Free Republic

Edward Bernays believed that society could not be trusted to make rational and informed decisions on their own, and that guiding public opinion was essential within a democratic society. Bernays founded the Council on Public Relations and his 1928 book, Propaganda cites the methodology used in the application of effective emotional communication. He discovered that such communication is capable of manipulating the unconscious in an effort to produce a desired effect – namely, a capacity to manufacture mass social adherence in support of products, political candidates and social movements. Nearly a century after his heyday, Bernays’ methodology is apparent in...

Is this Obamas chance to really become Nelson Mandela?

Wyoming rejects plan to buy aircraft carrier in case U.S. fell apart When the zombie apocalypse is upon us, we'll look back on how legislators from the land-locked state of Wyoming were mocked for wanting to buy an aircraft carrier. The carrier was just one part of a so-called "Doomsday Bill," which explored emergency scenarios in the event of the United States collapsing. In addition to suggesting the purchase of an aircraft carrier, the bill called for $15,000 in funding to investigate how Wyoming might acquire airplanes, enact a draft for all branches of the military, obtain and distribute food...

Conservative Leaders Demand Apology From Huffington Over Anti-Catholic Column February 28, 2012 A group of socially conservative leaders is demanding Huffington Post publisher Arianna Huffington apologize for allowing a column to be published on her website that compares Catholics to pedophiles and attacks communion as a "barbaric ritual." (snip) Letter to Arianna Huffington from Christian and conservative leaders "Larry Doyle's recent anti-Catholic screed in the Huffington Post, 'The Jesus-Eating Cult of Rick Santorum,' is bigoted and unacceptable, and a perfect example of 'flame-throwing, name-calling, and simplistic attack dog rhetoric'" that Huffington pledged to avoid when she launched the Huffington Post...

Arianna Huffington and the liberal online juggernaut bearing her name have been tough on a lot of Republican presidential candidates, but when it comes to Newt Gingrich, the knife has cut a little deeper. Since the former House speaker emerged as the front-runner for the GOP nomination, Huffington has used her media megaphone — including the 37 million-visitor-a-month Huffington Post — to excoriate him as an insincere, self-serving flip-flopper, sometimes in biting personal terms. In a recent HuffPo column, for instance, she compared Gingrich to “the crazy uncle” who tries to persuade you to bet your retirement savings on an...

The 87-year-old mother did not have long to live. Her arthritic body had withered to 80 pounds. The actual exam, mother struggled to open her legs wide enough for the procedure and then lay there, quietly crying. Mother died two months later. It was totally unnecessary. Unnecessary, perhaps, but surprisingly common. Patients (ARE) inundated by medical advertising clamor for extra tests.

What is the deal with MSNBC folks being anti-Second Amendment lately? Last week it was fill in host Craig Melvin and this week it's analyst and Huffington Post writer Alex Wagner. Wagner was on Real Time With Bill Maher and when asked about what should be changed in the Constitution, Wagner said we should get rid of the Second Amendment. Bill Maher, HBO: "Let's ask Alex. What would you change in the Constitution?" Alex Wagner, Huffington Post: "Well, I'm going to be pilloried for this. I think get rid of the second Amendment, the right to bear arms. I just...

- Did Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer steal the idea for the Huffington Post? Though Huffington has deemed the allegation "ridiculous," a judge thinks that a lawsuit making that claim is serious enough to go to trial, per a ruling in a New York court Wednesday. Peter Daou and James Boyce, two former political advisers, filed suit against the HuffPost co-founders last November claiming that they took their idea for a liberal-leaning news site. Since then, Huffington and Lerer have tried to have the case thrown out, but to no avail. The judge ruled Wednesday that the case would go...

On April 8, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Boston conference on ''media reform.'' She was joined by four other congressmen, a senator, two FCC commissioners, a Nobel laureate and numerous liberal journalists. The 2,500-person event was sponsored by a group called Free Press, one of more than 180 different media-related organizations that receives money from liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros, who first made a name for himself in investing and currency trading, now makes his name in politics and policy. Since the 2004 election, the controversial financier has used his influence and billions to push a laundry list...

Arianna Huffington’s liberal-leaning Huffington Post was forced to write a retraction Tuesday after alleging that conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart doctored a video clip from a White House press briefing in order to make it look like CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell was unhappy about the recent debt compromise during an exchange with White House press secretary Jay Carney. In the clip, which Breitbart and other conservative media used to describe what they saw as O’Donnell’s liberal bias, the CBS anchor appears to claim about the debt compromise: “You gave them everything they wanted and we got nothing.”

Since I have studied, lectured on and written material on the "canonicity of Scripture" for 40 years, I read with interest the article by Dr. David J. Lose addressing the origins of the Bible ("Where did the Bible come from?" Huffington Post). I was greatly disappointed. First, the "Bible" is not one book but a collection of 66 ancient Jewish scrolls from the book of Genesis to the book of the Apocalypse. These ancient scrolls were produced in different times, cultures, languages, political, economic and social orders over a period of almost 2,000 years by 40 different authors. They are...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-r-keith-sawyer/why-osama-bin-laden-doesn_b_62752.html

We may have set a new low for idiotic lawsuits. Jonathan Tasini, a freelance reporter who was famously involved in a lawsuit with the NY Times, concerning copyrights on a database of freelancer articles, is now suing the Huffington Post for not paying him while he wrote for it by choice. The basis of the lawsuit is the already discussed fact that a bunch of folks who blogged for the Huffington Post are stupidly upset that Arianna Huffington sold her site to AOL for $315 million, and that they didn't get any of the money. Of course, they didn't invest...

FULL TITLE - St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact, Lane DeGregory win 2009 Pulitzer Prizes For the first time in its 125-year history, the St. Petersburg Times has won two Pulitzer Prizes in a single year. Staff writer Lane DeGregory, 42, captured the feature writing category for "The Girl in the Window," a moving account of a Plant City child whose mother kept her locked in a filthy room, and the adoptive family who worked to overcome her feral beginnings. The Times staff won the national reporting prize for PolitiFact, a Web site, database and "Truth-O-Meter'' that tests the validity of political...

Arianna Huffington sat down with The New York Times Magazine (you will recall, of course, the the NYT’s executive editor, Bill Keller, has made it quite clear that he’s none to happy with the Huffington Post’s method of aggregating content) to discuss pleasant topics like how her father, a former newspaperman, would feel about accusations that her site is responsible for that whole death of print thing we keep reading about in newspapers. The magazine broached another contentious and persistent criticism the Huffington Post has been contending with since it’s inception, and especially

The national Newspaper Guild has upped the ante in a strike against the Huffington Post, calling on all unpaid writers to stop contributions to the website. The 26,000-member union of media workers asked all unpaid contributors on Wednesday to withhold their work in support of a strike launched earlier this year by the art publication Visual Arts Source, whose writers had previously contributed free content to the Post. "Join us in shining a light on the unprofessional and unethical practices of this company," the Guild wrote in a press release. "Just as we would ask writers to stand fast and...

AFP - Bill Keller, executive editor of the venerable New York Times, and Arianna Huffington, founder of brash newcomer The Huffington Post, exchanged blows on Thursday in a highly public spat. http://www.france24.com/en/20110311-ny-times-huffington-post-exchange-barbs

That hurts. In order to integrate the Huffington Post into the AOL family, the company will be eliminating 900 jobs as they restructure the blog to try to return to revenue growth.

AOL's long-anticipated layoffs will start tomorrow, Kara Swisher reports. The company will let go between 400 and 500 employees, mostly in AOL's editorial groups. The layoffs have been anticipated since AOL's acquisition of the Huffington Post in February, and previous reports said they would begin this week.

Arianna Huffington is being cast by some unpaid Huffington Post contributors as an unethical robber baron. With Huffington awash in funds from AOL’s $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post, contributors have called a strike to demand proper compensation. The Huffington Post, established in 2005, emerged as a leading source of aggregated news content and liberal commentary written by unpaid contributors. With the success of the site, founder Arianna Huffington rocketed to national fame, frequently appearing as a guest on cable news programs. Bill Lasarow, Publisher and Co-Editor of Visual Art Source, announced that his organization is “now going on...