Free Republic

How to prop up a senile Senator, by Chris Matthews While clearing off Tivo this morning, I ran across last Friday's edition of Hardball on MSNBC. Since we do movies on the show with Emmett of the Unblinking Eye right around the same time, it's rare that I get to see if Chris did something stupid until after the weekend is over. This is one of those occurrances. Here's the transcript between Chris, Republican strategist Charlie Black, and Democratic strategist Steve McMahon...with my two cents thrown in along the way. CM: I saw that picture, gentlemen, and I saw a...

LaGuardia Community College, City U. of New York, is a scandal waiting to explode. You are invited to visit http://www.Laguardiacorruption.com to see the effect of administrative corruption on education and, in particular, how political cronyism and anti-Semitism destroyed the Mathematics Department. With more than 65,000 visits to date, the website aims to inform all colleges, education associations, interested taxpayers, elected officials and news media in the NYC vicinity.

When: 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 9, 2005 Where: Minneapolis Marriott City Center 30 South 7th Street, Downtown Cost: $30 if received by Friday March 4. Add $5 afterwards. Please join us for a Special Dinner Forum at which John H. Hinderaker and Scott W. Johnson of "Power Line" - Time magazine's "Blog of the Year" - discuss the role they played in exposing the fraudulent "60 Minutes II" report last September on President Bush's Air National Guard service. It will NOT be a coincidence that dinner will begin a half-hour before a large-screen showing of Dan Rather's...

Dear US Political Bloggers and any other civic minded folks. As you likely have heard already, Federal Election Commission seeks to stifle free speech on the Internet under the guise of Campaign Finance Reform . I am one of many folks who are fighting back this idiotic and amoral measure. I already emailed my representative and I urge you to do the same. Feel free to use my email below if you like. You can find and write to your representative or senator using www.house.gov and www.senate.gov. However, if (Heaven Forbid !) this McCain-Feingold restrictions will spread to the Internet,...

Political Bloggers--Beware ! Everyone in the US Political blogging community and in fact, anyone who cares about Political Freedom in America needs to be aware of what Federal Election Commission is up to.

THE FEC VS. BLOGS By Michelle Malkin   ·   March 03, 2005 02:20 PM CNET reporter Declan McCullagh has an important piece warning of the "coming crackdown on blogging." Joshua Claybourn of In the Agora analyzes the campaign finance law absurdities and First Amendment infringements on bloggers here. Winfield Myers is on the same wavelength. He writes: The possibilities that [FEC commissioner Bradley] Smith lays out are chilling and, if enacted, could spell the end of blogging as we know it. Indeed, it could turn much of what is published on the Net into a samizdat-style activity. Sound alarmist? Read on....

First they came for the soft money - I didn't care because I didn't even know what 'soft money' really was. Then they came for the big donors of hard money - I didn't care 'cause screw those millionaires. Then they came for the corporations and unions that wanted to run ads during the 60 days before an election - I didn't care because corporations are evil and unions are evil-er. Now they're coming after me - Oh shit!

Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over. In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines. Smith should know. He's one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, which is beginning the perilous process of extending a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet. In 2002, the FEC exempted the...

Blogger Beer

Here's a piece that might irritate our fellow bloggers--especially the folks who uncovered (so to speak) Jeff Gannon's secrets. I just posted it in my "Capital Games column at www.thenation.com. (If you've already seen it, scroll down to other original items on this blog, including a posting on Howard Dean's latest dumb remark.) In brief, I'm being a worrywart about the journalistic implications of the Gannon affair, and I note that two key aspects of the story--that Gannon is a gay GOP hypocrite and that Gannon was handed classified information regarding the Wilson leak investigation--are not fully supported by the...

RFE/RL Interview Sources at Risk in Iran (Prague, Czech Republic--February 24, 2005) Being interviewed by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty can place journalists in peril. Iranian weblogger and journalist Arash Sigarchi, who has been interviewed by--but has never worked for--Radio Farda, a U.S.-financed radio station broadcasting in Persian to Iran, was sentenced to 14 years in prison on February 22 by a revolutionary tribunal in Gilan, northern Iran. International press in Canada and France reported on February 23 that Reporters Without Borders issued a statement expressing outrage at the sentence and calling on Iranian President Mohammad Khatami to intervene. The RWP...

CYBERSPACE — During the US presidential election, many heard for the first time about the rise in influence of the “bloggers,” the wave of self-publishing internet journalists whose up-to-the-nanosecond news reporting caused the downfall of CBS’s anchor-Titan Dan Rather. Now that the bloggers have found themselves powerful enough to depose one of mainstream broadcast media’s most powerful icons, they are realizing their power in other areas. A group of pro-life bloggers has banded together to try to stop the starvation death of Terri Schindler-Schiavo. One of the writers on the group blog, “Tim,” wrote, “Terri's bloggers have a lot of...

Mark Jen landed a dream job with an American Internet search engine giant in January. He was fired less than a month later. His infraction? He ran a Web log, where he freely gabbed about his impressions of life in his workplace. Others who lost their jobs courtesy their personal blogs include a flight attendant who claims she was fired for pictures she posted on her personal blog that her airline deemed "inappropriate." An online social networking site canned an employee last summer for her online musings about the company. Web logs, or blogs, the online personal diaries where big...

I started a Conservative based Blog about a month and a half ago with 2 friends who have since bailed on the project. I am looking for 2 conservative/libertarian minded individuals who would be willing to contribute to this blog project. The website is called Right On! and if you would like to join, email me at macguru jamesmeister com. Thank you so much, and I hope that this isn't considered SPAM. -James

"GRAND FORKS, N.D., Feb. 16 - From a chenille-slipcovered sofa in the basement of their friend Dave's mom's house at the edge of a snow-covered field, Brad and Other Brad, sock-footed pioneers in the latest technology revolution, are recording "Why Fish," their weekly show. Clutching a microphone and leaning over a laptop on the coffee table, they praise the beauty of the Red River, now frozen on the edge of town, and plug an upcoming interview with a top-ranked professional walleye fisherman. Then they sign off. "I'm Brad" says Brad, in real life, Brad Durick, a 29-year-old television advertising salesman....

Lately I have been hearing so much about the social security crisis and the immigration crisis. President Bush is spending much of his “political capital” on his attempt to fix the social security crisis. Bill Bennet on his radio show Morning in America has spent almost two weeks discussing the issue of the immigration crisis. While I agree with both that we do in deed have problems in these areas, none of the discussions that I hear seem to get back to the root cause of the problem and hence have no real chance of coming up with a good...

The media buzz over the rising power of Internet weblogs (the "blogs") reached a new crescendo when CNN's chief of newsgathering, Eason Jordan, resigned over sloppy charges he made at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. When Congressman Barney Frank suggested at the conference that journalists dying in Iraq have been "collateral damage," Jordan objected. On the forum's own weblog, journalist Rony Abovitz reported that Jordan "asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by U.S. troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which...

-----Original Message----- From: [steel_resolve] Sent: Mon 2/14/2005 9:59 AM To: Iraq'd Blog Cc: Subject: Your Latest Article - Wow! BLAH BLAH BLAH!! Iraq passed a crucial test, and you have nothing good to say about it. You seem to have no problem whatsoever highlighting the negative (early and often) so why not give a few column inches to this amazing success and the peaceful political transition it is formenting? Because you can't. You see Stuart, you want Iraq to fail. Much like Ted Kennedy and that loser John Kerry, you can't see past your own selfish interests to see a...

I've been doing this for a long time now. By "this" I of course mean eating while I type. But I also mean this Internet thing. This column in fact pre-dates NRO itself and NRO is now considered one of those ancient landmarks of the Internet, like some old city that has been razed and rebuilt so many times nobody remembers why certain streets have the names they do. I remember when the first blogs started to appear and I was not particularly bullish on their chances for success. Of course, I was wrong about a great deal and right...

Well ..I hesitate a bit to put this up, and mods if you need to pull it, go ahead. I usually glance at DU from time to time as I think it is important to see what they are thinking about...(The Democrats must be listening to them as their BS is perculating all over the political landscape.) Last night I wandered into a post about Guckert/Gannon .The DU link is here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3106117 They say a big story about him is about to break. The website that is after him is: AMERICAblog.org, at http://www.americablog.org/ As best I can tell they are...