Free Republic

OAKLAND, Calif. -- It's been two months since Rodrigo Salido left the maximum security wing at Santa Rita jail, and two months without pills for his bipolar disorder. Now Salido, who served two years for burglary, assault and gang involvement, has no health insurance and few options for refilling his medication. California and 25 other states, under a provision of President Obama’s health law, opened up Medicaid to single and so-called “childless” adults. The change in eligibility criteria will extend Medicaid coverage to vast numbers of ex-offenders whose incomes are below the federal poverty line. Men and women involved in...

What will it take for ABC, CBS, and NBC to cover the IRS targeting scandal, which is no doubt bigger than Watergate? Time after time after time, we’ve seen major developments in this story go completely unreported, or, at best, given a few token seconds. The liberal media are downright allergic to the truth about the IRS scandal. This administration has lied countless times to the media’s face, and they just continue to sit there and take it. They’re so lovesick with everything Obama that they can’t bring themselves to do their jobs and report the news. It’d be pitiful...

... Abramson recently learned her pay package was not commensurate with that of her predecessor, Bill Keller, and sought parity... “‘She confronted the top brass,’ one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was ‘pushy,’ a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect.” [Publisher Arthur] Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits ...

What keeps you up at night? That’s the question economist Gary Yohe, one of the architects behind the White House’s 2014 Climate Assessment report, posed to several of his co-authors during a May 6 panel in Washington D.C. Unsurprisingly, the assembled team of climate experts and other academics had no lack of answers, ranging from the possibility of more extreme weather events to the risk of climate-induced mental health degradation. But what keeps Iowa State University climate scientist Gene Wanker up at night is what climate change could do to one of humanity’s most basic needs. “I worry about food...

A Baltimore television station has been evacuated after someone rammed a truck into the building. That person is now believed to be barricaded in the building. WMAR-TV posted this to its Facebook page, “ALERT | Stay away from ABC2 News studio at 6400 York Road. A man in a truck crashed through the lobby and is potentially armed. Will update as needed.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's longtime press secretary says he's confident his boss of 14 years had no knowledge of or involvement in the scheme that shut traffic near the George Washington Bridge in a political payback plot. The spokesman, Michael Drewniak, called the plot reckless and perplexing in an opening statement Tuesday before a New Jersey legislative committee that's investigating last September's lane closings. Drewniak has also testified before a federal grand jury that's separately investigating the lane closings.

The left laughs and the right groans as Ann Coulter, once again, has managed to confound and amaze with her special brand of self-promotional crazy. She couldn’t have seen it coming, but at least some entertainment value came out of it. It started Sunday night, when Coulter took her circus to Twitter to mock the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, which was created earlier this month to draw support for the missing schoolgirls in Nigeria. Nothing like distorting good-faith efforts into Twitter snark to fit some monotonous political narrative. To be fair, Coulter wasn’t the only one who took a few jabs at...

Here's a riddle: Many Republicans deny it's happening. Some Democrats don't want to talk about it. What is it? The answer is the growing U.S. economy, on pace to expand as much as 3.5 percent this year, about the best performance in the industrialized world. Unemployment has fallen from 10 percent to about 6.3 percent and consumer confidence is at a six-year high. Better economic data could help persuade voters in November to look past President Barack Obama's weak approval ratings and his unpopular healthcare law and give Democrats enough lift to hold onto the Senate and limit their losses...

Vladimir Putin uses an invisible army of social media propagandists, in addition to conventional media, to support his narrative of an out-of-control Ukraine, to spread fabrications of atrocities by Ukrainian extremists, and to unleash destabilizing rumors on east Ukraine. If Ukraine unmasks the myths of Russia’s disinformation war, Putin’s target audiences, at home and abroad, must eventually reject his whole narrative. [....] This photo circulated unquestioned, until the KyivPost (See: Moscow journalist says there was no pregnant woman in Odessa Trade Unions Building) reported its debunking by a media reviewer from Moscow, Elena Rybkovtseva. In her investigation, Rybkovtseva began with...

This administration enjoys an advantage afforded no other: a partisan media that has its back, minute-by-minute. When Jay Carney was grilled at length by Jonathan Karl of ABC News over an email outlining administration talking points in the wake of the 2012 Benghazi attack, it was not, by the reckoning of many observers, the White House press secretary's finest hour. Carney was alternately defensive and dismissive, arguably fueling a bonfire he was trying to tamp down. But Carney needn't have worried. He had plenty of backup. He had The New Republic's Brian Beutler dismissing Benghazi as "nonsense." He had Slate's...

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.It is one of life’s verities — as the “narratives” of the fourth estate rarely fail to remind us — that journalists tend to regard themselves as the guardians and escorts of civic progress and virtue. Thus freighted with a higher mission than most, they are naturally tempted to insert themselves right into the middle of the nation’s political debates. The more consequential, the better. That may go some distance toward explaining the mess we are in these days.But for all the power of the pen, the keyboard, the microphone, and the TV cameras, it’s...

Here’s an unsolicited tip for Rep. Trey Gowdy: A smoking gun explanation for the Obama Administration’s use of false talking points has already been found. And the culprit is not a White House adviser or State Department bureaucrat. It’s the intelligence community’s reliance on the media. It’s tucked inside the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on Benghazi, which reveals a key source of the bad intelligence that made it into Ambassador Susan Rice’s famous talking points: the media incorrectly reported that before the attack on Sept. 11, 2012 there were protests outside the U.S. facilities in Benghazi when there...

House Speaker John Boehner would not say Thursday if the House GOP’s campaign arm should stop including the Benghazi attacks in fundraising appeals. Asked three times whether the National Republican Congressional Committee should be fundraising based on what they call Democratic obstruction of the Benghazi investigation, Boehner answered only: “Our focus is on getting the answers to those families who lost their loved ones. Period.” An NRCC email sent Wednesday morning included a link to “become a Benghazi watchdog” – which led to a page where supporters can donate cash. A separate website called “BenghaziWatchdogs.com” still contains a link encouraging...

Do you think Fox News is the only network that wants the Obama administration to come clean on its numerous scandals? Think again. Here are five non-Fox News journalists who are demanding answers. 1. Sharyl Attkisson Sharyl Attkisson, an award-winning investigative journalist, used to work at CBS News. When she used her talents to spotlight idiosyncrasies in the Obama administration, Attkisson claims, the network showed little interest. After being unable to pursue the "Obamacare," Fast and Furious and Benghazi scandals at the network, Attkisson chose to resign in March. In an April 20 interview with CNN's "Reliable Sources," she accused...

Andrei Kondrashov is one of 300 media professionals awarded by Russian President Vladimir Putin for their "objective" coverage of events in Crimea. Speaking to RFE/RL in Moscow, Russian state television's leading news anchor defended his award and said he saw no difference between journalism and propaganda. (RFE/RL's Russian Service) [Video]

News broke Monday that President Vladimir Putin issued a decree in April honoring more than 300 journalists for their objective coverage of the events that have unfolded in Crimea. [....] Among the reported recipients of the "For Service to the Fatherland" award were talk show host Arkady Mamontov and RT's chief editor Margarita Simonyan. [....] “These awards show that Russia's political system works on the basis of informal rules and signals. If someone does not receive such an award, this could be interpreted as a sign of disgrace,” Gatov said by phone.

A year after announcing a world record for crowdfunding for journalism, the editor-in-chief and publisher of De Correspondent shared their thoughts and lessons on start-up journalism.Last April, Rob Wijnberg and Ernst-Jan Pfauth raised $1.7 million in crowdfunding for De Correspondent, a new, online-only publication The idea was to go from 'the news' to 'the new'," said Wijnberg, De Correspondent's editor-in-chief, who was previously editor-in-chief of nrc.next. He and Pfauth, publisher of De Correspondent and former online editor of nrc.next, said they had tried to change the direction of their previous publication and failed. Instead, they took the ideas they had...

... Obama is suffering from a shortage of successes. Whatever he's doing, it isn't working. Russia is still threatening Ukraine. Syria is still mired in bloodshed. Secretary of State John F. Kerry's thankless mediation between Israelis and Palestinians seems doomed. But wait a minute. This is a president who used to say we could swing for the fences. We could repair America's relationships with its allies, enjoy a "reset" with Russia, embrace the Muslim world and make peace just about everywhere. The failures call to mind the question a famous Alaskan foreign policy analyst once asked: "How's that hopey-changey thing...

THERE has been a festival of commentary of late bemoaning the pusillanimous foreign policy of President Obama. If only we had a president who rode horses shirtless, wrestled a tiger or took a bite out of a neighboring country, we’d all feel much safer. Your Honor, I rise in — partial — defense of Mr. Obama. Let me start by asking a question I’ve asked about other countries: Is American foreign policy today the way it is because Obama is the way he is (cerebral, cautious, dispassionate) or is Obama the way Obama is on foreign policy because America is...

Two years after winning an election in which foreign policy was barely mentioned, President Obama is being pummeled at home and abroad for his international leadership. The world sometimes seems as if it is flying apart, with Mr. Obama unable to fix it. Through a combination of a few significant missteps, circumstances beyond his control, unreasonable expectations and his maddeningly bland demeanor, Mr. Obama has opened himself to criticism that he is not articulating a strong, overarching blueprint for the exercise of American power and has not been able to bend authoritarian leaders to his will. Still, too often, Mr....