Free Republic

A real estate agent in Houston who blogged about Anna Nicole Smith was jailed for contempt last week in a defamation case brought by the late Playboy model's mother. Legal experts said bloggers are increasingly the targets of such litigation, which are testing the bounds of free speech. Lyndal Harrington, who is accused of helping to spread falsehoods that Virgie Arthur married her stepbrother and abused Smith as a child, spent four nights in jail after she failed to comply with a court order to turn over her computer. The 53-year-old grandmother claimed her computer was stolen during a burglary...

(United States Army) This week the Army not only launched an official blog portal, but also an Army fan page on Facebook.

Blogger becomes casualty of Iran cyber-wars The Associated Press - ‎Apr 11, 2009‎ He was Iran's first known casualty in the skirmishes between bloggers challenging the Islamic regime and authorities striking back with the tools they know ...

CNBC looks to be making another left turn. After the network announced Democratic National Committee chairman and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as a “CNBC contributor,” the network has gone even farther. According a status update from Arianna Huffington’s Facebook page on March 24, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post will co-host CNBC’s morning program, “Squawk Box” on March 31. “I'll be hosting Squawk Box on CNBC next Tuesday,” Huffington’s post read. “Who would you like to see me interview, and what should I ask them?” ..more..

[video] This is a tragic story. But let it serve as a chilling warning that the internet must remain free. Let’s just let the people who broke the story explain it in their own words: Omid Reza Mir Sayafi, a 29-year old Iranian blogger and journalist died in Evin Prison in Tehran on March 18. In December, he was sentenced to two and half years in prison for allegedly insulting religious leaders, and engaging in propaganda against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Mir Sayafi was still awaiting an additional trial for insulting Islam. According to the Human Rights activists in...

OBAMA PLANS TO DESTROY AMERICA ORCHESTRATED CRISIS TO HASTEN FALL click here MUST READ!!!

<p>Resume Falsification of Radley Balko Exposed. Exaggerations A Common Tactic of the Left, Obama Acolytes.</p> <p>Liberal (and ersatz libertarian) blogger and wanna-be pundit Radley Balko claims on his bio on his blog that he is a bi-weekly columnist for Forbes.com. But an investigation by the RLCIL demonstrates that Mr. Balko has taken extreme liberties — perhaps even license — with the term “bi-weekly.”</p>

Demonstrating once again the depths of stupidity of the Left, an imbecile blogger known as “Charles” at a site called “The Edge of Tommorrow” defends a kiddie porno advocate, David Ogden, who has been nominated by Obama for the position of deputy attorney general of the U.S. The author writes, “The RLC labels David Ogden, Barack Obama’s nominee to be deputy attorney general, a “pornography buff” and “cultural radical” because he has a record of successfully defending obscenity cases. Remember, these are the people who claim to be the libertarian wing of the party.” Clearly, this “Charles,” confuses liberalism with...

Yes, Islamic law really does forbid conversion. Let's just hope Saudi blogger Hamoud Bin Saleh doesn't receive Muhammad's preferred punishment for apostates: beheading. Arresting converts and critics is exactly what you'd expect from our "partners" in the War on Terror, isn't it? But would you expect Google's blogspot platform to go along with Saudi Arabia's request to ban Saleh's website? You. Bet.

HOWDY FREEPERS!!!!!!!This morning my op-ed focuses on one of Oklahoma's most well respected bloggers.Michael Bates is a well respected blogger who authors the blog Batesline (http://www.batesline.com) He also writes a column for an alternative media source, Urban Tulsa Weekly.When Michael composes a blog one of the things he always takes care to do is research his material for his blogs and get his facts straight.Recently, Mr. Bates was hit with a lawsuit by World Publishing Company, publishers of the Tulsa World. Apparently this had to do with a piece he composed on January 15 regarding the World's declining circulation.Now, here...

A few days ago, in the context of pointing out some of the excesses that typify superhero comic books being published today, I posted my personal mission statement, promising to no longer take part in the superhero decadence trend. As surely as night follows day, the comics community reacted (here, and on comics-devoted news sites and message boards, far and wide), in a more or less even mix of pro and con, support and condemnation, leavened with the usual percentage of anonymous bomb throwing that’s impossible to avoid in our wonderful Internet culture. Some arguments (on both sides) were fairly...

If you stare at the lines in the road, you’ll never see where you’re going. While the Devil might be in the details, if you want to know where he’ll be you need to look for the pattern. Pattern-recognition is one of the trickiest pieces of programming, partially because we know very little about how our brains work, and partially because humans make it look so damned easy. Our brains are designed to spot and record patterns. Sure, it takes a long time. Evenutally, enough memories gel to enable us to look back and assign confidence of some correlation (if...

A South Korean blogger pleaded not guilty Saturday to charges that he spread false economic information on the Internet, a news report said, in a case that drew heated debate over freedom of speech. The blogger, identified only by his surname Park, gained prominence among South Koreans because some of his dire predictions about the global economy, including the collapse of Lehman Brothers, later proved to be correct. Known widely by his pen name "Minerva," the mythological Greek goddess of wisdom, the 31-year-old Park was accused of spreading false information on an Internet discussion site last month that the government...

In 2006, Thailand announced it was blocking access to YouTube for anyone with a Thai I.P address, and then identified 20 offensive videos for Google to remove as a condition of unblocking the site. ‘If your whole game is to increase market share,’ says Lawrence Lessig, speaking of Google, ‘it’s hard to . . . gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy concerns or in ways that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.’ In March of last year, Nicole Wong, the deputy general counsel of Google, was notified that there had been a precipitous drop in activity...

I'm trying to make a blogger post with the title "Islamist Videos" every time I enter the titme Google changes it to इस्लामिस्ट Does anybody understand this? I can't tell if Blogger (which is owned by Google)is trying to help me, trying to censor me or just screwed up. Thanks all!

GISS's October Data. The large reddish-brown area in Russia is actually September readings. Amateur team finds NASA error similar to one they discovered a year ago. NASA'S Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is one of the world's primary sources for climate data. GISS issues regular updates on world temperatures based on their analysis of temperature readings from thousands of monitoring stations over the globe. GISS' most recent data release originally reported last October as being extraordinarily warm-- a full 0.78C above normal. This would have made it the warmest October on record; a huge increase over the previous month's...

Carol Anne Burger was fighting for her life. Racked by economic and romantic reversals, she struggled against moods that swung from sadness to anger. Her e-mails and an eight-page letter, subsequently e-mailed to Boynton Beach police by a friend in close touch with Burger during her final months, depict a bright, idealistic and compassionate woman struggling to keep her head up while caught in a painful, humiliating situation. She was unemployed and having to sell her house because of the breakup of her long-term relationship with her partner. Worse, she was still living in that house with her former mate,...

Relax, people. McCain did fine. Re: Ayers. If McCain flogs that too enthusiastically he’s screwed. Obama already won a couple of news cycles last week when he painted McCain as unconcerned about the economy and wanting to debate something that happened 40 years ago.

Obama's Ties to Tony Rezko and Alexi Giannoulias Closing the Obama-Rezko gap. Who is Alexi Giannoulias? Could there really be yet another shady connection that will finally grow legs in the media. Obama helped Alexi Giannoulias (D) win a run for Illinois State Treasurer. Giannoulias has helped fund Barack Obama. From Giannoulias' website: "Prior to taking office, Giannoulias served as vice president and senior loan officer at Broadway Bank in Chicago’s Edgewater community. Crain’s Chicago Business rated Broadway the No. 1 Bank in Illinois for five years based on return on assets. Giannoulias grew up in Chicago, graduated cum laude...

NEW ORLEANS — The citizens of this scarred city have grown accustomed to promises of grand official projects that will infallibly transform life here but somehow never do. Their attention is diminishing. But not in the case of Karen Gadbois. She jumps in her car and checks up on the promises, driving for hours across the city, then blogs about the results on her kitchen table while her dogs yap around her. A few months ago, she discovered a city renovation program that was not actually fixing up houses. That activism might normally go down as well-meaning naïveté. Here though,...