Free Republic

Rather, they’re proudly dependent on an unaccountable globalism If you want to know where media bias resides, simply look at who the media isn’t questioning. The most recent row between CNN’s Jim Acosta and President Donald Trump reinforced this observation. On the heels of the Trump Administration’s decision to revoke the press pass for Jim Acosta (which a D.C. judge has since ordered the White House to reinstate), the “mainstream” media backed Acosta in decrying the purported assault on America’s hallowed First Amendment. Piggybacking on the mainstream media’s argument, the New York Times’ “True Conservative™,” Bret Stephens, shared his fear...

Not everyone believes Elvis is the king. President Trump will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to seven Americans on Friday, including the late rock star Elvis Presley, though even that gesture is coming under fire from liberals. Trump is honoring Presley, baseball legend Babe Ruth, former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, philanthropist Miriam Adelson, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, jurist Alan Page, and Hall-of-Fame quarterback Roger Staubach. Still, some have accused Trump of racism for honoring Presley, long known as the "King of Rock and Roll." The Washington Post’s pop culture critic Chris Richards called Trump’s move “a little nod...

"Wildfires don’t care about wealth or status,” began the New York Times this week, describing the celebrity homes obliterated by fire in California. But what the report didn’t add, leaving it instead to Neil Young’s website, was that climate change cares even less. As President Trump took time out of his busy schedule protecting his hair and insulting the French to blame poor forest management, Young laid it on the line: “As a matter of fact this is not a forest fire that rages on as I write this. We are vulnerable because of climate change.” Nothing brings the environment...

Facebook is being hit with fresh criticism from Capitol Hill as lawmakers reacted harshly Thursday to a New York Times investigation that detailed the company’s efforts to wield influence in Washington after becoming aware of Russia-linked activity on its platform during the 2016 presidential campaign. The explosive article laid out how Facebook’s leadership was reluctant to confront the Russian efforts on its platform and was unprepared for the subsequent firestorm and fallout, which involved the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Specifically, the Times reported that the tech giant used a Republican opposition research firm called Definers Public Affairs to accuse liberal financier...

If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama. Mr. Trump made his animus toward the news media clear during the presidential campaign, often expressing his disgust with coverage through Twitter or in diatribes at rallies. So if his campaign is any guide, Mr. Trump seems likely to enthusiastically embrace the aggressive crackdown on journalists and whistle-blowers that is an important yet little understood component...

One hope for Yemenis is that the international fallout from the death of the Saudi dissident, Jamal Khashoggi, which has damaged Prince Mohammed’s international standing, might force him to relent in his unyielding prosecution of the war. Peter Salisbury, a Yemen specialist at Chatham House, said that was unlikely. “I think the Saudis have learned what they can get away with in Yemen — that western tolerance for pretty bad behavior is quite high,” he said. “If the Khashoggi murder tells us anything, it’s just how reluctant people are to rein the Saudis in.”

Many have been critical of Google’s plan to launch a censored search engine in China, now a former Facebook executive has called out Google’s CEO for lying about the company’s motives. Facebook’s former security chief Alex Stamos took to Twitter recently to attack Google CEO Sundar Pichai for his comments defending the company’s decision to move into the China market with its censored search engine known as “Project Dragonfly,” Silicon Beat reports. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Pichai stated that Google was “committed to serving users in China” and compared Chinese censorship laws to the “right...

President Obama is sidestepping the Senate to directly fill the No. 2 position at the Justice Department and appoint four U.S. ambassadors whose nominations had been stalled or blocked by lawmakers for months. The White House on Wednesday said Mr. Obama is using a recess appointment to install James Cole as the deputy attorney general and ... Senators had blocked or refused to consider the confirmations of the nominees for various reasons, including questions about their qualifications. ... Recess appointments are made when the Senate is not in session and last only until the end of the next session...

President Donald Trump‘s pick for interim Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker, has been met with harsh opposition in the form of a New York Times op-ed co-authored by none other than George Conway. That’s right, the same Conway who is married to counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway and regularly trolls the president on Twitter. “President Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States after forcing the resignation of Jeff Sessions is unconstitutional,” they wrote. “It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr. Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders has been accused of sharing a "doctored" video of CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s interaction with a White House intern that resulted in the reporter’s press pass being revoked. Acosta's press pass to access the White House was suspended "until further notice" Wednesday, hours after he engaged in a contentious back-and-forth with President Trump. A White House intern attempted to retrieve the microphone from Acosta, but the CNN reporter resisted and asked an additional question – and that’s where things get cloudy. Sanders said the suspension of his press credentials stemmed from his "placing his...

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a nationally influential literary critic for The New York Times for three decades, who wrote some 4,000 reviews and essays, mostly for the daily column Books of The Times, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 84. His death, at the Milstein Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, was caused by complications of a stroke, his daughter, Rachel Lehmann-Haupt, said. In one of journalism’s most challenging jobs, Mr. Lehmann-Haupt was The Times’s senior daily book critic from 1969 to 1995, tackling two or three books a week and rendering judgments that could affect, for better or ill, literary careers as well...

I'm not going to give away the punch line, but it's pretty freaking awesome. Greatest. President. Ever. (video is at the link)

You’ve heard of the “margin of error” in polling. Just about every article on a new poll dutifully notes that the margin of error due to sampling is plus or minus three or four percentage points. But in truth, the “margin of sampling error” – basically, the chance that polling different people would have produced a different result – doesn't even come close to capturing the potential for error in surveys. Polling results rely as much on the judgments of pollsters as on the science of survey methodology. Two good pollsters, both looking at the same underlying data, could come...

Fascinating graphic portrayal of how the meme, "Jobs not Mobs" spread through the Web. Very cool!

With Election Day at hand, we know one thing for sure: Voter turnout is huge. In fact, it looks like we will have the highest midterm turnout since 1966. The rationale for a gigantic blue wave that would represent a repudiation of the 2016 election has been that millions of Americans are so turned off by President Trump and his agenda that they will come out en masse and hand Congress to Democrats with large majorities, proving what has been an article of faith among Trump-haters, that his election was an anomaly and that American politics would quickly revert to...

I was shocked reading this column (non-paywalled version here) appearing today in the New York Times, written by a true NeverTrump conservative, Bret Stephens. ... After briefly excoriating Trump for running on “fear” instead of basking in his accomplishments (which contradicts the political wisdom that voters rarely vote out of gratitude), Stephens gets to the nub of his semi-confession: Trump is really smart. Of course, he has to present that revelation in disparaging terms, but it is a couple of steps better than “Trump is an idiot.” The mystery of Donald Trump is what impels him to overturn the usual...

This is exactly the phenomenon that I had described after the Pittsburgh shootings in, "If the Synagogue Shooter Were Muslim, the Media Would Be Defending Him." In 2006, Naveed Afzal Haq used a teenage girl as a hostage to force his way into the Seattle Jewish Federation where he shot 6 women. The Muslim attacker shouted, “You Jews” at the non-Jewish marketing director and shot her in the stomach. The bookkeeper went into cardiac arrest, died at the scene, was revived and died again on the operating table and still lived to testify at Haq's trial. "I want these Jews...

FULL TITLE: New York Democrats drafting bill to screen social media accounts, Internet search history of gun buyers If two New York Democrats have their way, prospective gun buyers in the state will have three years of their social media interactions screened as part of the background check process. On Friday, WCBS 880 reported that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and state Sen. Kevin Palmer are drafting a proposal that would let authorities review three years of social media history and one year of internet search history of anyone seeking to purchase a firearm in the state. “A three-year review...

A 26-year-old man charged with vandalizing a historic New York City synagogue on Friday, just days after the Pittsburgh massacre, has been identified as a former campaign worker for Barack Obama who was profiled by the New York Times in 2017. The Times described James Polite as a young man who “spent much of his childhood in foster care,” and performed canvassing work for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. After a chance meeting, he got a job that year as an intern for Christine Quinn, a former speaker of New York City’s city council who was also a former mayoral candidate....

When President Trump was asked for comment regarding the arrest of Hollywood actor Alec Baldwin for assault charges on Friday, he responded with just four simple words. Baldwin, who dresses up and mocks Trump on Saturday Night Live, was arrested and charged for attacking a man over a parking space in the West Village area of Manhattan. Liberal 60-year-old Baldwin has a history of arrests related to his anger management issues.