Free Republic

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama was served with papers yesterday connected with the lawsuit filed more than two weeks ago in federal court in Philadelphia questioning his constitutional eligibility for the American presidency. Service was made at his Washington, D.C. Senate office at approximately 1:00 p.m. From a press release provided by filing attorney Philip Berg and available on his Web site: Philip J. Berg, Esquire, the Attorney who filed suit against Barack H. Obama challenging Senator Obama’s eligibility to serve as President of the United States, has received confirmation from his Process Service Company that the Democratic National Committee (DNC)...

There has been a news blackout in the major media in France and elsewhere, becaue coverage of the story was deemed insulting to Moslem Arabs. Not one member of the seven-man Arab crew was smart enough to throttle back the engines from their max power setting, so the $80 million brand-new aircraft crashed into a blast barrier, totaling it.

DENVER (AP) - Barack Obama is striking back fiercely and swiftly at an ad linking him to a 1960s radical. The ad is funded by 1 of the main supporters of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which went after John Kerry in 2004. This ad questions Obama's ties to William Ayers, a founder of the radical Weather Underground organization that took credit for a series of bombings four decades ago.

Several years ago as the MSM began to fall in love the leftist Republican Arnold Swartznegger they chose to carefully examine the fourteenth amendment regarding Arnolds possible requirement deficit, even going to the point of 'floating a trial balloon' to determine the public attitude toward amending the Constitution to 'force a fit'. It is noted that the idea did not gain any traction to speak of, but there was, and still remains, some interest in this notion.Now comes an examination of a true contender, someone who has a good chance of being elected, and with serious people asking pertinent questions...

SOME FAMILY MAN: Asse Sam Hoyt ALBANY - A married assemblyman got caught with his virtual pants down - busted by XXX-rated e-mails to a 19-year-old intern.....In one sex message Hoyt made it embarrassingly clear they shared not only an interest in the people's business, but in lusty sex and personal hygiene. Titled "what i wish," the Democratic assemblyman's list included: ". . . that i could be painting your toenails right now . . . that i could see you do that little cheerleader move . . . that i could be your human lollipop . . ....

Republicans called for a criminal probe of Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith for allegedly threatening lobbyists who fail to contribute to Democratic campaigns. "It borders on criminality," said Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos. "You cannot threaten people to give contributions. That's thuggery. Quid pro quo is a crime - you go to jail." Senate Investigations Committee Chair George Winner said Smith, of Queens, "may have broken several laws - including coercion, official misconduct, attempted bribery and even conspiracy." Smith told a group of lobbyists at a fund-raiser for Senate Democrats in that their clients would be shut out of a...

By Michelle Malkin  •  August 12, 2008 11:38 AM Remember the Jeep Jihadi who attempted to mow down students at UNC-Chapel Hill in the name of Allah two years ago in a botched attempt to “avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world”? He finally pleaded guilty this morning to nine counts of attempted first-degree murder.Hat tip - Bob Owens.Reminder: A suspect who is accused of hitting students with a sport utility vehicle at the University of North Carolina made his first court appearance Monday.Mohammad Taheri-azar, a 2005 UNC-Chapel Hill graduate, smiled and waved before his hearing Monday. Taheri-azar told the...

OReilly just announced on air that he had the entire John Edwards story last fall and chose not to air it. First it was Mr.Jesse Jackson's statements regarding the denutting of Obama, leaving off only the pertinent part of the story of Jackson regarding Jacksons racist remarks. He said then it was the right decision and tried to rehab his programming decisions in the eyes of the public. Now, he tells us he has sat on the story regarding John Edwards love child and paramour since last fall. They report, they decide what we will hear.He finished the story tonight...

John Edwards. There, I said it. I guess it's too late to be dramatic, now that Edwards has talked to a MSM outlet (ABC) about his affair. I really meant to say something earlier, when almost every daily newspaper, including The Chronicle, was not touching a story broken by, gasp, the National Enquirer, but I was tied up. Most MSM in general had stayed away, picking at it with their noses held, as if looking for something valuable in a moldy dumpster. Of course the New York (City) Times said they were "looking into it" but certainly not printing a...

ABC Radio news just announced Sen. John Edwards will admit to the affair with Rielle Hunter in an interview with the network, but insists the child is not his. We return you to your regularly-scheduled FReeping.

<p>Commentary: Is it any wonder that nobody buys newspapers any more?</p> <p>LONDON (MarketWatch) -- The scandal over former Sen. John Edwards' alleged fathering of a love child is rapidly being surpassed by a greater travesty -- not one single major media organization in the U.S is covering the story.</p>

Over at Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft introduces us to Amy Proctor's report on the amazingly large crowd of South Koreans that came out to welcome George W. Bush to their country. It's a good thing that Amy clued us in here in America, because our media sure ignored the story of this large turnout. Amy directs our attention to The Korea Times report that revealed that 374 "conservative groups" intended to "stage a large-scale demonstration welcoming Bush, at Seoul Plaza," and boy did they ever come through. It turns out, the anti-Bush protesters were only able to muster a could...

Coverage of John Edward’s Adultery: ABC: http://abcnews.go.com/search?searchtext=john%20edwards&type=: “No such topic found” CBS: http://search.cbsnews.com/?source=cbs&q=john+edwards&x=14&y=9 “No such topic found” NBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/?q=john+edwards&search=search+site&submit=Search&id=11881780&FORM=MSNBC&os=0&gs=1&p=1&adunitid=&propertyid= “No such topic found” New York Times: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/john_edwards/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=john%20edwards&st=cse “No such topic found Boston Globe: http://search.boston.com/local/Search.do?p1=Header_Searchbox_LocalSearch&s.sm.query=john+edwards&s.tab= “No such topic found”

..the closest AP's Douglas Birch came to mentioning the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Christian faith was by remarking how the bearded author and Soviet dissident looked like a religious icon: In a 1978 speech at Harvard ** Solzhenitsyn denounced the Western view that liberal democracy was fated to triumph in non-Western civilizations, which he called "worlds" unto themselves. ..in that speech-"A World Split Apart"-Baptist theologian Albert Mohler argues, that Solzhenitsyn famously diagnosed secularism as a disease corrupting the West and, what's more, he did so thoroughly anchored in his Orthodox Christian faith (emphasis mine): *** Solzhenitsyn railed against the secularism and...

The MSM are still getting killed on the story of John Edwards and his relationship to racy blonde Rielle Hunter - or should I say his relationship to Hunter's love child? Check out this comprehensive piece by mondoreb from the Blogger News Network. There are a few interesting wrinkles. The first concerns pack journalism. Mondoreb reports: "Because of those 'vigorous denials from campaign staffers,' not one reporter posed the question to Edwards that DBKP kept repeating, 'Do you deny that you've been in telephone contact with Rielle Hunter since she found out she was pregnant?' Did the reporters on the...

As you may have heard, the National Enquirer claims to have ambushed former presidential candidate John Edwards in the Beverly Hilton the other night, where he was allegedly ronday-voo'ing with his alleged mistress and their alleged love child. Alleged alleged alleged alleged alleged! The newspaper reports that its team confronted Edwards about it, and he ran away and hid in a men's room until security forced the reporters away. The paper says it had a photographer present; I want to see pictures. Still, the Enquirer, as sleazy as its tactics strike many people, has a better reputation on stories like...

The National Enquirer a couple of nights back caught former-Senator John Edwards, who is reportedly on Barack Obama's short list as a vice-presidential candidate, entering the Beverly Hilton Hotel room of a woman that isn't his wife. His wife, suffering from cancer, was presumably back at home in North Carolina. The Enquirer story has the definite sound of legitimacy... So what does the L.A. Times do, they put out an email to their bloggers telling them not to discuss the story...

A U.S. marine watches children play in Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad. (AP File Photo/Todd Pitman)(CNSNews.com) – American heroism has been ignored and overlooked by networks at home and overseas for the duration of the Iraq war, while insurgents and terrorists have used willing media outlets to score public relations wins. That bleak assessment comes from U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq during the pre-surge time frame, when the insurgency was its height. A collection of graphs and charts made available through the public affairs office of the Multi-National Corps in Iraq indicates that the media has pulled back...

French media loses big court case proving Palestinian propaganda false, New York Times ignores shocking story… Why? France TV 2 has lost a major court case in France that makes the lie to a major piece of Palestinian propaganda. In 2000 an incident occurred in the Palestinian areas that has since been used as propaganda for the Palestinian cause all across the world and the New York Times has repeatedly been a willing host for this propaganda. Now, however, it has been proven that France 2 perpetrated a lie that has given succor to terrorism. And where is the New...

Victory in Anbar Province, Iraq? If you Google, "Anbar + victory," all you will find is a bunch of outdated stuff from the years when coalition forces were taking a real beating from Al Qaeda Iraq and the Sunni insurgents, who were then still trying to take back control of the whole Country. The latest entry in Google's search engine, for "Anbar + victory" is from 2006. In order to find even minimal coverage of the significant victory our forces in Anbar have wrought this day, Saturday, July 5, you'll have to be quite a lot more specific in your...

This Weekend: Geraldo and Team NEW TIME: Sat., June 28 and Sun., June 29 at 10 p.m. ET • Saturday: Geraldo 'At Large' Special Presentation: 'Iraq: Where Good News is No News'.

Someone please tell CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan that her reaction is precisely the reaction her peers are shooting for: "If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts," Ms. Logan said. Logan admits here a common complaint about the kind of news reported out of Iraq for the duration of the war, which is a macabre focus on blood-soaked sensationalism to the near exclusion of any other sort of story. The newsworks (to perhaps coin a phrase) have...

Getting a story on the evening news isn’t easy for any correspondent. And for reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is especially hard, according to Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News. So she has devised a solution when she is talking to the network. “Generally what I say is, ‘I’m holding the armor-piercing R.P.G.,’ ” she said last week in an appearance on “The Daily Show,” referring to the initials for rocket-propelled grenade. “ ‘It’s aimed at the bureau chief, and if you don’t put my story on the air, I’m going to pull the trigger.’ ”...

"Where are all of the Hollywood celebrities holding telethons asking for help in restoring Iowa and helping the folks affected by the floods? Where is all the media asking the tough questions about why the federal government hasn't solved the problem? Asking where the FEMA trucks (and trailers) are? Why isn't the Federal Government relocating Iowa people to free hotels in Chicago? When will Spike Lee say that the Federal Government blew up the levees that failed in Des Moines? Where are Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks? Where are all the looters stealing high-end tennis shoes and big screen...

Media: Haven't heard much news coming out of Iraq recently? Consider the near silence a clear indication that things are going well there.Reports of good news from Iraq since the U.S. and allied forces took down Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003 have been about as common as Bigfoot sightings. The mainstream media have religiously dwelled on the bad news, but have decided that progress isn't worth the coverage. That's left others to fill in the gaps. One largely unreported bit of positive news is the decline in casualties caused by improvised explosive devices — homemade roadside bombs. According to the...

The Chicago press mostly overlooked Obama’s worst scandals, instead griping about the trivial. Chicago papers, radio, and television haven’t been hagiographic in their coverage of local-rising-star-turned-Democratic-nominee Barack Obama. They dug deep into Obama’s real-estate dealings with developer/felon Tony Rezko, and provided gavel-to-gavel coverage of Rezko’s trial. But if one were to assemble a list of the revelations that have most damaged Obama’s efforts to win the presidency, two at or near the top would be the video of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright; and Obama’s long, working relationship with William Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and...

Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani is the latest Marine to turn out not to be a "cold-blooded killer" that the media and Democratic politicians painted Marines charged with the Haditha "massacre" to be. This two weeks after another Marine was acquitted in a Haditha court martial. FoxNews.com has the AP story about the dismissal of charges against him here.: CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. - A military judge dismissed charges Tuesday against a Marine officer accused of failing to investigate the killings of 24 Iraqis. Col. Steven Folsom dismissed charges against Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani after finding that a four-star general overseeing the...

Usually, when a journalist is censored in a Western nation, American news organizations respond with collective outrage. But as a major attack on press freedom unfolds in Canada, America's mainstream media are silent. Neither the TV networks nor the major newspapers have reported on hearings last week at what amounts to a Stalinesque show trial in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mark Steyn, a Canadian journalist who now lives in New Hampshire and whose column appears in National Review magazine as well as several U.S. and Canadian newspapers, is facing charges before British Columbia's Human Rights Tribunal. His crime? Spreading "hatred." The...

What the Media Didn’t Tell You About Friday’s Unemployment Spike By Jerry Bowyer It wasn’t Bush, it wasn’t greedy corporations, or free trade, or history’s most over-predicted recession. It was not the oil companies, income inequality, or the excesses of cowboy capitalism. None of these things caused the unemployment rate to jump a half a percentage point in one month. Ask yourself a few questions: Why did unemployment surge at a time when unemployment compensation claims are historically low? More to the point, how could unemployment spike this much without a coinciding spike in corporate lay-offs? The answer to all...

Two weeks ago Cliff Kincaid, president of the conservative group America's Survival Inc., called a press conference in Washington to challenge the mainstream media to look into the hard-core left-wingers who are known to have influenced Barack Obama -- first as a teenager in Hawaii and later in Chicago. Specifically, Kincaid's group wants a major news organization to follow up on the investigative work it has done that documents that an elderly black man who mentored Sen. Obama in Hawaii was a lifelong member of the Communist Party USA. Kincaid also would like to see a serious journalistic vetting of...

The Chinese government has instructed domestic media outlets to rein in coverage of the schools that collapsed during last month’s devastating earthquake in Sichuan province, journalists familiar with the directive have told the Financial Times. A notice was sent to media outlets across the country late last week, following a spate of reports about the collapses that killed thousands of students. Their parents blame sub-standard construction and government negligence, if not corruption, especially in areas where schools were the only structures to fail catastrophically. Last week Southern Weekend, an investigative weekly newspaper from Guangzhou, Guangdong province, ran a report on...

Conservative bloggers and talk radio hosts have noticed the rash of gaffes — some goofy, some more serious — emanating from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama lately, but the mainstream media’s coverage of Obama’s bouts with foot-in-mouth disease has been sparse, to say the least. In the case of one of Obama’s more recent gaffes, however, a CNN reporter did Obama the favor of editing the gaffe right out of his story. On Monday, Obama weirdly talked about honoring the nation’s “unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience today.” In a report...

Sadr: Hides in Iran as his Iraq minions lose. May 20, 2008 -- DO we still have troops in Iraq? Is there still a conflict over there? If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines. Want a real "inconvenient truth?" Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating. But that fact isn't helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even...

Two frightening killers were on the loose, and the Sacramento Bee’s readers wanted to protect themselves. They wanted more than descriptions of the attackers’ clothing at the time of the murders. They wanted to know the criminals’ race. The Bee, they accused editors, had allowed outdated policies to endanger public safety. Challenged by readers and by bloggers who don’t adhere to journalistic conventions, many editors have been thinking about loosening their rules for identifying race in crime stories. In general, news outlets have avoided racial and ethnic identifiers unless they were important to the case, or, perhaps, if victims’ descriptions...

THE REAL NEWS of April played second fiddle to the presidential campaign, the pope's visit to America, and the Texas polygamy case. more stories like thisThe death toll for the US military in Iraq hit 49 in April, making it the deadliest month since September, according to the Associated Press. Around Iraq, at least 1,080 Iraqi civilians and security personnel were killed last month, an average of 36 a day, according to the AP tally. While that's down from March's total of 1,269, or an average of 41 per day, those casualties certainly don't add up to a stable Iraq....

Two Recent Success in WoT You Didn't Hear About by Warner Todd Huston, Featured Writer April 29, 2008   The Taliban suffered a big loss in Pakistan/Afghanistan this month and so did al Qaeda in Iraq, but the MSM has been practically silent on these great successes. It only goes to show that the media is so completely sold on the claim that the war is lost that they aren't interested in doing any real reporting on the war. Not only has Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki headed up a brilliantly successful attack on rebel leader and Iranian backed...

UPDATE: Now with a possible, if x-rated explanation, after the jump. You have been warned. UPDATE: The New York Times report -- CNN Reporter Faces Drug Charge - City Room - Metro - New York Times Blog -- omits the sex equipment and partner details. Commenters are clueless as a result.....

Imagine for a moment that a Fox News reporter was arrested in Central Park early in the morning with a rope around his neck that was tied to his genitals. Do you think this little nuance would be included in press coverage of this bizarre event? Probably in the headline and the opening paragraph, right? Well, for some reason, though news outlets did report the odd happenings in NYC Friday morning when CNN's Richard Quest was officially arrested for loitering and drug possession, from what I can tell, only the New York Post included the "kinky" elements in its article...

Time magazine is using the fact that the Democrat presidential candidates are currently being forced to raise more money to battle each other as evidence that the Democrats are much better at online campaign fundraising than the Republicans. Political blinders were firmly in place on Time writers Michael Scherer and Jay Newton-Small when they triumphantly put forth their reality-challenged  thesis of Why Democrats Rule the Web: Republicans, who once were far ahead of Democrats in whizbang TV technology, let their party fall behind the nerd curve as Howard Dean and later John Kerry revolutionized and then exploited online fund-raising in 2004. Four years...

It could potentially be one of the biggest energy breakthroughs in history – genetically manipulating bacteria to quickly convert anything that grows out of the Earth into oil. But the biggest names in the national media have thus far not provided any coverage of this possible solution to skyrocketing gas prices and Ameria's long-term energy security. A WND story last month introduced to the nation a new technique where altered bacteria "rapidly digest" everything from grass clippings and wood chips, turning them into hydrocarbons for fuels such as gasoline and diesel. If done on a large scale, it could provide...

BEND, Oregon, April 4, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The mainstream media pushed the story of Thomas Beatie this past week, billing the story as the 'miraculous' male pregnancy. The startling news headline took the media by storm on April 1 (was this date a coincidence?), following Beatie's appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show and an interview in People magazine.If this story really were an instance of an unexplained pregnancy in a male, it might really be newsworthy. But it is actually a total non-story about a woman becoming pregnant. And yet, it has been turned into a giant media deception to...

Crude Coverage Media ignore OPEC’s control of oil market when covering America’s pain at the pump. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Highlights: • Since January 2007, the network news has run 43 stories on oil companies’ profits and just three stories on OPEC profits – a ratio of 14-to-1. • Network reporters have referred to oil companies as “a bunch of thieves … ripping people off” and asked them to “cut back a bit on your profit.” But they have overlooked the openly anti-American hostility of some OPEC nations and have downplayed the cartel’s control of world prices. • The networks didn’t mention the...

WASHINGTON, March 24, 2008 (AFP) — The US death toll in Iraq had just passed 4,000, but on Monday the most viewed story on Yahoo News was "Oil fluctuates as dollar, stocks rise." And the most emailed story was: "1986 message in bottle drifts 1,735 miles." Five years after the US-led invasion of Iraq began, Americans' interest in the war, and press coverage of it, is flagging. (snip) "People see gas going up and the price of their house going down .... It's more immediate than the Iraq war," said Bob Stover, managing editor of Florida Today in Melbourne, Florida....

Two weeks since the ABC and NBC evening shows took multiple days before getting around to informing viewers that disgraced New York Governor Eliot Spitzer belonged to the Democratic Party -- after every ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news program last year immediately highlighted the party of Republican Senators David Vitter and Larry Craig -- Monday's broadcast network evening newscasts all failed to note, verbally or on-screen, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's party. ABC anchor Charles Gibson announced on World News: “Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was charged today with felonies that could cost him his job and 15 years...

The Wall Street Journal’s editors took the time to read the Pentagon report on the connections between Saddam Hussein and terrorist groups, and wonder why the national media have ignored the story. The analysis of the Harmony documents got initially misreported, and after the Pentagon released the full analysis, few if any news agencies opted to correct the initial distortions they published — and the WSJ says that leaves Americans misinformed: Five years on, few Iraq myths are as persistent as the notion that the Bush Administration invented a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Yet a new Pentagon...

Remember the war in Iraq? The question isn't entirely facetious. The war has nearly vanished from TV screens over the past few months, replaced by stories about the fascinating presidential campaign and faltering economy. Yet Americans continue to fight and die there, five years after the war started in March 2003. "It's no big secret that this is a war that everyone has grown tired of," said CNN correspondent Arwa Damon ... Statistics clearly illustrate the diminished attention. For the first 10 weeks of the year, the war accounted for 3 percent of television, newspaper and Internet stories in the...

As Jeremiah Wright's screaming sermons have gone from ABC across the media in the last 24 hours, many are asking: where were the networks on this story? It sounds like Obama's minister is less versed in the audacity of hope than in the audacity of hate. A Nexis search of network transcripts shows that up until now, Obama's church and minister have been barely mentioned -- and usually as an Obama defense mechanism. Up until this week, NBC has done nothing. CBS has devoted about a minute to controversy in a February 28 CBS Evening News story. ABC's Jake Tapper...

Just as occurred Monday night, viewers of Tuesday's ABC and NBC evening newscasts never heard the word "Democrat" applied to New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, nor did they even put a "(D)" on screen by his name as ABC did briefly Monday. CBS didn't announce his party either on Tuesday night, but Katie Couric had done so Monday night. The ABC and NBC newscasts, however, did put "(R)" on screen over soundbites from Republicans and NBC's Mike Taibbi twice referred to the reaction from "Republican" politicians. Fill-in ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas avoided any party tag: "New York's Governor, Eliot Spitzer,...

A U.S. Federal Communications Commission official is seeking an inquiry into the blacking out of a politically charged segment of the CBS News magazine "60 Minutes" by a local television station in Alabama. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said he had asked the chairman of the FCC to open an inquiry into the February 24 incident at WHNT, a CBS affiliate in Huntsville, Alabama, in which civil rights footage from the 1960s was blacked out. "The FCC now needs to find out if something analogous is going on here," Copps said at a luncheon with media watchdog groups. "Was this an...

One year ago, liberal journalists depicted the surge of U.S. troops to Iraq as a certain failure. “A lot of people are going to go to bed tonight terrified,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews opined just minutes after President Bush announced the policy on January 10, 2007. Other journalists were only slightly more subtle. “Many experts warn, it’s too little, too late,” NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski argued on the January 8, 2007 Nightly News. The next morning on NBC’s Today, the network’s graphic describing Iraq was “Lost Cause?” At the same time, leading Democrats left themselves no wiggle room as they, too, denounced...