Free Republic

Around 9:00 last night, the TV pundits realized that it would no longer do to say that it was an anti-incumbent year: The vast majority of the incumbents losing — all of them in the Senate — were Democrats. Nor could the election be chalked up to red-state reaction. Republicans took Senate seats in Iowa and Colorado, which voted for Obama twice apiece, and governorships in Maryland and Illinois, which last voted Republican in 1988. The wave gave Republicans a larger Senate majority than all but the most confident among them had expected, and added to the ranks of their...

-- Tom Magliozzi, half of the "Click and Clack" team of brothers who hosted NPR's "Car Talk" radio show, died Monday. He was 77. NPR reported the death Monday afternoon. The cause was complications from Alzheimer's disease, the radio network said. In a statement, his brother Ray remembered a jovial partner. "We can be happy he lived the life he wanted to live; goofing off a lot, talking to you guys every week, and primarily, laughing his ass off," he said.

Tom Magliozzi, one of public radio's most popular personalities, died on Monday of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 77 years old. Tom and his brother, Ray, became famous as "Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers" on the weekly NPR show Car Talk. They bantered, told jokes, laughed and sometimes even gave pretty good advice to listeners who called in with their car troubles. If there was one thing that defined Tom Magliozzi, it was his laugh. It was loud, it was constant, it was infectious. Tom and Ray grew up great friends despite a 12-year gap between them. Both...

http://www.journalism.org/interactives/media-polarization/outlet/npr/ See chart at link NPR>"The clear majority of its audience (67%) is left-of-center, and it is a particularly popular source for consistent liberals, who make up 41% of its audience. "

And so NPR is pulling back on using the name of the Washington football team after all. Seven months after NPR editors officially declared that they would continue to use the team's name in news reports, Mark Memmott, the standards editor, issued this guidance to the newsroom Friday: A Word About The Name Of Washington's Football Team We have not changed it significantly, but we have added to our guidance on the name of Washington's NFL team. Here's an update: NPR News does not plan to prohibit the use of the full team name. The team's name is the name...

On the October 12 broadcast of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition, host Ari Shapiro discussed Iran's appeal as a tourist destination with Iranian-born, U.K.-based writer Kamin Mohammadi. While Mohammadi is no regime puppet--she was vocal in her opposition to the 2009 crackdown--her Twitter feed is lately full of anti-Israel rhetoric and government retweets, and she did her best to put an absurdly positive spin on Iran for NPR. Mohammadi praises Iran's history, beauty, and culture, pointing out that parts of the country are quite modern, and that those coexist with artifacts of ancient civilizations. All true--and irrelevant to the question...

"It was a fascinating experience," says the former NPR chief Less than a year after taking the reins as Twitter's head of news, former NPR and NBC News exec Vivian Schiller has exited the company, she announced in a series of tweets on Wednesday in which she described her time at the social network as "a fascinating experience."

NPR--Notorious for Palestinian Revisionism NPR’s political position is heard by many, and its audience is led to sympathize with the Islamic enemies of civilization. Our very future is in upheaval and I challenge NPR’s motives, ethics, and sense of responsibility. I have written NPR (Notorious for Palestinian Revisionism) in the past, regarding its position on the war of Islam against Israel, the Jews and Christians worldwide. Whether it is Hamas, ISIS, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, and even the most ludicrous appellation—“religion of peace,” their goal is the same: global conquest and the spread of Islam and Sharia law. The...

~snip Driving the email barrage was an open letter to me in the liberal Daily Kos by one of its bloggers, Assaf Oron. He wrote that, "I have long suspected - with good evidence - that NPR news does little more than shill for the same interest that dominate our politics and mainstream media, albeit with a high-brow veneer. I think the final proof has arrived today." ~snip

When President Woodrow Wilson was casting about for an attorney general in 1919, his private secretary Joseph Tumulty wrote that the office "had great power politically...we should not trust it to anyone who is not heart and soul with us." Eric Holder's great qualification for the job he has just resigned was that he was with the president he served — heart and soul. His complicated role in Barack Obama's administration was inextricably bound to race – he was the first African-American U.S. attorney general, appointed by the first African-American president. Someday, another black president may name another black attorney...

Last week, Breitbart News revealed a secret video game journalist mailing list used by a clique of influential writers, editors, and bloggers, some of whom attempted to bully their colleagues with it in an attempt to shape the news agenda for political purposes. We can today reveal the complete list of journalists, some 150 key industry figures, on the list. Outlets with representation span the entire video games journalism universe and include Polygon, Ars Technica, Wired, Eurogamer, Destructoid, Kotaku, Joystiq, TechRadar, and many other well-known brands in games publishing. But they also include freelancers and staffers for publications as solidly...

NPR is again feeling Barack Obama’s pain, with a Friday All Things Considered story they headlined “For Obama, August Is the Cruelest Month.” Even the French are mocking his time off. The media now insist Obama is victimized by bad news, not that he's done anything wrong that would create bad news. His approval ratings are lowest in August, suggested NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley, but never fear, “the President's numbers have tended to rebound soon after Labor Day.” Horsley insisted that Obama has vacationed far less than George W. Bush:

Despite the economic recovery, more than 46 million Americans — or one in seven — used a food pantry last year. And a surprisingly high number of those seeking help were households with military members, according to a new survey by Feeding America, which is a network of U.S. food banks. The — conducted in 2013 — found that almost 620,000 of the households using Feeding America services have at least one member currently in the military. That's one quarter of all U.S. military households. , who's president and CEO of the Maryland Food Bank in Baltimore, says she isn't...

Until this year, the world had recorded 1,640 deaths from Ebola since the virus was discovered in 1976. Then Ebola appeared in West Africa. So far this year, 887 people have died of Ebola in West Africa, the World Health Organization Monday. The graphs include only years in which 50 or more Ebola deaths were reported. To put that into perspective, more than a third of all people known to have died from the virus have died in the current outbreak. And the outbreak is still spreading at a frightening rate. Last week, there were more than 200 new cases...

NPR’s education team sent out a curious tweet Wednesday that prompted an online backlash. “I reach out to diverse sources on deadline,” the tweet from @npr_ed said. “Only the white guys get back to me.” The tweet seemed uncharacteristic for NPR, an outlet that fired analyst Juan Williams after he made remarks about feeling “nervous” if he sees people dressed in “Muslim garb” on an airplane.Kamenetz said she had mistakenly sent the tweet from the NPR education account instead of her own and that she regretted it.

Last week National Public Radio (lavished with over $4 billion by U.S. taxpayers over the past decade) ran a week-long “special series” on—and from—Cuba. Such was its propaganda value for the Castro regime that Cuba’s own KGB-founded and mentored media gleefully ran some of the programs —and in their pristinely unedited form. Given totalitarian media practices that’s quite a “compliment” to NPR’s producers. To wit: "Everything within the Revolution, nothing outside of it." (Fidel Castro speech, June, 1961.) "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." (Benito Mussolini, Doctrine of Fascism, 1932.) In his famous speech...

That National Public Radio has nice things to say about socialism shouldn’t be surprising. After all, “Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public,” explains NPR’s own website. “Elimination of federal funding would result in fewer programs, less journalism…and eventually the loss of public radio stations.” NPR’s brand of journalism came under fire most recently when Republican Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn sponsored a bill in 2011 to defund the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. “Since 2001, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds programming for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, has received...

You already know how the national polling looks, but those numbers include the opinions of many Americans whose votes will have zero impact on the much-watched battle for control of the Senate. NPR clears out New Yorkers, Californians and Texans (among others) from its sample, focusing instead on the following 12 states: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina and West Virginia. A look at the results, bearing in mind that presidential approval rating has historically been the single most significant variable in midterm election cycles: That would be (38/58) overall, including an...

Lots of tense, awkward laughter on NPR today! Hillary Clinton's book tour took her to "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross this afternoon, where the two got into it a bit over if and when Clinton "evolved," as they say, on the issue of gay marriage, or whether she held her personal opinions in favor of equality until they were politically viable. The answer is: Clinton is not telling. But it wasn't for Gross's lack of trying. "So what's it like when you're in office and you have to do all these political calculations to not be able to support something...

As part of a prisoner swap to free Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the United States agreed to transfer five Guantánamo detainees to Qatar. NPR's Tom Bowman received a list of the prisoners being released from a Pentagon official. According to documents leaked to the organization WikiLeaks, all five prisoners were high-ranking Taliban officials. Some were considered high-risk and "likely to post a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies." U.S. officials said working with the government of Qatar, they had ameliorated some of those risks, because the detainees will face restrictions on their movements and activities. Using those leaked...