Free Republic

NEW YORK, April 17, 2014, (LifeSiteNews.com) – A New York City councilman has effectively told traditional marriage supporters they are “not welcome” in the Big Apple. In response to Chick-fil-A’s proposed plans to expand their business and set up restaurants in several locations, including New York City, Councilman Daniel Dromm told the Huffington Post that the fast-food chain would not be welcome in the most populous city in the country. Councilman Daniel Dromm “We don’t need bigots coming to New York City,” Dromm told HuffPost. “They are not welcome here unless they can embrace all of New York’s diverse community,...

Let’s do a thought experiment. If Charles or David Koch got invited onto NBC’s Today show to talk about their efforts to advance their political agenda, would either or both get partnered with Savannah Guthrie for a softball interview? Would their interview include suggestions that one of them should run for President? Kyle Drennen at Newsbusters notes that two weeks prior to Michael Bloomberg’s appearance on Today, the network took a much different approach to money in politics: (VIDEO-AT-LINK)The clip just provides the highlights. Newsbusters has the whole transcript up, but let me just note the tough questions asked by...

A hotel executive and Democratic fundraiser has pleaded guilty in New York to witness tampering and conspiracy to evade campaign finance laws. Sant Singh Chatwal appeared Thursday in federal court in Brooklyn. The candidates were not identified. Chatwal had raised at least $100,000 for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign against Barack Obama

Veterans Blast NY Times Op-Ed That Stereotypes Them as Potential Domestic Terrorists By Matthew Balan Created 04/16/2014 - 5:41pm An unsigned Wednesday article in the Military Times spotlighted how veteran groups have rebuked the New York Times for an opinion piece that played up the recent shootings at two Jewish community centers as apparent proof that white veterans are susceptible to joining hate groups. Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America hammered the liberal newspaper for its "sensational, slanderous and incredibly offensive" attack on his peers. In the Wednesday op-ed, author Kathleen Belew cited a controversial 2009 Department...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com - NY Times Columnist: Republicans Right on Liberal Inner City FailuresPosted By Daniel Greenfield On April 15, 2014 @ 1:29 pm In The Point | No Comments Nicholas Kristof’s article is really a bait and switch, admitting that Republicans were right about three major liberal social policy failures in the inner city… but offering only more of the same liberal social policies. “Conservatives have been proved right about three big ideas of social policy. Liberals may grimace, but hear me out on these points,” he writes.“STRONG FAMILIES Conservatives highlight the primacy of family and argue...

http://longisland.news12.com/ News 12 Long Island has a poll on "assault weapon" registration in NYS. Today is the deadline to register in NYS. The good folks at LongIslandFirearms.com have already moved it from 70/30 Yes, to 77/23 No! The poll is in the lower right hand corner of the page. Help make it a blow out! FUAC!

This year April 15 is more than the tax deadline for an estimated one million New York State residents. It’s also the deadline to register “assault weapons” and “high-capacity” magazines. If they don’t, they’ll begin living outside the law. A lot of them have decided to do just that. They’ve decided to practice civil disobedience even though failure to register an “assault weapon” by the deadline is punishable as a “class A misdemeanor,” which means a maximum sentence of one year in prison. I put “assault weapon” and “high-capacity” in quotes because their definitions vary by state—they’re political terms. In...

New York Officials Argue for Flexibility with Gun Law Violators… As Long as They're on the City's PayrollSome of New York's most strident gun control advocates have rushed to the defense of an unwitting traveler who was arrested at an airport for a technical violation of a draconian gun law. Has a new era of sanity arrived in the Big Apple? Not really. This defendant happens to be an NYPD officer who is alleged to have violated India's strict firearm regulations. On March 10th, NYPD Officer Manny Encarnacion was arrested when officials at the airport in New Delhi discovered three...

What if the United States has been waging the wrong war against the wrong enemy for the last 13 years in Afghanistan? Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall, who's spent more than a decade covering Afghanistan since 2001, concludes just that in her new book, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014.

(Reuters) - Iranian-American Amir Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine whose previous death sentence in Iran on espionage charges was overturned, has been secretly retried, convicted of collaborating with the U.S. government and sentenced to 10 years in prison, the New York Times reported on Friday, quoting his lawyer. The newspaper quoted lawyer Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabaei as saying Hekmati, held since 2011, was not told by Iranian officials about the retrial, conviction or prison sentence. The Times quoted Tabatabaei as saying Hekmati was retried by a revolutionary court in December and convicted of "practical collaboration with the American government." :snip: The...

In an unusually pointed rebuke of its ally, Israel said on Wednesday that it was “deeply disappointed” by Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks a day earlier that appeared to lay primary blame on Israel for the crisis in the American-brokered Middle East peace talks.

I'm in a rental car with Al Franken, and we're driving across New Hampshire on the Sunday before the nation's first primary, heading to a John Edwards rally. The Democrats are in a kooky mood following the sudden collapse of Howard Dean in Iowa, and Franken -- comedian, celebrity, scourge -- is spending two days in the state not in any official capacity but as a sort of good-will representative from the party's satiric wing. He is not, as you might think from the outrageous trappings of his comedy, an extreme lefty but rather a devout party man, one who...

Our recent interview with Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel about his provocative prediction that most employers will abandon health coverage by 2025 struck a nerve with You’re The Boss readers. It came as no surprise that Dr. Emanuel’s claim, first made in his new book, “Reinventing American Health Care,” would be swept up in the broader political and ideological debate about the Affordable Care Act. But in their many comments, readers raised interesting questions, and we took some of them back to Dr. Emanuel in another conversation that appears, edited and condensed, below. It’s worth noting that among those readers who...

If President Obama means what he says about wanting an immigration system that reflects American values, helps the economy and taps the yearnings of millions of Americans-in-waiting, he is going to have to do something about it — soon and on his own. It has been frustrating to watch his yes-we-can promises on immigration reform fade to protestations of impotence and the blaming of others. All Mr. Obama has been saying lately is: No, in fact, we can’t, because Republicans and the law won’t let me. Mr. Obama is correct when he complains that long-term immigration repairs have been throttled...

Wow. This was warped and offensive. New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman sited a debunked study to compare global warming deniers to Trotsky Marxists – then blames the Syrian revolution on global warming, not on Bashir Assad’s brutality. Let me put this in personal terms. Your son or daughter has a disease. And you go to 100 doctors. 97 out of a hundred say, “This is a cause and this is a cure,” and three percent say, “This is a cause and this is a cure.” It’s like 97% of experts say this. 3% say that. And, conservatives...

“New York Times” columnist Thomas Friedman took a nasty swipe at conservatives over the subject of climate change on Sunday April 6. Friedman appeared alongside Heidi Cullen of Climate Central on Sunday’s CBS This Morning and proceeded to mock conservatives who question human-caused climate change. Speaking to host Bob Schieffer, Friedman claimed that 97 percent of scientists believe in climate change and “conservatives are saying I’m going go to with the 3%. That’s not conservative, that’s Trotskyite radicalism.” [See video below.] (video at link) Friedman’s obnoxious comments came after Schieffer wondered, “In our politics now, everything breaks on these ideological...

The self-absorption of some on the left prevents them from even the most elementary shoe-on-the-other-foot perspective on the intolerance at Mozilla. Writing in a New York Times blog, Farhad Manjooo thinks it is fine to cater to the intolerance of those who see opposition to gay marriage as deserving loss of livelihood. This case is in his thinking different from, for example, the 1950s, when racism and sexism were rampant, and the Hollywood blacklisting of communists (long held up by the left as a national trauma that must never be forgotten).  Mozilla is not a normal company. It is an...

If President Obama means what he says about wanting an immigration system that reflects American values, helps the economy and taps the yearnings of millions of Americans-in-waiting, he is going to have to do something about it — soon and on his own. It has been frustrating to watch his yes-we-can promises on immigration reform fade to protestations of impotence and the blaming of others. All Mr. Obama has been saying lately is: No, in fact, we can’t, because Republicans and the law won’t let me. Mr. Obama is correct when he complains that long-term immigration repairs have been throttled...

NY Times: Mozilla CEO's 'Anti-Gay' Stance 'By Definition Disqualifying,' He Needed 'Rehabilitation' By Tim Graham Created 04/05/2014 - 6:59pm Our web guru Steve Edwards passed along a tweet from Moe Lane that said "New York Times confirms: Open Source advocacy is for liberals/progressives only. " Lane linked to an obnoxious blog post by Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times titled “Why Mozilla’s Chief Had to Resign.” You see, “Mozilla is not a normal company. It is an activist organization.” And activists apparently find it very distasteful to be less than “militantly tolerant,” as Manjoo put it: Is this an...

A dangerous new form of a powerful stimulant is hitting markets nationwide, for sale by the vial, the gallon and even the barrel. The drug is nicotine, in its potent, liquid form — extracted from tobacco and tinctured with a cocktail of flavorings, colorings and assorted chemicals to feed the fast-growing electronic cigarette industry. These “e-liquids,” the key ingredients in e-cigarettes, are powerful neurotoxins. Tiny amounts, whether ingested or absorbed through the skin, can cause vomiting and seizures and even be lethal. A teaspoon of even highly diluted e-liquid can kill a small child. But, like e-cigarettes, e-liquids are not...