Free Republic

On April 8, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Boston conference on ''media reform.'' She was joined by four other congressmen, a senator, two FCC commissioners, a Nobel laureate and numerous liberal journalists. The 2,500-person event was sponsored by a group called Free Press, one of more than 180 different media-related organizations that receives money from liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros, who first made a name for himself in investing and currency trading, now makes his name in politics and policy. Since the 2004 election, the controversial financier has used his influence and billions to push a laundry list...

Hitler's Muslim Nephew Comes to New York September 24, 2007 FrontPageMagazine.com Kenneth R. Timmerman What was New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinking? Apparently the former Democrat believed that escorting Iran’s Hitler-wannabe president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the site of the September 11 memorial at Ground Zero would generate a terrific photo op. “Here I am with world leaders,” that type of thing. After all, Bloomberg has already made his appearance at the “World Leaders Forum” at Columbia University, so he was in the zone. And last year, U.S. News & World Report crowned him as one of America’s “best leaders.” But...

FULL TITLE - St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact, Lane DeGregory win 2009 Pulitzer Prizes For the first time in its 125-year history, the St. Petersburg Times has won two Pulitzer Prizes in a single year. Staff writer Lane DeGregory, 42, captured the feature writing category for "The Girl in the Window," a moving account of a Plant City child whose mother kept her locked in a filthy room, and the adoptive family who worked to overcome her feral beginnings. The Times staff won the national reporting prize for PolitiFact, a Web site, database and "Truth-O-Meter'' that tests the validity of political...

* SEPTEMBER 20, 2010 6:00PM Columbia U. Bows to Tyrant plus today's Kooky Fringe Quiz Rate: 0 The idiocy of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher or why I left the left.... Despite Ethiopia's deep disgust, Lee Bollinger and Brad Pitt-mentor Jeffrey Sachs still don't get it. While they sip white wine at the Clinton Summit for the conscience-less Clintons this week, Ethiopians rally against Bollinger's invitation to war criminal Meles Zenawi. An extremely popular African-American radio host discussing the mass rape in the Congo last week had this to say to the white caller who brought up the Muslim-Christian conflict...

I’ve been flagging the MSM newspaper bailout campaign for the last two years (chronology recap here). The clamor for big government to rescue old media has not died now. The latest? Columbia University president Lee Bollinger doing the Chicken Little routine in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. As I wrote back in December 2008 in opposition to newspaper moochers: How “free” can a “free press” be if it is leveraged with government funding? How free would they be to criticize other corporate enterprises seeking local, state, or federal help to keep them afloat in hard times? Quis custodiet...

You think there are problems now with the mainstream media? Just wait. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger joins the drumbeat of those proposing fixes that are guaranteed to make the MSM much, much worse — and he wants to do it with your tax dollars.In a July 14th op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Bollinger argues that the time has come to rescue the declining fortunes of newspapers and broadcast news with “enhanced public funding for journalism.” He envisions the future of American journalism as a “mixed system,” part public, part private. Otherwise, worries Bollinger, Americans might not get the news...

NEW YORK (MNA) – An academic delegation of Columbia University professors and deans of faculties plans to visit Tehran to officially apologize to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. The delegation plans to express regret for the insulting remarks Columbia University President Lee Bollinger directed at Ahmadinejad on September 24 in his introductory speech, the Mehr News Agency correspondent in New York reported. Since the incident, the deans and professors from the faculties of history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, philosophy, and Islamic studies have criticized Bollinger’s behavior toward Ahmadinejad. A member of the delegation, who requested anonymity, said the main goal of...

Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, was confronted yesterday by discontented professors who gathered more than 100 faculty signatures for a document criticizing his leadership. Their “statement of concern,” read to him at a faculty meeting, outlined a grab bag of charges, some relating to governance of the university and some concerning Middle East issues that have repeatedly troubled the campus, in particular his challenging introductory remarks when the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, visited this fall.

Psychiatric Association Releases Final Report on "Lee Bollinger's Disease" By William S. Smith : 03 Oct 2007 (SATIRENEWSSERVICE) The World Psychiatric Association (WPA) today issued its long-awaited, massive study on Intelligentsia Derangement Disorder (IDD). Known popularly as Lee Bollinger's Disease, IDD is characterized by profound disruption in cognition involving the most fundamental human attributes: language, thought, perception and desire for self preservation. The disease has been found in epidemic proportions on university campuses. The WPA study, which included extensive case histories of every single academic in the United States and Western Europe, reports that 99.99999% of all, non-economist social science...

The President of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, really gave it to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He really did. He called Ahmadinejad a "petty and cruel dictator" and many other harsh names. All richly deserved. And it is likely that President Bollinger felt that he had done a good thing. In fact, however, as many of us predicted, it was Ahmadinejad who won. The very moment the Iranian Holocaust-denier was given a university platform, he won. Even the deserved insults gave Ahmadinejad a victory. Most people do not like their leaders publicly insulted abroad, even if they agree with most of...

There is a suicidal mania that tends to grip the American media and academia from time to time, and it has happened again with the American visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the poster boy for state sponsors of terrorism. It's bad enough that Ahmadinejad was among friends when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in late September, but when major American newspapers, several American TV networks, including CBS's 60 Minutes, the National Press Club, and a major Ivy League university give a significant propaganda victory to a man who is arguably the most dangerous man alive, there's a...

Patriots need to learn to two words -- "treason" and "traitor." The American people need to hear the truth - that the left has gone far beyond dissent. It betrays America at every turn. Its hatred of our nation - our history and underlying ethos - is visible in word and deed. It slanders the republic, lies about our past, undercuts our warriors, revels in American deaths and consorts with the enemy in time of war (aid and comfort, and all that). These reflections are prompted by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia University, in the course of his...

Isn't it always? But enough about Iran, let's talk about me! The same university that shouted down an American anti-illegal-immigration activist and the same university culture that just deemed former Harvard honcho Larry Summers too misogynist to be permitted on campus is now congratulating itself over its commitment to "academic freedom." True, renowned Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo is not happy. "They can have any fascist they want there," said professor Zimbardo, "but this seems egregious." But, hey, don't worry: He was protesting not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presence at Columbia but Donald Rumsfeld's presence at the Hoover Institution.... Lots of prime...

1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pronounced mah-MOOD ah-mah-dih-nee-ZHAD) was born Oct. 28, 1956, three years after the CIA-sponsored coup that installed the pro-Western leader Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Iran's leader. A Shiite Muslim, he and his wife, a professor, have two sons and a daughter. 2. When he was an infant, Ahmadinejad's family moved from the village of Aradan to Tehran. It was at this point that the family changed its name from Saborjhian, which translates to "thread painter" (the lowliest job in Iran's traditional carpet-weaving industry), to the more religious Ahmadinejad ("race of Muhammad" or "virtuous race"). 3. Ahmadinejad is...

Too bad Dr. Lee Bollinger, who has a law degree, forgot an essential cross-examination principle: Never ask a hostile witness a question you don't already know the answer to. If he'd remembered that bit of courtroom wisdom before he invited Iran's president to Columbia University, perhaps jihadists around the world wouldn't be laughing at America right now. Bollinger is the president of Columbia, which invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a question-and-answer forum on campus this week. The showdown was supposed to expose the Iranian propagandist, but it turned out to be the biggest public relations disaster in the history of American...

TASE HIM, BRO!September 26, 2007 Democrats should run Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for president. He's more coherent than Dennis Kucinich, he dresses like their base, he's more macho than John Edwards, and he's willing to show up at a forum where he might get one hostile question -- unlike the current Democratic candidates for president who won't debate on Fox News Channel. He's not married to an impeached president, and the name "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad" is surely no more frightening than "B. Hussein Obama." And liberals agree with Ahmadinejad on the issues! We know that because he was invited by an American university...

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have faced ridicule in the United States by suggesting there were no homosexuals in Iran, but he won praise at home on Wednesday for taking his country's case to "the Lion's Den." Generally, politicians and media in the Islamic Republic -- even some who have previously criticized the president -- described Ahmadinejad's visit to New York as a triumph and denounced the university president who called him "a petty and cruel dictator." But one pro-reform newspaper said that, although the president told his U.S. audience he respected academics, that was not always how it seemed at...

Columbia University president Lee Bollinger exercised his free speech rights by giving guest lecturer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a good tongue lashing. It is doubtful his words swayed the Iranian despot – “OK, OK, the Holocaust happened, and I will dismantle my nuclear program just as soon as I get back home!” - but with his tough talk “Bollinger had clawed his way back to semi-respectability in polite society by insulting his guest - not the usual practice in polite society, but consider the depth of the hole Bollinger had dug for himself by insisting on being a good academic liberal,” as...

A backlash against the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, who on Monday delivered a harsh rebuke to President Ahmadinejad, is coming from faculty members and students who said he struck an "insulting tone" and that his remarks amounted to "schoolyard taunts." The fierceness of Mr. Bollinger's critique bought the Iranian some sympathy on campus that he didn't deserve, the critics said, and amounted to a squandered opportunity to provide a lesson in diplomacy. Mr. Bollinger opened a two-hour program during which the Iranian president spoke and answered questions at the Roone Arledge Auditorium in Morningside Heights by calling Mr....

TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- Seven chancellors and presidents of Iranian universities and research centers, in a letter addressed to their counterpart in the US Colombia University, denounced Lee Bollinger's insulting words against the Iranian nation and president and invited him to provide responses for 10 questions of the Iranian academicians and intellectuals. The following is the full text of the letter. Mr. Lee Bollinger Columbia University President We, the professors and heads of universities and research institutions in Tehran , hereby announce our displeasure and protest at your impolite remarks prior to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent speech at Columbia...