Free Republic

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Scott Pelley at this debate Saturday night was amazing to watch. This is the anchor of the CBS Evening News, and he thought he had Newt Gingrich twisted in circles over foreign policy. At one point, Pelley got this contorted, smug, all full-of-himself smile on his face while he could not have been more wrong about something. Newt slapped him down and put him in his place, but Pelley to this moment doesn't know that that's what happened! Newt put this guy in his place. Pelley still thinks that he won that little tete-a-tete. I'm convinced he...

Taking a page from Ronald Reagan, Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Saturday sought to use humor to rebound from his much-noted debate flub earlier in the week. That flub, a 53-second brain freeze that was replayed endlessly on news shows, had him forgetting the name of the Department of Energy, the third federal agency he pledges to eliminate. So Perry was quick to cut off CBS’ Scott Pelley, one of the debate moderators in South Carolina, when he began a question, saying, “Governor Perry, you advocate the elimination of the Department of Energy. If you eliminate the Department of Energy...”...

Republican Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s campaign is expressing outrage over an internal CBS memo that they said is proof the network mistreated the Minnesota congresswoman during Saturday night’s CBS News/National Journal Debate. The email was accidentally sent to the Bachmann campaign by CBS News. The campaign decided to release the email to show what they believe was a planned effort to limit questions to Bachmann. Bachmann’s campaign manager blasted CBS for what he called “concrete evidence confirming what every conservative already knows.” “The liberal mainstream media elites are manipulating the Republican debates by purposely suppressing our conservative message and limiting...

Following Saturday’s GOP CBS/National Journal debate, the Michele Bachmann campaign accused CBS News of organizing a biased event by purposefully keeping her questions to a minimum. After accidently receiving an internal email from John Dickerson – the newly appointed political director for CBS News – her campaign released a screenshot of the correspondence to reporters. Via The Hill:  Dickerson was responding to an email sent to CBS News staffers discussing the possibility of booking Bachmann for a webcast interview. The initial email notes that Alice Stewart, Bachmann's spokeswoman, was included in the email chain, but Dickerson appeared not to have...

The first broadcast network presidential debate this year, which ended its national telecast and switched to a choppy livestream feed two-thirds of the way through the event, produced a storm of complaints from viewers across the country and two of the candidates on the no-frills debate stage in Spartanburg, S.C. CBS’s foreign policy debate, co-sponsored by National Journal, offered unusually detailed discussion of policy and a format that was free of many of the literal bells and whistles of more slickly-produced face-offs. But the confusing format — the televised portion for most of the nation ended after an hour and...

f there was a loser on the debate stage tonight, it was CBS. First, they scheduled their debate on a Saturday night between two major football games. Then they decide to only broadcast the first hour of their 90-minute debate. Then their Internet feed failed for the final 30 minutes. This was CBS’s first and only debate — and it showed. Scott Pelley was a terrible moderator. He treated the men who might be the next commander in chief like schoolchildren, cutting them off in mid-sentence, lecturing them to answer his questions. He even lectured Newt Gingrich on policy, telling...

On Wednesday's Early Show, CBS's Betty Nguyen incorrectly reported that Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain had been accused of "sexual assault" by two women. Nguyen later accurately reported that the women actually leveled sexual harassment allegations against Cain. The fill-in news anchor used the erroneous term during a 14-second news brief 37 minutes into the 7 am Eastern hour: "One of two women who accuse Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain of sexual assault wants to speak out. The woman's lawyer say she wants to be released from a confidentiality agreement, so that she can publically respond to Cain's recent claims...

CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley spoke with chief Washington correspondent and "Face the Nation" anchor Bob Schieffer, about the Herman Cain phenomenon. A transcript follows. Pelley: Bob, I wonder how seriously should we take the Cain campaign? Schieffer: I think it has to be taken very seriously at this point, Scott, and here's why. Think about this: Mitt Romney has been plodding along at about 25 percent in the polls and it's like he's been running most of his life. Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, gets into the race, zooms immediately to the top in the polls, has...

Adios commie.

September 17, 2011 House GOP Rejects Obama Jobs Proposals (CBS/AP) WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders say they are rejecting President Barack Obama's jobs proposals to rebuild schools and blighted neighborhoods, and help keep state and local employees on the job. In a memo to GOP lawmakers that was also issued publicly and reprinted in The New York Times, House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and other Republican leaders also objected to the president's proposal for a temporary reduction in payroll taxes, in order to boost consumer spending and increase demand. The GOP leaders say such a...

For Katie Couric, the offer in 2006 to become the anchor of “CBS Evening News” came with another incentive, one she prized almost as highly, according to two of her friends: the chance to report for “60 Minutes,” the newsmagazine that for Ms. Couric stood for the kind of serious journalism she had always aspired to. Regular appearances on “60 Minutes” were written into her $15 million-a-year contract with CBS, but once she arrived at the network, she found a chilly reception from some of the staff members at the venerable program. Some of Ms. Couric’s associates said that the...

Following his three-day bus tour to promote his economic agenda -- and not to mention the debt limit rancor in Washington before that -- President Obama is finally getting some rest and relaxation. On Thursday, he and his family are heading off to Martha's Vineyard, the island off of Massachusetts. They'll be staying at a 28-acre retreat called Blue Heron Farm for about 10 days. There has been criticism of the president's vacation at this time. But how does the number of vacation days the president has spent compare to his predecessors? CBS Radio's Mark Knoller has kept track of...

After showing an image of the sign "To Gaza with Love" from one of the boats of a flotilla planning to challenge the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, Saturday’s CBS Evening News showed a report highlighting the allegedly nonviolent intentions of American activists on board one of the ships - named "The Audacity of Hope" - without noting that, during last year’s anti-Israel flotilla trip, some activists attacked Israeli troops as they attempted to board. CBS correspondent Barry Peterson merely recounted that Israeli troops killed some of the activists without explaining why: Last year, boats ran the blockade. Israeli...

Of all the complaints about Sarah Palin and her bus tour, this one’s easily the strangest. CBS reports that the media has begun to grumble that Palin’s decision to keep them out of the loop on the tour’s stops have created a dangerous working environment for reporters: Since Palin and her team won’t share where the potential candidate is headed, reporters and producers have little choice but to simply stay close to Palin’s bus. This has resulted in scenes of the Palin bus tooling down the highway followed by a caravan of 10 or 15 vehicles – including a massive...

<p>Drudge, Breaking NOW: Obama to show long form birth certificate!</p>

Last weekend, His Presidency Barack Obama was captured making potentially offensive comments to a group of big money donors who had paid large sums of money for special access to His Presidency. We observed that CBS only released “selectively edited” moments from the raw tape. We know how much the mainstream media values complete and full disclosure of recordings of this nature, so we found it curious, to say the least, that there was not one drop of intellectual curiosity from these guardians of media purity regarding the content of the full recording. Maybe CBS’s motive has nothing to do...

I caught the CBS News evening report tonight for the first time in about 2 decades. They led off with a report of Sarah Palin's speech in Wisconsin, and they of course provided liberal spin. They claim there were far more liberals (i.e. union thugs) than Tea Partiers (claiming the thugs surrounded the smaller Tea Party crowd). But something caught my eye during the report, specifically when they did a pan of the "liberal crowd"...but they pulled a Dan Rather by using video footage from some liberal rally prior to the April 5th Wisconsin Supreme Court election.How do I know...

Breaking: CBS News senior political correspondent Jeff Greenfield is leaving the network. In an email to staff Monday night, Greenfield said he will be departing CBS at the end of April. It does not sound like the decision to leave was his own, if the email was any indication: “While I did not initiate this decision, I think it was the right one,” he wrote.

Could it happen here? That's the question on everyone's mind as we watch the nuclear emergency unfold at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. As it turns out, the U.S. government has long been asking the same question. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently provided MSNBC with an updated list of the American plants most at risk of core damage (which can lead to meltdowns and radiation release) in the event of an earthquake. What parts of the country are most at risk? You may be surprised. Most people would assume California plants, built around the turbulent San Andreas fault line, might...