Free Republic

In March 2017, a little-known Democratic congressman named Beto O’Rourke proposed something unusual to Will Hurd, a Republican colleague from a neighboring district: that they rent a car and embark on a 24-hour, 1,600-mile road trip from San Antonio to Washington. Their live-streamed odyssey wound up attracting blushing news coverage and evoking the bipartisan companionship of a bygone era. For Hurd, a pragmatic, swing-district moderate with numerous Democrats employed on his staff, the cross-aisle kumbaya was routine; few lawmakers hug the middle so tightly. For O’Rourke, the demonstration was less likely; he had done little to distinguish himself in the...

'Y'all Country Is Nuts': Citing Racism, U.S. Rapper Azealia Banks Vows to 'Never Ever Ever' Visit Israel Again Banks went on a tweetstorm about the racism and rudeness she says she experienced while in Israel for her concert in Tel Aviv American rapper Azealia Banks vowed on Wednesday never to visit Israel again, claiming she encountered racism while in the country for her show in Tel Aviv on Monday. Banks said she was treated badly on account of her skin color on multiple occasions, claiming that a rabbi sitting next to her on the plane offered her money for sex,...

**SNIP** A flyover state is the huge region between the coasts. As opposed to the eastern seaboard, northern post-industrial states and Pacific Ocean states. They’re overwhelmingly Republican, stanchly conservative, regressive right wing, evangelical Christian and working class, well, the loudest, most ill-informed of them are. The term wasn’t commonly used in a political manner until recently with the emergence of the Tea Party and the election of Obama. **SNIP** Since the inception of the term silent majority almost 50 years ago, and all of its iterations since, this block of voters was hardly a majority and never silent. This group...

President-elect Donald Trump exploded at media bigs in an off-the-record Trump Tower powow on Monday, sources told The Post. “It was like a f—ing firing squad,” said one source. “Trump started with Jeff Zucker and said I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed…. “The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing down,” the source added. A second source confirmed the encounter. “The meeting took place...

When I asked her for an example, she replied, “Every morning, we hold a meeting about how to build that evening’s broadcast. We’ve been doing this for decades. Everybody talks about which stories we’re going to air, what the line-up looks like, and which reporters we’ll have live in the field and which ones will be filing taped pieces. In the past, the left-wing bias was always left unspoken. People just ‘got it,’ because they all thought the same. “Once Obama pulled ahead of Hillary and certainly once he became president,” she said, “the bias came out of the closet....

The Benefits of Being Politically Correct By Anna North November 10, 2014 1:20 pm 30 Comments When people bring up political correctness, they’re often talking about how much they hate it. Unlike, say, “diversity” or “inclusion,” the term is perhaps most frequently used by those who object to what it stands for, who feel that calls to change the way they speak harm them or society in some way. These objections inspired Jack Goncalo, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell, and his team to study the actual effects of political correctness. They’d heard “this idea that the effort to...

For centuries, Christians thought culture would change if we just had a majority of Christians in the culture. That has proven to be a false assumption. Culture is defined by a relatively small number of change agents who operate at the top of cultural spheres or societal mountains. It takes less than 3-5 percent of those operating at the top of a cultural mountain to actually shift the values represented on that mountain.For example, this is exactly what advocates in the gay rights movement has done through the "mountains" of media and arts and entertainment. They have strategically used these...

Mitt Romney attacked his GOP presidential rival Newt Gingrich over what has to date been one of Gingrich’s most effective debate methods — going after the moderators and the media for questions he deems inappropriate. “It’s very easy to talk down a moderator,” Romney said Wednesday on Fox News. “The moderator asks a question and then has to sit by and take whatever you send to them. And Speaker Gingrich has been wonderful at attacking the moderators and attacking the media.”

After three years of eating steaks the size of elephants' ears, Kevin bids farewell The BBC's America correspondent Kevin Connolly is packing his bags for a new post in the Middle East. During his three years in the US he has visited 46 out of 50 states and covered the country's election of its first black president.Sometime around the spring of 1835, a young Frenchman called Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to the United States on a mission guaranteed to make Americans bristle with irritation. He was going to understand them, and explain them. De Tocqueville was smart, Gallic and aristocratic...

Boiling Mad: A surprising and revealing look inside the Tea Party movement—where it came from, what it stands for, and what it means for the future of American politics They burst on the scene at the height of the Great Recession—angry voters gathering by the thousands to rail against bailouts and big government. Evoking the Founding Fathers, they called themselves the Tea Party. Within the year, they had changed the terms of debate in Washington, emboldening Republicans and confounding a new administration's ability to get things done. Boiling Mad is Kate Zernike's eye-opening look inside the Tea Party, introducing us...

Police launched an investigation Tuesday after veteran British TV broadcaster Ray Gosling confessed on air to smothering his lover, who was dying of AIDS. A spokesman said officers would liaise with the BBC after Gosling's admission was aired on its 'Inside Out' program, broadcast at 7:30 p.m. GMT Monday. The BBC did not alert the police in advance of the confession, which was reportedly recorded last November. A police spokesman said: "We were not aware of Mr. Gosling's comments until the BBC Inside Out program was shown. "We are now liaising with the BBC and will investigate the matter."

An obligatory link on a day when she’s ripping “pathetic” smearmongering bloggers in the pages of Esquire and the Trig Truther-in-chief is poised to win Best Blog. She serves: [I]s your paper really still pursuing the sensational lie that I am not Trig’s mother? Is it true you have a reporter still bothering my state office, my very busy doctor (who’s already set the record straight for you), and the school district, in pursuit of your ridiculous conspiracy?…Come on Mr. Doyle and Mr. Dougherty, I so desperately want to have even a tiny bit of faith in the ADN. And...

COOL:

An article in yesterday’s New York Times by Public Editor Clark Hoyt, “Separating the Terror and the Terrorists,” is a nauseating example of the paper’s moral relativism applied to the war on terrorism. Hoyt tries to rationalize The Times’ reluctance to apply the “terrorist” label to people who take hostages, blow up bystanders and shoot 5-year-old girls in their beds. Hoyt admits “The Times is sparing in its use of ‘terrorist’” when reporting on Palestinian atrocities. In an effort to be even-handed, the paper has decided to call the murder of Jews inside the 1948 boundaries of Israel “terrorist,” but...

(NEW YORK) They scold us for “being unfair,” remind us to “ask all the candidates the same questions,” and occasionally, they boo us. From Canton to Colorado, some of the tens of thousands of people attending Sarah Palin’s rallies regularly take it upon themselves to give the media a piece of their minds. So I thought it only fair to turn the microphone around, and give a handful of rally attendees a chance to air their grievances about the way in which the media has covered the Republican vice presidential nominee. Watch the video below:

I KNOW Sarah Palin, and so does my wife. Neither of us ever actually met the governor of Alaska, but we grew up with her - in the small-town America despised by the leftwing elite. One gal-pal classmate of my wife's has even traveled from New York's Finger Lakes to Alaska to hunt moose with her husband. (Got one, too.) And no, Ms. Streisand, she isn't a redneck missing half her teeth - she's a lawyer. The sneering elites and their mediacrat fellow travelers just don't get it: How on earth could anyone vote for someone who didn't attend an...

Los Angeles(Reuters) - Many Hollywood celebrities who had supported Hillary Clinton are rallying behind Barack Obama, pledging money and star power to the Democrat's U.S. presidential bid before a big fundraiser next week. Experts say that since Clinton conceded defeat this month after a grueling Democratic nominating contest, celebrities have quickly united behind Obama. The result, they said, could be a campaign cash windfall for the senator from Illinois, but star support doesn't necessarily translate directly to votes. Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior scholar at the University of Southern California, said that once a politician becomes known, voters look for...

Sean Penn has experienced backlash for talking openly about his political beliefs, but sees such discussion as more respectable than promoting movies. "There's baggage attached to coming out publicly on stuff, but there's baggage - in my view, more damaging baggage - to goin' and (appearing) ... on Jay Leno's show, philosophizing about 'Uncle Buck' or whatever you're hawkin'," the Oscar-winning actor tells Esquire magazine in its September issue, on newsstands Wednesday. Penn, 46, has bitterly criticized President Bush, toured Iraq to observe the war there and helped rescue workers with door-to-door searches for survivors after Hurricane Katrina swamped New...

You could say this has been a big week for MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann, but lately they've all been big weeks. It would be difficult to find an anchor or TV personality who has been on a bigger roll. Certainly not Katie Couric, to name but one. In fact, in the last year, Olbermann has emerged as a kind of force of nature on television. His viewing audience has continued to rise -- his show is up about 76 percent in the first quarter of this year as compared with last. His profile, however, is off the charts. Olbermann has...

The news keeps getting worse for NBC, which set a low-water mark for prime-time viewership for the second straight week. One week after NBC averaged 6.8 million viewers -- its smallest in-season audience since at least 1987, and probably well before -- the network sank to 6.2 million last week, according to Nielsen Media Research. "They are just in a complete mess," said Marc Berman, a television analyst for Media Week Online. NBC notes that TV viewership in general is lower, with all of the broadcast networks down 10 percent from last year over the past three weeks, and that...