Free Republic

The Sunday before the first presidential debate of 2016 was filled with analysis and speculation about how the candidates were going to perform. It was the same on CNN’s Inside Politics were their panel touted Hillary Clinton’s ability to debate.  Host John King played a clip of Clinton leaving Senator Bernie Sanders speechless after slamming his questions about her speaking fees as a smear, saying it was a clue about how Monday’s debate might turn out. CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson seemed almost in awe of Clinton’s counter of Sanders, noting his lack of a response wasn’t good for him. “One of...

Governor Mike Pence appeared on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, where their Presidential Debate Moderator Martha Raddatz relentlessly grilled him about Donald Trump’s involvement in the “Birther movement.” Under pressure, Pence defended himself by reminding Raddatz that members of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign leaned on questions of citizenship to take jabs at then Senator Barack Obama. But Raddatz wasn’t having any of it, “I want to talk about the facts. What's the proof of that?” At first, Pence tried to stick to the issues by noting that the American people don’t care about the birther issue and are not talking...

Showing how much the liberal media is in the tank for Hillary Clinton in this election, reporters at the joint conference of National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists on Friday afternoon wildly applauded ClintonÂ’s far-left answers to a slew of softball questions about immigration, the electorate, and even whether she has any black friends. The gathered journalists had already given Clinton a friendly reception during her speech before NBCÂ’s Kristen Welker and TelemundoÂ’s Lori Montenegro came out to moderate the question and answer session (not to be confused with the press conferences sheÂ’s avoided for...

Editor’s Note: Conservatives know they are under assault. What many may not know (because the media hasn’t told them) is that they are the targets of a coordinated, well-honed campaign by the left to push conservatives entirely out of the political debate. The Intimidation Game is the first real telling of what happened at the IRS—how elected Democrats used that agency to muzzle tens of thousands of Tea Party members during two elections. It's the real story of how a liberal Wisconsin prosecutor used secret subpoenas and predawn raids to silence 30 conservative grassroots organizations in that state. It's the...

In his second speech on Sunday morning's terrorist massacre in Orlando, Florida, President Barack Obama said  on Monday that "the shooter was inspired by various extremist information that was disseminated over the Internet," that "we see no clear evidence that he was directed externally," and that "this is certainly an example of the kind of homegrown extremism that all of us have been so concerned about for a very long time." The press, led as usual by the Associated Press, is certainly cooperating with those characterizations. Presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has clearly made up her mind that...

The media campaign to replace the conservative late Justice Antonin Scalia with an Obama appointee has begun. It won’t be pretty. Republicans will be accused in the media -- actually they are already being accused -- of being “obstructionists” and worse in blocking the appointment of Judge Merrick Garland. But how did it get this way with the media, Democrats and Supreme Court nominations in the first place? Let’s return to the days of yore - the summer and fall of 1987. I was a young political director in the Reagan White House, and President Reagan had nominated Robert Bork...

Layers of editors and fact-checkers at the Columbus (OH) Dispatch and others involved in its production "somehow" failed to detect the creation of an obviously false caption to a campaign rally photo of Donald Trump taken by a St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographer. The photo, taken on Friday at Trump's St. Louis appearance by the Post-Dispatch's David Carson, had the following caption, apparently added surreptitiously, when it appeared in print at the Columbus Dispatch: "Donald Trump addresses a campaign rally in St. Louis. He was scheduled to go to Chicago for a rally, but canceled as his supporters became violent."  If any press...

In the early moments of CNN’s Super Tuesday 2 coverage, Atlantic contributing editor and CNN political commentator Peter Beinart encouraged viewers to consider “how brilliant was Hillary Clinton” to accept President Obama’s offer to become his secretary of state and “politically de facto his vice president” even though “[a] lot of people at the time didn't see” this so-called “wisdom.” Not long before a commercial break, Beinart chimed in to exclaim: “If you think about it, how brilliant was Hillary Clinton. Let’s go back to becoming Obama's Secretary of State. Let’s think about it now. She is running as the...

he Washington Post's obsession over Donald Trump is a sight to behold — but not a pretty one. On Monday, following two week-earlier Trump-demonizing columns, one comparing the billionaire to medieval emperor Charlemagne, and another claiming that Trump's electoral progress thus far had helped her understand "exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany," the Post issued a house editorial directly comparing Trump's "assault on democracy" to Hitler's rise to power. In other words, last week's columns were merely appetizers for the paper's institutional assertion that, as far as they're concerned, the "authoritarian" Trump should be rejected because of the likelihood...

Conservative and center-right columnists often have to do far more digging than their liberal counterparts, simply because overwhelmingly left-leaning beat journalists, aka "Democrats with bylines," provide such unbalanced reporting on current events on a daily basis. Fortunately, the Washington Post's Marc Thiessen did the entirely necessary work of rummaging through available information about federal court nominations in 1988 and 1992. Any beat reporter could have done the same thing, but either didn't, or decided not to report what was found. What Thiessen unearthed makes an argument-ending mockery of Vice President Joe Biden's claim, made in a Monday evening tweet, that when he...

On January 26, 2006, former Vice President, current climate alarmist and centimillionaire Al Gore told the Associated Press's David Germain that "unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return." . Tuesday, as DC and much of the Northeast finishes digging out from a serious and possibly historic weekend snowstorm, will be the tenth anniversary of Gore's "planetary emergency" warning. The "global warming" true believers in the establishment press will never hold Gore accountable for his nonsense, which is why going to alternative sources such as...

On the Monday night edition of MSNBC's All In, longtime liberal columnist Jonathan Alter reacted to President Obama's executive actions on gun control by comparing it to President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and remarking how heartbreaking it was for Obama to have met with the families of Sandy Hook victims and "see those six-year-olds stacked up like cord wood." Host Chris Hayes began the segment with a number of soundbites from the President and Republican presidential candidates opposed to the move before remarking: "While the substantive reason to be concerned about guns seems clear, in a country where...

On Thursday night and Friday morning, NBC News tried their best to go after Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson by attempting to make a mountain out of a molehill of his relationship with a man who was convicted nearly a decade ago of insurance fraud while ignoring the ongoing investigation of Hillary Clinton over her private e-mail server. Even though competitors ABC and CBS didn’t cover this story, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt hyped on Thursday that “Republican frontrunner Ben Carson is facing new questions about his friendship with a convicted felon. NBC Tries (and Fails) to Make...

Most of us have heard it by now. If you have the audacity to point out in a conversation or speech that "All lives matter," you're a hateful, violent raging racist out to undermine the (white guy George Soros-funded) "Black Lives Matter" movement. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley have toth made the "mistake" of contending that "All lives matter" during the past few months. Each has felt it necessary to either apologize or otherwise back away from their statement. A Thursday Rasmussen poll the vast majority of the establishment press has ignored and will likely to continue...

Time.com's Zeke Miller tweeted yesterday that a "reporter" asked recently declared presidential candidate Marco Rubio of Florida the following question: "Is 43 old enough to be president?" Meanwhile, two weeks ago, a column at Time.com claimed that Hillary Clinton is "biologically primed to be a leader." Seriously. Since he either can't or won't tell us who asked the question, we're unable to determine if the "reporter" to whom Miller referred was asking the question because he or she doesn't know the Constitution or was trying to bait Rubio into giving an answer implicitly or explicitly criticizing other candidates. It would...

Bill Maher is known for his pathological, frothing attacks on all things conservative. However, on the August 1 edition of Real Time With Bill Maher, the HBO host took a controversial stance for a liberal: he defended Israel. When his Iranian-American guest Reza Aslan argued that “Amnesty International...have found no evidence whatsoever of any kind of human shield being used,” Maher interrupted to state “It's a war. It's a war that Hamas started.” The left-wing comedian continued, claiming that “somehow when Israel reacts to this, they have to do everything in a way that doesn't kill any civilians. People die...

Did you catch the story about those conservative Republican male chauvinist pig politicians in Florida who think that it was a waste of time to pass a bill which would make it a crime for a guy to secretly administer an abortion-inducing drug to a spouse or partner he impregnated? How utterly outrageous ... Wait a minute ... It was Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz who said that? C'mon, that's not possible. What? There's audio of her saying that on a Florida public radio station? Get outta here. If that were true, the press would be printing and...

Former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin was convicted on 20 of 21 counts of corruption and bribery today. USA Today reporter Rick Jervis did a bit of a profile of Nagin in the course of reporting on the convictions. It included a recounting of the his time at the city's helm during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But one thing it oh-so-predictably did not include was Nagin's Democratic Party affiliation

I paused a bit before putting this post up because the last thing an AP reporter needs is some guy on the right telling him he did a good job. I suspect that it's not a resume enhancer. That said, there are two reasons not to to ignore Terence Chea's coverage of the Saturday's Walk for Life West Coast in San Francisco. The first is how it contrasts with Brett Zongker's dismissive and incomplete coverage of the far larger DC March for Life the previous Wednesday. For starters, Chea appropriately described the San Francisco march as "massive"; Zongker's story covering...

On Friday, the Supreme Court issued a one-paragraph order in Little Sisters of the Poor et al v. Sebeluis et al. It told the Sisters that for the case to continue with no enforcement of the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate, they need only to inform the government in writing "that they are non-profit organizations that hold themselves out as religious and have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services." That's easy, because that's what they are, and that's their position. As a result, the government has been "enjoined from enforcing against the applicants the challenged provisions of the...