Free Republic

In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday. An investigation into these allegations was ongoing, and in the interim, Domenech has resigned, effective immediately. When we hired Domenech, we were not aware of any allegations that he had plagiarized any of his past writings. In any cases where allegations such as these are made, we will continue to investigate those charges thoroughly in order to maintain our journalistic integrity. Plagiarism is perhaps the...

<p>They are two of America's free, unregulated voices of political activism but a gathering storm of Washington regulation threatens to stifle them forever.</p> <p>Grass-roots activists and Internet bloggers, who largely escaped the restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, are the targets of a looming, two-pronged government assault which aims to lasso and corral the last wild mustangs on the political range.</p>

This is a blog for the majority of Americans. Since the election of 1992, the extreme political left has fought a losing battle. Their views on the economy, marriage, abortion, guns, the death penalty, health care, welfare, taxes, and a dozen other major domestic policy issues have been exposed as unpopular, unmarketable and unquestioned losers at the ballot box. Democrats who have won major elections since 1992 have, with very few exceptions, been the ones who distanced themselves from the shrieking denizens of their increasingly extreme base, soft-pedaled their positions on divisive issues and adopted the rhetoric and positions of...

Published: March 21, 2006 11:35 AM ET NEW YORK During the recent controversy surrounding Dan Froomkin's blog at The Washington Post, editors not only decided to clearly label his column "opinion" but also to make an effort to hire a conservative blogger to balance his alleged liberal slant. Today, the Post launched the result: A new blog called "Red America," created by Ben Domenech, co-founder of RedState, a popular community blog. It immediately set off what Post political reporter Tom Edsall called a "firestorm" in his online chat today. A former contributing editor to National Review Online, Domenech later became...

ONE could almost imagine George Clooney, robed and slippered, taking to the veranda of his Italian lakeside villa and hunkering over a laptop for his maiden voyage into the blogosphere, which appeared in the form of a passionate left-wing call to arms at HuffingtonPost.com last week. ..."You gotta be a grown-up and take your hits," Mr. Clooney concluded. "I am a liberal. Fire away." But just as the great digital chinwag was taking note of the newcomer ... Mr. Clooney dropped a bomb, asserting that although the sentiments in the post were his, they were cobbled together from past interviews...

Call-In News Review C-SPAN, Washington Journal Washington, District of Columbia (United States) Smith, Christy Hardin Co-Founder, Firedoglake.com Mirengoff, Paul Contributor, Powerlineblog.com

Judith Miller has a new alibi -- the blogs done her in! Writer Marie Brenner presents Miller's latest defense in an April Vanity Fair feature story about the fallout from the Valerie Plame investigation. ... The ones tossing the fire were those dastardly—but unnamed—bloggers ... In June, back in New York, "Miller realized that she was losing her authority" inside the Times. "None of my colleagues ever spoke to me about my reporting. But they would say, 'We don't want to work with her.' In August, Bill Keller replaced Raines as executive editor, and according to Miller, he told her,...

On some weekends, Jenison Junior High School Principal Donna Bergeon does what many of her students do. She goes online to check Xanga. She looks for online messages about bullying, harassment, students who cut themselves or choke themselves for the high they get. "I like to be pro-active," she said. "I'm not spying on them; I just care about them." Jenison is among a growing number of local districts monitoring student communications on Xanga or similar Internet weblog sites, even though those messages are posted after school hours. Others include East Grand Rapids, Forest Hills, Zeeland and Wyoming. At least...

JEROME ARMSTRONG AND MARKOS MOULITSAS are pioneers. Armstrong founded MyDD.com, arguably the first political blog of real prominence. As for Moulitsas, he's the founder and proprietor of Daily Kos, by far the most widely read of all political blogs. Pioneers they may be, but neither Armstrong nor Moulitsas has developed a reputation as a particularly skillful prose stylist.Yet their new book, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, is a crisp and well-crafted work. The authors sharply diagnose the Democratic party's ills in a blunt and entertaining fashion.Less impressive is the political philosophy they espouse. Crashing...

WASHINGTON -- Former senator John Edwards got high marks from labor for a new effort to unionize hotel workers, and Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold's demand this week that President Bush be censured was music to the ears of activists on the left. Meanwhile, Mark Warner, former Virginia governor, recently hired one of the leftist blogosphere's biggest names to run his Internet outreach campaign, and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana began a blog on the liberal Huffington Post, peddling his foreign policy views. The next round of prospective Democratic presidential candidates, even those with centrist credentials, is actively courting the Democratic...

U.S. House Will Vote Soon on Whether to Ditch John McCain's Internet Regulations Gun Owners of America E-Mail Alert 8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA 22151 Phone: 703-321-8585 / FAX: 703-321-8408 http://www.gunowners.org Wednesday, March 15, 2006 The U.S. House of Representatives will vote, as early as Thursday, on legislation introduced by Texas Congressmen Jeb Hensarling and Ron Paul. This bill (H.R. 1606) will exempt the Internet from regulation under federal "electioneering" laws. Unless the Hensarling-Paul bill is successful, many major blogs and web sites could be shut down for 60 days before any general election -- and for 30...

If you're one of the nation's 30 million-plus bloggers - or among the 75,000 joining their ranks every day - keep an eye on Thursday's House vote on the Online Freedom of Speech Act. Unless the bill passes, you may need a lawyer, if you discuss politics online. If it passes, you may still need a lawyer, if you spend more than $250 a year on your blog. If all that seems confusing, you're not alone. Both critics and supporters of this bill, sponsored by Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, claim to want to protect bloggers and "small speakers" from onerous...

The Federal Election Commission has postponed a long-anticipated decision on whether to apply the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law to political speech on the Internet. It appeared that FEC Commissioner Michael Toner wanted to give Congress a chance to pass the Online Freedom of Speech Act proposed by Texas Republican Jeb Hensarling. But late Wednesday afternoon, the House Rules Committee passed on the opportunity by failing to report Hensarling’s bill out of committee for debate on the House floor. Key House aides told NewsMax that the House would likely resume discussion after March 27. If so, legislators might have to...

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) yesterday postponed a controversial decision on subjecting Internet political speech to campaign-finance regulations, raising the stakes for today’s scheduled House vote on a bill that exempts all blogs, Web ads and other online communications. The heated debate over a proposal by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) to exclude online content from the “public communications” covered by campaign-finance law has engulfed every corner of the political world, splitting both Democrats and Republicans and pitting mainstream editorial boards against left- and right-wing bloggers.The House Rules Committee scheduled a meeting late yesterday to determine the ground rules for debate...

WASHINGTON - When Rep. Roy Blunt was vying for the House majority leader spot in January, conservative bloggers fought for his ear. Blunt, R-Mo., had invited a select group of bloggers to a moderated question-and-answer session. But Republicans John Shadegg of Arizona and John Boehner of Ohio held what the bloggers considered a much more freewheeling chat with them. Mike Krempasky, a blogger at the influential conservative RedState.org, contended Blunt's reticence worked against him in the House leadership race. "Blunt tried to do this in a way that was regimented," Krempasky said. "The more you try to control it, the...

When Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the proprietor of Daily Kos, recently told The Washington Monthly's Benjamin Wallace-Wells, "I'm not ideological at all. ... I'm just all about winning," he could have been speaking for the entire left-wing blogosphere. If there's one animating idea that's shared by liberal bloggers like Kos and Atrios and all the others, it's, as Wallace-Wells called it, "the ideology of winnerism." Which is why it's bizarre that these very same bloggers are always so eager to celebrate moral victories. After Howard Dean went down to defeat, they boasted about how they took a virtual nobody to the...

When Gallup polled Democratic voters in February on the party's 2008 hopefuls, it didn't even offer Russ Feingold as a choice. But in one corner of the Democratic universe - the readers of liberal Web logs - the Wisconsin senator has emerged as a political favorite. In an online poll last month on the nation's most widely read liberal blog (DailyKos. com), Feingold led the Democratic presidential field, picked by 30 percent of the 11,000-plus people who visited the Web site and voted. "He definitely is the most popular Democrat among the `netroots,'" said liberal blogger Chris Bowers, referring to...

MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., March 2, 2006 – The widespread use of Web logs, or "blogs," by online writers has proliferated information on topics as varied as the authors. Blogs, in essence, are online journals or forums for their authors, known as "bloggers." Public affairs officials here said thousands of blogs are created each day, and they estimate that more than 21 million blogs are posted on the World Wide Web today. Blogs sometimes include information -- accurate and otherwise -- about the U.S. military's global war on terror. U.S. Central Command officials here took notice and created a...

Democrats are getting an early glimpse of an intraparty rift that could complicate efforts to win back the White House: fiery liberals raising their voices on Web sites and in interest groups vs. elected officials trying to appeal to a much broader audience. These activists -- spearheaded by battle-ready bloggers and making their influence felt through relentless e-mail campaigns -- have denounced what they regard as a flaccid Democratic response to the Supreme Court fight, President Bush's upcoming State of the Union address and the Iraq war. In every case, they have portrayed party leaders as gutless sellouts. First, liberal...

THE rise of blogging is often cast in black-and-white terms: blogs versus the "MSM" (the derisive term some bloggers apply to the mainstream media). But things may shake out more along the lines of journalism versus armchair yammering. Both can be, and are, presented on Web sites that call themselves blogs. Both have been presented in the mainstream media all along. "The State of the Blogosphere" presented at sifry.com this week by David L. Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a leading blog search site, shows just how complicated things have become. According to Mr. Sifry's data, mainstream media sites, as...