Free Republic

Just heard on the KABC Larry Elder show that the Campaign Money Watch group purchased a $400,000 Ad critisizing John McCain concerning excessive money used for his political campaign! I searched their site and found plenty of statements against McCain for various "Reason" but not on this yet. They have a special blog for McCain here: http://www.campaignmoney.org/blog-tags/john-mccain

Ask most Americans if they were aware that Iraqis, by almost a 2-to-1 margin, believe that life today is better than it was under Saddam Hussein, and you'd most likely elicit incredulousness, blank stares or outright laughter. Not because it isn't true, though. It is. The mainstream media just forgot to mention it. In the past month, two surveys that involved face-to-face interviews with thousands of ordinary Iraqis have been released. While each contained significantly different results, both provided substantial evidence that Iraqis are not nearly as gloomy as Americans have been told to believe. To the extent the mainstream...

If Jack Bauer were in charge of U.S. forces in Iraq, we would have won by now. Bauer is the tough, no-nonsense American hero who defeats America's enemies in the popular "24" series. Bauer would have wiped the floor with al Qaeda of Iraq, the other Sunni terrorists, and the anti-American militias. They would have cried uncle a long time ago. And Bauer would have done all of this without American reporters breathing down his neck. Bauer will be facing some new enemies on Sunday night, when the four-hour premiere of the new season begins. Based on the previews, Bauer's...

One of the characteristics of the Minneapolis Star Tribune that makes it such a bad paper is the relentlessness of its bias. From coverage of the local news, to the editorial page, to the letters to the editor, to its metro columnists the paper is saturated with a leftist know-nothing perspective. The one exception is columnist Katherine Kersten, whom the paper treats like a virus against which antibodies must regularly be deployed. Thus the editorial page runs editorials that argue with her columns and the letters to the editor tilt markedly against against her columns. On the Star Tribune site...

When the election was over and George W. Bush had prevailed despite the tsunami of media-bias debris that washed over him, liberal media critics responded in a predictable way. Quoting my NRO post-election rehash (which insisted that "every anti-Bush angle...was explored with great ferocity"), Columbia Journalism Review executive editor Mike Hoyt could only muster this response in an editorial:What's disturbing is not the way that Graham is whining into his champagne but his little two-step away from reality. He and others are defining bias downward, as anything that challenges a GOP point of view.Mark that down as Hoyt's First Rule...

 OUR ORWELL: Is there any journalist one trusts more than John F. Burns to tell us what is going on in Iraq? Somehow, Burns is untainted with the cynicism and reflexive anti-Americanism of many of his journalistic peers, and yet is open to the nuances of a complicated and often surprising world. His despatch from Iraq today in the NYT is peerless. Not just beautifully written, deep while never seeming less than conversational, it makes a couple of really important points. First off: The amiability that greets a Westerner almost everywhere outside the Sunni triangle, and even there when American...

Gross vs. O'Reilly: Culture Clash on NPR By Jeffrey A. Dvorkin Ombudsman National Public Radio On October 9, Terry Gross, longtime host of NPR's Fresh Air aired her interview with populist political talk show host Bill O'Reilly. The e-mails and phone calls of outrage are still arriving. The interview was taped the day before on October 8. The ostensible reason was to talk about O'Reilly's latest book, Who's Looking Out For You? The book is about, among other things, the claim that America is in the midst of what O'Reilly calls a "cultural war between left and right." And he...

Dan Rather-Baised just began his nightly "news" program by asking if Arnold had been given a "pass by the very people who should have asked tough questions".....this on a day that a Gallup poll found that a majority believe the media is too liberal....the gall of this guy.

Washington, DC - I am no admirer of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a political leader. In fact, from the beginning of his candidacy, I have urged Californians to consider the morality of each candidate before voting on the next governor of my home state. But I am appalled at the shocking double standard displayed by the Los Angeles Times in its exposes last Thursday and Saturday on Schwarzenegger as a serial groper. The charges, of course, go back to the days when he was a body builder. His behavior was clearly immoral and is to be condemned. However, I note that...

People of faith have long complained that the mainstream news media pay too little attention to religion -- except, of course, when there's a controversy or a scandal, like the ongoing story on priests as sexual predators. Absent such a scandal -- or the death of a pope and the election of his successor -- the news media often seem indifferent to, ignorant of and, at times, downright hostile toward religion. "Members of the faith community are on target," Underwood writes, "when they complain about the incapacity or the unwillingness of journalists to take seriously the importance of the spiritual...