Free Republic

Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, the now freed American hikers who were held in an Iranian prison after being convicted for espionage, appeared before cameras and reporters in New York on Sunday and gave prepared statements about their detentions in Iran. Bauer, a freelance journalist, along with Sarah Shourd, a teacher and women’s rights activist, and Fattal, an environmentalist, were arrested July 31, 2009 while hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan. Shourd was released last year. Bauer's and Fattal's remarks were critical of American foreign policy towards Iran as well as the Iranian government's treatment of it's own people. "The only explanation...

I hope I never write another piece on Sarah Palin again. The woman is a disease, and I choose my words carefully there. She is everything that is wrong with America, and indeed, that is the only reason I’m writing this at all. This essay is altogether far more a commentary on Governor Quit’s America than it is on the woman herself. Our national problem is Palinosis far more than it is Palin. There have always been people like Sarah Palin, and presumably there always will be. The two real questions are why anyone cares about them and, most astonishingly,...

She hasn't declared her candidacy yet. She showed up in New Hampshire the same day Mitt Romney declared he was running for president and garnered most of the press. And that was before the media got hold of her Paul Revere gaffe. And despite the fact that most Republicans won't vote for her, Palin has managed to top a poll. In what might be considered something more suitable to the strange-but-true section of the news, a poll released Wednesday by Reuters/IPSOS reflects something not seen in the results of any other poll -- Sarah Palin leading all other Republican 2012...

Among the emails Sarah Palin fielded while she was on the campaign trail were a batch of vicious threats against her life. On Sept. 12, 2008, she received a message through the state of Alaska's website that accused her of being racist and suggested that she would have joined the Ku Klux Klan if she were a man. "She doesn't belong to the NRA to support the right of each citizen to have weapons in an aim of self-defence, but just to support the right of every Southern white citizen to shoot all non-white people legally!" wrote the sender, identified...

Politico knew they likely wouldn’t get a quote from Sarah Palin for the latest hit piece they published so they made one up. One of the authors is the former chairman of the Democratic Party of Virgina.Politico wrote: Will Sarah Palin’s intensifying rivalry with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) cause the former Alaska governor to run for president?The first female Republican vice presidential nominee clearly believes she is the one who has paid the heavy dues by bearing the brunt of the “liberal elite” attacks to help build the tea party, social conservative wing of the GOP.Palin’s bus tour had some...

The mark of any successful political venture by Governor Palin often results a misrepresentation of her words that only leaves the media with egg on their faces. Governor Palin’s bus tour has been successful in allowing her to highlight the greatness of the history of America, meet everyday Americans and fellow politicians, and share her policy stances on everything from fishing regulations in New Hampshire to ethanol subsidies to the debt ceiling. Such successes leaves the media grasping at proverbial bendy straws. Today’s news is no different. Poised with the opportunity to more appropriately address political stories essentially pre-written for...

Everyone has already had a grand old time mocking this video of Sarah Palin bungling her Paul Revere history, but I actually think it amounts to quite an eloquent statement. It’s as eloquent an argument as anyone could make that this woman really should not be treated by any of us as anything resembling a presidential candidate until it’s absolutely necessary — which is to say, until she actually runs for president.

By KASIE HUNT: SEABROOK, N.H. — Sarah Palin’s bus is plastered with a mock-up of the U.S. Constitution. But her entourage — both the three-vehicle motorcade that includes the bus and the smaller, two-SUV version she uses for smaller events — hasn’t been very respectful of traffic laws. They speed. They run red lights and stop signs. They make last-second lane changes to get off the highway, sometimes without signaling.....So do the reporters following them.

According to Chris Matthews, Sarah Palin is the most divisive figure since Abraham Lincoln "caused" the Civil War. In an odd historical analogy, the Hardball host marveled at Palin's bus tour: "Leading off tonight, civil war on the right. Not since the election of Abraham Lincoln has a Republican caused such a war." The anchor frothed, "Sarah Palin went right to New Hampshire, serving as a human grenade, blowing up his announcement by saying Romney's health care is a total violation of Tea Party beliefs."

NEW YORK — Fresh off her Times Square pizza summit with Donald Trump, Sarah Palin carried on with her tour of the Big Apple Wednesday, paying visits to such treasured landmarks like Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Although Palin was greeted with hand shakes and smiles from local admirers, her visit to New York wasn't immune to some hometown detractors. While Palin and company met with top brass at FOX News headquarters in Midtown, an unknown vandal managed to tag the former Alaska governor's patriotic-themed "One Nation" tour bus. "I, the media whore," read a hand

While tweeting about her visit to New York, Sarah Palin let the world know that she was visiting the Statute of Liberty. You probably aren’t surprised, but Sarah Palin managed to get the name of the Statue of Liberty wrong. This woman wants Republicans to believe that she can be president, but she doesn’t know that it is called the Statue of Liberty? What’s worse is that this wasn’t a verbal gaffe, it was written. She could have checked the tweet before she sent from her Blackberry, but that isn’t how Sarah Palin rolls.

Palin is rubbing the media mob’s sense of entitlement right back in its face. In the 1970s, The Boys on the Bus exposed how a clubby pack of male political reporters ruled the road to the White House and shaped the news. Four decades later, an outsider gal from Alaska has commandeered the 2012 media bus — and left Beltway journalism insiders eating her dust. We’ve come a long way, baby. Amid frenzied speculation over her potential presidential-campaign plans, former GOP Alaska governor Sarah Palin launched an all-American road trip with her family this Memorial Day weekend. Establishment media types...

MSNBC's Martin Bashir on May 31 insisted that Sarah Palin's bus tour amounts to a "breach of a federal law." Anchoring his eponymous program, Bashir scolded, "In fact, the whole thing could be in breach of a federal law because the United States Flag Code establishes important rules for the use and display of the stars and stripes, the flag of the United States." (VIDEO AT LINK) In his accusatory "Clear the Air" segment, the former ABC Nightline anchor lectured Palin that "standards of respect and etiquette" discourage using the American flag for "any advertising purpose whatsoever." "She drapes herself...

New York Times chief political blogger Michael Shear is a bit annoyed that Sarah Palin is successfully attracting media attention while ignoring reporter’s inquiries and playing hide-and-seek with the press on her "One Nation" bus tour. (Photo by the Times' David Winter.) Shear, who has filed multiple blog posts on the Palin family's historical trail through the Northeast, made Tuesday’s print edition with his gripes: (Palin Family Hits Road, if Not 2012 Trail)Ms. Palin announced her bus tour with great fanfare last week and is using it on her Web site to raise money for her political action committee. Despite...

Charlie Sheen, at least, has an excuse. He's on a drug he calls "Charlie Sheen." But what powerful hallucinogen inhaled by the left induces the mental fantasy that makes them believe: Spending nearly a trillion dollars in "stimulus" money "created or saved" 3.5 million jobs? A "tax cut" means giving checks to the nearly 40% of the work force that pays no federal income taxes? Racism drives the Tea Party/conservative/right-wing criticism of a left-wing black president — who received more of the white vote than John Kerry, in every age demographic, and who at one time enjoyed an approval rating...

One day short of the three-week anniversary of their departure, Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller said it's time for Dems to come home and take the fight over collective bargaining rights to the ballot box. Miller, D-Monona, said it was "stunning" that Senate Republicans took less than 30 minutes to vote to end collective bargaining rights for public employees that have existed in Wisconsin for more than 50 years. He called it a disrespect to the people of Wisconsin that will not be forgotten, promising there will be political consequences. "It’s time for us to join the fight back in...

Ok, so I have this niece who I love but, would love to strangle right now. We've been doing the usual back and forth about WI. I posted about what pigs these people were and she posted back that she went to a tea party, there were guns, racist signs, they left the place a mess. I don't know if she really was there or not. I've never heard that any tea party has left a place a big mess. I asked her for proof, that was just a bit ago, so no response yet. I know that there are...

Since lefty blogger Ian Murphy prank called Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on Wednesday, various media outlets have devoted significant coverage to the prankster. None have seen fit to mention some of Murphy's more colorful antics - proclaiming "f**k the troops," for instance, or pretending to be autistic to gain access for a story. CNN has been out front covering the prank and its perpetrator. The channel named Murphy its "most intriguing person of the day" in one segment, and devoted an article on its website to Murphy's wild claims - that Walker is "delusional," as CNN's headline blared, and that...

Jimmy Carter was vilified by his enemies as the president who" lost Iran". JFK was decried by the right and the Mafia as the mug who "lost Cuba". The hysterical McCarthyites of the early 1950s fulminated endlessly that Harry S Truman "lost China" (not to mention "losing" Eastern Europe). Is Barack Obama on a glide path to the legacy as the president who "lost America"? The man who was elected as much on his snake oil speechifying as on the bumper sticker of "the change we can believe in", has since then pretty much never missed an opportunity to miss...

Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence. As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision.