Free Republic

Could Ferguson happen here? Some would say it already did — nearly five decades ago. Days of sometimes violent demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., erupted after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, was shot dead by a police officer Aug. 9, allegedly in self-defense. At the height of the civil rights movement, the Watts riots were triggered after a young black motorist was pulled over and arrested by a white California Highway Patrolman on Aug. 11, 1965, on suspicion of drunk driving. The struggle to arrest him sparked six days of rioting that claimed the lives of 34 people, injured more...

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry devoted much of her show Saturday to the fatal shooting of Michael Brown and the unrest that has followed in Ferguson, Missouri. But perhaps the most moving part of her broadcast came when she looked at the hundreds of other unarmed black men who are killed by police every year. ADVERTISEMENT Harris-Perry began by solemnizing reading off just some of the names of those men before arriving at Michael Brown. “In the past decade alone, these men and hundreds of others have lost their lives to police,” she said. She cited a recent story that said local...

The Press vs. Al GoreHow lazy reporting, pack journalism and GOP spin cost him the election One month after formally kicking off his presidential campaign, Vice President Al Gore paddled down the Connecticut River in New Hampshire on July 22nd, 1999, spreading his green theme of protecting the environment and pausing for a photo op. His message was quickly drowned out, though, when the Washington Times' Bill Sammon reported that local authorities had granted Gore a special favor when they released nearly 4 billion gallons of water from a nearby dam into the drought-stricken river in order to keep the ...

In the wake of the recent surge of violence in northern Iraq as well as the potential coup within the government, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams did his best to push the White House line that President Obama’s summer vacation was full of work.

Hillary Clinton called President Barack Obama on Tuesday to “make sure he knows that nothing she said was an attempt to attack him” when she recently discussed her views on foreign policy in an interview with The Atlantic, according to a statement from a Clinton spokesman. The statement comes amid tension between the Clinton and Obama camps in the wake of the interview. It also comes as Obama and Clinton, his former secretary of state, are due to cross paths at a social gathering Wednesday night in Martha’s Vineyard. In the interview, Clinton dismissed the Obama administration’s self-described foreign policy...

In a remarkably candid interview on Lebanese TV, the head of foreign relations at Hamas’s Information Ministry in Gaza explained how harassment, interrogations and deportations were used to ensure that journalists reporting from Gaza during Operation Protective Edge stuck to Hamas’s official line and did not report “the Israeli narrative”. […] Foreign journalists have regularly complained of being harassed by Hamas authorities in Gaza, directly leading to biased coverage in favor of Islamist terrorists and against Israel. …

Hamas spokesperson Isra Al-Mudallal, said in a TV interview on Friday that journalists who filmed “places from where missiles were launched” were forced by security personnel to stop or leave the Gaza Strip. According to a new report by MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute, Mudallal, told the Lebanese TV station Mayadeen TV by Skype that some journalists “would focus on filming the places from where missiles were launched.” “Thus, they were collaborating with the occupation,” said Mudallal, the head of foreign relations in the Hamas Information Ministry. “These journalists were deported from the Gaza Strip. The security agencies...

BERLIN — German weekly Der Spiegel reports that the country's foreign intelligence agency eavesdropped on calls made by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessor Hillary Clinton. Der Spiegel reported Saturday that the agency, known by its acronym BND, tapped a satellite phone conversation Kerry made in 2013. The magazine says the agency also recorded a conversation between Clinton and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan a year earlier. Without naming its sources, Der Spiegel says the calls were collected accidentally and the three officials weren't directly targeted.

This column concerning the reportage from Jena is exactly what I describe in my novel " A Sense of Duty." The protagonist, rookie police officer Mike Carr, shoots a black organized crime figure who unbeknownst to him is an old high school friend. An award winning journalist,Neil Foster ( a liberal elitist who thinks cops are working class scum), and a local civil rights leader (attempting to revive his career), exploit the incident by completely fabricating a narrative of racist and brutal police conduct. Here is an excerpt: (The scene is a corner bar. The reporter Foster met with a...

A billionaire and a receptionist walk into the IRS bar. They each order a beer. The IRS bartender charges the receptionist $2.50 and the billionaire . . . $2,260. Who got undercharged? If you're Warren Buffett or Tom Brokaw, the answer is the billionaire.

David Gregory is now the poster boy warning for that old adage: be nice to people on your way up because you'll meet them on your way down. And now that Gregory is on the down career escalator because of his quick removal today from both Meet The Press and NBC News as you can read here at Newsbusters, Dylan Byers at Politico has given him a swift kick on his way out the door. Apparently Gregory was not very nice to the folks who worked at NBC News as you can see below. Perhaps Gregory can take this as...

Via the Daily Caller, you would think an eyewitness account of the disappearance of the last American POW in Afghanistan would be easy money for a publisher. But sometimes there are higher considerations. While the U.S. Army weighs whether to bring charges against Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was freed earlier this year after spending nearly five years as a Taliban captive in Afghanistan, six of his former platoon mates are shopping proposals for a book and movie that would render their own harsh verdicts… “I’m not sure we can publish this book without the Right using it to their ends,”...

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — The pastor came one afternoon to survey his church, or what was left of it: remnants of a “welcome” sign and a strip of Christmas garland still tacked to the wall. The gang took the chairs. They took the light fixtures. They took the doors. They had given his family 24 hours to get out and so they did, abandoning their home and the small evangelical church he led. “There was no other way,” Pastor Jorge Rivas said the other day, on the porch of a house in another part of this violent city, where...

Twelve states filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration on Friday seeking to block an Environmental Protection Agency proposal to regulate coal-fired power plants in an effort to stem climate change. The plaintiffs are led by West Virginia and include states that are home to some of the largest producers of coal and consumers of coal-fired electricity. The suit was filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The other plaintiffs are Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming. The E.P.A. rule, announced by President Obama on June...

Part One: Can a Free Biafra Stop the African Islamic Caliphate? In the classic comedy, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," the daughter Toula complains to her mother about her stubborn father being the "head of the house," Maria replied, "Let me tell you something, Toula. The man is the head, but the woman is the neck. And she can turn the head any way she wants." Welcome to America, "We the People" are supposed to be informed and in control, but the media is the "neck," she can turn the focus of Americans to what it wants them to see...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the weekÂ’s top news, including the struggle on Capitol Hill to find a resolution to the political division on the border crisis before Congress leaves for August recess, as well as how these events will affect the November election, plus the outlook for ending the war between Israel and Hamas. (AUDIO-AT-LINK)TRANSCRIPT JUDY WOODRUFF: In Washington, House Republicans were racing to pass something on the border crisis after a day of confusion and chaos on Capitol Hill Thursday. For a taste of what went on...

Robert Kennedy, speaking of John Kennedy, using words they would both probably use to praise John Kerry, said that JFK’s favorite quote was this: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of moral crisis preserve their neutrality.” This quote from Dante, derived from his Inferno, describes the way Kerry performs his role as secretary of State. Kerry clearly envisioned and passionately warned that the people of Israel and Palestine must choose between two alternative futures. The first future is the negotiated creation of a two-state solution that would leave Israel and a new state of...

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) is calling on the Obama administration to impose a travel ban on three West African nations in response to a growing Ebola virus outbreak. The House Foreign Affairs Committee member wants the State Department to bar citizens of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone from entering the United States, including any foreign travelers who have visited those countries in the previous 90 days. He also requested that the ban be expanded to any nation that reports an originating case of the virus, and that restrictions only be lifted 90 days after the last reported case.

GAZA - The idea that one of Hamas’ main command bunkers is located beneath Shifa Hospital in Gaza City is one of the worst-kept secrets of the Gaza war. Muslim Brotherhood Soldiers So why aren’t reporters in Gaza ferreting it out? The precise location of a large underground bunker equipped with sophisticated communications equipment and housing some part of the leadership of a major terrorist organization beneath a major hospital would seem to qualify as a world-class scoop—the kind that might merit a Pulitzer, or at least a Polk. So why isn’t the fact that Hamas uses Shifa Hospital as...

And why reporters won’t talk about it. The idea that one of Hamas’ main command bunkers is located beneath Shifa Hospital in Gaza City is one of the worst-kept secrets of the Gaza war. So why aren’t reporters in Gaza ferreting it out? The precise location of a large underground bunker equipped with sophisticated communications equipment and housing some part of the leadership of a major terrorist organization beneath a major hospital would seem to qualify as a world-class scoop—the kind that might merit a Pulitzer, or at least a Polk. So why isn’t the fact that Hamas uses Shifa...