Free Republic

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Well, the government shutdown continues, and the media is continuing to have a field day with it all, and, as discussed yesterday, the media is really the problem here, folks. I mean, the Democrats are who they are, and we know that. Obama's who he is, and we know that. Harry Reid is who he is, and we know that. Pelosi's who she is, and we know that. And we've known this for years. There's really not a whole lot to be told anymore about them; everybody knows. Well, maybe, I mean the low-information crowd. The low-information...

The list of things on which Barack Obama has been wrong goes on to the crack of doom.  But there's one thing on which the President is surely right. In devising his strategy for dealing with the shutdown, the prez can count on the MSM to blame Republicans. Mark Halperin bared the president's calculus on today's Morning Joe, saying the Obama admin has little incentive to negotiate because it believes a "sympathetic" press will blame Republicans like they did in the 1990s, accusing them of being "obstructionist."  View the video after the jump. Halperin offered what amounted to an indictment...

How did the MSM get the D.C. Navy Yard shooting wrong? Let us count the ways. In watching the coverage of the Washington Navy Yard shooting as it unfolded last Monday, I had to remind myself that most of the reports I was hearing would surely turn out to be incorrect, in some cases wildly so. And indeed this turned out to be the case. We were told, for example, that there was more than one gunman, and that one of them was armed with an AR-15 rifle. Even worse, both CBS and NBC identified the wrong man as the...

NBC announced today that it would be launching a week of programming to help Obamacare get off its feet, according to a press release sent out by the network. The law has been widely opposed by all Republicans and supported by most Democrats, including President Obama. The headline of the press release reads: NBC News Launches “Ready or Not, the New Healthcare Law,” a Multi-Screen Experience to Help Americans Get the Most Out of the Affordable Care Act Dr. Nancy Snyderman Answers Most Pressing Questions Across Social and Via New Video Series #AskDrNancy Interactive Tools and Resources Help Audience Navigate...

Journalism isn’t what is used to be, and it wasn’t great to begin with. Last week a man who heard voices in his head followed the advice from the voices in Joe Biden’s head about armament, bought a shotgun, hacked off the barrel and killed a bunch of people in the Washing Navy Yard. As with all such incidents, two completely predictable occurrences came to pass. First, after waiting for facts to emerge, the sanity of the suspect was shown to be non-existent. Second, the gun control industry did not wait for facts to emerge. Neither did the media. One...

"It is not, however, too late to set the record straight in the public square and with lawmakers, who will be predictably pressured to “do something.” Here, the truth is vital, for it demonstrates neatly the reality that, in a country with 350-million-plus privately owned firearms, the state is utterly powerless to stop evil with the law. President Obama, Senator Feinstein, Senator Schumer et al. could have pushed through Congress every single gun-control provision that they coveted earlier this year — an “assault weapons” ban, a limit on the size of magazines, and a requirement that background checks be conducted...

In this morning’s anti-gun editorial, the Chicago Tribune makes mention of Jeffery Johnson. Regular Alley readers will recall Johnson, despondent after exhausting his unemployment compensation, who returned to the Empire State Building to empty a revolver into the former boss he blamed for losing his job. The NYPD, the “Gang who cannot shoot straight” finally admitted wounding eight bystanders before they managed to shoot an unarmed man to death.But here is the way the Trib’s editorial writer describes that tragedy: Barely a year ago, Jeffrey Johnson, who’d just lost his job at a New York women’s apparel firm, returned to...

Aaron Alexis seems to have listened to Joe Biden and taken his advice. Back in February Biden said: "You don't need an AR-15," he said. "Buy a shotgun! Buy a shotgun!" And that's what Aaron Alexis did. Back then Bided added: "I have two shotguns at home. No one is going to come and take my guns." Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHZ7zXLvOkYAaron Alexis did buy a shotgun- legally: Aaron Alexis legally purchased the shotgun he used to kill 12 people, the FBI said Tuesday. FBI Assistant Director Valerie Parlave also told reporters that Alexis only had the shotgun -- not an...

George Zimmerman should be disarmed. If ever a man deserved to be shunned by society, it is pudgy Georgie Zimmerman. And in some quarters, he is. Unfortunately, there are enough of his ilk around – the big guns who run the National Rifle Association, conservative talk radio Obama haters and others – who quickly and emphatically drew the besieged Floridian into their warm and fuzzy protective cocoon of right-wing fanaticism. The ink was not even dry on the long-delayed Zimmerman arrest warrant when the NRA brass leaped to his defense because he fulfilled their classic gunfighter role model — a...

If the mainstream media were a college class, Republicans would be taking advanced calculus taught by a short tempered professor from South Korea with bad English, while Democrats would be taking remedial reading pass/fail. In other words, as long as liberals don't do anything to embarrass the Democrat Party, they get treated with kid gloves while all Republicans should assume reporters would just as soon punch them in the throat as ask them a question. What this means is that Obama seldom has to deal with tough questions a Republican in his shoes would have to hear asked on an...

Politico’s Dylan Byers, in a piece for his buddies in the MSM, declares that conservative criticism of the mainstream media is overblown. Byers writes: So often conservative media, like conservative media criticism, can't be taken seriously because it overplays its hand. Like someone who shouts "thief!" the second his keys go missing, much of the conservative echo-chamber has a hyper-aggressive penchant to see conspiracy where they'd do better to see questions in need of answers. As a general rule -- albeit with plenty of exceptions -- there is a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach among those who fashion themselves as "anti-MSM," which can...

Philip Rucker leads the Post today with a story about a study that claims there is a “vast” gun market thriving online that allows gun buyers to evade the background check system. Rucker’s story is full of misleading statements. The marketplace for firearms on the Internet, where buyers are not required to undergo background checks, is so vast that advocates for stricter regulations now consider online sales a greater threat than the gun show loophole. Misleading statement #1: Buyers are only not required to undergo background checks if they’re not buying from a licensed firearms dealer. If you buy...

"There are too many people on the American right who hate the very notion of Barack Obama in the White House...They hate not just his politics but him," says Chris Matthews. Let me finish tonight with this. I said it before and am now saying it again. There are too many people on the American right who hate the very notion of Barack Obama in the White House. It grates on them, just as it thrills – even now – tens of millions of others. They hate not just his politics but him. Think about all the days we have...

One of the brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston bombings was in possession of right-wing American literature in the run-up to the attack, BBC Panorama has learnt. Tamerlan Tsarnaev subscribed to publications espousing white supremacy and government conspiracy theories. He also had reading material on mass killings. Until now the Tsarnaev brothers were widely perceived as just self-styled radical jihadists. Panorama has spent months speaking exclusively with friends of the bombers to try to understand the roots of their radicalisation. 'Government conspiracies' The programme discovered that Tamerlan Tsarnaev possessed articles which argued that both 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma...

Shifts in climate are strongly linked to increases in violence around the world, a study suggests. US scientists found that even small changes in temperature or rainfall correlated with a rise in assaults, rapes and murders, as well as group conflicts and war. The team says with the current projected levels of climate change, the world is likely to become a more violent place.

Obama: Traditional journalism is dead By Jonathan Easley - 07/31/13 02:50 PM ET President Obama weighed in on the state of journalism in an Amazon Kindle interview published Wednesday, noting the difficulties journalists face in the new media atmosphere and declaring that the “old times aren’t coming back.” “It used to be there were local newspapers everywhere,” Obama said. “If you wanted to be a journalist, you could really make a good living working for your hometown paper. Now, you have a few newspapers that make a profit because they are national brands, and journalists are having to scramble to...

...Network evening news viewers in 2012 never once heard the embarrassing prediction by Obama’s economic team that passage of the $787 billion “stimulus” would halt the rise of unemployment at 8%. (In reality, the jobless rate stayed above that mark for 44 months, the worst economic performance since the Great Depression.) There was just a single network mention last year (on ABC) of Obama’s broken promise of cutting the federal budget deficit “by half by the end of my first term in office.” Reporters on CBS and NBC never once brought up this inconvenient truth. All three evening newscasts buried...

A National Geographic “undercover team” wants to end private firearm sales and ban those they find disturbing. They never say it honestly and outright, but that’s the conclusion one walks away with after viewing the hysterical hit piece embedded in a July 16 ABC “Nightline” report. “Investigative journalist” Mariana van Zeller is appropriately incredulous and intimidated as “former police officer and firearms expert turned private investigator” Jesse Torrez guides her through such shocking activities as looking up classified ads on the internet, dialing the phone and driving to meet people to make private transactions. Had someone with experience in such...

While the mainstream media lavished endless attention and emotion on the George Zimmerman trial for the killing of Trayvon Martin last weekend, the body of a 17-year-old black boy was discovered on basement stairs, face down, behind a boarded-up house in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. His body was so badly decomposed that local news reports originally suggested that he had died of blunt force trauma. An autopsy demonstrated that he had in fact been shot to death. His family blamed his death on his refusal to join a gang at school. The boy's name was Darryl Green. Thus far,...

Half of all voters consider radical Muslims the bigger terrorist threat facing the nation, but supporters of President Obama consider the Tea Party to be as big a danger. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 51% of Likely U.S. Voters consider radical Muslims to be the bigger threat to the United States today. Thirteen percent (13%) view the Tea Party that way, and another 13% consider other political and religious extremists to be the larger danger. Six percent (6%) point to local militia groups. Two percent (2%) see the Occupy Wall Street movement as the bigger terrorist...