Free Republic

So you finally decided to take the big step, to wade into the debates of the day, and lend your ever-so-wise voice to the great political public square. You’ve decided to become a political blogger. Now what? And what can you learn and expect as you step forth to ideological battle and proclaim the truth as you know it? I have blogged from a conservative point of view for many years, both as an individual as well as in a group blog format, and in that time I like to think that I’ve learned a few things about blogging along...

Thanks to a bill that has received bipartisan support in the Senate, the Department of Justice may soon have the power to suspend domain names if the Attorney General deems a site as having copyright infringement “central to the activity” conducted by the site owners.  Hollywood and the recording industry has pushed the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) to get the government in position to seize Internet sites that damage the property rights of intellectual property producers, bypassing the existing remedies of lawsuits and damage recoveries.  However, the ambiguous nature of the definition and the wide latitude it...

Crazy? I'll give you crazy . . . Last Friday Mika Brzezinski and Morning Joe engaged in some strange and possibly unprecedented TV "journalism." They invited Terry Jones—the potentially Koran-burning pastor—on the show via live feed, gave former Newsweek editor Jon Meachem the chance to lecture him about Christianity and implore him not to proceed with his plan . . . then summarily cut the feed without giving Jones the chance to say word one in response. "We don't really need to hear anything else" declared Mika, as she shut down the pastor's microphone. A number of bloggers, including NB's...

-A weekly summary of news, views, and humor from the New Media's resurgent Right-

ON MAY 26, 2006, RIGHT-WING POLITICAL REPORTER JOHN J. MILLER published an article for the National Review titled "Rockin’ the Right: The 50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs" wherein he identified some of the more "liberal" rock songs according to popular memory from the 1960s to present day as actually "convey[ing] a conservative idea or sentiment." [SNIP]I argue these lists attempt to reterritorialize rock as a means of shifting the terrain of political debate concerning the various cultural forms that can now be claimed for conservatism, and I position them in relation to a larger right-wing political trend: one which attempts...

Anti-Obama sentiment brewing on internet as Tea party threatens boilover WHEN Stacy Mott, a stay-at-home mother of three children, started writing a blog after the election of President Barack Obama last year, she had no involvement in politics and simply wanted to vent her frustration at financial bailouts, healthcare reform and legislation to combat climate change. The former marketing executive at Toys R Us quickly found she was not alone. One year on, her blog, Smart Girl Politics, is an organisation with 23,000 members and co-ordinators in almost every state. "There are a huge amount of people out there...

The Huffington Post is one of those aggregation Web sites criticized by media titan Rupert Murdoch yesterday. And its response to his statement that practices by those sites amount to content theft: Enough of the whining and finger pointing. Here's Arianna Huffington's post in response to Murdoch: She said the News Corp. chairman just doesn't get the new Web media model. Murdoch and Huffington were among those at a media star-studded event at the Federal Trade Commission on the future of newspapers. The FTC said its workshop was meant to consider ways the federal government could play a role in...

Either I have a message worth reading - in which case LGF blocking me makes no difference, or I have nothing worthy to say - in which case acceptance by LGF makes no difference! Meanwhile, after wracking my brain as to why I was banned and seeing who else the good Mr. Johnson has been feuding with, I can only surmise that the above quoted posts and many others which expose extreme Islamists in my blog may have cumulatively been the cause of my banishment. Should that be the case, I can only thank Charles Johnson for elevating my little...

always say I love numbers because numbers don't lie. I recently scanned Michelle Malkin's site, Michael Gaynor's site, and Anita Moncrief's site, and what I discovered is rather illuminating. For instance, on Michelle Malkin's site, Anita Moncrief is mentioned in more pieces (25-19) than Wade Rathke. In other words, if you relied primarily on Michelle Malkin's site for your news, you'd think that Anita Moncrief is more important to the ACORN story than the long time CEO of the group, Wade Rathke. Wade Rathke is known by almost all that follow ACORN whereas Moncrief is relatively unknown by most that...

I’ve counted Right Wing Nuthouse as one of the blogs I read on a regular basis for the past few years now (as noted by the fact that it is in our blogroll). I’ve always found Rick Moran’s articles to be interesting and thought provoking, even if I often disagreed with him (as he is a bit more moderate than I am). Yet, earlier this week, he wrote a column that I found to be a vitriolic attack on Rush Limbaugh for a typical Rush segment in which Rush illustrated absurdity by being absurd. The bit in question that Rick...

I had looked forward to interviewing Phelim McAleer at the Right Online conference about his new film, Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria, since I interviewed him at CPAC about his efforts on the documentary at that point. This time, though, Phelim’s co-director and wife Ann McElhinney joined us to discuss the film, the radical environmental movement, and how Rachel Carson changed the world — to the detriment of tens of millions of people who have needlessly died through the banning of DDT.

Conservatives take on liberals in blogosphere DAN NEPHIN Aug. 14 PITTSBURGH -- Call this city blogger central. Two grassroots groups - one left leaning, the other right leaning - are holding their annual conferences here and teaching members how to wield clout online. On the left is Netroots Nation, which has been credited in part with helping usher President Barack Obama into office. On the right is RightOnline, a project of the conservative Americans for Prosperity Foundation. The Netroots Nation conference is much larger, at about 1,800 people, and lasts four days. RightOnline has about 700 people and lasts two...

There are plenty of interesting thoughts swirling around in the blogosphere, as evidenced by this first NewsReal Blog Round Up. Andrew Sullivan muses on the Cash for Clunkers program and conservatism: What conservatives have to do, in my view, is not demonize government, but to champion limited government. If government can do tangible practical things that help everyone, while balancing its budget, it’s doing what conservatives think it should. Smart, practical initiatives that address problems that the private sector has failed at: what else is government for? The rest is ideology – and it seems to be all the Republicans...

The whole birth certificate issue gets weirder still: "I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen. I have nothing further to add to this statement or my original statement issued in October 2008 over eight months ago...." But why are we supposed to rely on the testimony of Dr Fukino, whom I believe entirely. It is not my job as a journalist or yours as a...

There's been a lot of talk recently about what is being lost with the death of newspapers. But less discussed is what is being GAINED. And that is that the Web is a much more interactive, participatory medium that a newspaper can ever be. One controversial or memorable blog entry can attract more comments than entire career as a newspaper reporter. Just as important, there is no filter -- no copy editor -- to get between you and those armies of commentors out there. And those commentors come in many forms -- more than most of us ever imagined. Here's...

Reaching across the aisle must have been too uncomfortable for a man who is used to standing around and watching admirers crawl up that same aisle to offer obeisance. In his first televised press conference since being elected to become All Things to All People, Barack Obama dropped the pretense of giving a crap about what anybody else thought. Those of us who have been paying attention to the man rather than the media-spun myth were less than surprised by the development. Three weeks into his tenure, Mr. Obama acknowledged that his effort to change the political climate in Washington...

This was the pot calling the kettle . . . broke. Talk about chutzpah, this was the journalistic equivalent of John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer co-authoring an advice book on how to stay faithful to your wife [foreword by Bill Clinton]. By its cover story this week, Time deigns to dole out advice to newspapers about how to save themselves. This from the same Time whose parent, Time Inc., just a few months ago announced massive layouts. Time Inc. is in turn owned by Time Warner, which just yesterday announced a fourth-quarter loss of . . . $16 billion. Time...

Week of babies and lies Sarah Palin talks about her daughter's baby, and a hoax that fooled Oprah Winfrey falls apart. Buzz Week in Review A collective exhale ushered the volatile 2008 out the door this week, although one baby who caused a political storm managed to quietly slip himself out before the end. Meanwhile, a long-time Oprah hoax and high-seas piracy stirred up the Buzz—and the searches—during this transition period. Mom, Do We Have to Do a Combo Celebration? Bristol Palin's boy emerged not as the grandson of the first female vice president, but as another December baby who...

There was no Memorex around when the brontosauri were bidding bye-bye, but I think we have a pretty good idea of what they sounded like as they were going extinct. Just listen to Brian Williams this morning. Appearing on Morning Joe, the NBC Nightly News anchor lamented the decline of "classically-trained" journalists in favor of guys with "an opinion and a modem." A question from Pat Buchanan about the ebbing fortunes of the old media set Williams off on a soliloquy he assured us was not self-interested. View video here.

Who is "Buckhead" for the WBEZ tapes? Remember 2004, Dan Rather, the "fake but accurate" memo, and a poster on Freerepublic.com named "Buckhead" who was the first to spot the fact that something was not quite right about that memo? Well, now we have the tapes of Obama, Ayers, et al., in the WBEZ (Chicago National Proletarian Radio) archives that, as far as Obama being a socialist, are like the punchline to the old joke where the guy asks the girl if she'd sleep with him for a million dollars, and she says, "Sure!". Then he asks her if she'd...