Free Republic

H/t Kimberly M. Did the Code Pink members who interrupted John McCain's speech last night use MSNBC press badges to get into the hall? Not according to Code Pink itself, which claims the two women "obtained passes to the convention from disaffected Republicans." Right. There is another much more intriguing explanation out there. According to Shay at Booker Rising, which describes itself a newsite for black moderates and black conservatives [emphasis added]: "I took the shuttle bus back to Minneapolis, and I overheard a convention organizer named Phil telling a convention delegate that the protesters on Wednesday night got through...

September 2, 2008, 10:32 pm Alaska Party Official Says Palin Was Not a Member By The New York Times The chairwoman of an Alaskan political party that advocates a vote on the state’s secession from the union said Tuesday that she had been mistaken when she said Gov. Sarah Palin was a member of the group. A front-page story in The New York Times on Tuesday and articles in other news media reported that Ms. Palin was a member of the Alaska Independence Party for two years in the 1990’s. The information in the Times article was based on a...

Wednesday, August 13, 2008 Obama creates the illusion of Republicans for Obama: scrapes barrel with 2 unknown GOP discards & a NY lib with dodgy friends Democrats for McCain including many of the millions who form part of the Just Say No Deal/ PUMA/ and NoBama coalitions are providing a solid block of support for John McCain. Not to be outdone Obama today, with great media fanfare, announced his Republicans for Obama group. This is another desperate attempt to reassure Democrat super-delegates that Obama is commanding broad support across the country, especially from Republicans who Obama argues would never rally...

A trio of Republicans have defected from their party's likely presidential nominee and kicked off an effort to garner support for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. The group, called Republicans for Obama, is led by two moderate Republicans -- James Leach, a former U.S. representative from Iowa, and Lincoln Chafee, a former U.S. senator from Rhode Island -- along with Rita Hauser, a prominent fund-raiser for President George W. Bush. Their reasons for crossing party lines are diverse, ranging from the war in Iraq to overspending in Washington, and signal unhappiness not just with the candidacy of Republican Sen. John...

Over the past couple years, we’ve noticed a suspicious number of ticket camera editorials by the Orlando Sentinel. After looking more closely, we noticed that nearly every editorial in the Sentinel was strongly in favor of installing ticket cameras. Furthermore, we noticed that nearly every pro-camera article was written by one member of the Sentinel’s Editorial Board, George Diaz.This seemed odd, so we decided to look into it further.After some quick research, we discovered that George Diaz appeared at a symposium held by The National Campaign To Stop Red Light Running in late 2007.As we covered on this blog previously,...

New York Times publishes correction... 48 years late US Navy Airforce Major John McCain lying on a bed in a Hanoi hospital No one can accuse The New York Times of papering over its mistakes. America's most famous newspaper today issued a formal correction to a review of a Broadway production of West Side Story published no less than 48 years ago. In a further sign of just how seriously the newspaper takes its role as a newspaper of record, the "Gray Lady" also confessed that it had wrongly described John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, as a "former fighter...

LOS ANGELES - Local water director Xavier Alvarez was sentenced to three years' probation and fined $5,000 in federal court Monday morning for falsely claiming he was awarded the Medal of Honor. MP3 Audio: Alvarez Medal of Honor claimBefore he was sentenced, Alvarez told Judge R. Gary Klausner that he was "very remorseful" for his false claims of military valor. "I'd like to apologize to everyone in this whole nation," said Alvarez, who represents south Pomona Xavier Alvarez. (Staff photo) on the Three Valleys Municipal Water District board. As part of Alvarez's terms of probation, the court recommended he perform...

Quote: In a handout picture released on the news website of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, four long and medium range missiles rise into the air after being test-fired at an undisclosed location in the Iranian desert on July 9, 2008. Iran today test-fired a missile it said is capable of reaching Israel, angering the United States amid growing fears that the standoff over the contested Iranian nuclear drive could lead to war. G**** Images Hahaha nice Photoshop work If you dont have real pictures fake it

As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo appeared on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

At least one of the photographs released today by Iran and published by an unquestioning Western media has been Photoshopped:

Who read Free Republic? Apparently the U.S. Secret Service does!This past weekend, I posted an article alerting the Secret Service that members of the terrorist supporting group Code Pink were using fake presses to gain access to events headlined by Secret Service protectees like presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (AZ).This morning, McCain spoke at the LULAC convention in Washington, D.C. Usually when he speaks at an event in D.C., McCain can expect to have his speech disrupted by Code Pink activists who rush the stage and heckle him from the audience and the press section.That didn't happen today....

How does the pro-terrorist group Code Pink infiltrate closed events where the U.S. Secret Service is in charge of security? One way is with fake press credentials made by a diarist at the Daily Kos.Code Pink has made a habit of infiltrating events and getting close to officials under the protection of the U.S. Secret Service.Yesterday Code Pink member Desiree Farooz rushed the stage and came dangerously close to President Bush at Monticello. The weekend before she rushed John McCain. Last fall she got close enough to Condoleeza Rice to place her hands around the Secrtary of State's head.At the...

First, here is a link to my post yesterday about this article: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2039487/posts To Whom It May Concern: When I first heard that Findlay, OH been chosen for an article by such a prestigious paper like the Washington Post, I was glad for our community to get the exposure. Then I read with disgust the article by Eli Saslow in our local paper. It is obvious to me that Mr. Saslow came to our city with an agenda - one to show how only unenlightened, racists believing wild and untrue stories about the candidate could possibly be against Obama. He...

It is obvious to me that reporter Eli Saslow came to our city with an agenda -- to show that only unenlightened racists who believe wild and untrue stories about Sen. Barack Obama could possibly be against the candidate. Mr. Saslow chose an older portion of town with older residents and then ascribed their supposed views to our entire city.

Last fall, Barack Obama explained why he hadn't been wearing an American flag pin on his lapel. "I won't wear that pin on my chest," the presumptive Democratic nominee said. "Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism." What a difference a presidential campaign makes. Obama, who suggested back then that the flag pin "became a substitute for I think true patriotism" after the Sept. 11 attacks, now regularly sports the patriotic symbol at campaign events. He even briefly employed...

LONDON. A third of the Coptic sculptures at the Brooklyn Museum of Art are modern fakes. Its collection of late Egyptian sculpture was, until now, the second largest in North America. Brooklyn curator Dr Edna Russmann, who is concluding a study of the works, warns that other museums which acquired Coptic sculptures in the past 50 years are likely to face similar problems. The unmasking of the forgeries will be revealed in an exhibition on “Coptic Sculpture in the Brooklyn Museum”, opening on 13 February 2009. The Art Newspaper can reveal that ten of Brooklyn’s 30 sculptures are now deemed...

The Justice Department on Friday agreed to pay more than $5.8 million to Steven Hatfill, the former government scientist once branded by the Justice Department a person of interest in the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001. The legal settlement to Hatfill, in cash and an annual payments, signals the end of a civil lawsuit Hatfill brought against the Justice Department and FBI, accusing them of violating his privacy rights by improperly leaking sensitive information about the anthrax investigation to reporters. "I think it's a gratifying end to a very sad chapter in [Hatfill's] life and that of the FBI and...

What happens when the "fact-checkers" don't check facts and the "watchdogs" don't watch? Consider the case of those who claim to be watching politicians for lies and deceptions and pretend to analyze Senator Barack Obama's new patriotic "Country I Love" television ad, airing in 18 states. The Annenberg Political Fact Check, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz have written analyses of the Obama ad. But they are as flawed as the ad itself.

Uncontacted" Amazon Tribe Actually Known for DecadesKelly Hearn for National Geographic NewsJune 19, 2008 Recent photos of an uncontacted tribe firing arrows at a plane briefly made these Amazon Indians the world's least understood media darlings. Contrary to many news stories, the isolated group has actually been monitored from a distance for decades, past and current Brazilian government officials say. No one, however, is known to have had a face-to-face meeting with the nomadic tribe, which lives along the Peru-Brazil border. And no one knows how much, if anything, these rain forest people know about the outside world. The tribe—whose...

In a dramatic report, the New York Times has uncovered a conspiracy by the United States military to conscript children. Posing as male nannies, bow-tie wearing Republicans wisk away infants as their single mothers fulfill their dreams in exciting careers away from the drudgery of traditional home-based chores. They then force these babies into combat zones and cover up their misdeeds with the complicity of the right-wing hate media. This conspiracy came to light in today's Times. Buried deep inside a front page story detailing how George W. Bush has personally foreclosed on millions of American homeowners in order to...

"A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There's a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year. If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it's not surprising that would happen." --Barack Obama, Palm Beach fundraiser, May 22, 2008. The presumptive Democratic nominee for president needs to be more careful in his use of statistics. If he is going to blame Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh for "ginning up" hate crimes against Hispanics, he needs solid data to back up his allegation. The hate crimes statistics that he...

What is it with photographers these days? Are they really all terrorists, or does everyone just think they are? Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We've been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required. Except that it's nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph...

SUBOTICA -- A Bosniak man in northern Serbia is under arrest for staging and then reporting incidents made to look like hate crime. Serbian police (MUP) in Subotica say they yesterday detained Samir K., 35, on suspicion that he threw a Molotov cocktail at his own house, in addition to spraying nationalist graffiti, and then reported this. The suspect was further found in illegal possession of firearms and explosives, and will be charged with causing ethnic, racial and religious hatred and intolerance, as well as with attempted murder in an unrelated incident. His claims started to unravel when the suspect...

Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) has been a fairly undistinguished member of the House of Representatives for nearly a quarter of a century. He is a career member of the Financial Services Committee who has made little or no name for himself since his first electoral victory, and has maintained incumbency through the funneling of pork back to his district. Even his Wikipedia entry says that Kanjorski "usually plays behind-the-scenes roles in the advocacy or defeat of legislation and steers appropriations money toward improving the infrastructure and economic needs of his district." “But [in] the temptation to want to win back...

AL DURA UPDATE: "Israel Radio's Paris correspondent Gil Michaeli has just reported that the French Court of Appeals has overturned the libel judgment against Phillipe Karsenty and has determined that Karsenty did not libel France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin when he reported that the 'death' of 12-year old Mohamed Al-Dura at Netzarim in the Gaza Strip in September 2000 may have been staged, and that it was unlikely that the death was caused by IDF soldiers." Perhaps the Israeli military should start filing foreign libel suits against media outfits that collaborate in fake reporting. There's likely enough to keep quite...

A Hardball epic . . . Message to Chris Matthews: when ripping a guest for his lack of historical knowledge, try to avoid making a history mistake of your own in the same segment. It happened on this afternoon's Hardball. After lambasting a guest for not knowing his Neville Chamberlain history, Matthews surmised that the attack on the USS Cole in October, 2000 happened under . . . President Bush. View video here.

MoveOn.org sponsored a contest for the best 30-second pro-Barack Obama TV commercial. The winner, according to the Associated Press's article, "MoveOn ad features pro-Obama Republican," was an ad starring Air Force veteran John Weiler. The spot includes Mr. Weiler, whose military service is to be commended, saying "I've been a Republican since before I could actually vote." Not only that: "I'm a lifelong Republican and I'm voting for Barack Obama." I don't know if Mr. Weiler is a lifelong Republican as he claims. I do know that if the Associated Press is accurate in its reporting, he must have been...

The story is about climate change, and when I saw the accompanying photo of a fish lying at the bottom of a dried lake, I immediately screamed fake. Take a look, there's no way the buzzards or other predators wouldn't have picked it clean in the time it took for the lake to evaporate.

Radio talker Randi Rhodes, who last week was suspended from Air America for obscene language at a public appearance, has switched to Nova M Radio, a competing syndicator. Clear Channel Denver announced Thursday that Rhodes will be reinstated in her afternoon timeslot (1-4 p.m.) on KKZN 760 AM, under a new contract with syndicator Nova M Radio, effective Monday. Nova M Radio, another progressive radio outfit, was founded by some of the originators of Air America. Celebrity voices will fill in for Rhodes until a replacement is named. According to Kris Olinger, who manages Denver's Air America affiliate, Rosie O'Donnell,...

Watching the Democrat Presidential candidates swing through the state of Pennsylvania, it's as if the state all of the sudden had an epidemic of "lifelong Republicans", going through a change of heart and switching over to the Democrats. Not to take part in their primaries, but due to ideological reasons. Obama seemed to be the major, perhaps the only, beneficiary of all these former "lifelong Republicans", now Democrat voters. It seems that we are dealt this left wing propaganda every election, every primary year. Hordes of "lifelong Republicans" who tell us that they are now Democrats. In reality, the vast...

AP Shuts Down Blogger With Threats of Legal Action Well, here is what might be a landmark case for the blogosphere, for the Internet, and for the future of our new media, citizen journalism. The AP has just sent a cease and desist letter to Brian C. Ledbetter telling him to stop using their copyrighted images on his website, snappedshot.com. Snappedshot.com is a site predicated on criticism of photo-journalism. In pursuit of his criticism, Mr. Ledbetter uses photos from across the web that he thinks are doctored or misleading in some way. He then reports his opinion on the bias...

Editor quits, paper apologizes over doctored photo Updated: 2008-02-19 07:56 A newspaper apologized Monday and its chief editor resigned over a fake picture scandal, in which a photographer manipulated images to show Tibetan antelopes roaming under a bridge on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. Photographer Liu Weiqiang's fake shot that appears to show Tibetan antelopes crossing near a bridge on the Qinghai-Tibet railway as a train passes. [china.com] The Daqing Evening News, based in the oil city of Daqing, Heilongjiang province, said in a statement on its website: "We sincerely apologize to Chinese Central Television (CCTV), Xinhuanet and other media that published...

Riots inspired by the Newsweek report have broken out elsewhere in the region. But at least 17 people have died in Afghanistan, where the worst violence erupted in the town of Ghazni, south of Kabul.The magazine said that notes from Marc Falkoff, who is representing 13 Yemenis held at Guantánamo, blamed a guard stomping on a Koran for an incident in August 2003 when 23 detainees tried to kill themselves. One of the 13 told Mr. Falkoff, according to his notes, that another detainee had attempted suicide "after the guard took his Koran and threw it in the toilet." A...

(IsraelNN.com) Hamas leaders spoke to the Arabic language Ash-Sharq il-Awsat newspaper recently and explained that as Muslims, they are allowed to lie. In an interview printed on Thursday, senior Hamas terrorists explained, “A Muslim is permitted to say things that oppose his beliefs in order to prevent damages or to be saved from death.” This approach, known in Arabic as “taqiyya,” was behind several Hamas leaders’ recent public expression of support for Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, they explained. Senior Hamas terrorists in Samaria, who were recently released from jail, publicly expressed disapproval with the Hamas takeover of Gaza and...

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) poses as a civil rights group, defending the rights of Muslims in America. But it was founded by Hamas as a front for Hamas's terrorist activities. Ghassan Elashi, who was the head of CAIR's Texas chapter, and another CAIR founder, Omar Ahmad, attended a key meeting in Philadelphia in 1993. An FBI memo characterizes this meeting as a planning session for Hamas, Holy Land Foundation, and Islamic Association of Palestine. Out of this meeting CAIR was born. In December 2004, a federal judge in Chicago ruled the Islamic Association of Palestine (along with the...

The Dixie Chicks are partners in name only - the multi-platinum- selling trio is all but broken up, according to a source close to the group.Natalie Maines and sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Robison made just a handful of appearances together in 2007 - and now they rarely even talk, the source reveals. "The girls have gone their separate ways," the source close to the Texas-raised country musicians told The ENQUIRER. "They were not getting along when they toured together during 2006, but they managed to stay civil. Now when they're not forced to be together, the girls don't even...

After a two-year investigation into the killings of up to 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, the Marine Corps has decided that none of the Marines involved in the incident will be charged with murder. Instead, two enlisted Marines and two Marine officers will face trial in coming months for the killings and for failing to investigate them. The most serious charges have been leveled against Marine Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, who is scheduled to be arraigned on charges of voluntary manslaughter in California next week, the last step before the case officially moves to trial. Initially called a massacre...

GARLAND, Texas (Dec. 29) - A 6-year-old girl who won four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert with an essay falsely claiming her father died in Iraq isn't going to the show after all. The contest's sponsor, a store chain named Club Libby Lu, withdrew the prize Saturday and awarded it to another contestant. It didn't identify the new winner. "With this decision, we hope to revive the intended spirit of the contest, which was designed to make a little girl's holidays extra special," Club Libby Lu chief executive Mary Drolet said in a statement Saturday. Officials of the Chicago-based...

The winning quotes in the MRC's "Best Notable Quotables of 2007: The Twentieth Annual Awards for the Year's Worst Reporting." As noted in previous CyberAlerts, the awards issue was posted, with videos, on Monday, December 17, but following tradition, today, Friday and Monday -- the last weekdays of the year -- CyberAlert will run the winning quotes followed on succeeding days by the runners-up. The Media Research Center's annual awards issue provides a compilation of the most outrageous and/or humorous news media quotes from 2007 (December 2006 through November 2007). To determine this year's winners, a panel of 53 radio...

Media watchdog website Honest Reporting has awarded their annual Dishonest Reporter Awards. Some of these stories you know and some you don't--probably because they were ignored by the media. Some were even covered here at NewsBusters. The "winners" included Christiane Amanpour for “God's Warriors,” the BBC for covering up an internal investigation into its Mid East reporting, US government funded Al-Hurra TV's former 'director Larry Register for dhimmitude, a UNC Daily Tar Heel article about breaking up with a boyfriend because of Israel and of course Charles Enderlin and the Mohammad Al Dura Fautography that launched the Second Intifida. See...

Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi photographer who had a hand in The Associated Press’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize for photography before being jailed without charges by the United States military, finally had a day in court last week. But his story, which highlights the unprecedented role that Iraqis are playing in news coverage of the war, is really just beginning. snip A spokesman for the military said that Mr. Hussein had been detained as “an imperative security threat” and that he has persistently been “treated fairly, humanely and in accordance with all applicable law.” In a lengthy e-mail message, the spokesman said...

The Other Fallujah Reporter Posted By Michael J. Totten On December 16, 2007 @ 2:17 pm “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” — Thomas JeffersonI just returned home from a trip to Fallujah, where I was the only reporter embedded with the United States military. There was, however, an unembedded reporter in the city at the same time. Normally it would be useful to compare what I saw and heard while traveling and working with the Marines with what a colleague saw and heard while working solo....

For months, our magazine has been subject to accusations that stories we published by an American soldier then serving in Iraq were fabricated. When these accusations first arose, we promised our readers a full account of our investigation. We spent the last four-and-a-half months re-reporting his stories. These are our findings. ::very big snip:: In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity--which, in the wrong hands, can become...

'Dead' Iraqis Show at Press Conference Smiling, Waving By Jim Hoft | November 30, 2007 - 10:07 ET How Embarrassing!Picture this...You report to the international news agencies that 11 of your family members in Iraq have been slaughtered! You hold several press conferences and gain great sympathy.(AFP)You become an overnight sensation with the antiwar media.You've never had so much sympathy and attention in all your life. You even get a state funeral in Jordan where you make a living as a Baathist anti-Iraq War journalist.(Awad Awad, Deseret)You get photos taken of you and your official government guest sobbing in grief....

NEW YORK (AP) - The U.S. military's plan to seek a criminal case against an Associated Press photographer in Iraq without disclosing the charges or evidence against him makes a mockery of American democratic principles, AP President and CEO Tom Curley said Saturday. "This is a poor example—and not the first of its kind—of the way our government honors the democratic principles and values it says it wants to share with the Iraqi people," Curley said in a column in The Washington Post. The U.S. military notified the AP last weekend that it intended to submit a complaint against Bilal...

BAGHDAD — Coalition forces detained (24) suspects Sunday during operations targeting al-Qaida networks in central and northern Iraq. Coalition forces captured a wanted individual during operations north of Samarra. The wanted individual is believed to be involved in al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) media networks and was involved in attacks against Coalition forces. In addition to the wanted individual, Coalition forces detained three suspects without incident. During other operations in Samarra, Coalition force detained (11) suspects during operations targeting al-Qaida’s courier and media networks, as well as weapons facilitators and associates of senior terrorist leaders. During operations in Baghdad, Coalition forces...

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US military has filed a formal complaint with an Iraqi criminal court accusing a detained, award-winning Associated Press photographer of being a "terrorist media operative," the Pentagon said Monday. Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said the military made the complaint about Bilal Hussein, who has been held for more than 19 months without charges in US military custody, to Iraq's Central Criminal Court. "We believe Bilal Hussein was a terrorist media operative who infiltrated the AP," he said. "MNF-I possesses convincing and irrefutable evidence that Bilal Hussein is a threat to security and stability as...

NEW YORK (AP) - The U.S. military plans to seek a criminal case in an Iraqi court against an award-winning Associated Press photographer but is refusing to disclose what evidence or accusations would be presented. An AP attorney on Monday strongly protested the decision, calling the U.S. military plans a "sham of due process." The journalist, Bilal Hussein, has already been imprisoned without charges for more than 19 months. A public affairs officer notified the AP on Sunday that the military intends to submit a written complaint against Hussein that would bring the case into the Iraqi justice system as...

CNN Pre-Plann(T)ed & Censored Every Question & Questioner at Dem Debate(?)! [NOTE: I've tried to compile what I think is the most informative postings on this.] CNN's Las Vegas Post Debate Analysis-- A Clinton Reunion It's hard to have a bad debate performance when: ** The audience is planted in your favor** The questions are planted in your favor** The questioners are your supporters** The after debate spin room includes 2 former and 1 current staff members The post debate was as Clinton-friendly as the actual debate.The CNN debate may have been pre-planned and censored every step of the way, but...