Free Republic

Well, I’ve said it a million times: The anchorman of CBS News should attend Democratic fundraisers (as happened). The Supreme Court reporter of the New York Times, a.k.a. the paper of record, should march in abortion-rights rallies (as happened). And PBS news figures should be open partisans. Yesterday, when Senator Barbara Mikulski declared for the Iran deal, meaning that this deal could not be blocked by the Senate, Gwen Ifill spiked the football. “Take that, Bibi,” she tweeted. Aha! Good one, Gwen! The PBS ombudsman has written about this matter disapprovingly. I’m not sure I disapprove. What I disapprove of...

I’m the ombudsman at PBS and I don’t want to be glib or dash off something on Twitter that I would quickly regret, or that could easily be misunderstood, or could be used to either discredit me and my work or PBS. I had the same policy about pre-social media venues when I was the ombudsman at The Washington Post. So that brings me to the real self-inflicted wound, which was a tweet by PBS NewsHour co-anchor Gwen Ifill on Wednesday—after it became known that President Obama had secured the necessary number of Democratic backers in the Senate to ensure...

A South Florida bus driver is upset after he was suspended from work for several days months after he was viciously attacked by a passenger. According to the victim, his employers told him he should have handled the altercation differently. Sixty-six-year-old Ken Legler was on his routine drive July 15 when a woman stepped onto the bus. Legler said she handed over her bus pass, but he noticed it had been tampered with and then called his dispatcher to inform them regarding the pass. "I've been a bus driver 28 years. This is the way I was trained to do...

Those who teach in higher education are relatively OK with some religious groups, according to a study based on a 2012 online national survey that drew 464 complete responses. Asked to assess religious groups on a “feeling thermometer” of 1 to 100, Jewish people, mainline Protestants and Catholics all achieved an average score of 65 or higher, researchers led by University of North Texas sociologist George Yancey reported in an online article in the journal Sociology of Religion. Next to the bottom, just slightly above fundamentalists, were Protestant evangelicals with an average score of 48. Based on the rankings and...

On Friday, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), the antiabortion activist group that has been releasing undercover videos targeting Planned Parenthood, the practice of fetal tissue donation, and later-term abortion, has admitted that images shown its most recent video of a fetus of approximately 19 weeks gestational age was not taken at a Planned Parenthood affiliate clinic, as heavily implied in the video. ....In the video, Holly O’Donnell, a former employee of StemExpress, a middleman company that provides fetal tissue — among their forms of donated tissue — to biomedical researchers, discussed a fetus she sees and works with following...

Finally! Something from a New York Times reporter you can absolutely, positively believe: that no matter the mounting evidence, he will not condemn Hillary Clinton for her email malfeasance. On today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough repeatedly tried to get Jeremy Peters to state whether he agreed with the federal judge who yesterday declared that Hillary had not "followed government policy" regarding her email. After haplessly trying to do anything but answer the question, an exasperated Peters finally sputtered: "you want, you want me to indict and damn Hillary? I'm not going to do that." View the video...

The LA Times reported: As they sorted and re-sorted questions, the unpredictability of real estate tycoon and reality-TV star Donald Trump was never far from their minds. “I would say the level is about an eight on the concern meter because of the unknown,” Baier said. Baier even had a “nuclear option” at the ready for Trump if he ignored all protocol. The script — which Baier didn’t have to use — took a page from Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” TV show. It went like this: “Mr. Trump, in your business you have rules. You follow rules. We have rules on...

After 16 groundbreaking seasons on "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart hosted the program for the very last time Thursday night, and a plethora of special guests joined him. The hour-long finale started as expected with Stewart, 52, bringing his unique brand of sarcastic comedy. But tears eventually came after so many former correspondents he has helped along the way continued to thank the icon.

Hillary Clinton‘s campaign sent a letter to The New York Times lambasting them for their recent coverage of Clinton’s use of private email while she was Secretary of State. The letter, first obtained by CNN and then posted online by the Clinton campaign, is in direct response to the Times‘ most recent reporting on Clinton. The Times ran a report saying that two government inspectors general recommended the DOJ open a criminal investigation into Clinton’s emails due to classified material on her private account, but it turns out the recommendation was not on criminal grounds, so the Times ended up...

America’s anchors have spoken: the shooting of one lion vastly outweighs the trafficking of baby parts by a taxpayer-funded abortion giant. In other words, the broadcast news shows spent more time in one day on Cecil the Lion than they did on the Planned Parenthood videos in two weeks. The three broadcast networks, ABC, NBC and CBS censored the third video released Tuesday by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) exposing Planned Parenthood’s practice of harvesting aborted baby parts -- censored it at Planned Parenthood’s urging. But the news shows did find more than 14 minutes for a more...

....[BO's wife] was joined by E!'s own Terrence Jenkins, rapper Wale and more than 130 college-bound students at the White House to discuss tackling obstacles in school and the importance of education at the 2015 Beat the Odds Summit.... [she] recalled her own college experience, advising students—regardless of upbringing and background—to lean on each other during tough times. "You cannot live in isolation when you go to college," she explained. "The kids who didn't make it from my school or graduated later usually were the ones that I didn't see. They just disappeared and they tried to fix the stuff...

A day after The Daily Signal reported on controversial reviews for Ryan T. Anderson’s new book on Amazon.com, the country’s largest Internet retailer said it has removed reviews that included photos of Nazi concentration camps. Anderson’s book, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” had one-star ratings that included pictures of men in what looked to be a World War II-era concentration camp. The reviewer argued that the book was modern-day fascism.

The adults patrolling the playpen of Republican politics are appalled that we’ve become a society where it’s O.K. to make fun of veterans, to call anyone who isn’t rich a loser, to cast an entire group of newly arrived strivers as rapists and shiftless criminals. Somewhere, we crossed a line — from our mothers’ modesty to strutting braggadocio, from dutiful decorum to smashing all the china in the room, from respecting a base set of facts to a trumpeting of willful ignorance. Yes, how did we get to a point where up to one-fourth of the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower...

....Obama took a victory lap on Stewart’s show, ticking off a list of achievements on health care, foreign policy and more. “The VA works better than when I came into office. Government works better than when I came into office. The economy is better than when I came into office,” Obama boasted.

Many years ago I interviewed for a reporting job covering government waste, fraud and mismanagement. The interview went well and my future employers mentioned that they’d had trouble keeping the position filled as many reporters had trouble coming up with story ideas. They wondered if that would be a problem. I thought they were joking, so I chuckled. But they were entirely serious. I thought of that when looking at media coverage of the Planned Parenthood scandal. The media seem to be really struggling to come up with any story ideas for how to cover this story. (snip) Using Nexis,...

Muslim groups say a judge's decision to release from federal custody a Signal Mountain man accused in court records of planning an attack on a mosque in New York state represents a double standard and should be revisited.... ...Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Doggart poses a threat to Muslims and shouldn't have been released. Other groups have echoed those sentiments. "I think this case has been mishandled and it hasn't been treated with the seriousness it deserves," Hooper said. ""Unfortunately, this fits a pattern of cases in which no Muslim is involved and it is...

During Wednesday’s national press conference about his Iran deal, President Obama played the media like a fiddle. It was a situation where the media was so compliant the questioners were hand-picked by the White House beforehand, the president filibustered throughout, and Obama ended the event by asking himself the questions he wanted to answer. Only Major Garrett of CBS News asked a truly tough question, a question that was obviously framed in a way to cut through the president’s rigorously-rehearsed talking points. For daring to question the Lightbringer in the same way the media questioned President George W. Bush for...

In the Washington Post's liberal blog The Plum Line, Paul Waldman last week recycled one of the enduring lies of liberal politics: that "the Willie Horton issue," as Waldman calls it, was a successful appeal by the 1988 Bush for president campaign to American voters' racism. That's a lie and deserves to be exposed as such.

Was watching BBC Europe yesterday -flicked it on the the hotel for five minutes while unpacking- and the amount of left wing pom-pom shaking they can pack into a brief period of time is just about any intellectually-honest person can stomach... And that's regardless of political bias -like we never knew The Beebe leaned to the left. But it's relentless these days... I used to admire their professionalism and world coverage in the 80s/90s, as I still do the Telegraph, etc. British press is in many ways superior to my own country's, imho- even car magazines, i.e. CAR was a...

I am Brad Steinle. Kate Steinle's big brother. She was my best friend, my love, my everything!