Free Republic

Rita Cosby is losing her year-old MSNBC show and will get her own specials unit for the cable channel effective July 10. The shuffle, which MSNBC announced Thursday, is the first big move of Dan Abrams' three-week tenure as MSNBC's general manager. "Rita Cosby: Live and Direct," which has been telecast at 10 p.m. (ET) weeknights and repeated at 1 a.m. (ET) since late spring, will be replaced by taped documentary programming, under the familiar label of "MSNBC Investigates." Ms. Cosby will serve as the primary anchor of "Investigates," which has been led by various rotating anchors over years. "Investigates"...

Wednesday, Jun 07 Rick Kaplan Resigns: "He Has Led MSNBC Through A Period Of Impressive Growth" "I want to thank Rick for his service to MSNBC," NBC News president Steve Capus said in a message to MSNBC employees at 4pm. "Over the last two and a half years, Rick has been a tireless champion for the network and all the hard work you do each and every day. He has led MSNBC through a period of impressive growth especially in primetime. You, the staff at MSNBC, are enormously dedicated and have built a rock-solid foundation for our future growth. MSNBC...

After being passed over for a chance to replace NBC News chief Neal Shapiro, MSNBC boss Rick Kaplan's job is in jeopardy, The Post has learned. Sources say Kaplan is likely to be out as the head of the ratings-challenged cable news network by the end of the year.

It might be a good idea for Keith Olbermann and Rick Kaplan to give each other a wide berth until things cool down. I hear that MSNBC staffers in the Secaucus newsroom-studio watched in horror Monday night as the volatile Kaplan, the president of the cable outlet, publicly laced into the eccentric Olbermann, anchor of the 8 p.m. show "Countdown," after the latter eulogized lung-cancer victim Peter Jennings with a graphic rant about his own cancer scare.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Aboard U.S.S. Benfold, in the North Pacific AS the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln returned home to San Diego this week from its relief mission in Indonesia, the main lesson of the United States military's remarkable tsunami relief effort has yet to be acknowledged: that the global war on terrorism, rather than distracting the military from performing humanitarian deeds, has made it far more effective at them. This is worth bearing in mind, especially now that President Bush's request for $82 billion in emergency military spending has re-opened the argument over Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's longstanding plan for...

Last Update: 10/01/2005 22:07 Tsunami 'wave rat' sells domain name, gives cash to Chabad By Reuters TORONTO - A Canadian student dubbed the "wave rat" for offering the domain name tsunamirelief.com for $50,000 on the online auction site eBay has sold it and donated the money to a Jewish charity's relief efforts, the gaming company that bought it said Monday. Josh Kaplan, 20, branded a "wave rat" by the New York Post, which suggested he was trying to profit from the disaster, sold the domain name to the Montreal-based internet gambling company for $10,000. The entire amount was given directly...

With Kaplan’s entrenchment, MSNBC will, like the other establishment networks, almost certainly become just another cookie cutter stamping out a daily batch of predictable one-sided, pro-Democrat, anti-Republican, pro-Leftist propaganda. Needless to say, MSNBC Democrats like Matthews or the “Countdown” laughing Lefty Keith Olbermann will get no comparable command to “balance” their Left-leaning shows with right-wing voices and views.

An Islamic leader sought by Ankara on treason charges has been deported by Germany hours after a court cleared his extradition. Muhammad Metin Kaplan, 51, was detained at an Internet café in Cologne and hustled into a Turkey-bound plane at the Duesseldorf airport on Tuesday although he formally had two weeks to appeal the decision by the Cologne administrative court. Kaplan faces charges for masterminding a failed 1998 plot to crash a plane laden with explosives into the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern secular Turkish state. Angelika Flader, a spokeswoman for the North Rhine-Westphalia state...

In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge. The crowd I joined in Franken’s living room was comprised of: Al Franken and his wife Franni; Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for the New Yorker; David Remnick, editor for the New Yorker; Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Magazine; Howard...

The walls haven't collapsed around George W. Bush, but the pillars are buckling, the floorboards are rattling, the inspectors are probing, and it doesn't look good. In the White House and the Pentagon, senior officials face the prospect of criminal charges. The vice president is accused of malfeasance, at best. A key erstwhile ally in the war on terrorism has apparently turned against us in an act of criminal perfidy. And now the nation's spymaster has turned in his cloak—it's not yet clear whether he jumped or got pushed; either way, Bush's risk-rating has just soared.

The long-winded case of Metin Kaplan, the radical Muslim cleric, is threatening the recent German immigration compromise. The conservative opposition has renewed calls that the law include tighter security measures. After the botched attempt to arrest and deport radical Muslim imam Metin Kaplan from Germany, the opposition is raising new questions about the compromise reached with Chancellor Schröder's government over a much-needed immigration law. Edmund Stoiber, Bavarian premier and head of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), who was part of the long-running immigration negotiations, has demanded further refinements to the compromise which is designed to make it easier for...

At a recent academic conference on ancient history and modern politics, a copy of Robert D. Kaplan's Warrior Politics was held up by a speaker as an example of the current influence of the classics on Washington policymakers, as if the horseman shown on the cover was riding straight from the Library of Congress to the Capitol.* One of the attendees was unimpressed. He denounced Kaplan as a pseudo-intellectual who does more harm than good. But not so fast: it is possible to be skeptical of the first claim without accepting the second. Yes, our politicians may quote Kaplan more...

<p>BOCA RATON, Fla. -- In a call center here, 148 sales representatives work the phones, following their training manual's exhortation to "sell the dream." Their jobs and raises hinge on meeting quarterly sales goals. They adorn their cubicles with colored flags, denoting completed interviews with prospects and allowing supervisors to check progress at a glance.</p>

Bush to World: Drop Dead! The president lays an egg at the U.N. By Fred Kaplan Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2003, at 2:23 PM PT Has an American president ever delivered such a bafflingly impertinent speech before the General Assembly as the one George W. Bush gave this morning? Here were the world's foreign ministers and heads of state, anxiously awaiting some sign of an American concession to realism—even the sketchiest outline of a plan to share not just the burden but the power of postwar occupation in Iraq. And Bush gave them nothing, in some ways less than nothing....

<p>Munich, Germany -- Metin Kaplan heads a group that seeks world domination by Islam on the basis of Shariah law, welcomed the Sept. 11 attacks, agitates against the United States, Western society and Jews, and allegedly is linked to al Qaeda.</p>

The Atlantic Monthly | March 2002   The World in 2005 Hidden in plain sight   by Robert D. Kaplan   .....   s Americans, we have a natural tendency to believe that world events over the next few years will unfold from September 11. But in truth much of the world will evolve without regard to September 11. Civil wars will continue, diseases will break out, and local economic crises will run their course. The challenge is to anticipate how these other processes will intersect with the war on terrorism. We saw an example of such intersection after...

In a country where high school kids of every stripe seem to favor the same uniforms of baggy pants or midriff-baring shirts, it can be hard to spot differences in class background. But one giveaway for juniors and seniors lies in the contents of their backpacks--there's a good chance that the more affluent will be toting test-prep materials from companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review. These are the top firms that teach courses designed to give kids a leg up on those all-important college-entrance exams, the SAT and ACT, as well as graduate school equivalents like the GMAT and LSAT....

"The greater the disregard of history, the greater the delusions regarding the future." Robert D. Kaplan OMED: there is a dispute about this book, particularly with respect to Kaplan's seeming belief that the spread of Western democracy is not necessarily a good thing across the globe. Here is a quote from Steven Alford, in a Houston Chronicle review: "Despite careful readings of Machiavelli and Hobbes, however, Kaplan fails to distinguish between selfishness and self-interest. While selfishness ignores the interests of others (Hobbes' idea of human nature), self-interest, in action, is a much more complex idea and one that distinguishes Machiavelli...