Free Republic

Chuck Todd told Matt Lauer on Wednesday that the White House was “caught flat-footed” on the backlash against the prisoner swap for Sergeant Bergdahl. “I’ve had a few aides describe it to me as ‘we didn’t know that they were going to Swift Boat Bergdahl’,” Todd said, “And Matt, of course, that’s a reference to that political fight back in 2004 over John Kerry’s military service which became so controversial in that campaign. So there’s some fighting words there.”

WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) — White House aides are accusing soldiers who served with Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl are “swift boating” him following his release over the weekend after five years in captivity. NBC News’ Chuck Todd reported Monday that the White House did not expect this sort of vitriolic backlash exchanging five high-level Taliban members held at Guantanamo Bay for Bergdahl, who left his Army post in 2009 in Afghanistan and was subsequently taken captive. “They did not expect this backlash on Bergdahl himself,” Todd reported on NBC’s “Today.” I’ve had a few aides describe it to me as we didn’t...

What’s an “Islamophobia”-promoting academic to do when there simply aren’t enough hate crimes to sustain the mythical narrative that Muslim-Americans are persecuted for their religion? The Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project (IRDP) at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Race & Gender came up with a brilliant idea for this spring’s Fifth Annual International Islamophobia Conference: they invented a thought crime called “latent Islamophobia.” According to the conference description and “inspired by [the late Columbia professor] Edward Said’s work on Orientalism,” “Islamophobia” can be broken into two categories: latent and manifest: Latent Islamophobia is founded upon an unquestionable certitude...

The Taliban prisoner swap for Bowe Bergdahl might do some good, but fear and anger are getting in the way of a realistic appraisal.Richard Hofstadter opened his 1968 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," with this line: "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds." He continues, "Behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." One wonders...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is re-establishing a law enforcement group to fight those it designates as domestic terrorists, with an announcement expected on Tuesday, Department of Justice officials said. Following hate-motivated shootings such as the one at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, Missouri in April, federal prosecutors have pressed the need to coordinate intelligence of such criminals on a national level, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The group will coordinate cases that involve Americans who may be spurred to violence for political or prejudicial reasons.

Calling slain civil rights hero Harvey Milk a “predator” on its website this week, the fundamentalist Christian group American Family Association (AFA) urged members to refuse any mail postmarked with a recently-released commemorative stamp featuring the late San Francisco supervisor. “Harvey Milk was a very disreputable man and used his charm and power to prey on young boys with emotional problems and drug addiction,” reads the AFA’s press release. “He is the last person we should be featuring on a stamp.”

- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com - Canada On Verge of Banning Christians from Professional LifePosted By Lea Singh On May 30, 2014 @ 12:15 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments An intense struggle is happening in the realm of professional licensing in Canada. The religious freedom of Christians and others is colliding on a grand scale with the “equality rights” of the LGBTQ identity group, and as the tide turns in favor of equality rights, we are starting to witness socially accepted ostracism of Christians by professional bodies.On April 24th, the law society of Canada’s largest province voted against...

Imagine the press letting a Republican or conservative try to get away with trying to avoid uncondtionally calling something as infuriating and outrageous as the Veterans Administration waiting list scandal a real scandal. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did that on Monday (HT Patterico and Real Clear Politics) in an interview with Vox's Ezra Klein, who naturally let it slide right on by:

“Clueless” actress Stacey Dash is joining Fox News as a paid cultural commentator, but the move isn’t going over well with black liberals who think she is being hijacked as the network’s “token” black woman. [snip] “And how is Stacey Dash about to ‘contribute’ to Fox News like straight-to-DVD black cinema aint pay some of them bills…” wrote @eeshurheartout. “Congrats on your new token!” wrote @mandyplz “She truly thinks she’s a white woman,” wrote @ChampagneNii. “Now every self hating black has a show on Fox News,” wrote @funkdigital. [snip]

Meet the well-funded advocacy network of liberal groups that orchestrated the successful ouster of the Benham Brothers from HGTV. Until last week, David and Jason Benham were set to host a new home-renovation show on the Home and Garden Television network, called “Flip It Forward.” But all that changed after an obscure website called Right Wing Watch drew negative attention to the Benham’s conservative views on abortion and gay marriage. The website vilified the hosts with the headline, “HGTV Picks Anti-Gay, Anti-Choice Extremist For New Reality TV Show.” The story shed light on how the hosts’ father, Flip Benham, is...

Just in the last week, in the latest blitz of gay über alles, at the provocation of groups like GLAAD and Right Wing Watch, a newspaperman was sacked in Iowa and an entire show on HGTV was canceled because of editors and two handsome blond brothers adhering to the millennia-old strictures about chastity.If you are a pair of gorgeous brothers dedicating your life to building homes for the poor, but you criticize homosexuality, you must be stripped of your life’s work and publicly humiliated.  But if you are a pair of gorgeous brothers who decide to have unprotected anal sex...

The U.S. Department of Justice wants new authority to hack and search remote computers during investigations, saying the new rules are needed because of complex criminal schemes sometimes using millions of machines spread across the country. Digital rights groups say the request from the DOJ for authority to search computers outside the district where an investigation is based raises concerns about Internet security and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. “By expanding federal law enforcement’s power to secretly exploit ‘zero-day’ vulnerabilities in software and Internet platforms, the proposal threatens to weaken Internet security for all of us,” Nathan...

The Conservative oriented website dedicated to aggregating news from around the world-wide-interwebs, Weasel Zippers, has just lost its primary funding source because… Well… It’s kinda hard to say. According to the site, Google AdSense (an add generator produced by the infamously liberal corporation in Silicon Valley) has cancelled its agreement with the website because of apparent violations to their terms of use. According to Google, the conservative news site has failed to produce an adequate amount of “original content” to continue utilizing the internet advertising tool provided by Google. Of course, the claim seems mildly curious given the fact...

David and Jason Benham said Thursday they were disappointed that HGTV pulled the plug on "Flip it Forward," due to debut in October. After the network announced the show was upcoming, the lobbying group Right Wing Watch labeled David Benham an "anti-gay extremist" and reported on statements he made against homosexuality and gay marriage.

I can't keep up with it. Under Janet Napolitano - and in the MSM then - an act of terrorism became known as (or redefined as) "man-caused disasters." Before that, under the Bush administration, it was defined as an act of "terrorism." In the MSM, now, and to a large degree some Ukrainians are called terrorists. Sometimes they are called anti-Kiev protesters, or sometimes anti-government protesters. Should the MSM call Right Sector and others in Ukraine "terrorists"? One hardly ever even sees the word "fascist." But when you look at the top four news articles cached on Yahoo.com, when entering...

Throughout history, religion has sanctioned and fueled the persecution of homosexuality. That dynamic may be drawing to an end. Polls, clerics, and denominations are shifting. Theology is adapting. Resistance to same-sex marriage is dwindling, and there’s no end in sight. For 15 years, the Ethics and Public Policy Center has hosted the Faith Angle Forum, a regular conference on religion and public life. Several weeks ago, the group met again to discuss current issues. Transcripts of the conference have just been posted on EPPC’s website. They underscore the extent of the anti-gay collapse. The first session, led by papal biographer...

A Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Oregon was thrown out of a meeting with the alternative weekly newspaper Williamette Week after he confronted a reporter for writing “blah blah blah” on his notepad while another GOP candidate was talking.

"If all you have is a hammer," the old saying goes, "everything looks like a nail." Left unsaid is the fact that the real problem isn't the possession of a hammer, but the certitude that all you need is the hammer. In other words, it's a failure of the imagination -- which is a kind of arrogance -- that's really to blame. "I've got my hammer, and that's all I need. Besides, have you ever seen a problem that didn't look like a nail?" This is a version of what academics call "confirmation bias" -- the tendency to accept only...

If you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every...

<p>‘as time goes on, weirdly, I’m growing less liberal. I’m more like, ‘No, religion is ruining the world, you need to stop!’.</p>