Free Republic

In the wake of the murders in Charleston, President Obama has made more exaggerations and false claims about gun violence in America. He made two public addresses this past week — one to the nation on Thursday and one to the U.S. Conference of Mayors on Friday. On both occasions, he gave distorted impressions of how rates of violence in America compare with those in the rest of the world. In his address to the nation, Obama claimed that, “We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in...

Ann Coulter and Megyn Kelly found there to be lots of liberal hypocrisy in how the Associated Press didn’t see much wrong with photos showing a gun on a poster pointing right at Ted Cruz‘s face.Coulter said the AP is “insulting our intelligence” by saying it wasn’t intentional when they clearly wouldn’t have done the same to a Democrat. She went off a little on liberals being obsessed about racism.Kelly brought up the infamous liberal media outrage about Sarah Palin‘s “crosshairs” graphic for members of Congress to take out. One of them was Gabrielle Giffords, and after she was shot...

Ben Hubbard of the New York Times writes of the Islamic State, or ISIS, that “…the group is offering reliable, if harsh, security; providing jobs in decimated economics; and providing a rare sense of order in a region overwhelmed by conflict.” This summary of ISIS and their good deeds sounds eerily similar (and just as disgusting) to the accolades bestowed upon Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party before — and even after — the Second World War and the Holocaust. Hubbard uses the example of a nameless labourer from Raqqa who had “earned good money painting their offices,” who opined...

Washington (CNN)—The first black Republican woman elected to Congress is returning $1,000 in donations from Earl Holt, the alleged white supremacist whose writings have reportedly inspired Charleston shooter Dylann Roof. A spokesman for U.S. Rep. Mia Love said Monday that she would be returning the three donations Holt made to her campaign immediately, after being contacted by CNN. Love made history last November when Utah residents selected her as the first black Republican woman to serve in Congress. Holt, who is president Council of Conservative Citizens, donated thousands of dollars to Republican candidates Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum...

President Obama continued his criticism of Fox News, arguing that the network’s viewers are getting a different set of facts than the rest of the country. During a WTF Podcast with Marc Maron, Obama lamented that the media is “splintered” now, with all kinds of different news outlets. “We’re not in a common conversation,” he said. “If you watch Fox News you inhabit a completely different world with different facts than if you read (the) New York Times,” he said. Obama said media institutions such as Fox News and political organizations were trying to profit from polarization, and that’s leaving the political...

It took less than two days for the press to take a story about a white South Carolina man who shot and killed nine black churchgoers, and turn it into a story about the Confederate battle flag flying outside South Carolina's state house. For media, the flag as a supposedly influential symbol of racial oppression and hate represented an issue that required immediate attention and hours of coverage. By Friday, the press' focus on the flag was intense.

Comedian Bill Maher said conservative media — including the Drudge Report, Fox News and The Daily Caller — may have a hand in inspiring Dylann Roof to shoot up a black church in Charleston, S.C. this week. Maher was discussing the massacre with a panel on his HBO show, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” that included Daily Caller senior contributor Matt Lewis. “We can never know why someone snaps, but I bet you I know where he got his news,” Maher said, referring to Roof, who killed nine people in the attack on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church.

WASHINGTON — In February 2008, an aide sent a news article to Vice President Dick Cheney reporting that former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell might vote for a Democrat for president. Sections were highlighted in yellow, and someone had circled a quotation from Mr. Powell in which he said America had lost “a lot” of prestige around the world. Mr. Cheney recorded no reaction, but one can imagine some consternation at what the vice president presumably deemed disloyalty to the administration that both of them had served. Mr. Powell had been the vice president’s chief internal adversary during President...

A new Gallup survey has revealed that Americans have approximately twice as much confidence in law enforcement personnel—52 percent—as they do in newspapers—24 percent—and television news—21 percent. The telephone poll was conducted June 2-7 and included Gallup’s newest survey on confidence in U.S. institutions, which it has updated every year since 1993. According to an article by Jeffrey M. Jones, “Americans’ confidence in most major U.S. institutions remains below the historical average for each one. Only the military (72 percent) and small business (67 percent)—the highest-rated institutions in this year’s poll—are currently rated higher than their historical norms.” …

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A website with a white supremacist manifesto features dozens of photos of Dylann Storm Roof, the man accused of killing nine people at a church in Charleston, S.C., posing with weapons, burning an American flag and visiting Southern historic sites and Confederate soldiers’ graves. It is not clear who wrote the words and who took the pictures, but it traces the evolution of the author’s racist worldview and concludes with a section labeled “An Explanation.”

Man, the fun never stops. President Obama continues to cast a pall of unseriousness over his presidency, which was already of questionable seriousness, planning a weekend of golf out in California following two days of fundraising on the Left Coast. This just a week after throwing a White House bash for 500 of his closest friends. Meanwhile, his wife is on a taxpayer-funded excursion to Europe where she is promoting health and education overseas while taking in some sights with her daughters and her mother. According to the Washington Examiner, Obama will golf in Palm Springs even amidst drought, a...

The New York Times ran an article this weekend profiling and quoting many children of gay and lesbian parents under the headline “What Could Gay Marriage Mean for the Kids?”Noticeably absent were any children who, while loving their two moms or two dads, yearned for both a mom and dad.In my new book, “The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” I devote a chapter to highlighting the stories of children of gays and lesbians who have spoken out about how redefining marriage has social costs. Their basic story is the same: Same-sex marriage denies children like them a relationship with...

A new study in the American Journal of Public Health claims that the state of Connecticut’s 1995 gun licensing law has reduced firearm homicide rates by 40 percent. But this just released study gives academics a bad name. Not surprisingly, anti-gun activist and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the left-wing Joyce Foundation funded the research. The study cherry picks which states with gun licensing laws are examined, which years are looked at, and the type of crime to study. Any normal researcher would look at all the states in the country that have passed a similar law...

One would think that Catholic priests like Chicago’s Rev. Michael Pfleger, an early supporter of Barack Obama and his push for gun control, would not be bearing false witness against one of his neighbors. Yet there he was standing in front of Chuck’s Gun Shop in suburban Riverdale, Illinois, to blame it, and other legal businesses like it, along with the National Rifle Association, for the murder spree in the gun-controlled progressive worker’s paradise of Chicago. Standing with the camera-shy Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence president Dan Gross in front of the gun shop,...

Why is Caitlyn Jenner treated as a groundbreaking cultural hero and Rachel Dolezal condemned as a charlatan? If it’s okay to be transgender, what’s wrong with being “transracial”? With those taunts, as the weekend opened, the right baited the left and the mainstream media, which to conservatives are generally one and the same. Many in the mainstream took the bait, and the cases of Jenner and Dolezal were forever intertwined.

Only in a media biased in favour of progressive causes would make such idiotic statements In recent years a lot of attention has been placed on media bias. Those on the right of the political spectrum are always pointing out the left wing bias of the mainstream media such as the New York Times, CNN and no one’s favourite, MSNBC. Those on the left deny such bias because they are incapable of seeing it. To them, left wing views are not biased but merely the truth. Divergent views are wrong and those who accuse the media of a progressive bias...

The Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University put out this press release on a paper by Rudolph, Stuart, Vernick, and Webster: "A 1995 Connecticut law requiring a permit or license – contingent on passing a background check – in order to purchase a handgun was associated with a 40 percent reduction in the state’s firearm-related homicide rate, new research suggests. "Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, compared Connecticut’s homicide rates during the 10 years following the law’s implementation to the rates that...

You can call Katie Couric the $10 million anchor. That’s how much Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer is forking over to retain the Web portal’s global news anchor, several sources told The Post on Friday. The new contract, agreed to in the last several days but not yet finalized, gives Couric a stratospheric annual pay package in line with that of NBC’s suspended Nightly News anchor Brian Williams.Only Couric is actually anchoring a newscast. The 58-year-old journalist, who had been negotiating a second contract for the past few months, won a significant rise. While the new deal contains a few...

New York City underwater? Gas over $9 a gallon? A carton of milk costs almost $13? Welcome to June 12,  2015. Or at least that was the wildly-inaccurate version of 2015 predicted by ABC News exactly seven years ago. Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015. The segment included supposedly prophetic videos, such as a teenager declaring, "It's June 8th, 2015. One carton of milk is $12.99." (On the actual June 8, 2015, a gallon of milk cost, on average, $3.39.) Another clip featured this prediction...

The first salvo was the parking tickets: Politics is not the only area where Mr. Rubio, a Republican from Florida, has an affinity for the fast track. He and his wife, Jeanette, have also shown a tendency to be in a rush on the road. According to a search of the Miami-Dade and Duval County court dockets, the Rubios have been cited for numerous infractions over the years for incidents that included speeding, driving through red lights and careless driving. A review of records dating back to 1997 shows that the couple had a combined 17 citations: Mr. Rubio with...