And what about the Iraqis deporting Palestinians? I bought into this war because I expected the Shiite Iraqis to immediately start exerting a heavy hand at least on the Saddam supporting Pals. Why am I getting the idea, even while reading Freerepublic, that the US military and CIA are acting much more like wusses than they ever thought of being during the Vietnam War? Where is the Phoenix Program?</p>