Free Republic

Douglas McKinnon teases us with "That said, in off-the-record conversations with my left-leaning journalistic friends, not one believes Obama is going to win re-election. Not one. While most believe Mitt Romney to be a weak candidate, they are still convinced that he will comfortably defeat Obama on Nov. 6. These liberal and jaded journalists privately admit that Obama has been exposed for what he is: an overhyped, self-invented candidate with no real-world experience who has been frozen into inaction by the enormity of the office he holds."

My tour of Israel continues with the Young Jewish Conservatives. Today we had the opportunity to meet with Gil Hoffman — the Chief Political Correspondent of the Jerusalem Post. He told us that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Israel in a few days is because the “Palestinians are afraid of Mitt” and understand that he has a good chance of winning the election. The Palestinians are worried that a potential President Romney, who is scheduled to visit Israel soon, as well, will be much harder on them, and therefore believe that now is the time to draw...

Robert Maurius Reno, one of former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno’s two younger brothers, died Saturday morning, according to their sister, Maggy Hurchalla, of Stuart. The Miami native was born Dec. 11, 1939, at Jackson Memorial Hospital and succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease at the Miami Veterans Administration Medical Center, where he’d been living for about four years. He was 74 and, said Hurchalla “a proud liberal Democrat.’’ Reno became a journalist, like his parents, the late Henry and Jane Reno, and spent most of his career at Newsday, the New York daily, starting as a reporter in 1968. As a...

News channel France 24 hosted a panel Monday night to discuss Egypt’s first civilian president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi. One of the guests on the panel, via satellite from Cairo, was Nader Amram, a member of the Freedom & Justice Party’s foreign relations committee. (The Freedom & Justice Party (FJP) is the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party.) When Amram learned that an Israeli journalist was also included on the panel, he protested that he had not been informed beforehand that he would have to appear with an Israeli. He then launched into a mini-diatribe about how Israel is the real...

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reacted with "anger, shock and disbelief" at a decision by a Rome judge to fine an Italian journalist who had the courage to speak out against an anti-Semitic cartoon. In a ruling last week, Judge Emanuela Attura ordered journalist Peppino Caldarola to pay a fine of 25,000 euros for slandering extreme-leftist writer Vauro Senesi, whose caricature of Italian Jewish politician Fiamma Nirenstein was published in 2008 in the communist newspaper Il Manifesto and has been widely condemned as anti-Semitic. The cartoon, titled "Fiamma Frankenstein," depicted the Italian Jewish candidate for parliament as monster-like, with a hook-nose,...

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has declared that there is no proof that in-person voter fraud is a problem. He's about to see proof that even he can't deny.In a new video (below) provided to Breitbart.com, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas demonstrates why Holder should stop attacking voter ID laws--by walking into Holder’s voting precinct and showing the world that anyone can obtain Eric Holder’s primary ballot. Literally. The video shows a young man entering a Washington, DC polling place at 3401 Nebraska Avenue, NW, on primary day of this year--April 3, 2012--and giving Holder’s name and address. The poll worker promptly...

Last night things got so shrill on Roseanne Barr's Twitter timeline that we're pretty sure this tweet from Roseanne to our own Dana Loesch broke some windows:

New Delhi An Israeli official said an explosion was hit an Israeli diplomat's car in New Delhi on Monday. He said one person was hurt in the blast, but did not identify the victim. Israeli Embassy spokesman David Goldfarb said the car was near the embassy when the blast went off. Indian police said only that a car was on fire on the street outside the embassy.

LONDON (AP) — She was instantly recognizable for the eye patch that hid a shrapnel injury – a testament to Marie Colvin’s courage, which took her behind the front lines of the world’s deadliest conflicts to write about the suffering of individuals trapped in war. After more than two decades of chronicling conflict, Colvin became a victim of it Wednesday, killed by shelling in the besieged Syrian city of Homs. Colvin, 56, died alongside French photojournalist Remi Ochlik, the French government announced. Freelance photographer Paul Conroy and journalist Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro were wounded.

A court ruling last December would seem to indicate that no, bloggers are not privy to the same legal protections afforded so-called real journalists. Via the Washington Examiner: This past December, federal judge Marco Hernandez of Oregon issued a ruling in the libel trial of Obsidian Finance Group v. Cox that has dangerous First Amendment implications. Hernandez ruled that blogger Crystal Cox was not entitled to the same protection under media shield laws that other members of the press enjoy. This ruling made it easy for a jury to find her guilty of libel. That result threatens the First Amendment...

Not long after North Carolina State lost to rival North Carolina for the 11th straight time on Thursday night, reporters asked junior forward Scott Wood how frustrating it was to have never beaten the Tar Heels. Wood's response was brilliant in its simplicity. "Has your wife ever cheated on you?" Wood deadpanned in response. Then after a few seconds of the most awkward silence imaginable, he responded, "that's probably how frustrating it is."

Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that emerged from the Department of Homeland Security in November, Washington has written permission to collect and retain personal information from journalists, news anchors, reporters or anyone who uses “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.” According to DHS, the definition of personal identifiable information can consist of any intellect “that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information which is linked or linkable to that individual.” RT adds: "Previously established guidelines within the administration say...

Richard Threlkeld, a far-ranging and award-winning correspondent who worked for both CBS and ABC News during a long career, has been killed in a car crash on New York's Long Island.

The race for the Republican nomination may be coming down to Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, but in the contest for the Iowa caucuses, their high-profile battle might still turn out to be a sideshow. The national party has spent the last two weeks resigning itself to a choice between the former speaker and the former Massachusetts governor. But Iowa Republicans may end up choosing between Gingrich and Representative Ron Paul. In every post-Thanksgiving poll but one, Paul has been neck and neck for second place in Iowa. In most of them, he has lagged well behind the soaring speaker,...

“Montana blogger is not journalist,” Jeff Barnard of the Associated Press reported Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernández ruled that “investigative blogger” Crystal L. Cox “was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news outlets.” Per Alex Dobuzinskis of Reuters: Hernandez found Cox failed to present evidence that she had any media credentials or affiliation with a “recognized news entity,” or that she had checked her facts or tried to contact the other side to “get both sides of the story.” “Montana blogger is not journalist,” Jeff Barnard of the Associated Press reported...

Many people believe in the Constitutional misconception that the newsman is afforded extra Constitutional protection by the First Amendment which states that "Congress shall make no law...abridging...the freedom of speech, or of the press." This is simply not the case. The Supreme Court rightly recognized that notion is based on fallacious reasoning, though later federal appellate courts have not been as wise in applying that precedent. "Freedom of the press" is not a term synonymous with today's media or news reporting, it refers first and foremost to the printing press, (which produced, for example, such important political opinionated works as...

Saudi journalist Mshari Al-Zaydi wonders in an Al-Arabiya commentary why we don’t dispense with the euphemisms, and call the Arab Spring what it is quickly becoming: the Muslim Brotherhood Spring. That should not have been a surprise, Al-Zaydi notes: Shock is acceptable if one is surprised by something completely unexpected… I recall how many Arab writers at the beginning of this year – the year of the Arab Spring – prophesied that what we were witnessing were uprisings staged by non-political civilians and youth, and claimed that not a single radical or ideological slogan was chanted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square,...

With the feeding frenzy that's going on over the Cain sexual harrasment incidents I was wondering what the track record of the various journalists, media outlets, editors, producers, etc. is. It would be really fun to confront them and make them explain it applying the same standard they are using against Cain. It would be really funny if Politico had some. Same with some of the MSNBC hosts. Turn about is fair play. It's time some of the left wing hit squads get hit back I haven't the slightest idea of how to obtain this information.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has released new guidelines for employees dealing with reporters, and some journalists are none too pleased about it. The new media policy requires all HHS employees to notify the agency’s office of public affairs about contact with the media and coordinate any interview requests with the office. It also discourages off-the-record conversations without prior approval. Jim Dickinson, editor of FDA Webview and FDA Review, issued a scathing critique of the new guidelines.