Free Republic

The former executive director for the American Conservative Union has agreed to serve on the advisory council for GOProud, a homosexual lobby that has approved of same-sex "marriage" and the repeal of the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy that allowed homosexuals to serve in the military if they didn't make an issue of their lifestyle choice even though the law banned that. According to an announcement today from GOProud, Chuck Muth, the former executive director of the ACU, is joining the GOProud leadership team. Christopher Barron, chairman of GOProud's board, said in a prepared statement the organization was honored to...

The Republican National Committee has ended a debate partnership with National Review after the venerable conservative magazine devoted its new issue to a "symposium" of reasons why voters should reject Donald Trump's presidential campaign. "We expected this was coming," the magazine's publisher Jack Fowler wrote in a blog post late Thursday night, just 90 minutes after the symposium went live. "Small price to pay for speaking the truth about The Donald." RNC spokesman Sean Spicer Fowler's account of events, and added in a comment to Buzzfeed's Rosie Gray that "a debate moderator can't have a predisposition." That leaves CNN, Salem...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) returned to the campaign trail this weekend, making seven stops in New Hampshire with his colleague and preferred presidential candidate, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). After the third stop, at an American Legion hall in Hudson, N.H., the two hawkish Republicans sat down for a joint interview about the refugee crisis, the need to send troops to fight the Islamic State, whether the secretary of state should resign, and what the world would look like had voters made McCain president seven years ago. WP: You both mentioned that there are senators who are late-comers to this issue,...

New analysis from the Washington Post removes any doubt that the anti-Obama Birther movement was started in 2007 and 2008 by Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and her Democrat supporters. As Breitbart News reported earlier this month, other left-wing media outlets, like Politico and the Guardian, had already traced the Birther movement back to Democrats and Ms. Clinton. Using his wayback machine on Wednesday, the Post’s David Weigel took an in-depth look at the origins of the false rumors that President Obama is a practicing Muslim who was not born in a America. Weigel’s reporting contains the final pieces of a...

On Thursday afternoon, 13-year old CJ Pearson warned his 43,900 followers not to believe what they read. The black Georgia teenager, whose activism and online success had made him a youth outreach chairman for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), had been trading messages with a reporter for Glenn Beck's news site, The Blaze. Oliver Darcy, a reporter for the site, was asking Pearson to prove -- as he had claim, to great viral attention -- that President Barack Obama had truly blocked him on Twitter. In lieu of proof, Pearson was calling for help. "In a few minutes, @oliverdarcy is going...

BERLIN, N.H. -- The Republican primary's scramble to the right has led to pointed criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement, and of the Obama administration's approach to police reform. After Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) criticized the president for "vilifying" law enforcement, other candidates found reasons to blame Democrats for an atmosphere where protesters could chant threats to police. "In the last six years under President Obama, we've seen a rise in anti-police rhetoric," wrote Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) in an op-ed this week. "Instead of hope and change, we've seen racial tensions worsen and a tendency to use law...

The headlines neatly tell the story. "Ron Paul’s Passive-Aggressive Campaign Against Rand Paul." Rand Paul Has a Daddy Issue." "Like Father, Like Son? Not Exactly." Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has endeavored so much to distinguish his "libertarian-ish" views from his father's "voluntarist" politics that any snark from the paterfamilias generates a story. He'll joke that he's still looking at who to endorse; it will be reported like Saturn devouring his offspring. There will be no snark this weekend. As Rand Paul heads out of the country for a medical mission to Haiti, Ron Paul will make a print and e-mail...

ATLANTA -- Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) avoided the RedState Gathering this weekend. While Republican presidential rivals like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee faced down questions about Donald Trump in Atlanta, Paul was touring South Carolina, holding meet-and-greets and dropping into a "Pints for Liberty" happy hour. But in Goose Creek, S.C., Paul unloaded on Trump, recapitulating the arguments he'd made throughout Thursday night's presidential debate, saying conservatives were "kidding themselves" if they fell for Trump's brand of anti-establishment politics. "I can't imagine Donald Trump even knowing what a tea party is," Paul said, referring to...

LANSING, MI -- A Republican presidential candidate hasn't won Michigan since 1988, but with 2016 on the horizon, GOP lawmakers are proposing bills that could help a second-place finisher win some electoral college votes here. • Rigging? State Rep. Cindy Gamrat, R-Plainwell, this month reintroduced legislation that would award Michigan's electoral college votes by Congressional District, ditching the winner-take-all model that most states use and diminishing the influence of large cities that can swing a vote. David Weigel of Bloomberg News, calling the bill part of the "electoral college-rigging movement," noted that Republican nominee Mitt Romney would have won nine...

Near the end of March 2010, as Republicans outside Kentucky realized that Rand Paul might actually become a senator, Paul’s opponent received an unexpected and important-looking endorsement. “I’m a lifelong conservative, and I can tell the real thing when I see it,” announced Dick Cheney. “I have looked at the records of both candidates in the race, and it is clear to me that Trey Grayson is right on the issues that matter—both on fiscal responsibility and on national security.” Paul’s campaign was half-unsurprised, half-amused. They’d seen this coming a week before, when former Cheney policy adviser Cesar Conda emailed...

With two Pulitzer Prizes to her name, Dana Priest is one of the Washington Post’s most celebrated reporters. Until Monday, when the Post published the first installment of a bombshell series on post-9/11 intelligence industrial complex, national security blogger William Arkin was hardly known to the paper’s readers. But from a media perspective, Arkin’s role as co-author of the series might be the more important. It marks the first time one of the Post’s bloggers – lately the cause of controversy because they sometimes blur opinion and reporting — has had a byline in one of the paper’s big, investigative...

Former Reasoner David Weigel has an interesting article up that seeks to answer why there aren't any Club For Growth/FreedomWorks/Tea Party/Paulista-style primary-election challenges to the worst of the Democratic Party's status quo (like, say, the execrable Dianne Feinstein). This section in particular is unintentionally revealing: Two months ago, Progressive Insurance founder Peter Lewis left the Democracy Alliance, a lefty donor coalition. Earlier this month, billionaire George Soros made his first 2012 political donations—$1 million each to America Votes and American Bridge 21st Century. That’s $23.5 million less than he gave to liberal groups in 2004. According to David McKay, chairman...

It's the season of good cheer and if you want a really good belly laugh then check out David Weigel's August prediction in Slate that the Democrats in the lame duck session of Congress would NOT attempt to ram through legislation in the final days as their term winds down. Here is Weigel proving he is something less than another Nostradamus with his August assertion that the conservative suspicion at the time that Congress would attempt such a maneuver was really nothing but silly political paranoia: ...The latest attack comes from Republicans who demand that Democrats promise not to 1)...

The case of Mr. David Weigel, a reporter who was hired by The Washington Post to blog about conservatives and who resigned from his job on June 25, exposed the inner workings of journalism in America. But what has been most telling about the case since then hasn't just been Weigel's actions or the revelations of other journalists on "Journolist," -- which is described by The Post as "an off-the-record listserv for several hundred independent to left-leaning commentators and journalists that was founded in 2007" -- but how other journalists have reacted to the news. Although it has long been...

f any large publication stands to suffer from the JournoList controversy, it’s the Washington Post. The paper hired JournoList founder Ezra Klein from the left-wing publication The American Prospect, and Klein continued to run JournoList while at the Post. In June, the paper quickly accepted the resignation of David Weigel, whom it hired from the left-wing publication The Washington Independent, over comments made on JournoList. (Klein announced he was shutting down the list-serv shortly thereafter.) It is not known whether other Post writers, some of whom also came to the paper from left-wing publications, took part in JournoList; I have...

Guest blogging for lunatic Andrew Sullivan, disgraced former WaPo blogger David Weigel tries to talk some sense into Sully: Trig Palin is Sarah Palin's son and it's irresponsible to suggest otherwise. [...] All of the evidence indicates that Trig Palin is Sarah's son, and none of it suggests otherwise. I paid close enough attention to this in 2008, and realized pretty quickly that the countervailing theories made no sense. Too many people watched Palin announce the pregnancy and saw her come along until she went into labor, prematurely, while attending a National Governors Association event in Texas. Here in Alaska,...

Former Washington Post writer David Weigel has attempted to explain away his Journolist e-mails attacking conservatives by claiming he was a trash-talking thoughtless jerk. If you think that self-damnation was bad, at least it was much better than admitting something even closer to the truth which would be that he deviously allowed people to think of him as a conservative. In fact, he is still lamely making that conservative claim in his Big Journalism article but first the jerk confession: ...I treated the list like a dive bar, swaggering in and popping off about what was “really” happening out there,...

David Weigel, who was hired by The Washington Post to blog about conservatives, resigned Friday after leaked online messages showed him disparaging some Republicans and commentators in highly personal terms. Weigel, whose tenure lasted three months, apologized Thursday for writing on a private e-mail exchange that Matt Drudge should "handle his emotional problems more responsibly and set himself on fire." He also mocked Ron Paul, the Texas congressman, by referring to the "Paultard Tea Party." The Daily Caller reported more inflammatory comments on Friday, with Weigel writing that conservatives were using the media to "violently, angrily divide America" and lamenting...

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh famously said he hoped President Obama would “fail” in January, 2009. Almost a year later, when Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital with chest pains, Washington Post reporter David Weigel had a wish of his own. “I hope he fails,” Weigel cracked to fellow liberal reporters on the “Journolist” email list-serv. “Too soon?” he wondered. Weigel was hired this spring by the Post to cover the conservative movement. Almost from the beginning there have been complaints that his coverage betrays a personal animus toward conservatives. E-mails obtained by the Daily Caller suggest those complaints have...

FIRST ON FBDC: FishbowlDC has confirmed that WaPo conservative-beat blogger Dave Weigel has resigned after a slew of his anti-conservative comments and emails surfaced on FishbowlDC and Daily Caller over the past two days. A spokesperson for the Post said the paper will not offer additional comments but confirmed that the writer's resignation was accepted.