Free Republic

SEATTLE - Rod Watson had to cancel 1,000 flu-shot clinics in four states when the national vaccine shortage cut off his supply two months ago. Now Watson has flu shots aplenty - and he can't give them away. "My biggest fear is I'm gong to end up with a lot of serum, and there's a national shortage," said Watson, president of Prevention MD, a medical screening and immunization company. He offers $20 flu shots Monday through Friday at his Seattle-area office. Public health officials in California, Colorado and other states have voiced similar fears. Some are relaxing the rules to...

I would like to make a point about the election that I think has been missed by all the pundits. Why was it as close as it was? The 9/11 attacks have been widely cited as helping Bush. They certainly did give him an opportunity to prove his leadership, but they also hurt him in another very important respect that nobody seems to realize. They sucker-punched the U.S. economy just as we were trying to come out of a recession. The economy is still a very important factor in Presidential elections whether we realize it or not. Had the 9/11...

WITH the CBS News investigation of Memogate almost done, Mary Mapes, the producer who obtained the fake memos used in Dan Rather's George Bush-bashing report, is fighting to save her job and her reputation. The sleuths at ratherbiased.com report Mapes wrote up a 68-page statement in her own defense and has been lobbying to convince the CBS probers that Rather's exposé on Bush's National Guard service was accurate, even if the documents obtained from a crackpot Texas Democrat were bogus. Rather acted preemptively by quitting as the "Evening News" anchor.

When I was linking to CBS News for my Stupefy Me report earlier today (directly below), I came across this gem of a story (FR THREAD ON THE CBS ARTICLE: Blogs: New Medium, Old Politics NEW YORK, Dec. 8, 2004). It appears that CBS News not only is striking back at the blogs and bloggers that took out Dan Rather and embarrassed their entire organization, but they are also supporting censorship of us rascally citizens. Internet blogs are providing a new and unregulated medium for politically motivated attacks. With the same First Amendment protections as newspapers, blogs are increasingly gaining...

Rumor has it that the results of the investigation into CBS Memogate are going to be released tomorrow. And in a rather ... uh ... curious coincidence, Dr. David Hailey, the Utah State professor who is desperately, quixotically trying to prove the CBS memos are real, has released what he claims as the final version of his shoddy, laughable "analysis". And I'm sure you won't be shocked at all to discover that his conclusion is ... the documents were typed. On a magical typewriter that somehow produced an exact duplicate of a Microsoft Word document, down to the spacing, line...

Publishers Weekly Names 'America' (The Book) Jon Stewarts Riff on Politics, Book of the Year Jon Stewarts' 'America,' (The Book) the television commentators riff on politics and other matters of historical staire, has been named Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, the industry trade magazine.In announcing the award Monday, Pubishers Weekly called the book 'a serious critique of the two party system, the corporations that finance it, and the spinless cowards in the press who aggressively print allegiation and rumor independent of accuracy and fairness.'Stewart's book was released in September and immediately topped best seller lists even as Wal...

After the 2000 presidential campaign, strategists for President Bush came to a startling realization: Democrats watch more television than Republicans. So by buying millions of dollars' worth of television advertising time, Republicans were spending their money on audiences that tended to vote Democratic. What to do? With the luxury of four years until the next election, the Bush team examined voters' television-viewing habits and cross-referenced them with surveys of voters' political and lifestyle preferences. This led to an unusual step for a presidential campaign: it cut the proportion of money that it put into broadcast television and diverted more to...

NEW YORK (AP) - The New York Times Co. told investors Thursday that its fourth quarter and full-year earnings would come in below Wall Street estimates on weaker-than-expected advertising in the fourth quarter and higher costs for promotion, printing, distribution and newsprint. The company also said it would begin expensing the cost of stock options and its employee stock purchase plan. It also said that it would no longer provide estimates for full-year earnings, focusing instead on quarterly estimates, due to the greater uncertainty in the current environment for media companies. The company, which also publishes The Boston Globe and...

George W. Bush ran the most negative presidential campaign in history, and the media never covered the story, an aide to Sen. John Kerry's campaign said last Monday at the journalism department. Marco Trbovich, a United Steelworkers of America employee who advised Kerry on labor policy, told the 20 students gathered at Carter Hall that about 80 percent of Bush's campaign money was spent on negative advertising. "If you can think of a few positive commercials that you saw, you saw all of them that were there," he said. Bush's campaign played upon fear, using patriotic and religious fervor to...

IN A recent speech at Tufts University, Andy Rooney reflected on the election and said, according to The Tufts Daily, that Christian fundamentalism is a result of "a lack of education. They haven't been exposed to what the world has to offer." Those comments as well as the identification of the "bigoted Christian redneck" after Election Day in various editorials left me wondering: Where do these "liberal elites" get this fictional image of Christians? When did this distorted perspective begin in our cultural history? How can I work to bridge this gap? Rooney is reflective of the "liberal elite" in...

NEW YORK Feeling a bit lost lately? You should, at least according to a compendium posted today at Jay Rosen’s popular PressThink Web log, because the biggest loser on Election Day was not John Kerry but the mainstream media. Daniel Henninger, writing in The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal, put it this way: "It is often said that the only sure winner in American politics is the media. Amid GOP victory parties or the ruined dreams of the Kerry candidacy, the one constant is that the media marches on. Maybe not this time. Big Media lost big." "I was interested...

What the Republicans did, cleverly, was to establish effective "memes" in the minds of the public and the pundits... Bush became the "winner" of a dead heat, in the midst of an incomplete recount, when a premature victory was declared on her own unnecessary deadline by his Florida campaign co-chairwoman, who also held the crucial post of secretary of state... [I]t was clearly a shameless ploy to slam the door before the election escaped. A meme was born. The other effective GOP meme was the mantra, "we counted, and counted again, and then a third time." These words were chanted...

Hoo-boy. It's a hot time in the old blogtown. The pajamahadeen are firing their virtual bullets into the cyber-air in celebration of CBS anchor Dan Rather's announcement on Tuesday that he was retiring as the top talking face of the network after 24 years. "This has been a simply outstanding month," crowed a poster on http://www.freerepublic.com. "Bush won, Arafat died, we're kicking ass in Fallujah, and now this!" Typically, the above-quoted "Freeper" didn't get that Rather may be down, but he certainly isn't out. When he steps down as front man for The CBS Evening News on March 9, he...

THE last presidential election in the United States is as American as apple pie. Even till the last second before the event started, nobody in the US or elsewhere knew for sure whether George Bush would retain his job or whether he would be defeated by John Kerry. Characteristic of American presidential elections in recent history, the last one was tough, rough and sometimes acrimonious, although some degree of razzmatazz was also noticeable.Key issues in the run-up to the election were security, the war against terror, the American misadventure in Iraq and the worrisome state of US economy. Generally speaking,...

The Ehrlich administration has taken the unusual step of banning all state officials from speaking with two Sun journalists, who they say are "failing to objectively report" on state issues. The governor's press office sent a memo Thursday to all state public information officers and to the governor's staff ordering them to not speak with State House Bureau Chief David Nitkin or columnist Michael Olesker. "Do not return calls or comply with any requests," press secretary Shareese N. DeLeaver wrote in the memo. The ban is in effect "until further notice." "There's no hiding the fact of The Sun's distaste...

Between the end of the Republican National Convention and Election Day, the Houston Chronicle spent roughly 50,000 words on President George W. Bush and his campaign for re-election. Perhaps most impressive, one of its own columnists had major news to break on the race. He just didn't, umm, break it to the Chronicle. Russ Baker, a New York-based freelance journalist and contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review, had been circling the reporting waters around President Bush for several months, dialing up hundreds of possible sources for material on the commander in chief. "I just didn't think we really knew enough...

The Washington Times www.washingtontimes.com Election mythsPublished November 18, 2004 As a wrap-up to Election 2004, it should be noted which election "myths" helped shape each party's strategy. Not surprisingly, the losing party held to the losing myths, and vice versa. Here are some that failed to hold up on Nov. 2:      • Anger is a platform. Ever since the 2000 election, Democrats rallied around their mutual disdain for President Bush. The Democrats should have remembered that Republican anger at Bill Clinton didn't work, either.     • It's the money, not the message. The myth is that the candidate who...

In May 2003, I suggested in this space that the exit polls would need more than a makeover. I also questioned the wisdom of putting veteran exit pollster Warren Mitofsky in charge. Shortly thereafter, I received a telephone call from Mitofsky, who, naturally, expressed his disagreement with my opinions. Later in the year, I heard from Mitofsky again when I criticized his exit polls in the California gubernatorial recall election. I’ll say this for him: Mitofsky is a great flack. And he must be a great salesman. Anyone who can talk the networks into giving him $10 million for the...

Liberals again illicitly claim moral high ground By Charles Krauthammer WASHINGTON — In 1994, when the Gingrich revolution swept Republicans into power, ending 40 years of Democratic hegemony, the mainstream press needed to account for this inversion of the Perfect Order of Things. A myth was born. Explained the USA Today headline: "Angry White Men: Their votes turned the tide for the GOP." Overnight, the revolution of the Angry White Male became conventional wisdom. In the 10 years before the 1994 election, there were 56 Nexis mentions of angry white men in the media. In the next seven months, there...

Tune in Now