Free Republic

The New York Times has an article worth reading discussing EPA’s efforts to influence comments submitted to them by the public regarding the agency’s and Army Corps of Engineers’ proposal to redefine “Waters of the United States (WOTUS).” Notably, Gina McCarthy, administrator of EPA, went before a Senate committee earlier this year touting the fact that almost 90 percent of all comments submitted expressed support for the rule as proposed. It turns out that many of these comments were submitted as a result of an unprecedented outreach initiative, which is being led by a former Obama campaign staffer. Thunderclap (a...

The groom and groom strolled down the aisle to the mellow strains of “Mr. Sandman.” Wearing her black robe with her signature white lace collar, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg presided over the marriage on Sunday afternoon of Michael Kahn, the longtime artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, and Charles Mitchem, who works at an architecture firm in New York. The gilded setting was elegant: Anderson House in the Embassy Row neighborhood, the headquarters in Washington of the Society of the Cincinnati, a club for the descendants of the French and American soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary...

Paul Krugman: Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago. But many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on. Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who...

Since a federal jury on Friday sentenced the convicted bomber to death, the [Boston Marathon] finish line suddenly seems to be a place of ambivalence. Fresh flowers are accumulating. A sense of sorrow lingers in the air. Sightseers who come to snap a photo feel a little self-conscious. Residents train their gaze on the line, and the conversations turn to death — and disappointment. “I was shocked,” said Scott Larson, 47, a records manager who works near the finish line. “The death penalty — for Boston.” To many, the death sentence almost feels like a blot on the city’s collective...

WASHINGTON — A Twitter post recently caught the eye of Bill McKibben, the environmental advocate and godfather of the Keystone XL pipeline protests. It included an image from “The Simpsons” showing Homer and his family basking in mountains of cash in their living room, followed by a report on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s appearing at a fund-raiser with a lobbyist from the Keystone fight. Mr. McKibben’s environmental organization, 350.org, has been trying to raise awareness about the ties it sees between lobbyists for the oil pipeline and former aides to Mrs. Clinton. He promptly shared the post with his 150,000 Twitter...

NBC Universal, News Corporation, Turner Broadcasting and Thomson Reuters are among more than a dozen media organizations that have made charitable contributions to the Clinton Foundation in recent years, the foundation's records show....The following list includes news media organizations that have donated to the foundation, as well as other media networks, companies, foundations or individuals that have donated. It is organized by the size of the contribution:....$1,000,000-$5,000,000 Carlos Slim Chairman & CEO of Telmex, largest New York Times shareholder James Murdoch Chief Operating Officer of 21st Century Fox Newsmax Media Florida-based conservative media network

At first glance, Senator Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi Nelson Cruz, seems to be just the sort of person the Tea Party supporters who celebrate her husband’s anti-establishment positions love to hate. A vegetarian with a Harvard M.B.A., Mrs. Cruz is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, one of the Wall Street firms that helped set off the populist rage that ushered Mr. Cruz into the Senate in 2012. She works for Goldman in Houston, where she lives with the couple’s two young children, and as her husband’s fame has increased — depending on the audience, he is among the most...

  The New York Times declared that Christianity in America is declining and I say “Amen to that!” Actually, the article’s title is “Big Drop in Share of Americans Calling Themselves Christian” and that’s why I’m happy it’s true.  The Times piece is based on a Pew Research Center survey, which shows that people are abandoning the moniker of Christian religious identity in favor of post-modern nihilism. The biggest declines are in Mainline Protestant and Catholic denominations.  If you’re a Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian (PCUSA), Episcopal, Congregationalist, or Disciple of Christ, you’re becoming a rarer commodity.  And that’s a good thing....

A federal judge in New Orleans has thrown out a lawsuit filed against the New York Times by a Loyola University economics professor who had accused the newspaper of libel.

CNBC Chief Washington Correspondent and New York Times Political Writer John Harwood argued that GOP presidential candidates Dr. Ben Carson and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) are too sensitive to tough questions, while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is better at handling tough questions in an interview set to broadcast on Tuesday’s “Hugh Hewitt Show.”Harwood discussed an interview he did with Carson during which Carson argued that Hewitt “was so gleeful about thinking that he had caught me on something,” during a questioning on the Baltic states and NATO on Hewitt’s show back in March. After hearing the exchange between Hewitt and...

A former CIA officer has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for leaking details of a secret mission to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Jeffrey Sterling of O’Fallon, Missouri, was facing a recommended sentence of 20 years or more under federal sentencing guidelines for violations of the Espionage Act. …

<p>In 1998 the paper criticized [4] the withdrawal of playwright Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christi” from the Manhattan Theater Club, due to threats of violence. Corpus Christi was about [5] a gay Jesus, with a plot line that included the Christian Son of God performing a same-sex marriage, and Judas betraying him due to romantic jealousy. “What we are witnessing, once again, is the peculiar combat between freedoms that is repeatedly staged in America,” the paper stated. “The practitioners and beneficiaries of religious freedom attack the practitioners of artistic freedom–freedom of speech–without seeing that the freedoms they enjoy cannot be defended separately.”</p>

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered emergency measures on Sunday to combat the wage theft and health hazards faced by the thousands of people who work in New York State’s nail salon industry. Effective immediately, he said in a statement, a new, multiagency task force will conduct salon-by-salon investigations, institute new rules that salons must follow to protect manicurists from the potentially dangerous chemicals found in nail products, and begin a six-language education campaign to inform them of their rights. Nail salons that do not comply with orders to pay workers back wages, or are unlicensed, will be shut down. The...

EARLY one morning, 50 years ago today, while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life. There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that it was an accident, that he’d quarreled with Mary. None were true. As his friends knew, he’d been suffering from depression and paranoia for the last year of his life. Ernest and I were friends for 14 years. I dramatized many of his...

e New York Times just published one of the more rough-handed pieces we’ve yet seen regarding “gay Christianity.” In “Bigotry, the Bible and the Lessons of Indiana,” opinion writer Frank Bruni takes the gloves off and seeks to bully Christians into caving on homosexuality. The column is frank, direct, and brutalizing.Let’s consider five takeaways from this striking article.1. Here’s what Bruni believes opposition to “gay Christianity” is based in: raw prejudice. He says as much: But in the end, the continued view of gays, lesbians and bisexuals as sinners is a decision. It’s a choice. It prioritizes scattered passages of ancient texts over all...

The NYT has never had the slightest sense of moral aberrance ,egregious wrongheadedness any sense of guilt, regret in the attitude or philosophy regarding the headlines, articles and the the cognitive dissonance they bring to bear written as if no logic, reasoning, common sense was mandatory in the process. While human behavior is determined by logic, reason and calculated conclusion, animals have no self-awareness, considered unable to visualize that which is not visually present, behavior driven by instinct, hot-wired into their brain with no input to help modify, ameliorate the manner in how they behave. The NYT it seems operates...

New York Times foreign correspondent Rukmini Callimachi on Sunday tweeted: Rukmini Callimachi ✔@rcallimachi Free speech aside, why would anyone do something as provocative as hosting a "Muhammad drawing contest"? The tweet came off of the news that police had killed two gunmen at a Garland, Tex., event showcasing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. SNIP In his treatment of the issue, the “Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart couldn’t resist throwing in some qualifiers regarding the First Amendment implications of the episode. AFDI, he noted, had given away $10,000 to the best entry in a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest. SNIP “AFDI is a...

Officer’s vital signs plummet after being shot in the head By Larry Celona, Shawn Cohen, Jamie Schram and Bruce Golding The distraught family of NYPD Officer Brian Moore was preparing for the worst Sunday as his condition deteriorated from a bullet wound to the head that left him on life support. Moore’s parents, including his retired-cop dad, Raymond, were joined by his police partner and dozens of other officers at Jamaica Hospital after he began bleeding uncontrollably and his blood pressure plummeted early Sunday, sources told The Post. At one point, a police chaplain was called to the hospital after...

New York Times Co. shares leaped 10.7 percent in after-hours trading after Fox Business Network reported billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg had expressed renewed interest in buying the paper. The former New York City mayor was prepared to pay up to $5 billion to acquire the Gray Lady — more than double the $2.3 billion market cap of the company. Bloomberg LP completely dismissed the FBN report as untrue. “There is no truth to this rumor,” Ty Trippet, a spokesman for the data and business news service, said in an e-mail. Mike Bloomberg has in the past expressed interest in buying...

GRIN clink on link http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/business/media/new-york-times-company-q1-earnings.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0