Free Republic

.....A hallmark of your work is that you despise political violence; why is your prose so combative? I'm almost always in the position of challenging conventional wisdom. I have to start by getting up, by standing out from everyone else and saying: "I don't accept this". If you haven't got anything particularly new to say, if you're just one of what Bob Dylan memorably called the rat race choir, you can gargle on without ever having to do anything exceptional or make an impression-you're just there. And an awful lot of people in commentary journalism are repeating, what everyone else...

Folks, it's past time we start actively fighting against the biased mainstream media (MSM). I suggest the following:

The day after a shooter killed 17 people at a Florida high school, President Donald Trump offered comforting words - for gun owners. "We are committed to working with state and local leaders to help secure our schools and tackle the difficult issue of mental health," Trump said in brief remarks at the White House. "It is not enough to simply take actions that make us feel like we are making a difference. We must actually make that difference." Translation: Your guns are safe. With Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress - and Democrats holding enough seats to...

I am a trauma surgeon, and I've seen what AR-15s can do. There's no reason for civilians to own them. An assault rifle is designed to deliver fatal wounds to multiple individuals within a short time period; it has no other purpose. The AR-15, the civilian version of the military assault rifle (M16 or M4), has become the most commonly used rifle in US mass shootings; the recent shootings in Parkland and Las Vegas, for instance, testify to the effectiveness of this weapon’s design. It was made for the military, to allow members of the armed forces to better dispatch...

By their own logic, the GOP and Trump are complicit in America's mass shooting epidemic. On January 20, 2018, President Donald Trump's campaign released a television ad titled “Complicit” that blamed Democrats for murders committed by illegal immigrants. Trump tweeted that day: “Democrats are far more concerned with Illegal Immigrants than they are with our great Military or Safety at our dangerous Southern Border. If Donald Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress can blame Democrats for the actions of undocumented immigrants, then the American people should be able to blame Trump and Congressional Republicans for murders committed with guns....

The Rob Porter domestic abuse scandal is more than just another bout of bad publicity for the White House. It's an actual dilemma that leaves President Donald Trump with no great options, only differing levels of bad choices. But every sensible choice includes chief of staff John Kelly leaving the White House. The key is what Kelly knew about the evidence of Porter's domestic abuse record, when he knew it, and what he did about it when he did know it. That leaves Kelly stepping down quietly and the president not commenting about it as the least bad scenario. It's...

he county in South Korea that’s hosting the 2018 Winter Olympics, Pyeongchang and the Chinese restaurant chain, P.F. Changs sort of look alike. Sort of. And over the weekend, WLS-TV the ABC affiliate in Boston ran a graphic that accidentally had P.F. Cheng 2018 instead of the name of the town

Are the ABC O&O's quietly phasing out humans? Sources tell FTVLive that the O&O's have been using robots to write stories for the station's websites. The company is using a program called "Hoodline... ...scans Yelp, apartment sites and other review sites to "create" stories from the scans. It then publishes...

During an increasingly ugly meeting, the company’s CCO refused to answer whether money laundering allegations were true and blamed staff for undermining the business. During a private meeting with editors this week, a top Newsweek executive blamed his own journalists for the magazine’s recent turmoil and refused to answer whether the company committed financial crimes. Newsweek Media Group interim Chief Content Officer Johnathan Davis took questions from editors for nearly 90 minutes on Wednesday, according to recording obtained by The Daily Beast, about firings and investigations that have engulfed the company. Last month, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office raided Newsweek...

The Rise of the #MeToo-Toos: It would be laughable if it were not so cunning in intent: the Journalist Protection Act to protect reporters from the “toxic environment” supposedly created by President Donald Trump, who truthfully accuses media outlets like CNN of reporting “fake news”. If California Democrat Eric Swalwell gets his way—and with Maxine Waters among 12 other Congressional Democrats on his side, who’s to say he won’t—it will now be a federal crime to “intimidate” or attack journalists.

<p>President Donald Trump is continuing his habit of painting immigrants as criminals, highlighting gang connections, calling family reunification a national security threat and bemoaning the death of a pro football player involved in a car accident with a man living in the country illegally.</p>

Old liberal media liars never fade away. They just rage, rage against the dying of their dinosaur industry's light. I'm looking at you, Dan Rather. After years of trashing alternative media, which exposed the veteran CBS News reporter's monumental Memogate fraud in 2004, Rather has joined the ranks of pajama-clad online broadcasters. The 86-year-old grandfather of fake news now uses Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to stoke the left's anti-Trump resistance -- all while clinging bitterly to the vestiges of his defunct "legendary" newsman persona. Consider Gunga Dan's comments on the House Intelligence Committee's release of the four-page Nunes memo alleging...

The Chicago-based owner of the Los Angeles Times is expected to announce it is selling the newspaper, according to people familiar with the company’s plans, in a surprise move that probably spells the end of its long-troubled relationship with Southern California’s leading news outlet. [Snip] The past few months have been particularly chaotic at the Times, with rapid turnover in the paper’s top ranks and a major clash between management and journalists over a proposal to have more non-staffers contributing more news content. [Snip] The paper’s future has been clouded since Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy court protection in 2008....

This week we saw a perfect example of how corrupt journalism has become. There was an opportunity to report the news and journalists and their fellow travelers in the pundit class balked. While that wasn’t unusual, what was is how they did it in the lead up to the news, not bothering to wait until they’d seen what they were attempting to discredit. There was an unprecedented attempt to make the release of the FISA memo NOT NEWS before anyone knew what was in it.Over the past two weeks, Democrats scrambled to “warn” the public that the release of the...

As President Donald Trump looks to give his first State of the Union address on Tuesday, NBC will be launching livestreams of the network special report, a live blog with real-time fact-checking and analysis from the NBC News politics team, and analysis exclusive to digital platforms. Coverage on NBC News begins at 9 p.m. with "NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt leading the coverage. Holt will be joined by "Today" co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, "Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd, "Megyn Kelly Today" anchor Megyn Kelly, NBC News special correspondent Tom Brokaw and NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell....

President Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers and political watchdogs are furious that the FBI failed to preserve five months of text messages between FBI agents Lisa Page and Peter Strzok – but the news divisions at CBS, NBC and ABC have largely ignored the story. The story was completely ignored on Monday’s evening newscasts despite details emerging with plenty of time to be included -- and Tuesday wasn’t much better. “Where the networks wanted to censor the revelations, Fox News Channel’s ‘Special Report’ covered them in detail,” Newsbusters’ Nicholas Fondacaro wrote. “Instead of reporting on the FBI, ABC’s ‘World News Tonight’...

LONDON - Britain’s government will set up a new unit to tackle “fake news” and to try to deter those who aim to use it to influence events in the country, a spokesman for Prime Minister Theresa May said on Tuesday. “We are living in an era of fake news and competing narratives,” the spokesman told reporters. “The government will respond with more and better use of national security communications to tackle these interconnected complex challenges.”

President Donald Trump is tweeting about missing text messages involving an FBI agent reassigned from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. But he's overstating the number of missing texts. Trump on Tuesday called news the FBI was missing five months' worth of texts from the agent, Peter Strzok, "one of the biggest stories in a long time." Strzok was removed from Mueller's team following the discovery of anti-Trump text messages exchanged with an FBI lawyer. Trump suggested incorrectly the number of missing messages was "perhaps 50,000." The Justice Department says that's the overall number of messages found on FBI servers.

It often looked like Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t survive his first year as president. The mere fact of his election so infuriated seven southern states that they seceded from the Union before he was sworn into office. Rumors of an assassination plot caused him to sneak ignominiously into Washington for his inauguration, disguised in a cap and cloak that for weeks became objects of derision by cartoonists. A horrible first year for one of the nation’s greatest presidents might serve as a source of inspiration for Donald Trump who’s had his own rocky start —except. Except just about everything. Lincoln constantly...

Three hours west of Chicago, a federal prison stands ready to take in thousands of inmates and hire hundreds of guards, but its expansion is on hold, awaiting approval from a U.S. Congress that is again paralyzed by budget disputes. In Florida, the Coast Guard patrols the waters off President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, working off an outdated budget that has not increased to account for this new mission. Across the country, with the 2018 fiscal year well under way, the U.S. government is carrying out duties ranging from nuclear weapons development to homeless assistance, but its spending levels and...