Free Republic

Last week, Newsbusters brought you "Stumped," as April Ryan struggled to cite a single foreign policy success by her super-fave, President Obama. In the best Hollywood tradition, this morning we bring you a sequel--Stumped II: Syria! On today's Morning Joe, lugubrious lefty Eric Alterman of The Nation mag was stumped when Joe Scarborough asked him what the US should do about Syria. After humming, hawing and a couple of false starts, Alterman asked how much time they had. Right, as if if only he had more time to expand on the nothing he had to say. Shades of that SNL...

Sidney Blumenthal, a close adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has reportedly undertaken an email campaign to defend a controversial book written by his son that compares Israel to Nazi Germany. The book, written by Max Blumenthal, accuses Israel of being a fascist country and has chapter titles explicitly comparing the Jewish State to Nazi Germany, such as “The Concentration Camp” and “The Night of Broken Glass.” According to the Nation columnist Eric Alterman, who harshly reviewed the book, long-time Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal has sent “nasty emails” to “our mutual friends and professional acquaintances” attacking him for “telling the...

Nation columnist and government worker, tenured professor Eric Alterman defends public employee unions

The following 65 names are confirmed members of the now-defunct JournoList listserv. 1. Ezra Klein 2. Dave Weigel 3. Matthew Yglesias 4. David Dayen 5. Spencer Ackerman 6. Jeffrey Toobin 7. Eric Alterman 8. Paul Krugman 9. John Judis 10. Eve Fairbanks 11. Mike Allen 12. Ben Smith 13. Lisa Lerer 14. Joe Klein 15. Brad DeLong 16. Chris Hayes 17. Matt Duss 18. Jonathan Chait 19. Jesse Singal 20. Michael Cohen 21. Isaac Chotiner 22. Katha Pollitt 23. Alyssa Rosenberg 24. Rick Perlstein 25. Alex Rossmiller 26. Ed Kilgore 27. Walter Shapiro 28. Noam Scheiber 29. Michael Tomasky 30....

After our very own Editor-in-Chief David Horowitz wrote a post blasting progressive columnist and Professor of literature Eric Alterman, I sent the latter an email, inviting him to respond to Horowitz’s post right here, at NewsReal Blog. Why? Well, because we, unlike most progressives, mean it when we say we encourage debate. Alterman emailed me back immediately. The answer was short: “No thanks.” It’s what I should have expected from a leftist, of course, but for some reason, I expected better of Alterman. I thought he would actually be willing to break ranks with the rest of the radical progressive...

From a non-Jew, it would smack of anti-semitism. From Eric Alterman? You be the judge. The author of the Altercations column at Media Matters has a running complaint: Rick Klein, editor of The Note at ABC News, pays too much respect to the writings of other Jewish pundits. Jennifer Rubin, one of the chief bloggers at Commentary's "Contentions" blog, was Alterman's first target, in his August 1 column [emphasis added throughout]: "I realize I may be the only person in the world to care about this, and I only care a tiny bit, but what does Commentary's Jennifer Rubin have...

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (CNN ) – Columnist and author Eric Alterman was arrested Sunday night inside the debate spin room and charged with criminal trespass after police say he refused repeated orders to leave.

How out there on the left wing is Eric Alterman? MSNBC, the network of Keith Olbermann, he who has accused Pres. Bush of fascism and called for his impeachment - fired him, presumably for being too extreme.But not to worry, Alterman's column, 'Altercation,' was promptly picked up by David Brock's Media Matters. For my sins I recently subscribed to the column's email list. Reading through this evening's edition, one thing emerges: Eric Alterman is one angry guy. In the course of one mere column, Alterman vents his bile in these diverse directions: "This notion of a leftist alliance with Islamic...

I've been in a tiny minority of late - well, it's been me and Karl Rove and a few others - who worry that the polls indicating a Democratic tsunami taking over both houses of Congress may be vastly overstating the likely result. When NBC reports that "52% say they prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress, compared with 37% who want Republicans to maintain power", that's both a misleading and irrelevant statistic. This is not a national election. It is about 500 individual elections, the vast majority of which are fixed by structural factors including gerrymandering, money, population disparities and the power...

At a recent conference on the Clinton Administration at Hofstra University, ex-press secretary Jake Siewart made a point that had previously eluded me: It was during the early days of Clinton's presidency that the democratization of instant information made the insider press corps obsolete. To retain their importance and self-regard, these journalists had to invent a new function for themselves, and they did: interpreting, not reporting, the news. But instead of doing the hard work of researching the historical, economic, sociological and political contexts of a given story and then finding a way to explain these in lay terms, they...

According to Eric Alterman, conservative Christians don’t really like the Jews. The left-wing writer suggested this in the Thursday edition of his MSNBC blog, despite admitting that he knows "darn few" right-wing Christians. (Alterman is known for writing books such as "What Liberal Media?" and others.) He came to this conclusion while expounding on the perceived anti-Semitism of some Europeans: "I wouldn’t argue that the French are not anti-Semitic and that American right-wing Christians are not philo-Semitic, but it’s not that simple. France had Jewish prime ministers in both the thirties and fifties and might get another one soon. No...

After chugging down a rancid carton of Air America Brand milk, well past its sell-by date, MSNBC's Eric Alterman concludes we're the network's real problem. Hope he didn't give them all of his lunch money. MSNBC NewsYes, it's a right-wing conspiracy to silence the "progressive" alternative, led by yours truly, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. It couldn't have anything to do with $875,000 in shady taxpayer grant transfers from a Bronx-based community nonprofit, to the liberal network and resulting city investigation, right? Or that we proved (after producing a signed, notarized document) Al Franken knew about...

Al Franken And  Other Airhead Americans Beg Congressional Forum - "Stop Conservative Bias" In Media Al Franken, Randi Rhodes (Infamous for kill-the-president skits), Eric Alterman (Center For American Progress i.e.. Communism), Traitorous David Brock and other intellectuals yukked it up at a Congressional Forum led by Representative Conyers http://www.conyersblog.us/ on Capitol Hill -Tuesday, May 24. They, and other forsaken liberal pundits, were crying out for the Fed gov to exercise more control over the dominant conservative media which has duped a large number of audience-citizens into believing that liberals are fools, unpatriotic, and even, imagine this. . . not funny!...

Alterman's attempt at post-election introspection: Let’s face it. It’s not Kerry’s fault. It’s not Nader’s fault (this time). It’s not the media’s fault (though they do bear a heavy responsibility for much of what ails our political system). It’s not “our” fault either. The problem is just this: Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the “reality-based community” say or believe about anything.

In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge. The crowd I joined in Franken’s living room was comprised of: Al Franken and his wife Franni; Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for the New Yorker; David Remnick, editor for the New Yorker; Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Magazine; Howard...

I'm in a rental car with Al Franken, and we're driving across New Hampshire on the Sunday before the nation's first primary, heading to a John Edwards rally. The Democrats are in a kooky mood following the sudden collapse of Howard Dean in Iowa, and Franken -- comedian, celebrity, scourge -- is spending two days in the state not in any official capacity but as a sort of good-will representative from the party's satiric wing. He is not, as you might think from the outrageous trappings of his comedy, an extreme lefty but rather a devout party man, one who...

Frustrated liberals, angry at having to spend an entire week watching the nation pay tribute to the man they derided alternately as "an amiable dunce" and a heartless autocrat, are now claiming that Bill Clinton was actually a more popular president than Ronald Reagan. "In truth, Ronald Reagan was never as popular as he is being presented to be with Americans," writes Slate Magazine's Eric Alterman. "As president, [he] was never even as popular as Bill Clinton during the period of Clinton’s impeachment," argues the disgruntled Democrat. For evidence, Alterman cites a Gallup poll that tracks approval ratings for...

It may have the ring of cliché, but America's next presidential election will be among the most crucial events in contemporary history. Rarely in the modern era has the world seen such unchecked power exercised so ignorantly, arrogantly and with such profoundly counterproductive results as the Bush Administration's bait-and-switch invasion of Iraq. As Al Gore told an audience at NYU recently, "The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States." The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Gore noted, has...

The Death of Journalistic Ethics There has been a subtle shift in opinion journalism in America in the past few years. Now, we have people working for newspapers and magazines who are devoted to getting certain polticians -- namely the left -- elected to office. While Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing talk show cadre are entertainers -- and describe themselves as such -- these people are embedded in the elite media and are not supposed to be political activists. In a stunning admission in Sunday's New York Times, the following people attended a meeting with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) in...

I sat between this incredible guy who had been on death row for eighteen years before being freed by the Innocence Project at Medill Journalism school (the winner of this year’s $100K Puffin/Nation prize) and Joe Wilson, winner of this year’s Ron Ridenhour prize. I asked Joe why Powell had turned out to be such a wimp—failing to use any of his prized credibility to put the breaks on his lying colleagues, and instead telling all those falsehoods at the UN and convincing a boatload of gullible reporters of a whole mess of stuff that just ain’t so. Wilson—whose speech...