Free Republic

History judges a leader exclusively through his actions and their ultimate results rather than through fleeting words. It appears that U.S. President Barack Obama is finally putting the brakes on his mouth after flooring it down Hope-and-Change Highway for most of his tenure. Remember the Syrian crisis that dominated chatter for months before all but vanishing? Recall how critics were talking about grievous incompetence and even possible impeachment? Fast-forward to today, and just try to start a conversation with, "Obama really botched the situation in Syria." Now that the Russians have overseen a plan for the destruction of that country's...

The big headline from USA Today says it all: Democrats beginning to support Obamacare delays. Of course, what the article does not say is that a delay of Obamacare is exactly what conservatives have been demanding for months. The intrepid reporter also forgot to mention President Obama’s refusal to discuss even a miniscule delay caused parts of the federal government to shut down. The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel proclaimed this week “a turning point” because “After 16 long days of vowing to Republicans that they would not cave in any way, shape or form on ObamaCare, Democrats spent their...

The president's remarkable speech in the Rose Garden yesterday, the high point of which was his claim regarding Obamacare --"It's really good!"-- sets the stage for another MSM fail, because the president made several specific, verifiable claims that ought to be the subject of real, deep and sustained reporting over the next few days. I had a lot of fun with the "It's really good!" exclamation by the president on yesterday show, mixing his remarks into a 1974 Pinto ad, and calling forth memories of New Coke, Rosanne Barr singing the Star Spangled banner, the launch of Microsoft's Zune, the...

NBC News Chief White House Correspondent and MSNBC host Chuck Todd reported on Monday that tea party figures like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin helped scuttle a potential deal to raise the debt ceiling over the weekend when they led World War II veterans to march on the White House. Todd reported that the tea party Republicans are “doing everything they can” to keep the shutdown and debt ceiling standoff “alive.” “While the non-tea party Republicans are desperately trying to end this standoff, the tea party Republicans are doing everything they can to keep it...

Once again, we've reached a government shutdown over irresponsible government spending. Once more, the media are proclaiming the world is coming to an end and blaming conservative Republicans for everything. They are working hand in glove with the Never Enough Government lobby that dominates Washington, without a shred of shame. Anchors and editors continue to insist that if the GOP were smart, it would bow to "conventional wisdom" and put its foot on the fiscal accelerator. That's what this is about. The elites fully expected Republicans "led" by McConnell and Boehner to fold and are stunned -- furious, really...

How did the MSM get the D.C. Navy Yard shooting wrong? Let us count the ways. In watching the coverage of the Washington Navy Yard shooting as it unfolded last Monday, I had to remind myself that most of the reports I was hearing would surely turn out to be incorrect, in some cases wildly so. And indeed this turned out to be the case. We were told, for example, that there was more than one gunman, and that one of them was armed with an AR-15 rifle. Even worse, both CBS and NBC identified the wrong man as the...

Why are liberals in so much denial about liberal bias in the news? Why do they think they're bending over backward to be "objective" doing that which Republicans see as partisan activism? Daniel Froomkin of the Huffington Post -- formerly of The Washington Post -- suggests an answer. He is exactly the kind of liberal agitator in the newsroom who wants every news story to be a blazing editorial. Every reporter must divide the world clearly between Liberal Sense and Conservative Nonsense. His latest article is titled, "Writing a Neutral Story About Something So Heartless As the Food Stamp Vote...

I'm fairly sure many liberals will consider this post as piling on President Obama. Their favored son, the first black President of the United States, is looking like a wall that has been painted with paint that is mostly water. Have you ever tried to do that? I have and it is impossible to get the wall properly covered. The paint will run away from your brush and roller. President Obama's colors are running pretty thin and he is having a hard time keeping his backside covered from all the scandals and claims coming out of his administration. Seriously, how...

Syria: The Asad government continues to insist that it did not use chemical weapons in the attack on 21 August. It approved an extension of the UN inspection team's visit and requested that it investigate three gas attacks against Syrian soldiers since 21 August. Lebanon's Daily Star reported on 26 August that at least four Hizballah fighters are receiving treatment in Beirut after coming into contact with chemical agents in Syria, a security source said. The source said four or five members came into contact with the chemical agents while searching a group of rebel tunnels in the Damascus suburb of Jobar over...

Living in the United States is great. You can say what you want, own what you want, shoot almost anything you want – it's like a dream that's too good to be true. It can fairly be said that the United States of America has offered an unprecedented level of prosperity and freedom to more people than just about any other political system in the history of the world. After all, we don't see any evidence that the ancient Sumerians were laying rubber in from of any Dairy Queens with any 1969 B.C. Mustangs, am I right? But yet –...

URGENT MEMORANDUM TO: All the Better National Reporters FROM: The Coach. SUBJECT: The Appearance of Credibility. Listen people, you’re doing great work. Our guy’s holding up very well considering how rough the economy is. No jobs, sky high dependency. Best part: people don’t blame him. They think he’s an innocent bystander rather than president for the last five years. We’re getting it done! But one thing…maybe we gotta be careful not to show quite so much pompom and drool. Jackie Calmes and Michael Shear from the Times had a great sit down with the president. And who among us wouldn’t...

On his radio show this morning, Glenn Beck not-so-fondly recalls the time he was employed by ABC News and became Diane Sawyer‘s “little bitch” before their working relationship soured and “she became the biggest bigot I’ve ever seen.” According to Beck, during his brief stint as an ABC contributor, Sawyer was fond of him and would call him up frequently to discuss what sorts of ideas she had for improving television. “I was Diane Sawyer’s little bitch,” he told his co-hosts today, recalling how she’d call and e-mail him so frequently his wife became concerned. However, he alleged, Sawyer stopped...

ABC News is being accused of deceptively editing, or at least misrepresenting (intentionally or not), some of the comments made by Juror B29, the lone “nonwhite” juror in the George Zimmerman murder trial. Further, the media as a whole are being accused of manipulating some of her statements. These allegations come not from a conservative news source, but rather from Slate.com. The key phrase latched onto by most media outlets, due to its sensational nature, was “George Zimmerman got away with murder” — words that were, in fact, said by Juror B29. But the full unedited video of the comment,...

Everything I initially wrote about the Trayvon Martin killing was based on network news reports. And it was almost entirely wrong. In my KOMO radio commentary of March 23, 2012, I said the following about the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman: “Thinking of 17-year old Trayvon the way we’d think of our own kids is exactly how to view this tragedy. The man who police say shot him, George Zimmerman, is a 28-year old CrimeWatch volunteer, who apparently did just about everything a Crimewatch volunteer SHOULDN’T do, such as following the 17 year old teen when a 911...

The story fed to the press would outrage anyone…and, predictably, it outraged everyone. The family provided a picture of Trayvon at age 12 or 13, which the media ran with the ugliest picture of Zimmerman they could find. The meme of a huge armed adult “stalking” a “helpless child” was born fully grown, to a Godzilla-like size. It loomed over America unopposed. The investigating officers and the State’s Attorney’s Office knew that the evidence showed something else: Zimmerman attacked by Martin, who towered over him, beat him to the ground, clearly smacked his head into the concrete, and might have...

On Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) blistered the mainstream media for favoring Republicans who are docile and trained to parrot policy positions Democrats prefer. “There are a lot of Democrats and folks in the media who like their Republicans timid and house-trained to just sit quietly in the corner, to accept losing, and to stand for nothing," Cruz said on Sean Hannity's radio show. Cruz said Americans are fed up with such Republicans who are no different from Democrats and offer no alternative. Hannity said Cruz was not one of those "house-trained" Republicans, and that is why the mainstream media...

While the mainstream media lavished endless attention and emotion on the George Zimmerman trial for the killing of Trayvon Martin last weekend, the body of a 17-year-old black boy was discovered on basement stairs, face down, behind a boarded-up house in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. His body was so badly decomposed that local news reports originally suggested that he had died of blunt force trauma. An autopsy demonstrated that he had in fact been shot to death. His family blamed his death on his refusal to join a gang at school. The boy's name was Darryl Green. Thus far,...

If you’re in your late teens and you get shot after assaulting a neighborhood-watch supervisor, and you want someone else to get blamed for your behavior, here are thirteen tips to make you look like an “innocent child” that loves Skittles, doing math and riding horses versus a gangbanger-in-waiting. 1. Don’t have pictures on social media, or on your cell phone, of you holding guns like a gangsta. If you do take pictures with firearms, make certain the weapon is held properly, away from the camera, with your finger off the trigger and it does not give off the I'm-a-criminal-in-training...

I don't care who you are, that's funny! Larry The Cable Guy.

Despite a heavy period of news that included the Boston Marathon bombings and the Jodi Arias trial, MSNBC's second-quarter ratings plunged to their lowest level since 2007. In primetime, MSNBC drew an average of 584,000 total viewers and 196,000 viewers in the key 25-54 age demographic. Those numbers were down 16% and 12%, respectively, from the second quarter of 2012. And they accounted for quarter lows not seen since the fourth and second quarters of 2007, respectively. The network had seen signs of this coming in some dreadful monthly ratings, particularly in May. The same factors contributed to the network's...