Free Republic

The world’s first scientific renaissance took place not in Italy, but in the Arab world. The period between the 9th and 11th centuries AD, when Islam took hold of a band of territory strategy from Spain in the West through to what is now Pakistan, saw an extraordinary intellectual flowering. Scientists in the Arab world during this period made important advances in fields as varied as astronomy, mathematics, medicine and optics – advances that fed into and stimulated the later European Renaissance. Which makes it all the stranger that modern Islamic nations have such a lamentable record in science. Where...

Which is obvious to anyone not intentionally misreading it. The real news here is not that Antonin Scalia said this, but that it’s the slightest bit controversial. But that’s not something that happened overnight. The secular left and their media servants have spent decades pushing the idea that the establishment clause is about protecting the non-religious from maniacal Jesus freaks - especially the nightmare scenario in which the Jesus freaks get a job with any public entity and are guided in any decision by biblical principles. Scalia is a man who actually knows about the founding of the nation and...

Just heard Newt on Hannity calmly predict Romney 53-47, 300+ EV and Republicans will win the senate.

Partisans on both sides have been making claims of a lead in the polls — the Republicans cite the national polls and the Democrats the state. I’m not a partisan or a Romney supporter, but I feel compelled to argue that the poll models are flawed and underestimating Romney’s lead. As far as modeling in these polls, the example of Marist and Mason-Dixon in Florida is illustrative of skewing. Marist tends to report big Obama leads, and M-D has reported decent Romney results. From the Tampa Bay Herald: “Mason-Dixon, which has been polling in Florida for 28 years, uses a...

With just a few days left until the election, the left’s out-of-control fringe has taken control – blaming Mitt Romney for deadly meningitis or even warning that his presidency will lead to the slow killing of gays. And when they aren’t doing that, they are calling, well, somewhat tongue in cheek, for a complete halt to sex with Republicans. Maybe it is true about someone putting drugs in Halloween candy. This close to Election Day, it’s getting harder to rank the liberal arguments on a scale of 1-10 (1 being sane and 10 being bonkers.) Perhaps they need the speakers...

NBC announced on Thursday that it would show a one-hour telethon and concert Friday night entitled "Hurricane Sandy: Coming Together" to benefit Hurricane Sandy relief efforts, with money raised going to the American Red Cross. "Today" co-host Matt Lauer will host the event, to be held at NBC's Rockefeller Plaza, and consist of performances by the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Jon Bon Jovi, Sting and Christina Aguilera, in addition to appearances from NBC news host Brian Williams and "Late Night" comedian Jimmy Fallon. But with the Presidential election just days away, and the notion that a number of...

Over the weekend, Facebook took down a message by the Special Operations Speaks PAC (SOS) which highlighted the fact that Obama denied backup to the forces being overrun in Benghazi. The message was contained in a meme which demonstrated how Obama had relied on the SEALS when he was ready to let them get Osama bin Laden, and how he had turned around and denied them when they called for backup on Sept 11. I spoke with Larry Ward, president of Political Media, Inc -- the media company that handles SOS postings and media production. Ward was the one who...

This one is really hard to believe, even for the most biased so-called "news network" in the nation. MSNBC on Tuesday totally trashed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for collecting food and supplies at a storm rally event in Ohio to be sent to victims of Hurricane Sandy (video follows with transcript and commentary):Link to Video at Source After introducing his Obama-supporting guests Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and Lehigh professor James Peterson, host Martin Bashir played a clip of the President speaking at the Red Cross headquarters in Washington Tuesday. When the clip concluded, Bashir said, “Mayor Reed, so the...

We wish Tina Fey would weigh in on politics more often! The 30 Rock creator, who rocked the 2008 Presidential election with her dead-on SNL impression of Sarah Palin, hasn't been so vocal about this year's race. But at a Wednesday night benefit for women's health, the comedian had some withering remarks for Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin... "Todd Akin claims that women can't really get pregnant from a legitimate rape because the body secretes hormones," Fey told the audience. "Now I can't even finish this sentence without getting dumber; it's making me dumber when I say it -- but...

Count former New York Times writer Virginia Heffernan as one of the media feminists who wanted to hit Mitt Romney with a binder for about a week. From her digital macrame rug on Yahoo News, Heffernan wrote an entire column insisting "The remark did not accomplish what he’d hoped. In fact, it tipped the hand of Romney’s women panic so thoroughly that it’s likely his court-the-undecided-females’ game is now thrown." "Plus, it misses the mark of normalcy so absolutely that he comes off as comical," she guessed. "No wonder it became a meme on Twitter and other social media sites....

Victims of the Nov. 2009 Ft. Hood shooting are being denied benefits commensurate with combat injuries because the Obama administration refuses to label the attack an act of terrorism. Instead, the shooting Maj. Nidal Hasan carried out after screaming "Allahu Akbar" it is still being labeled "workplace violence." The difference between labeling the incident "workplace violence" and "terrorism" is not only the rightful recognition 13 of our troops deserve for being killed in service to their country on Nov. 5, 2009, but also ongoing benefits that would help survivors pay for the physical therapy, and other medical and psychological treatments...

The White House scrambled late Saturday to deny a New York Times report claiming Iran has agreed to meet directly with U.S. officials to discuss its nuclear program, sending New York Times editors rushing to quietly but substantially revise their initial reporting on a key foreign policy issue for the second time in as many months. According to the Times, which anonymously quoted senior administration officials, Iran told diplomats it wanted to wait until after the November presidential election to put plans for the meeting in motion. (VIEW THE ORIGINAL NYT STORY)“It has the potential to help Mr. Obama make...

A CNN critique published Wednesday about GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s assertions on Operation Fast and Furious in the last presidential debate being “imprecise” is not only guilty of the same charge as well, but demonstrably wrong in places, with corrections provided to them ignored and suppressed by the news website’s comment moderators. Taking issue with Romney’s response that the gunwalking scheme had been “investigated to a degree,” CNN’s Terry Frieden concluded “that appeared to shortchange the 471-page report by the Justice Department inspector general last month… “It also suggested Romney gave an ‘incomplete’ to the extensive series of...

video at link:.... "She committed an act of journalistic terror or malpractice last night. If there were any journalistic standards, what she did last night would have been the equivalent of blowing up her career like a suicide bomber." So said conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh Wednesday regarding Candy Crowley's shameful behavior during the previous night's presidential debate (video follows courtesy Daily Rushbo with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

In the baseball playoffs, the tie goes to the runner. In debates, ties are decided by the moderator and that’s what happened during the Tuesday night presidential debate at Hofstra University in New York. CNN’s Candy Crowley made her presence felt as a moderator in a major way on two points, but none larger than the issue of Libya. The terrorist attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and four others in Benghazi has become a sore point for Obama, but Crowley made sure she called Romney out before Obama could tag him. When Romney said Obama had not called...

Time for your daily reminder that State didn’t merely stick Chris Stevens with “average” security despite him living and working in one of the jihadi-est places on earth. The security they provided him was actively, inexplicably, inexcusably bad. And before you read any further, let me remind you that the ominous chat-room message posted by Sean Smith the day he died about a Libyan guard taking photos of the compound still hasn’t been addressed by anyone in the government that I’ve seen. Did Stevens’s security break down to the point that his killers actually had someone on the inside?More red...

On NBC, DEM Rep. --former . Gov Jennifer Granholm (D-MI)-- again repeated VP Biden's line that that was the info we got from the intel, at the time of the attack, and that it was the REP. that cut the defense, thus(as a result) it affected (somehow) the security around the embassy... My question is, why is it that liberals can not stop hammering us on Iraq and refuse to take the truthful answer that we all thought that Saddam Hussein had WMD according to our intel at the time? -- BTW The DEM Mayor Kasim Reed (D-Atlanta) kept spinning...

Asked directly on Wednesday evening if Tuesday's deadly violence in Libya was "linked to a terror attack" – possibly al-Qaeda – a State Department official demurred: "Frankly, we are not in a position to speak any further to the perpetrators of this attack. It was clearly a complex attack...

In my estimation, last night’s debate was a draw. Both men did what they needed to do for the debate, but neither had enough of a breakout performance to make much of a difference in the race. I’d expect to see very little impact to the Mitt-mentum that developed after the first debate, for reasons which I’ll address in a moment.That wasn’t the conclusion reached by Frank Luntz’ focus group of former Barack Obama voters, and now undecideds, in Nevada. That panel overwhelmingly chose Mitt Romney as the winner, with observations about Romney’s presidential mien and Obama’s defensiveness and lack...

The State Department has released a transcript of a briefing that two high-ranking department officials gave to a number of reporters via conference call on October 9 (Tuesday). I am not certain about this, but I believe the transcript was only made public today. You should read it in its entirety; it is the most detailed description I have seen of the events in Benghazi on September 11. While this is by no means clear, it appears that the State Department may have released the transcript as part of the escalating conflict between Barack Obama and Joe Biden and the...

On CNN's "State of the Union" on September 30, Candy Crowley insisted David Axelrod, President Barack Obama's chief strategist, was wrong when Axelrod tried to claim President Barack Obama called the Benghazi attack "an act of terror" on the day after. "First, they said it was not planned, it was part of this tape," Crowley said when Axelrod tried to spin her. This was Crowley the journalist, unlike the pro-Obama advocate who moderated Tuesday's debate between Obama and Mitt Romney and interjected herself into an argument between Obama and Romney on the exact same issue -- and took Obama's side....

On Monday, I wrote that it would be wrong to prejudge CNN host Candy Crowley before she turned in her performance as a debate moderator. Just the week prior, ABC reporter Martha Raddatz was preemptively criticized for inviting President Barack Obama to attend her wedding in the 1990s, but she ended up being a straight moderator who advanced the vice presidential debate admirably. I wanted to extend the benefit of the doubt to Crowley, to not preemptively criticize her before she was worthy of criticism. Well, the verdict is in and criticism is entirely warranted. My singular take away moment...

LONDON -- Western intelligence has begun to detect tension within the Iranian regime over the country’s nuclear program, officials told NBC News on Friday. Even so, the European Union on Friday provisionally approved substantial new economic sanctions against Tehran. The new sanctions will have to be formally approved on Monday at an EU foreign ministers' meeting in Luxembourg before coming into effect.

In the end, Carter lost to Reagan because he dithered too much, because he was just too feckless, because our enemies were running amok, and Carter was trying to make a deal with them instead of acting the way most of us thought a real American leader should act. Then, as now, the media were overwhelmingly behind the Democratic incumbent, but the real world overwhelmed them. Then, it was American hostages in Iran. Now, it is American dead in Libya. Then, it was a mob of Iranian “students” shrieking “death to America” in Tehran and taking over the American embassy...

(The following is the third of three excerpts from The Right Frequency: The Story of the Talk Radio Giants Who Shook Up the Political and Media Establishment, by Fred Lucas; History Publishing Company. The adapted excerpt looks at the Fairness Doctrine.) The Democratic National Committee, with the approval of President Lyndon B. Johnson engaged in an effort that eventually led to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Fairness Doctrine. What would have been a major scandal had it been discovered, was revealed years later in former CBS News president Fred Friendly’s book “The Good Guys, the Bad Guys and...

Especially over the last two weeks.Whenever we watch Juan duel with Brit Hume,Krauthammer and the rest,regardless of how severe&damaging Obama's actions have been for the United States;"It's No Big Deal",according to Juan.And quite often Juan has to add George Bush to the mix{"Well This All Started Under The Bush Administration"}.And every week Juan has to Walk/Talk back the weekly "Obama Screw-Up".Between Jaun,Colmes & Beckel(well at least we get great laughs from Beckel&his Swear Jar), You got to admit,the lefties on Fox News have been making total fools of themselves explaining away the "Latest Obama Scandal".Maybe Fox Should Take This Poll:What...

CNN's Jim Acosta on Tuesday's Situation Room asked what many will think was a truly offensive question. "If you were to somehow beat the first African-American president, what would you say to the black community to assure them that you would be their president also?" (video follows with transcript and commentary): Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/09/25/cnns-acosta-romney-if-you-somehow-win-how-would-you-convince-blacks-y#ixzz27XGbKuhs

This just in from the Gallup organization: Americans' distrust of the media has just hit a  new record, with six in 10 Americans saying they have "little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly." Forty percent say they have a "great deal" or a "fair amount" of trust, and I assume this is the same crowd who approve of the job Congress is doing. Where do they find these people? Gallup says the 20-point difference between positive and negative views of the media is "by far" the highest Gallup has seen since it...

Republicans are getting depressed under an avalanche of polling suggesting that an Obama victory is in the offing. They, in fact, suggest no such thing! Here’s why: 1. All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin. In English, this means that when you do a poll you ask people if they are likely to vote. But any telephone survey always has too few blacks, Latinos, and young people and too many elderly in its sample. That’s because some...

Comedy has always been a place for taboo subjects, but many are asking if Saturday Night Live went too far with a sketch aired Thursday night in which Gov. Mitt Romney is repeatedly portrayed as a racist. The sketch, which aired during a "SNL Weekend Update Thursday" special on NBC last night, was based on the recent "leaked video" of Gov. Romney stating he will not try to win over the 47% of voters who loyally support President Obama. However, SNL took the premise further, by portraying Romney as secretly racist. At one point in the sketch, Jason Sudekis (who...

Since Obama's campaign has degenerated to nothing but lie, after lie, after lie why don't we just begin to make up stories just to demonstrate how craven this man is? If we float just as phony, made-up stories as the Obama campaign, no one will believe anything attributed to him. This man has no morals, none whatsoever. This man is a street thug in a $1,000 suit. Nothing more. Shame on those Americans who voted for him the first time. But I cannot think of a word to describe those who will do so a second time.

Former steel worker Joe Soptic has resurfaced in a new pro-Obama Super-PAC ad, blaming Romney for his wife’s death from cancer. “I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to anyone,” Soptic says in the ad. “And furthermore I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned.” But Soptic is actually a familiar face on the anti-Bain beat, and accused Romney of this before. Soptic was featured in an Obama ad in May, who explained that although he wasn’t “rich” he was able to put his daughter through college. In January, Soptic complained to Democracy Now, a liberal non-profit...

No description at YouTube, so my write up:CNN's Brianna Kielar spoke with Joe Soptic, a former steelworker featured in a new pro-Obama super PAC ad who was laid off in 2001 when Bain Capital closed the company he had worked at for a reported 30 years. Without directly accusing Soptic and Priorities USA of being despicable liars, CNN lets its reporting call them out as despicable liars. Soptic told CNN his wife had her own health insurance at her own job when he was laid off. Soptic said his wife quit her job a year or two later due to...

Please, spare me the objection that this comes from The One’s Super PAC, not his formal campaign, and therefore it’s technically not an “Obama ad.” That excuse never flew for Romney when his own Super PAC was carpet-bombing Gingrich and Santorum in the primaries. The wall of separation between a campaign and its PAC is all but invisible to the naked eye. If you think it’s easy for the White House to get Harry Reid to smear Romney over his tax returns, imagine how easy it must be for them to get former White House spokesman and current Priorities USA...

(snip) The point of calling Romney a murderer is to keep him on the defensive; the more ridiculous the charge is, the more media/online oxygen it sucks up and the less air there is for Mitt’s own attacks on O to breathe. .... Question: Knowing what we know now about the timeline of all this, what’s left of the accusation in the original smear ad? What is it, precisely, that Bain is being faulted for doing or not doing? They shouldn’t have closed down the plant because … it was unfair to expect the workers who were laid off to...

A new attack ad by a Super PAC backing President Obama appears to blame Mitt Romney for a woman's death from cancer after his company, Bain Capital, shut down the steel mill where the woman's husband worked. The ad makes it seem like Joe Soptic's wife, Ilyona, lost her battle with cancer shortly after he lost his job at GST Steel in Missouri, where he had worked for almost 30 years. "When Mitt Romney closed the plant I lost my healthcare, and my family lost their healthcare," Soptic says in the ad put out by Priorities USA Action, the main...

...played a role in the death of Ilyona Soptic at age 55. The ad features Joe Soptic, 62, of Missouri, who lost his job when GST Steel of Kansas City—owned by Bain and other investors for eight years—was closed. As melancholy music plays, Mr. Soptic says that when the plant closed, he and his family lost their health-care coverage and "a short time after that, my wife became ill." Her illness was diagnosed five years later. "I don't think Mitt Romney understands what he's done to people's lives by closing the plant," Mr. Soptic says in the ad. The steel...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama tried Monday to distance himself from an advertisement run by a supportive outside group suggesting there was a link between the death of a laid-off steelworker's wife and Republican Mitt Romney's former company. But Obama said he intends to keep raising sharp contrasts between himself and the GOP challenger. "I don't think that Governor Romney was somehow responsible for the death," he said.

Via Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed, who reminds us that O's attempt to disclaim responsibility for the ad under ye olde "I don't control my Super PAC" dodge is perhaps undermined by the fact that his own campaign used the story of the steelworker's wife too. Remember? Joe Soptic did a conference call with Stephanie Cutter and everything. The whole Hopenchange operation owns this smear, and regretlessly so. In fact, even Obama's gesture towards civility here in exculpating Romney for Soptic’s wife’s death is a feint: Bill Burton, who runs the Super PAC, ludicrously said that he too doesn’t think Romney...

The makers of a new Romney attack ad, as well as the steelworker featured in the television spot, are standing by the highly-scrutinized ad, saying the ad does not suggest that Romney is responsible for a woman's death from cancer. Joe Soptic, the former steelworker featured in a Priorities USA Action ad, told the Wall Street Journal that he thinks the ad is fair. In ad, the former GST Steel employee recounts how he lost his job and his health benefits after Bain Capital -- the private equity firm founded by Romney -- purchased and shut down the Kansas City...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Let's go to sound bite seven. Bill Burton. This is the guy that runs the PAC that did the ad, a truly disgusting figure. He was on Anderson Cooper last night on CNN. Cooper says, "How can you imply that Mitt Romney and Bain are somehow to blame for that poor woman dying of cancer?" BURTON: My goodness. We -- we -- we don't and we would not. I mean, those fact checks presuppose exactly what we were trying to do, and that's not the point of the ad. The point of the ad is to tell...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Stephanie Cutter, too. These people are lying through their teeth when they say that they didn't know the details of Soptic's story. Yesterday morning on CNN Starting Point show, they had Stephanie Cutter, Obama's campaign manager... By the way, there's another aspect to this. And I don't think it would amount to anything but it's real. That is the question of coordination. By law, the campaign can have nothing to do with the super PAC. But the campaign has run ads with this guy. There have been two ads featuring Soptic. One Soptic ad was run by...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: You know what I'm sitting here doing? I'm trying to think of a campaign ad from the past, in my lifetime, to compare with the "Romney Killed My Wife" ad. We know that the Obama people know that it's a lie. We know that they knew that everything in it was false. They don't care. That is the big point: They don't care. The point of that ad... Maybe we should spend some time explaining what the purpose of this is, because a lot of people make a mistake, here. For example, my friends, I know how...

Still working hard to avoid mentioning an outrageous Obama super-PAC ad that basically accused Mitt Romney of being responsible for the cancer death of a woman, Thursday's NBC Nightly News had the gall to instead promote pro-Obama fluff, as anchor Brian Williams gushed: "Knowing a hot product when he sees one, the President today visited the U.S. Olympic training facility in Colorado." Williams made sure to inform viewers that Obama "Promptly took his shoes off, got on the mat, and said his grandmother would be proud there were no holes in his socks."

Roger Hedgecock, the former San Diego mayor turned conservative talk radio host, called MSNBC's Chris Matthews a liar to his face Friday evening. This resulted in quite a heated exchange between the two on HBO's Real Time (video follows with transcript and commentary): Former San Diego Mayor Calls Chris Matthews a Liar to His Face CHRIS MATTHEWS: The big lie is that the people who make a lot of money were the only ones who worked hard. You go to D.C. – I say this a million times, I’m going to keep saying it to the people out there with...

On 6 November 1860, the six-year-old Republican Party elected its first president. During the tense crisis months that followed – the “secession winter” of 1860–61 – practically all observers believed that Lincoln and the Republicans would begin attacking slavery as soon as they took power. Democrats in the North blamed the Republican Party for the entire sectional crisis. They accused Republicans of plotting to circumvent the Constitutional prohibition against direct federal attacks on slavery. Republicans would instead allegedly try to squeeze slavery to death indirectly, by abolishing it in the territories and in Washington DC, suppressing it in the high seas, and refusing federal...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The grandson of former President Jimmy Carter says he persuaded the source who secretly taped Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney at a fundraiser to release the full video to the media. James Carter IV says he was intrigued after seeing what he describes as a short, mysterious clip of Romney talking about Chinese factory conditions.

One might have thought that Charlie Rose received an extra dose of caffeine before Friday's CBS This Morning, as the normally-subdued anchor hounded Romney campaign adviser Dan Senor on how the Republican presidential nominee would change policy toward Iran. Rose wouldn't let Senor complete an answer, interrupting six different times in 50 seconds.  [audio available here; video below the jump] By contrast, 11 days earlier, the veteran TV host tossed softballs at Democratic Senator Dick Durbin on the issue of ObamaCare, and merely prompted Durbin on the issue of the Chicago teachers strike. CBS's Rose Badgers Romney Adviser on Iran;...

He’s gone from hero to zero. In less than a year, “Today” show host Matt Lauer’s “likability” has plummeted 25%, according to the Q Scores, an influential survey used by companies and advertisers to help make major decisions. "Is it only 25 percent? Because it actually feels much worse," Lauer told the News. The shocking Q Score comes on the heels of internal research conducted by NBC brass that had the same findings, The News has learned. “It raises a flag,” said Henry Schafer, executive vice president of Q Scores. “If you’re [the “Today” show] you have to figure out...

He and his administration spent last weekend blaming the explosion of violence against America in the Middle East on a moronic anti-Muhammad video that’s been on YouTube for months. His United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice made the rounds of the Sunday morning news shows, where she made an absolute idiot of herself. Apparently auditioning for the secretary of state job in -- God forbid -- a second Obama administration, Rice insisted that the “spontaneous” Islamic rage that killed our ambassador in Libya and three other Americans was caused not by the failures of her boss but by an amateur movie...