Free Republic

Executives from several television networks held a conference call on Monday to discuss Donald Trump's campaign treatment of the press, but no immediate action is expected to come from the first call, sources familiar with the call told POLITICO. Another call is scheduled for this afternoon. Representatives from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN discussed how embeds and reporters from outlets are being treated, including being pushed into media "pens." The Washington Post was first to report on the conference call. It's unlikely a formal unified message will be sent to the Trump campaign unless all the networks agree on...

How many times have we heard that Donald Trump has peaked since he declared his candidacy for president in June? A half dozen times? More? And each time Peak Trump was announced by pundits, it was inevitably followed by yet another surge in the polls. This is probably why in recent weeks, media prognosticators seem to have shied from declaring Peak Trump since it is always followed by you-know-what. However enter Ezra Klein of Vox. Throwing caution to the winds, Klein went where few now dare to go by predicting that we have indeed finally reached Peak Trump. Klein consulted charts...

On what planet is it right to punish the innocent in a quixotic effort to curb campus rape?Unfortunately, it’s a-okay in the bizarro world that is Capitol Hill. Democrat Colorado Rep. Jared Polis earned roaring applause on Thursday when the lawmaker declared it is just to expel all students — regardless of guilt — who are accused of sexual assault.“I mean, if there’s 10 people that have been accused and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, seems better to get rid of all 10 people,” Polis said at a House hearing on campus sexual assault....

Cable news is in trouble. The Pew Research Center reports that the median daily audience for Fox, CNN, and MSNBC is down about 11 percent since 2008. The Washington Post's Paul Farhi sees a grim future for the industry. He argues that cable news outlets are pretty much where newspapers were a decade ago: their audience is aging, their medium is being disrupted by new technologies, and the next generation of viewers is developing habits and preferences that they're poorly placed to serve. (This is probably a good moment to note that I'm a contributor to MSNBC.) The networks may still...

The United States comes up constantly when you talk to Russians about their country's place in the world. But the conversations tend to go a lot differently than many Americans might expect. In the US, the common view is that Russians feel aggrieved by the loss of the Soviet Union and all the respect that came with being a global superpower. Russia's acts of aggression in Europe, in this telling, are all about challenging the American-led order as a way to prove Russia's might and importance. This aggression is wildly popular among Russians, many Americans believe, because it makes them...

Judging by liberal reaction to Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress on Tuesday, the Israeli Prime minister scored a direct hit at Obama's Arab-first policy. At least amongst the Arab-first crowd that Obama supports. "Given how much buildup the speech received," writes Matthew Duss in Slate, "and how much of America’s time has been wasted with the controversy surrounding it—it’s simply amazing that Netanyahu didn’t use the chance to offer any new or interesting ideas."And that's the best Duss has to offer in the Slate piece titled Netanyahu Just Did Obama a Big Favor.He never really gets to the big favor...

Here it is: When our great grandchildren are dealing with the effects of climate change, they will look at this and hate us: http://t.co/YBv5vM8Kzu— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) February 27, 2015 This is Vox's piece by Brad Plumer depicting Senator James Inhofe tossing a snowball on the Senate floor.  He then segues into more pretty charts showing data from the Climate Change Institute and NOAA. When will the climate kook-aid drinking liberals get it through their heads? It's not pretty charts, it's the data behind them that's cooked.If you use cooked data to make pretty charts, they are still wrong.  Ask...

"Finally I can know what it's like to have a President smarter than me." This was said by a very intelligent friend of mine after November 4, 2008, when Candidate Obama became President-Elect Obama. It was, for the college-educated cosmopolitan set, a triumph of rationality, of the reality-based community, over the flyover states, over the Red Americans, over the redneck cowboyism that ruled America from 2001 to 2008. This is what came to mind when reading this piece by Vox's Ezra Klein on "Obama Derangement Syndrome" - and specifically, when Klein says that "Bush Derangement Syndrome" was really a policy...

If Ezra Klein isn't being completely ridiculous he is being totally revealing (in a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot kind of way) about what and how liberals think.Today he opined on the demise of The New Republic (a magazine a journalism professor I had in college once referred to as "conservative"...she's Canadian) he dropped this little bomb that he probably thought was a gem on his readers (bold emphasis is mine). But what made the New Republic and its peer policy magazines so great was how restlessly, relentlessly idiosyncratic they were — that's how they drove new ideologies and new ideas to the fore....

Over the weekend the New York Times carried a story on the front page about the IRS scandal. The subhead of the story proclaims: “Scrutiny went beyond conservative groups.” Want proof? “Overseen by a revolving cast of midlevel managers,” writes the Times, “stalled by miscommunication with I.R.S. lawyers and executives in Washington and confused about the rules they were enforcing, the Cincinnati specialists flagged virtually every application with Tea Party in its name. But their review went beyond conservative groups: more than 400 organizations came under scrutiny, including at least two dozen liberal-leaning ones and some that were seemingly apolitical.”...

Did Ezra Klein find a Sherlock Holmes cap and magnifying glass in the same cereal box as the super decoder ring? One has to ask because suddenly Klein is playing the role of a junior detective making deductions about Officer Darren Wilson's newly released testimony to the grand jury in St. Louis to somehow come to the conclusion that he finds it "unbelievable." You can see Klein's bizarre conclusions at Vox where he Voxsplains it all based what he must believe to be his vast reservoir of street smarts. Of course, this whole notion of junior detective Klein has been...

Update: On November 20, the Supreme Court refused to stay a decision that struck down South Carolina's same-sex marriage ban, allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry starting at noon. Since 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on same-sex marriage, lower courts have followed with their own decisions effectively ending same-sex marriage bans in several states. As the decisions pile up, it can get a little difficult to track which same-sex marriage bans are legally valid and which have been overturned. This simple list tracks where each state stands.

When it became clear that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker had won reelection handily Tuesday night, I was all set to write an article hyping up his prospects to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. It seemed to make total sense — he's been elected three times in a blue state, while fighting hard for conservative priorities in a way that's impressed both the GOP's base and its elites. But then I sat down and watched his victory speech from Tuesday night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wxEfnPakLYM The very beginning is nice, as Walker thanks God for his win and gets some applause. But...

Ezra Klein has a new raison d'être. He wants to get the politics out of everything. Yes, the guy who set up a website to coordinate the attacks on Sarah Palin in 2008; the guy who used his blog on the Washington Post to argue many false arguments on behalf of Obama, including all the stuff he got wrong on Obamacare; the guy who cemented the Post’s place as the largely irrelevant, largely laughable post-internet dinosaur and press office for Democrat policies, says that everything has become politicized. And he deplores it. He quotes a report from Stanford:"Partisans discriminate against...

This week has featured a potential tipping point in the debate about due process and campus sexual assault. The first event came in publication of an extraordinary column by Ezra Klein, defending California’s “affirmative consent” law. In one respect, it wasn’t surprising to see Klein defend the proposal; too many liberal commentators (not to mention, of course, the entire Democratic contingent in the California legislature, plus Governor Jerry Brown) have backed the law. But Klein’s argument was astonishing—he conceded that the law was flawed, even badly flawed, but celebrated the flaws as a virtue. The law will mean that “too...

Who was Michael Brown?Why was Michael Brown shot?Who is Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Michael Brown?Was the shooting of Michael Brown legal?Is the Michael Brown shooting being investigated?What's happening in Ferguson, Missouri?Is the black community represented in Ferguson's government?Have the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, been peaceful?How have police handled the protests in Ferguson, Missouri?Why do police have military-grade equipment in the first place?How have government officials reacted to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri?

Jonathan Gruber absolutely did not mean what he clearly said over and over and over again. That pretty much sums up the left's rationale for "Speak-O" Gruber stating again and again and again that states with federal health care exchanges would not be eligible for subsidies. Of course, Gruber made these quite clear statements before it became obvious that the vast majority of states would refuse to set up their own exchanges and the threat of withholding the subsidies fell flat. Among the more amusing of those performing desperate damage control is Ezra Klein of General Electric Vox. Unfortunately for...

CBS news contributor Nancy Giles wants to sue Congress. Why? For going to bed instead of taking president Obama’s “touchdown dance” call on the night of his 2012 reelection victory. But it also sheds light on the media strategy that will be used in 2014 to bolster the president. In a nutshell that strategy is known as the “I’m-Rubber-You’re-Glue-Whatever-You-Say-Bounces-Off-of-Me-and-Sticks-to-You,” campaign narrative first used in 1973 by 3rd grader Amelia Snodgrass of Temple Mount, NJ as she swept into her second class presidency in three years. Accordingly in her Sunday column CNN’s Giles gets childlike in her complains that Speaker John...

You helped elect an untested presidential candidate, a man almost as liberal as you. He promised to heal the oceans, make health care an unalienable right and transform Washington's toxic culture. You mocked Republicans, independents and squishy Democrats who had the audacity to criticize your guy, much less doubt the inevitability of his victory. President Obama won, twice, and then didn't live up to anybody's expectations, including his own. What do you do? Well, if you're Ezra Klein and a coterie of inflexibly progressive pundits, you re-purpose an attack used against President George W. Bush's bombastic approach to geopolitics. You...

Klein is a leftist journalist who had the audacity to write about his issues with the Obamacare website while working for The Washington Post. His words were immediately savaged by the farther-left blogger, Joan Walsh, who was working for Salon magazine. She penned a harsh critique, headlined: “Liberal pundit fail: Rush to attack Obamacare site only aids unhinged right.” Here’s what Walsh wrote about Klein: “Ezra Klein then picked up the cudgel, telling the crew at MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ where every Obama misstep foretells the end of his presidency, that the Health and Human Services Department is covering up a ‘massive management failure,’...