Free Republic

Politico’s David Nather cast the most mentioned Republican presidential contenders as un-presidential on Friday in a story headlined “GOP 2016ers on Ebola: Panic.” Only Rick Perry was the responsible one, he implied: For once, President Barack Obama and Texas Gov. Rick Perry are on the same page. At separate briefings on the Ebola crisis, Obama administration officials and Perry have delivered the same message: Don’t panic — the health authorities know what they’re doing. But for other Republicans — and conservative media outlets — it’s time for panic. The likely 2016 Republican presidential candidates — except for Perry — are...

A number of center-right and New Media outlets have noted Politico Magazine's disingenuousness in the opening photograph in its "Race and the Modern GOP" article. At the item's top is the iconic "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" photo showing onetime segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace "try(ing) to block the entry of two black students" into the University of Alabama. The aforementioned article title appears beneath the words "History Dept." The magazine is clearly trying to lead anyone not old enough to remember or anyone unfamiliar with U.S. history to believe that Wallace, who ran for president as a Democrat in...

Leading astrologers say that Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky is destined for a future working on social justice and will enjoy a strong relationship with her proud grandparents, Hillary and Bill. After Chelsea Clinton and Mark Mezvinsky’s daughter was born at 7:03 pm at Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on Friday, POLITICO asked astrologers to weigh in on what is written in the stars for the former first daughter’s first daughter.

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Brace yourselves. It looks as though it's going to be 2008 and 2012 all over again -- where a 50 year-old GOP haircut and a 35 year-old GOP rock are big news but Hillary will get a sweet mainstream media pass when it comes to vetting her past and formative years. Worse, any attempt by New Media to do the vetting the MSM won't will be met with equal parts wrist-flicking and mockery. Oh, and once again, Politico will lead the Democratic defense. The tweets below are written by high-level Politico staffers. Politico presents itself as an objective news outlet...

Lois Lerner says she is no Jeffrey Dahmer. The former Internal Revenue Service official referenced the infamous cannibalistic serial killer as she broke her silence for the first time about last year’s IRS scandal. Lerner told the website Politico that she has been the recipient of threats and hate mail, describing how one person called her “the worst person ever in the United States.” I just thought, ‘Boy, worse than Jeffrey Dahmer?’” Lerner quipped. Lerner, who led the tax-exempt division of the IRS, was forced out of the agency after she found herself at the center of the scandal over...

Politico obviously had no problem finding Lois Lerner for an exclusive interview that it published on Monday. So why can’t the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ronald C. Machen, Jr., find Lois Lerner so that a federal grand jury can interview her? Perhaps the Obama administration doesn’t want Lerner answering any real questions about what happened at the IRS when it was targeting conservative organizations. While Lois Lerner gave a lengthy interview to Politico in the presence of her legal defense team, including her husband, who is also a lawyer and a partner at a major law firm,...

Lois Lerner. Hero. Servant. Brownie-baking puppy lover. Sister of the Blessed State. This is about all a person reading Politico’s new exclusive “interview” with the former head of the I.R.S. division that oversees tax-exempt groups, might take away. “I didn’t do anything wrong” claims Lerner, who, like any innocent person, is flanked by a major law firm’s partner, two personal attorneys and her husband – a lawyer. “I’m proud of my career and the job I did for this country.” And in around 3,700 obsequious words, Politico seems to agree. What exactly did she do for her country, you ask?...

Imagine the absurdity of reporting on supporters of Richard Nixon during the Watergate hearings with no mention of the White House Plumbers who performed the break-in at the complex. Such is the case now with Politico reporting on groups of Hillary Clinton supporters who will be defending her during the Congressional Benghazi hearings which makes absolutely no mention of the Sharyl Attkisson's report about how Hillary's aides at the State Department scrubbed the Benghazi documents of possibly incriminating information. To get an idea how ridiculous it is for Politico to avoid the Benghazi elephant in the room, let us first...

There is apparently no more important story or issue right now at the Politico than Ted Widmer's question about our national anthem: "Is It Time to Ditch the Star-Spangled Banner?" It is currently the lead item at the web site, complete with a huge picture of the American flag. The "beheading by ISIL of a British aid worker" and Wisconsin's court-granted ability to implement voter-ID in the fall elections are both apparently less important. - See more at: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2014/09/13/politico-lead-story-it-time-ditch-star-spangled-banner#sthash.B4XsZOqY.dpuf

The science is settled. General Electric Vox is now widely recognized as a tedious Web laughingstock. I could Voxsplain it to you with a whole bunch of annoying and condescending Voxcards but others have already done so including James Taranto last month in the American Spectator. However, while his criticism and that of others might be Voxsplained away by founder Ezra Klein as just having a political axe to grind, now even the liberal Politico has written Vox off as mostly hype and little substance as you can see in the article by Dylan Byers:

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...

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...

Polls from major networks, researchers and newspapers agree: America’s in a bad mood. In just one week, polls found politicians of all stripes are hitting approval numbers with record lows. The president finds himself roughly as popular as a trip to the dentist. The entire Democratic Party gets the thumbs down. Oh, and so does the Republican Party. But it doesn’t stop there. Americans are also bummed out about the future in general, especially the economy. Things are so low that even an old favorite, sugar, polled poorly. (See the latest congressional polls from POLITICO's Polling Center) Pollsters say it...

Joe Scarborough on Thursday had harsh words for Israel’s actions in Gaza, saying the country was engaging in “indiscriminate” killing. “This is asinine,” said the MSNBC host and former Republican congressman. “This continued killing of women and children in a way that appears to be indiscriminate is asinine.”

“This was a not-so-subtle message delivered by the el-Sissi regime that the ties between the United States and Egypt have cooled considerably,” Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told TheBlaze on Wednesday. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki brushed off any concerns about the security screening, tweeting that Kerry was focused on the objective of his mission – securing a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. The Jewish-American news site the Algemeiner termed the incident “symbolic,” describing it in part as “humiliation in Egypt.” The International Business Times observed that foreign governments “normally trust U.S....

Reading this Politico item on Obama's botched handling of immigration policy, one would think Democrats are all for embracing scores of illegal immigrant children now in the U.S. for an indeterminate period of time. Obama's foes on border crisis: Democrats “They sure didn’t check with me,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “I don’t know who they checked with, but I just think it was kind of a quick reaction without really thinking about the humanitarian aspects of this.” In fact, many prominent Democrats are not only taking the Obama administration...

In a recent Politico op-ed as detached from reality as her political views, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz wrote, “Come November, voters will have a choice between a Democratic Party trying to fix our nation’s problems and a Republican Party interested only in standing in our way.” I’d like to know what Democratic Party she’s talking about. Because it’s certainly not the one that controls the White House and the U.S. Senate today. It’s certainly not the Democratic Party she belongs too. If that party is “trying to fix our nation’s problems,” they clearly don’t know what they’re doing. Consider...

CNN’s Van Jones went head to head Tuesday with Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann over the border crisis, saying the congresswoman crossed the line in scapegoating the surge of unaccompanied migrant children for crimes committed by other undocumented immigrants. “Are you scapegoating every one of these kids?” Jones asked Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, on CNN’s “Crossfire.” “Well, hold on a second. There are lines that can’t be crossed here. I’m sorry congresswoman, I’m sorry congresswoman. There are lines that can’t be crossed here.” Bachmann, who acknowledged that 57,000 children have crossed America’s southern border into the country in recent months, also...

Former Rep. Ron Paul said the law enforcement that swarmed around Boston in the days following the marathon bombings was scarier than the actual terrorist attack. “The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” he said on the Lew Rockwell website, Politico reported. “This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.” The terror attacks on April 15 in Boston killed three and injured 264. Mr. Paul, a former libertarian political candidate who served in Congress as...

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank set off a flurry of outraged tweets on Monday night after posting a highly critical recap of a panel event at the Heritage Foundation that, he says, "deteriorated into the ugly taunting of a woman in the room who wore an Islamic head covering." Video of that panel has since surfaced and -- in my view -- Milbank grossly misrepresented the nature of that exchange. The woman in question, Saba Ahmed, an American University law student, does not seem to have been "taunted." Both panelists who responded to her accepted the premise of her question...