Free Republic

Timeline: February 26, 2012 - George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain calls 911 to report "a suspicious person" in the neighborhood. He is instructed not to get out of his SUV or approach the person. Zimmerman disregards the instructions. Moments later, neighbors report hearing gunfire.

New York (CNN) -- Is Rush Limbaugh becoming a relic, a human version of "Mad Men," except without the style or cool clothes? Has Limbaugh become as dated as Jazzercise or "Macarena?" All you need to do is look at the bottom line to see that Limbaugh is in trouble. Limbaugh once raked in the big bucks for his radio syndicator, Cumulus. But last week, Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey made it clear those days are over. Dickey reported that Cumulus had lost millions of dollars in ad sales because many advertisers no longer want to be associated with Limbaugh. According...

CNN has obtained an e-mail sent by a top aide to President Barack Obama about White House reaction to the deadly attack last September 11 on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that apparently differs from how sources characterized it to two different media organizations. The actual e-mail from then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes appears to show that whomever leaked it did so in a way that made it appear that the White House was primarily concerned with the State Department's desire to remove references and warnings about specific terrorist groups so as to not...

WASHINGTON -- CNN's John King says he is embarrassed after wrongly reporting last week that a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings was arrested, calling the mistake a "double kick in the head" because he's a Boston native. "When you do something like this, it's embarrassing," King, the network's chief national correspondent, told WTOP on Tuesday. "The one thing you have to do is look straight in the camera and say, 'We were wrong.'"

Snap shot in case they change it.

(Reuters) - Time has tapped U.S. President Barack Obama for its Person of the Year for the second time, citing his historic re-election last month as symbolic of the nation's shifting demographics and the rise of younger, more diverse Americans.

The case of Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash is, as sex scandals sometimes are, poised on the cusp of legally actionable and none of our damn business. (See also Petraeus, David, et al.) Clash, 52, acknowledges having had a relationship with a young man, now 24, while he was over the age of consent. His accuser says it began when he was 16. Clash has taken a leave of absence from Sesame Street while responding to the allegation. If his lover was under the age of consent, that’s a matter for the law. If he was over—whatever you personally think of...

...Historians may remember Obama as the nation’s first black president, but he’s also a religious pioneer. He’s not only changed people’s perception of who can be president, some scholars and pastors say, but he’s also expanding the definition of who can be a Christian by challenging the religious right’s domination of the national stage. Obama is a progressive Christian who blends the emotional fire of the African-American church, the ecumenical outlook of contemporary Protestantism, and the activism of the Social Gospel, a late 19th-century movement whose leaders faulted American churches for focusing too much on personal salvation while ignoring the...

In a rare example of political unity, both the Romney and the Obama campaigns have expressed concern to the Commission on Presidential Debates about how the moderator of the Tuesday town hall has publicly described her role, TIME has learned. While an early October memorandum of understanding between the Obama and Romney campaigns and the bipartisan commission sponsoring the debates suggests CNN‘s Candy Crowley would play a limited role in the Tuesday night session, Crowley, who is not a party to that agreement, has done a series of interviews on her network in which she has suggested she will assume...

Simon Baz is a Lebanese American hero from Dearborn, Michigan Meet the new Green Lantern, a Muslim-American who wears an Arabic tattoo on the same arm as his power ring. DC Comics is introducing its newest superhero in “Green Lantern #0” Wednesday — and Simon Baz is likely to be turning comic book fans’ heads faster than a speeding bullet. “In general, when you think about Arabs and Muslims in main roles in pop culture, they’re always the villains,” said Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York. “We're always the hijackers. We're always the bad...

The notion that liberals are smarter than conservatives is familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. The College Democrats are said to be ugly, smug and intellectual; the College Republicans, pretty, belligerent and dumb. There's enough truth in both stereotypes that the vast majority of college students opt not to join either club. But are liberals actually smarter? A libertarian (and, as such, nonpartisan) researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has just written a paper that is set to be published in March by the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. The...

(Reuters) - Time magazine and CNN said on Thursday they were reinstating journalist Fareed Zakaria after suspending him last week for plagiarism. Time said in a statement that it believed Zakaria made an "unintentional error" in what was an "isolated incident" in a recent column on gun control for the magazine that he took from another writer. "We look forward to having Fareed's thoughtful and important voice back in the magazine with his next column in the issue that comes out on September 7," Time said in a statement. Cable news channel CNN said that after a thorough internal review...

CNN has issued an apology for playing a song titled “Stupid Girls” before a segment about Sarah Palin. “The music selection was a poor choice and was not intended to be linked to any news story. We regret any perception that they were planned together,” a CNN spokesperson told the blog site Mediate. The song by Pink was the lead-in to a story about the former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate supporting Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy, who is facing public backlash for opposing same-sex marriage.

Influence is neutral. By itself it means having a profound effect on something, but that something can be good or bad. Therefore, I can’t argue with Time Magazine’s list of The 20 Most Influential Americans of All Time that happens to include the person who has most influenced the destruction of humanity, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. I have to agree with Time’s assessment that she is one of the most influential Americans of all time because her negative influence has been responsible for the deaths of millions, far exceeding that of Hitler’s influence in World War II, whom we...

Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., responded to George Lopez's profanity-filled tirade against him by telling the comedian to come meet with him. "Get some guts, come down here and meet me face to face. Let's see how you act then," Arpaio, known as "America's Toughest Sheriff," told ABC affiliate KNXV. Lopez has no comment regarding Arpaio's invitation, according to his publicist. Lopez's attack on Arapio was part of the comedian's "It's not me, it's you" standup comedy show on HBO Saturday night. The rant came after Lopez joked that Mitt Romney is Latino but won't admit it. Lopez's...

Anderson Cooper has some news to share. "The fact is, I'm gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn't be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud," the CNN anchor wrote Monday in an open letter to his longtime friend Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast. The host of Anderson Cooper: 360, 45, also says that he has waited until now to announce the fact because, "As long as a journalist shows fairness and honesty in his or her work, their private life shouldn't matter." Cooper, who also hosts his own syndicated talk daytime show Anderson, addressed...

The producers behind HBO's "Game of Thrones" would've been better off had they simple said what is likely the truth, that they hate George W. Bush and impaled his prosthetic head on a pole for the kind of childish shits and giggles the Secret Service might want to look into. Instead, they offer absurd explanations that, in my opinion, only prove what sniveling weasals (sic) they really are:

Barack Obama keeps desperately pounding the entertainment industry's ATMs in Hollywood and Manhattan, while our manufacturers of make-believe have absolutely refused to expel their vicious hatred of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. You wonder if, on any level, Obama is upset or chagrined or even embarrassed. Two examples have shown their ugly heads -- one of them severed. HBO -- with Bill Maher as the face of their political analysis is a global leader in burning Bush-Cheney hatred -- expressed surprise and embarrassment when it was discovered their violence-drenched series "Game of Thrones" included a scene with a model...

The Man of Steel? Lois Lane's lover? DC Comics has jumped the shark - maybe. But the DC Comics co-publisher appears to be contemplating changing the sexual orientation of an "established character:" One question asked at the DC panel today at the Kapow comic convention in London, was about DC co-publisher Dan DiDio's interview with The Advocate. Specifically over the decision not to change any character's sexual orientation when relaunching the DC Universe. At the time Dan stated they would introduce new LGBT characters rather than switch orientation, but the question asked why DC would switch race, size, age,...

WASHINGTON -- I first heard it two, perhaps two and a half years ago. A sage sitting in his New York City office pronounced it. Said the sage to me: "This is going to be the dirtiest presidential campaign in history." I would pass on my prescient friend's name, but he is a gentleman of high profile. It would be best if he were to continue his life unmolested by the Living Saint in the White House, whom a benighted majority of Americanos deposited there in 2009. Now, roughly six months from Election Day, I fear my friend was right....

Time magazine is out with its latest cover, one that’s sure to get its fair share of attention. Headlined “Are You Mom Enough?”, it features a blonde, skinny jean-wearing woman — and a preschool-age boy unmistakably latched on to her breast.The cover goes with the magazine’s feature story on “attachment parenting” — a philosophy designed to foster a secure bond to the child. Co-sleeping, or the “family bed,” and breastfeeding well past babyhood are sometimes the hallmarks of attachment parenting. The mother pictured on the cover is Jamie Lynne Grumet of Los Angeles and her 3-year-old son. “I don’t consider...

Does this cover go too far? (Photo: Time.com)The headline reads, "Are You Mom enough?" But if that wasn't enough to fan the flames of the Mommy Wars, there's the photo that goes with it: A pretty young woman wearing skinny jeans and a tank top, nursing her nearly 4-year-old son. It's meant to illustrate a story about Dr. William Sears and attachment parenting but, given that there's more to that movement than extended breastfeeding, it seems as if Time magazine was going for sensationalism and shock value. It's working. >>Warning: pic at the link<<

HBO's new film "Game Change" is thoroughly sourced, fair and balanced. It humanizes former Gov. Sarah Palin while letting even Democratic viewers get to know the woman behind the headlines. Balderdash. Big Hollywood has been tracking the film for some time, debunking its obvious lies and shredding HBO's pitiful defense of what is a politically motivated hatchet job. HBO has every right to create any kind of programming it wishes. And responsible media outlets have a duty to let viewers know when a film bears very little resemblance to the truth.

Here’s a blast from the past. Remember Eason Jordan? Every conservative political blogger worth his/her salt knows and remembers who he is. Former CNN head Eason Jordan is the disgraced journalist who admitted in a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece titled “The News We Kept to Ourselves” that he deliberately and intentionally whitewashed Saddam Hussein’s atrocities and regurgitated Hussein propaganda for a decade in exchange for access. Let me underscore that: In 2003, after the U.S.-led Coalition invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein, Jordan confessed that CNN had deliberately reported Baathist propaganda during the Saddam era...

Regular readers of Time magazine this week found in their mailbox yet another pile of leftist tripe in the vein of "the Constitution is a living document." This week's cover article by managing editor Richard Stengel is a freak show of anti-Constitutional babble including an assertion that the Constitution was not intended to limit government: "If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so...The truth is, the Constitution massively strengthened the central government of the U.S. for the simple reason that it established one where none had existed before."

Just finisjed watching HBO's Too Big To Fail. Its movie about the 2008 financial crisis and I have a question for those who've seen it and who has a better working knowledge of the events that led up to the 2008 crisis. How accurate are the facts portrayed in this HBO film? Knowing HBO's left leaning views and they clearly tried to make the repubs out to be villainous but all that aside, how did they do factually? Reason I ask is, if they did their homework and presented the business facts and events that led up to the 2008...

Today CNN quoted Rush Limbaugh, who said "Thank God for President Obama." What CNN did not make clear, however, was Rush was being HIGHLY sarcastic during his monologue and was thanking him for saying one thing and doing another. This is, of course, a fine example of what we are fighting in terms of MSM bias. CNN basically lied to their entire viewing public without actually lying. The implication is that Rush was thankful for Obama and what he did in terms of bringing Osama to justice...which anyone who actually heard the monologue can tell you is not true.

Kamila Remisova Vesinova and her team of researchers from the Czech Archeological Society believe they have unearthed the remains of an early homosexual man. The remains date from around 2900-2500 B.C., on the outskirts of Prague. That claim stems from the fact the 5,000-year old skeleton was buried in a manner reserved for women in the Corded Ware culture: its head was pointed east rather than west, and its remains were surrounded by domestic jugs rather than by hammers, flint knives and weapons that typically accompany male remains....

The weather seems to be going berserk, with more snow dumped on our beleaguered Northeastern cities in a month than in a year, paralyzing business and our lives. Records are being broken even as we speak. Common sense says that it's the freezing cold that is behind the freaky weather. But physics says otherwise. Basically, snowstorms in this region arise from the collision of cold Arctic air from Canada moving south and bumping up against warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, causing water vapor to condense and freeze and then form snowstorms, which travel up the Northeast corridor....

When Ellen DeGeneres dances with Wolf, you know the TV cable news world has boogied right on past another respectability barrier. Not that Blitzer, CNN news' unflappable Iron Man, doesn't deserve to have some fun on Ellen's show. But as CNN advertises its "objectivity" in the face of stiff competition from blatantly polarized and more popular cable networks, it risks stepping onto a different slippery slope: irrelevant circus act. And I'm not talking about reporter John King's weird relationship with his digitized, political blingtronics board. "Black people love Wolf Blitzer!" shouts CNN's hyper-animated morning news anchor, Tony Harris. Wait. Isn't...

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was a binge drinker who had a pornography habit or fetish in the 1980s, then changed radically when he stopped drinking alcohol, his former girlfriend told CNN on Monday. Lillian McEwen, who dated Thomas for several years before he was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1991, provided CNN's "Larry King Live" program with a harsh depiction of Thomas. She said when they first met, he might have been a "raving alcoholic" who used pornography to help fulfill sexual fantasies, but then gave up drinking and transformed into an angry, obsessive man who bullied his...

Reagan and Goldwater Would Be Considered 'RINOs' Today, Says Meghan McCain; CNN Doesn't Challenge Her Claim By Matt Hadro Created 10/01/2010 - 15:39 Meghan McCain apparently thinks there will be a "bloodletting" in the GOP in the next election, because the party has no room for controversial socially liberal figures like her. Appearing on CNN's "American Morning" Thursday, McCain criticized the current state of the Republican Party, which she believes is too conservative and narrow-minded to include more moderate and independent thinkers like herself. This focus, McCain warned, will cut down on the number of party voters. When the subject...

Sarah Palin could be President Obama's savior. When it comes to the 2012 presidential race, a new poll suggests President Obama could lose - unless he's running against Sarah Palin. The Politico/George Washington University Battleground Poll shows a majority of Americans are considering voting against Mr. Obama. 44 percent of those surveyed say they will vote to replace Mr. Obama and 13 percent say they'll consider voting for someone else. Only 38 percent say he deserves re-election. Voters are down on the president for lots of reasons, but especially his policies. By double digits, they disapprove of his new health...

Jon Voight appeared on Mike Huckabee's talk show and slammed Time magazine calling the publication anti-Semitic.

The stock market may be dragging, but home prices are soaring, fueling a national obsession with real estate. Your house is now your piggy bank. —“Home Sweet Home,” Time Magazine, June 2005 Buying a house is supposed to make us better citizens, better investors and better off. But that American Dream may well be a fantasy. —“The Case Against Homeownership,” Time Magazine, September 2010 Longtime readers of NotMakingThisUp know exactly where we’re going with this—or at least the general direction. But before we get there, let’s recap the story so far. All human beings—and especially those creatures residing on Wall...

Americans, says Time magazine, are too dumb to appreciate the wonders of President Barack Obama's $787 billion "stimulus" package. Gobsmacked by polls that show Americans don't believe government is smart enough to take money from taxpayers and give it to those it considers deserving, Time says: Voters tell "pollsters that even programs that have clearly helped (emphasis added) the economy, like the $787 billion stimulus, did no such thing."

The blue Chevy Cobalt broke down amid the mountains of Montana in an area where there was no cell phone reception. The Muslims in the car, on a cross-country journey for the holy month of Ramadan, approached a bushy-bearded fisherman. It would be another test of a question they wondered when they first set off from New York three weeks earlier: Is America still the accepting nation that embraced our forebears or has it reached a new level of intolerance?

(CNN) -- As the blue Chevy Cobalt crept toward the edge of the property in Chula, Georgia, a palpable nervousness wafted through the cramped car. Three men, straight out of central casting from "Deliverance," craned their necks toward our vehicle. A 30-by-50-foot Confederate flag waved 120 feet in the air. Nothing says "Welcome to the South" quite like the old battle flag. We were quite the sight for this rural stop along Interstate 75: two olive-skinned Americans on a mission; an African-American photographer; and me, a white boy from the Bible Belt. (snip) Already, the road trip has been a...

..."Fareed Zakaria GPS" opened with a debate about the controversial mosque slated...in Manhattan. It ended with a monologue in which the host seemed to imply that Hezbollah’s "respect" for Jews could be a model for Americans concerned with the mosque plans. In that final segment, Zakaria said:I wanted you to see this. This is the Magen Abraham synagogue. It's not in Miami. It's not in Tel Aviv. It's in Beirut. That's right, Beirut, Lebanon. The synagogue is just now emerging from a painstaking restoration project...So why did this nation, often teetering on the brink of religious hostilities and hostilities with...

Jocelyne Cesari, in a special column for CNN’s website, wrote a piece called, “Islam is a religion, not a terror ideology”. The piece is full of mistakes and assertions that are based in liberal’s hopes not actual fact. Let’s dissect this piece of wishful thinking one lie at a time. She writes, “Opposition to Islamic centers and mosques in the United States shows remarkable similarities to anti-Islamic movements in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, where people also have sought to prohibit new mosques. Last December in Switzerland, citizens voted in a referendum to prohibit new minarets.” There is good reason...

Should Muslims be allowed to build a mosque at Ground Zero? Merely posing the question is an act of deliberate distortion. As its defenders point out, the Community Center at Park51 will occupy not a solitary inch of the 16-block site on which the Twin Towers stood. Once built, the center will indeed house a mosque, "open and accessible to all" — but also a swimming pool, basketball court, auditorium, library, day care, restaurant and cooking school. The center is being built by a private organization on land it legally owns. Twenty-nine out of 30 Lower Manhattan community board members...

Washington (CNN) -- Members of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission shouted at each other Friday over the Justice Department's decision to drop most of the charges in a 2008 incident in which black militants confronted voters at a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, polling place, leading to charges of voter intimidation. Conservative commission members accused the Justice Department of "stonewalling" the commission's investigation into the dismissal, and called a Justice Department's response to requests for information "breathtaking and insulting." A liberal commission member, in turn, dismissed those complaints as the "last gasps of a conservative majority of this commission." At the end of...

Here is video of CNN anchors John Roberts and Kiran Chetry essentially “rolling their eyes” even as they report on the accusation that Sarah Palin “rolled her eyes” at a teacher she was having a debate with in Homer, Alaska. Palin encountered the teacher as she walked through town. The woman had a huge banner that attacked Palin as the “worst governor ever.” Palin engaged the woman in debate, and when learning the woman was a teacher, she appears to raise her eyebrows and look over at daughter, Bristol. Now, the media is attacking her for “rolling her eyes” at...

Could letting your man sleep with another woman help your relationship? Author and former mistress Holly Hill thinks so. "One of the main things that I have learned is that a woman that negotiates infidelity with her partner is far more powerful than a woman who is sitting home wondering why he's late from the office Christmas party," she says. "It's better to walk the dog on a leash than let it escape through an unseen hole in the back fence." Hill's memoir, "Sugarbabe" details her yearlong adventure with a series of so-called "sugar daddies." The book sold 24,000 copies...

Not just her nose, though: They ordered her husband to saw off her ears too for the crime of running away from home. Time’s editor insists that “We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it,” but that’s nonsense, of course. The image is as stark an argument as you’re likely to see for continuing the war, which is why lefties naturally have been griping about it all day. Some offer legit complaints — instead of putting a mutilated girl on the cover to make the...

If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would. But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, that isn’t what you’d do at all. In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed...

CNN has been marketing themselves as the "unbiased, neither left or right" news network. Yet, you have this quote from the Hotair story about the JOURNOLIST listsrv: "Update: But was the campaign effective? Ed Driscoll put together a video showing the correlation of this effort on Journolist and the declaration by CNN that it would be a “Wright-free zone.” Correlation isn’t causation, but this is a pretty interesting juxtaposition." It is clear that CNN was influenced by the JOURNOLIST effort, but you don't get this kind of results without someone on the inside (working for CNN) actively participating. So here...

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign. The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public –...

Un-friggen-real, does he even understand how obnoxious and offensive this sounds ?

One hundred thousand faithful Americans are telling Glenn Beck that enough is enough. This summer as Beck travels the United States solo and with Bill O'Reilly, Faithful America--a multi-faith justice organization--has rallied its members to push back against Beck's anti-Christian-social-justice message. When Beck makes stops in South Carolina, New York, New Jersey, and Washington D.C., the group's provocative new ad will follow his trail and challenge his words as “piecemeal gospel” on local Christian radio stations.....