Free Republic

The federal government never asked for the so-called information operations campaign, nor did cabinet authorize the initiative developed during the COVID-19 pandemic by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, then headed by Lt.-Gen. Mike Rouleau. But military commanders believed they didn’t need to get approval from higher authorities to develop and proceed with their plan, retired Maj.-Gen. Daniel Gosselin, who was brought in to investigate the scheme, concluded in his report.... The plan devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, also known as CJOC, relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war. The campaign called for “shaping”...

South Africa’s parliament has voted in favor of a fiercely contested secrecy bill which critics say will muzzle the media and provide cover for government corruption. The Protection of State Information Bill, which would replace apartheid-era legislation on classified information and espionage, passed with 189 votes in favor to 74 against, with one abstention. … The Bill has met fierce opposition from the media, rights groups and the opposition, which fear it will be used to persecute whistleblowers and stifle press freedom in country where the media regularly uncover government corruption and wasteful spending. …

Employees of Obama donor Leo Hindery Jr.’s media conglomerate Intermedia Partners, which now owns most of the top gun-culture media outlets in the country, believe that Hindery plans to gut and destroy all of them as part of a business plan that has already led to numerous layoffs and the virtual shuttering of prominent television production facilities in Minnesota and Montana. Hindery, who was in consideration to be President Barack Obama’s secretary of commerce, is managing partner of Intermedia Partners. The New York-based media private equity fund owns Intermedia Outdoor Holdings, which publishes 17 hunting, fishing, and shooting magazines, including...

In addition to cancelling its popular “American Guns” reality show, The Discovery Channel confirmed to Raw Story on Tuesday that firearms enthusiast Ted Nugent will also not be returning to the channel in any form or fashion. . ... After Friday’s devastating massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the spokesperson said that Nugent would definitely not be returning to the Discovery Channel.

At the Maldives' National Museum, smashed Buddhist statues are testament to the rise of Islamic extremism and Taliban-style intolerance in a country famous as a laid-back holiday destination. On Tuesday, as protesters backed by mutinous police toppled president Mohamed Nasheed, a handful of men stormed the Chinese-built museum and destroyed its display of priceless artefacts from the nation's pre-Islamic era. "They have effectively erased all evidence of our Buddhist past," a senior museum official told AFP at the now shuttered building in the capital Male, asking not to be named out of fear for his own safety. "We lost all...

Tens of thousands of Hungarians on Monday (2 January) went on the streets of Budapest in protest against controversial constitutional changes enacted one day earlier by center-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban, with former dissidents accusing him of "dictatorship." … Earlier that day, in a statement entitled "The decline of democracy—the rise of dictatorship", 13 former Communist dissidents, a group to which Orban once belonged, accused him of "removing checks and balances and pursuing a systematic policy of closing autonomous institutions." The letter also urged the EU not to "sit back and watch as (Hungary) is being held hostage by an...

A new course on Islam designed for journalists tries to minimize the impact and importance of “jihad” by comparing it to the number of murders in America each year. That same course claims “right-wing activists” tried to tie American Muslims to terrorism and doesn’t mention examples of Islamic attacks on press freedom.That’s the way a prominent news organization is teaching journalists in a three-hour online course. The Poynter News University, part of the Poynter Institute, launched the free course “Covering Islam in America” to guide the media on their coverage of Muslim communities.... In about 30 pages of text with...

Resolve & Frustration By Ari Bussel Most politicians in Israel are bureaucrats. Most bureaucrats in Israel excel at being politicians. Here and there, however, one may find a singular exception, a person who looks beyond the nine-to-five workday, who sees the bigger picture and has the nerve to do something beyond the call and comforts of what would ensure lifetime employment. They are often frowned upon, for they rattle a system otherwise quite stable. Why change something and cause more work? The salary, benefits and pension are all guaranteed and anchored with collective bargaining. If at the group level there...

Oliver Stone found himself the catalyst of an online brush fire on Monday after he made comments published in The Sunday Times of London that were interpreted as anti-Semitic. In an interview with The Times to promote his documentary “South of the Border,” which is about South American politics, Mr. Stone defended Hitler. “Hitler was a Frankenstein, but there was also a Dr. Frankenstein,” he said. “German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support. Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people.” Mr. Stone then proceeded to discuss what he called...

Free Speech: President Obama, while addressing college graduates, condemns our access to new media as a subversion of democracy. Is the iPad a threat to democracy or exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind? At Hampton University in Virginia on Sunday, the president lamented that in an age of text messaging, the Internet and the iPad, information and its unfettered exchange had become a diversion that was putting a strain on democracy. We are not making this up. The "24/7 media environment," he told the students, "bombards us with all kinds of comments and exposes us to all kinds of...

Matt Drudge is trumpeting the fact that Senate staffers have been warned to stay away from the Drudge Report on the theory that it may be spreading computer viruses. (If the old rules apply, that is libel per se, isn't it?) What I thought was even more entertaining was the Drudge Report's traffic totals: The [Drudge Report] was seen 149,967 times since March 1st from users at senate.gov and 244,347 times at house.gov. [There were] 10,825 visits from the White House, eop.gov," the Drudge Report wrote. These numbers appeared on March 8; do the math: 18,750 times a day, Senators...

Hat tip: Hot Air ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Well bravo to Cambell Brown for asking about how the White House feels about MSNBC. Notice Valerie did not have an answer for that one. That is why she quickly starts talking in generalities rather than about Fox directly. The White House is clearly losing the war on Fox News. The latest Nielsen ratings show what we all could have guessed, Fox’s ratings are up! If there is one thing I really cannot stand about this administration, it is the way they act like they are the keepers of the truth. They label everything that...

An AWESOME image of Obama as a baby...

First Amendment: Diversity czar Mark Lloyd's FCC votes Thursday on the issue of net neutrality. Advertised as providing access to all, it will do to the information superhighway what Lloyd proposed for talk radio. Not much was said when $7.2 billion was included in the stimulus bill "to accelerate broadband deployment in unserved and underserved areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits." The administration has big plans for the Internet — like controlling it. Susan Crawford, the so-called Internet czar, told the Wall Street Journal in April that the broadband billions...

Security: A Senate bill lets the president "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "nongovernmental" computer networks and do what's needed to respond to the threat. Didn't they just collect our e-mail addresses?We wish this was just a piece of the fictional "Dr. Strangelove" that fell to the cutting-room floor, but it's not. It is a real piece of disturbingly vague legislation sponsored by Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. Senate Bill 773 would grant the administration emergency powers (where have we heard that before?) in the event of a cyberemergency that the president would have...

1st Amendment: Mark Lloyd, a disciple of Saul Alinsky and fan of Hugo Chavez, wants to destroy talk radio and says free speech is a distraction. The new FCC diversity "czar" says Venezuela is an example we should follow.When Mark Lloyd was appointed July 29 as the chief diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission, a nation focused on ObamaCare and a deteriorating economy took little notice. But as angry constituents flood town hall meetings and call in to talk radio, a man dedicated to silencing them sits at the right hand of the president. They share a common hero...

Media Bias: Not long after pro football welcomed a convicted felon back on the playing field, Rush Limbaugh is dropped for his opinions from a group seeking to buy an NFL franchise. Won't someone throw a flag? When even Keith Olbermann says back off, you know the politically correct critics of the conservative icon and megaradio talk host's proposed part ownership of the St. Louis Rams are guilty of piling on. The prospect of the leading conservative voice in America participating in the purchase of a football team sent the liberal elites into cardiac arrest and into a frenzied campaign...

The Media: Now we know why the Democrats who run Washington declared war on Fox News. The feisty network is spoiling their policy of controlling Americans' diet of information. When Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., who earlier this year was set to be the Obama administration's secretary of commerce, warned on CNN on Sunday the U.S. was on track toward "banana republic" status, he was talking about "throwing debt on top of debt" to the tune of a trillion dollars or more a year. But another facet of banana republics is their rulers' control of the press. As in the make-believe...

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told a group of high school students last June that former Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong was one of her two favorite political philosophers, and you could tell she was speaking from the heart. Her earnest appeal to the teenagers to fight their own wars, as Mao had counseled when challenged within his own party, was clearly meant as a call to activism. "You fight your war and I'll fight mine," she quoted Mao as saying, because apparently Mao was all about personal choice. Of course, Mao's usual response to those who questioned his...

Let's face it. Fox News runs stories that the Obama administration would rather ignore - from the sleaziness and corruption in the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to the bizarre views and actions of senior presidential appointees such as Van Jones and Kevin Jennings. With Democrats controlling both Congress and the presidency, the Obama administration is trying to squash dissent. The administration is not content with attacking critical press. It is boldly proceeding with plans for the Federal Communications Commission to meddle in conservative talk radio. It threatens insurance companies with not being able to participate in...