Free Republic

Make no mistake: by criminalizing James Rosen of Fox News for asking government employees to give him information, the Obama administration is suppressing the ability of the press to do its job. It is so egregious that even the New York Times, normally sycophants for Obama, is alarmed. The editorial board today writes: With the decision to label a Fox News television reporter a possible "co-conspirator" in a criminal investigation of a news leak, the Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news. And the Times, a member/owner of Associated...

Clearly, the New York Times couldn't run with Jonathan Weisman's headline or opening sentence in the report he filed shortly after Friday's portion of Friday's testimony at a hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee in its Saturday print edition. And it didn't. The original headline at Weisman's story, as seen here (HT Ann Althouse via Instapundit), was "Treasury Knew of I.R.S. Inquiry in 2012, Official Says." His opening sentence: "The Treasury Department’s inspector general told senior Treasury officials in June 2012 he was auditing the Internal Revenue Service’s screening of politically active organizations seeking tax exemptions, disclosing for...

On April 8, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Boston conference on ''media reform.'' She was joined by four other congressmen, a senator, two FCC commissioners, a Nobel laureate and numerous liberal journalists. The 2,500-person event was sponsored by a group called Free Press, one of more than 180 different media-related organizations that receives money from liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros, who first made a name for himself in investing and currency trading, now makes his name in politics and policy. Since the 2004 election, the controversial financier has used his influence and billions to push a laundry list...

Someone get the staff of the New York Times down to NYU for a Biology 101 class. The Gray Lady reported today that abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell was found guilty of killing “fetuses.” Never mind that a “fetus” is an unborn child in the womb, not a baby who was killed after purposefully being birthed in an abortion process that is essentially infanticide. Unlike what the Times reported, a jury of 12 people, who clearly paid attention in seventh grade Life Science class, convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder. But, as the Washington Free Beacon first noted, the...

Another month and more foolishness in response to the bogus May jobs report. More complete falsehoods – let's call them lies, from the Obama Administration, being swallowed happily by the mainstream media and the cattle herd on Wall Street. It's human nature to want to run with the crowd even if you are not sure where they're all running to.  In the case of institutional investors - their 'Riverboat Gambler' instincts are taking over their rational minds.  Some of them are going to get caught with their tails in a crack, because this bubble in securities is just that.  And...

It's rare to get this kind of vindication, so let's enjoy it in memory of Andrew Breitbart for as long as possible. For more than two years, Andrew and Lee Stranahan have investigated the Pigford settlement and the fraudulent claims that not only have cost taxpayers billions, but have left the original black farmers who sued the USDA over discrimination. Today the New York Times reports what Andrew and Lee have been saying all along — that the Pigford settlement was a political hack job by Tom Vilsack’s Department of Agriculture, and that it’s a magnet for fraud (via Twitchy):...

(Reuters) - New York Times Co reported a decline in quarterly revenue on weak advertising sales but said it would try to grow out of the slump by expanding its suite of digital products. The 11.2 percent drop in advertising revenue in the first quarter underscores the pressure that the New York Times faces to increase its subscription revenue, especially for its digital products, and find new veins of income. The company plans to roll out a line of lower-priced products - including an expansion into e-commerce and games - to attract more readers around the world. Compounding the challenge...

New York Times Co reported a decline in quarterly revenue on weak advertising sales but said it would try to grow out of the slump by expanding its suite of digital products. The 11.2 percent drop in advertising revenue in the first quarter underscores the pressure that the New York Times faces to increase its subscription revenue, especially for its digital products, and find new veins of income.

The New York Times is very good at what it does — which nowadays involves a lot of lying in service to a leftist agenda. There are the outright lies (such as the paper’s recent distortion of a police bias trial to make the NYPD appear racist), the lies of omission (such as its lack of full reporting on the Obama administration’s fatal acts of malfeasance and dishonesty in, say, the Benghazi and Fast and Furious scandals), and the atmospheric lies (such as its rose-colored reporting on the disastrous economy in bluer-than-blue California). Altogether, these lies combine to make the...

Dowd bashes Obama: 'He still has not learned how to govern' By DONOVAN SLACK | 4/21/13 12:49 PM EDT The New York Times' Maureen Dowd ripped President Obama for failing to do enough on gun-control and said he "still has not learned how to govern." "President Obama has watched the blood-dimmed tide drowning the ceremony of innocence, as Yeats wrote, and he has learned how to emotionally connect with Americans in searing moments, as he did from the White House late Friday night after the second bombing suspect was apprehended in Boston," she writes in a column published Sunday. "Unfortunately,...

No sooner did the New York Times send a reporter to cover the murder trial of embattled abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell did the Gray Lady pull the reporter from daily coverage. Instead, the venerable newspaper will cover only “highlights” of the trail, which has weeks left to go. Local reporter JD Mullane of the Bucks County Courier Times, sent a tweet late Wednesday afternoon indicating the Times was pulling its reporter. “New York Times bails on daily coverage #Gosnell trial. Will cover “highlights” only,” he wrote.

In the immediate aftermath of the multiple explosions that rocked the Copley Square area of Boston during this afternoon’s marathon, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof took to Twitter to say that the tragic events are a “reminder” of how Senate Republicans blocked the appointment of a new director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). “[E]xplosion is a reminder that ATF needs a director. Shame on Senate Republicans for blocking apptment,” he tweeted with a link to a Washington Post article on the Senate GOP’s threats to put a hold on President Obama‘s nomination for a...

ORLANDO, Fla. — In the pews of the First Baptist Church of Orlando, where thousands of evangelical Christians gather on Sundays to worship and sing, a change of heart is happening on the once toxic issue of immigration. Two years ago, national evangelical leaders began to speak out in favor of legislation to give legal status to immigrants in the United States illegally. Now, as Congress is about to start a debate on overhauling the immigration system, conservative Christians in those churches, once inclined to take a hard line on immigrants they viewed as lawbreakers, are consulting their Bibles and...

Deep Thoughts by Thomas Friedman But don’t worry, the term “admits” is a bit strong. It’s more like the weatherman who predicted there wouldn’t be a flood for a month straight clinging to an antenna on the roof of his house and trying to find reasons why he was right all along even while the sharks are circling his chimney. The standard fallback position for Tahrir’s international cheerleaders is to argue that we were expecting positive results too quickly. The term “Arab Spring” has to be retired. There is nothing springlike going on,” Friedman says. “It’s best we now speak...

Genetic engineering in agriculture has disappointed many people who once had hopes for it. Excluding, of course, those who’ve made money from it, appropriately represented in the public’s mind by Monsanto. That corporation, or at least its friends, recently managed to have an outrageous rider slipped into the 587-page funding bill Congress sent to President Obama.[1] The rider essentially prohibits the Department of Agriculture from stopping production of any genetically engineered crop once it’s in the ground, even if there is evidence that it is harmful.

The co-author of a book on partisan science recently examined by Pacific Standard argues that our reviewer was a little too partisan himself. Any book that touches upon politics almost automatically angers half of the American public, regardless of what is written inside of it. It takes a special person—an objective, open-minded and self-critical one—to read and learn from a science book that criticizes people with whom the reader likes and agrees with politically.Recently, Pacific Standard published a review (“Red Science, Blue Science,” January/February 2013) by Wray Herbert, a pop psychology writer,of political writer Chris Mooney’s book The Republican Brain...

MF Global‘s bankruptcy trustee is hinting at taking legal action against the brokerage firm’s top executives, blaming them in a new report for engineering a “risky business strategy” and ignoring “glaring deficiencies” in internal controls. In accusing Jon S. Corzine and other MF Global executives of “negligent conduct” that may have accelerated the firm’s demise, Louis J. Freeh, the trustee for MF Global Holdings and a former director of the F.B.I., laid the groundwork for potential litigation. The 124-page report filed in federal bankruptcy court early Thursday leveled its sharpest critique at Mr. Corzine, the former chief executive who was...

We somehow missed this yesterday, but Newsbusters certainly didn’t, and it’s worth a look even a day later. The New York Times, with reporters around the world and “layers of fact-checkers and editors,� somehow couldn’t properly define Easter in a news article that focused on Pope Francis’ message on Christianity’s most holy of days. This correction has to be a contender for the most hilarious of the year: This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: April 1, 2013An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from...

A few months after I turned 40, a friend set me up with a guy she thought I’d like. She gave me a quick rundown: 50, former drummer now with a desk job, father of a 9-month-old girl. “Wait, he has a 9-month-old?” I exclaimed. “What happened to the wife?” There is no wife, she assured me. He’d gotten a woman pregnant after a brief period of dating; they now shared custody of their daughter. Though I’d never dated a man with kids, I badly wanted children. With my eggs in their last viable years, I knew I’d never have...

Finally the New York Times is reporting on the sexual assault of women in Egypt. Of course, they have to qualify it and deflect blame from the Muslim Brotherhood by saying that sexual assaults took place during the Mubarak regime, but that the police kept it quiet. Lol. They're actually attempting to norm this brutal and bloody violence against women by saying that it happened under Mubarak, sort of -- it's just that nobody knew about it. Still, they admit that after Mubarak left, so did the security police, and that since then, these attacks have gotten more brazen, more...

Now that Senate Democrats have passed their first budget in four years, Washington is turning its attention away from fiscal issues this week and towards social ones. President Obama devoted his weekly radio and internet address Saturday to pushing for more gun control in response to the mass killing in Newton, Connecticut last year. “As a nation, the last three months have changed us,” Obama said. “You – the American people – have spoken. You’ve made it clear that it’s time to do something.” Specifically, Obama called for more background checks and an assault weapon ban. Aides told the Associated...

The New York Times, in its role as the bible of the liberal mindset, instructs the liberal justices of the Supreme Court to avoid a sweeping ruling imposing gay marriage across the nation by judicial fiat. And it cautions its readership to be careful what they wish for from the court. That's the gist of this news analysis article by Adam Litvak, titled "Shadow of Roe v. Wade Looms Over Ruling on Gay Marriage." The word "shadow" gives away the game. The piece prominently features the ideas expressed by Justice Ginsburg, in essence that Roe v Wade pre-empted the political...

Anthony Lewis, a former New York Times reporter and columnist whose work won two Pulitzer Prizes and transformed American legal journalism, died on Monday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85. *** Mr. Lewis wrote several books, two of them classic accounts of landmark decisions of the Warren court, which he revered. Chief Justice Earl Warren led the Supreme Court from 1953 to 1969, corresponding almost precisely with Mr. Lewis’s years in Washington. One of those books, “Gideon’s Trumpet,” concerned Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 decision that guaranteed lawyers to poor defendants charged with serious crimes. It has...

When Benedict XVI was pope, the New York Times ran a scurrilous, distortion-infested campaign intended to link the former Joseph Ratzinger with the awful abuse scandals that have so harmed the Catholic Church. These pieces were manifestly dishonest and substance-free when you read them through. But the Times editors know most people don’t read the articles — they read the headlines and the first paragraph. So this morning, the pseudo-journalists at the Times began their campaign of lies against the new pope, Francis, under the damning (and damnable) headline: “Starting a Papacy, Amid Echoes of a ‘Dirty War’�: One Argentine...

I remember that early in the Iraq war, the New York Times tried to embarrass the Bush Administration by publishing an article saying that our troops had lost some WMDs they were guarding. I've been looking for that article and several searches have not located it. Does anyone else remember that? Why can't I find it? Has the Times stricken it? Does anyone know where I might locate it?

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has drawn the ire of the poverty-industrial complex for launching a gutsy ad campaign against teen pregnancy. Posters in thousands of bus shelters and subways show tiny tots bewailing the bad news about teen pregnancy. “Because you had me as a teen,” cries one, “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school.” Other stressed-out toddlers warn of the financial burdens their unwed mothers will face and the near certainty that their fathers won’t stick around. One little sage identifies the simplest way to avoid poverty: graduate from high school, get a job, and...

Lets say it plain and simple, the New York Times op-ed about the UN Commission of the Status of Women is a last gasp attempt to steer nations away from helping to end violence against women and girls, and instead promote controversial social policies. Ending violence against women, the priority theme of this year’s meeting of the commission, is no joke. It is one of very few global challenges that 193 UN member states want to address concertedly. Why is it then that the United States and some European nations keep raising obstacles towards reaching consensus on policies to end...

New York Times articles are not attacking the “occupation” anymore, but the very idea of a Jewish state. The New York Times has become the official paper of Israel’s Western would-be eradicators. Joseph Levine's latest oped argued that Israel has no right to exist and that history should be reversed: “I conclude, then, that the very idea of a Jewish state is undemocratic, a violation of the self-determination rights of its non-Jewish citizens, and therefore morally problematic”. The New York Times' relentless attacks could well play out in ways that indeed attempt to put an end to Israeli sovereignty. According...

From the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/opinion/the-worst-of-paul-ryans-budgets.html?_r=1& EXCERPT: All the tired ideas from 2011 and 2012 are back: eliminating Medicare’s guarantee to retirees by turning it into a voucher plan; dispensing with Medicaid and food stamps by turning them into block grants for states to cut freely; repealing most of the reforms to health care and Wall Street; shrinking beyond recognition the federal role in education, job training, transportation and scientific and medical research. The public opinion of these callous proposals was made clear in the fall election, but Mr. Ryan is too ideologically fervid to have learned that lesson. The...

The Project 21 black leadership network, New York Times liberal columnist Paul Krugman Obama Must Condemn NY Times Race-Baiting Tactics, Black Group Says Washington D.C. — The Project 21 black leadership network is condemning New York Times liberal columnist Paul Krugman for scurrilously pinning racist motives on critics of President Obama’s health care proposals. The group is calling upon President Obama to condemn all efforts to derail legitimate public debate, specifically including this effort to stifle debate with race-baiting tactics. “Paul Krugman is the one with race on the brain,” Project 21 Chairman Mychal Massie charged. “Specifically, he is using...

It’s been over a year since we lost Andrew Breitbart, although it seems much longer, and his departure is just as piercing today, as we confront an administration unencumbered by the rule of law, overseen by a politically neutered Congress, and whose actions are facilitated by a press whose slavish devotion to the left’s ideological agenda is something you would expect to find in the former Soviet Union. I don’t think we can exaggerate the importance of the space he occupied within the counterrevolutionary movement against the domestic left, and particularly, its allies among the mainstream media. Sitting through a...

Our feckless leaders may be incapable of passing a budget, but, boy, can they pass the buck. The White House spent last week in full campaign hysteria, blitzing online followers with the message that heartless Republicans are prepared to transform America into “Les Misérables” in order to protect “millionaires and billionaires, oil companies, vacation...”... --snip-- When President Obama told us in his first Inaugural Address that our time of “putting off unpleasant decisions” was over, advocates of reforming our fiscal disorder read that as a promise that the new president would go beyond the perennial economic quick fix. After pulling...

A paid death notice in The New York Times said a retired Israeli-born stockbroker loved everything about the city except the Times. The New York Post said Wednesday the notice for Amos Shuchman, 84, ran Feb. 2. Schuchman "loved his family, his birth and adopted countries, finance, skiing, opera, ballet and biking in Central Park. Loved everything about NYC, except The New York Times." Daniel Shuchman told the Post his father fought in the Haganah, a Jewish resistance movement, before Israel became an independent state. He said his father thought the Times' coverage of the Middle East was biased, canceled...

The New York Times Company said on Monday that it was planning to rename The International Herald Tribune, its 125-year-old newspaper based in Paris, and would also unveil a new Web site for international audiences. Starting this fall, under the plan, the paper will be rechristened The International New York Times, reflecting the company’s intention to focus on its core New York Times newspaper and to build its international presence. ”This recognizes our global reach and is an exciting and logical move,” said Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The New York Times. Mark Thompson, president and chief executive of...

The New York Times has called on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to remove New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez from his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Under the editorial headline “Mr. Menendez’s Ethics Problem,” the newspaper said Menendez “was never a distinguished choice for chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the position he ascended to this month by virtue of seniority.” “Concerns about that quality gap have sharply escalated amid new disclosures about Mr. Menendez’s use of his position to advance the financial interests of a friend and big donor,” the Times wrote. “Instead of trying...

Looks like liberals are still trying to peddle the discredited allegation that Tea Party members attacked black members of Congress. The op-ed page of today's New York Times contains a column by James Sleeper, a long-time left-wing activist, now a lecturer at Yale. The gist is the grudging respect that Sleeper came to have for Ed Koch, the former New York City mayor who passed away two days ago. Sleeper writes of how as mayor, Koch wrestled to the ground a protester who had stormed the stage as he spoke and pelted him with eggs. Sleeper wrote that Koch's asking...

The New York Times has been dragged kicking and screaming to the Robert Menendez scandal, but in an exhaustive story on the corrupt New Jersey Democrat  and his ties to Democrat sugar daddy Salomon Melgen they somehow managed to ignore the reports of Menendez shortchanging the 16-year-old prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. All the news that’s fit to print so long as it doesn’t hurt a prominent Democrat. But there is one rather juicy nugget that does make news. Two years ago, Dr. Melgen, despite an apparent lack of experience in border security issues, bought an ownership interest in a...

For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees. After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in. The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business...

Donald Trump has spent a lot of time in the last year trying to make news, first with his birther obsession, and more recently demanding comedian Bill Maher pay him $5 million. (Maher offered the sum for proof Trump wasn’t the “spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan.” Trump released his own birth certificate and threatened to sue Maher for the money.) Now Trump is exploring ways to make news in a more literal way: by acquiring the New York Times. According to sources familiar with the situation, Trump has engaged in more than one meeting to discuss...

A new federal assault weapons ban and background checks of all gun buyers, which President Obama is expected to propose on Wednesday, might have done little to prevent the massacre in Newtown, Conn., last month. The semiautomatic rifle that Adam Lanza used to shoot 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults complied with Connecticut’s assault weapons ban, the police said, and he did not buy the gun himself. But another proposal that Mr. Obama is expected to make could well have slowed Mr. Lanza’s rampage: banning high-capacity magazines, like the 30-round magazines that the police said Mr. Lanza used, which have been...

“Lack of Global Warming Means Cold, Empty Chairs at New York Times Environment Desk,” Jim Lakely writes ... The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. ... Al Gore has just declared Mission Accomplished for environmentalism? He’s got his $100 payout, and the rest of the world is left wondering why we should care about a religion when its chief practitioner has just signed his non-aggression pact with Big Oil. At...

The basics are as the headline suggests: Even some senior editors at the Times are rumored to be on the chopping block in an effort to cut costs, and the rest of the media is worried, because the Times already slashed staff in 2009 and so was thought to be relatively trim. The Times has already announced up to 30 layoffs, if it couldn't secure that many voluntary separations through buy-outs, but only a few people have taken that offer. So as of January 24th come the involuntary layoffs. The Times says this is all perfectly normal.

The next two weeks are going to get tense inside the headquarters of the New York Times. Last month, executive editor Jill Abramson told the staff she’d have to cut 30 positions from the news division to buffer against financial losses from rapidly declining advertising revenue. Reporters and editors would be offered buyouts, she said, but if she didn't have enough takers in a month’s time, she would be “forced to go to layoffs.” As the January 24 deadline approaches, only two people, assistant managing editor Jonathan Landman and reporter Jacques Steinberg, have formally announced their exits.

The New York Times is the only newspaper that runs a "business" column not about how to get ahead economically, but rather about how to indoctrinate kids to feel guilty about being financially successful. At least that's the theme of Ron Lieber's recent article, "An Invitation for High School Seniors to Write About Finances," which calls for seniors to submit their college application essays that focus on finance to the New York Times for possible publication. How do high school seniors write exemplary essays about "finances," exactly? One way is by concentrating their writing on corporate thugs like Bernie Madoff....

True to form, the New York Times saw out 2012 by publishing another apology for dictatorship. In his op-ed, Louis Michael Seidman -- Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University - argues that the Constitution should be abandoned.  The suggestion is so preposterous that it is tempting to dismiss the article altogether, but to do so would be to miss some very revealing implications.  The article is not so much a suggestion of constitutional reform as an open call for dictatorship. Seidman begins by blaming the current governmental crisis, incredibly, on "obedience to the Constitution," which he describes as containing...

AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions. Consider, for example, the assertion by the Senate minority leader last week that the House could not take up a plan by Senate Democrats to extend tax cuts on households making $250,000 or less because the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. Why should anyone care? Why should a lame-duck...

Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman has just about had it with the focus of his 40 years of academic study. As he writes in the New York Times on Monday, it is the Constitution itself which has allowed for the series of legislative follies that finally resulted in the “fiscal cliff.” Seidman says that it is time for Americans to realize what lawmakers have known since the constitution’s inception – it is okay to ignore it. “As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government...

[. . .] Nationwide, at least 23,000 schools — about one-third of all public schools — already had armed security on staff as of the most recent data, for the 2009-10 school year, and a number of states and districts that do not use them have begun discussing the idea in recent days. . . Plus the NRA plan was much more comprehensive than just armed guards.

Jim Treacher's right. Publishing this bilge is really just the Time's way of calling him a cornball brother.Of the offense of Disagreeing With The Left While Black, Tim Scott stands guilty as charged: But this “first black” rhetoric tends to interpret African-American political successes — including that of President Obama — as part of a morality play that dramatizes “how far we have come.” It obscures the fact that modern black Republicans have been more tokens than signs of progress ...Even if the Republicans managed to distance themselves from the thinly veiled racism of the Tea Party adherents who have...

he New York Times on Monday announced that it would offer buyout packages to 30 newsroom employees, and that layoffs would ensue if the 30 spots were not voluntarily filled. Citing a difficult "economic environment" that has led in recent years to a 60 percent staff reduction on the paper's business side, Executive Editor Jill Abramson said, "There is no getting around the hard news that the size of the newsroom staff must be reduced." While the loss of 30 jobs pales in comparison to the ousting of roughly 100 newsroom staffers in 2008, it is the latest evidence that...