Free Republic

No bargaining, no deals, no compromise — that's the hard-line stance that Republicans have staked in the days since seizing control of the House. Their prescription for the sluggish economy — lower taxes, huge spending cuts, less regulation, and repeal of the sweeping healthcare law just taking effect — excites the party's conservative base. But a long and ugly fight with President Obama and Senate Democrats, starting with next week's lame-duck session, could end up alienating the large number of Americans more interested in jobs than ideological battles. The midterm vote was "an expression of anger and impatience," said James...

Thursday September 30, 2010 Poll Finds Record Majority of Americans Distrust Mainstream Media By Peter J. SmithWASHINGTON, D.C., September 30, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A new Gallup poll shows that a record majority of Americans have little to no trust in mainstream media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.” Nearly half cited “liberal bias” in the media, which ranked only slightly higher than the U.S. Congress in public confidence levels.Gallup reports that 57 percent of those polled for their annual Governance poll, conducted Sept. 13-16, 2010, said their “confidence and trust” in mass media – newspapers, television, and...

Popular culture is in full-scale attack mode on the Tea Party I’m figuring they are very afraid of something. The Tea Party movement has caught the emotion and passion of America and network TV shows feel they have to fight back. This is quite odd. We have a new season of TV shows being unveiled by the networks and many of them feel like it’s important for them to attack those with conservative Constitutional values.

Thomas Friedman Bashes Tea Party, Calls for New 'Centrist' Movement By Noel Sheppard Created 09/29/2010 - 10:56 New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman is clearly unhappy about the Tea Party, so much so that he considers the movement "not that important." Instead, he envisions another group, "which stretches from centrist Republicans to independents right through to centrist Democrats," sitting silently out there in America waiting for the right leader to emerge. So wrote Friedman Wednesday in his "The Tea Kettle Movement [1]": The Tea Party that has gotten all the attention, the amorphous, self-generated protest against the growth in government...

Only when liberals are in charge can terms like faith, hope, charity and sacred honor be classified as hate speech. Our ever increasing lexicon now includes “Becklash”; defined as an entirely irrational reaction to a TV and radio commentator’s well attended non-political Restoring Honor rally in Washington. Misery Merchant, Al Sharpton is the architect of Becklash. Always desperately seeking relevance, Sharpton saw an opportunity in exploitation when he realized that the date of Beck’s long planned event was the same date that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. Sharpton would do well to actually...

Critics say that this amounts to increasing taxes at a time of high unemployment, and that instead the tax cuts should be extended as a stimulus measure. This overlooks the fact that tax cuts are an inefficient form of stimulus, because many people choose to save their additional income instead of spending it. If the goal is to encourage growth and employment immediately, it would be better to let the tax cuts expire and dedicate some of the increased revenue to real stimulus programs. Alternatively, if some tax cuts are extended -- as it seems likely that at least those...

This post looks at 106 reported “Journolistas” to look for connections or common threads. (It would be pointless to post it in its entirety, as it is full of hot links to other sources. If someone knows how to post those with the article, please do so.)

The following 75 names are confirmed members of the now-defunct JournoList listserv. 1. Ezra Klein - Washington Post, Newsweek, The American Prospect 2. Dave Weigel - Washington Post, MSNBC, The Washington Independent 3. Matthew Yglesias – Center for American Progress, The Atlantic Monthly 4. David Dayen - FireDogLake 5. Spencer Ackerman – Wired, FireDogLake, Washington Independent, Talking Points Memo, The American Prospect 6. Jeffrey Toobin – CNN, The New Yorker 7. Eric Alterman – The Nation, Media Matters for America 8. Paul Krugman – The New York Times, Princeton University 9. John Judis – The New Republic, The American Prospect...

If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would. But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, that isn’t what you’d do at all. In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed...

A group of liberal journalists used a now-defunct listserv to debate the merits of whether the federal government should forcibly shut down Fox News, according to a report in The Daily Caller. The online publication earlier reported that the journalists in the private group discussed ways to shield Barack Obama from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal when Obama was a presidential candidate. The latest article showed that several members of Journolist aired complaints about Fox News on the listserv in March of this year and debated how best to rein it in. Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, who said he was...

As of 10:00 p.m. EDT, hours after Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack fired Shirley Sherrod for racism in her official duties after being exposed by BigGovernment.com there is a near total blackout by the mainstream news media on the scandal.Sherrod was appointed a year ago by Vilsack to be the Georgia director of Rural Development where she doled out millions of dollars in federal funds.Just days before her appointment, the Obama Justice Department settled a lawsuit by Sherrod and her husband claiming discrimination against their farm cooperative for a reported $13 million. A search of Google News and Google Blogs...

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign. The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public –...

As we continue with America’s most left-biased, working journalist list we feature a journo that takes herself quite seriously as a non-opinion styled journalist. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour really does think that no one can tell that she is a true-blue left-winger. Sadly, there is that all too human penchant of fooling oneself as much as one tries to fool others with this one. But that doesn’t stop her from making the claim. In 2008, for instance, Amanpour said of herself, "I stay away from commentary and I stay away from ideology. All this stuff that we have seen marching into...

Scott Brown Slams Kathy Griffin for Calling Daughters 'Prostitutes' July 16, 2010 Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown slammed comedian Kathy Griffin for making a crude joke about his two daughters. Griffin, star of “My Life on the D List” made the comments on the Bravo network Tuesday night. The segment features Griffin being shown a photograph of Brown by two CNN reporters, John King and Dana Bash. Griffin identifies Brown in the picture, saying, “Scott Brown, who is a senator from Massachusetts and has two daughters that are prostitutes.” Bash erupts in laughter at Griffin’s comment. But Brown wasn’t laughing, blasting...

On her Bravo TV show Tuesday night, left-wing comedian Kathy Griffin referred to Sen. Scott Brown's two daughters as "prostitutes," and a CNN reporter apparently thought it hysterical. [Audio available here.] Griffin, who was readying herself for a trip to Washington, DC to rally and drum up support for a repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," brought CNN reporters (husband and wife) Dana Bash and John King onto the show to "coach" her for handling Washington. Bash is a congressional correspondent for CNN, while King anchors the news hour "John King, USA." When the couple showed Griffin a picture of...

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...

"Where would Jesus drill?" That sounds almost like it could be the opening of a tree hugger's bad joke, but instead it's the lede in a recent Associated Press story written by John Flesher about a so-called "Green religion movement." Efforts to make environmentalism its own sort of religion have been underway for some time now. But the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has sparked a new push to take what has been traditionally a political phenomenon, the American environmentalist movement, and make it part of the religious spectrum. ...more (w/video)...

NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd seemed astonished by how a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll confirmed solid agreement with Arizona's immigration enforcement law – “a whopping 64 percent support the law,” Todd marveled, “and we read them the law verbatim exactly as it's been written” and still, he repeated, “64 percent approve of it.” NBC also treated as surprising the majority backing for racial profiling to prevent terrorism, while Todd didn't mention what NBC's polling partner, the Wall Street Journal, found most newsworthy. Lead of the WSJ.com post: Republicans have solidified support among voters who had drifted from...

Yesterday the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a poll finding "Broad Approval For New Arizona Immigration Law." While Republicans were the most supportive, a full 45 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents polled supported the law. When broken down to the particulars of the bill, there was even broader support. For example, 65 percent of Democrats and and 73 percent of independents favored "requiring people to produce documents verifying legal status," the portion of the bill that has been derided as allowing the police to demand, "your papers please!" These poll numbers are...

The cactus in the photo at right planted along the Arizona border with California gives a pretty good indication of the reaction of that state to the boycott directed at them by the Los Angeles city council over the new immigration law. However, what is the opinion of folks in California? If a Los Angeles Times poll showed overwhelming support for the boycott, do you not think this would be front page news? Well, the results were overwhelming...97.6% of the respondents to this L.A. Times poll were opposed to the boycott of Arizona. The poll question: "Was the L.A. City...