Free Republic

When the street harassment video was launched earlier this week, we hoped that it would make an impact but never imagined that it would be viewed more than 15,000,000 times in the first three days. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Many women feel a little less alone and a little more validated in their experiences and we have heard support from our partners, new and old. Rob Bliss Creative donated time and labor to create this video and support our work. We are grateful for his work and the wide reach that his video has achieved but we feel...

Polls show that the Republicans have an advantage in the fight for control of the Senate. They lead in enough states to win control, and they have additional opportunities in North Carolina and New Hampshire to make up for potential upsets. As Election Day nears, Democratic hopes increasingly hinge on the possibility that the polls will simply prove wrong. But that possibility is not far-fetched. The polls have generally underestimated Democrats in recent years, and there are reasons to think it could happen again. In 2010, the polls underestimated the Democrats in every competitive Senate race by an average of...

The state’s highest court has toppled a cultural taboo — legalizing a degree of incest, at least between an uncle and niece — in a unanimous ruling. While the laws against “parent-child and brother-sister marriages . . . are grounded in the almost universal horror with which such marriages are viewed . . . there is no comparably strong objection to uncle-niece marriages,” Tuesday’s ruling reads.

Cuomo Sells 945 Copies of Book; Paid Over $700,000 Advance BY DANIEL HALPER Andrew Cuomo's book is a dud. The memoir, released last week, has sold 945 hardcover copies in its first week of sales, Amy Chozick of the New York Times reports. "Andrew Cuomo's memoir sold 945 hardcovers in first week on shelves, according to BookScan. That's right, guys, 945 copies," writes Chozick on Twitter.

It's not that Gov. Cuomo's book sales stink, he told reporters Monday -- it's just that his day job keeps him kind of busy when it comes to promoting it. Cuomo's first memoir signing drew fewer than 150 people to the Barnes & Noble in Union Square last Wednesday. His Amazon ratings aren't exactly a blazing constellation of five-star endorsements either.

This, however, seems to be too rubish a deduction for its critics. So reflexive has the search for complexity become that even the most straightforward of questions are now twisted and bent into more pleasingly distressing shapes. In her Brooklyn Magazine piece, Iverson argues that “it’s no coincidence that Roberts is presented in the video as being explicitly not responsible for the attacks on her because she’s not wearing ‘provocative’ clothes and she doesn’t respond to any of the verbal assaults thrown at her.” At first blush, one would have imagined this to be a positive thing. Does not the...

A new video about street harassment has gone viral and it proves that . . . how do I put this? It proves that I was right. The video, released by the nonprofit anti-street-harassment organization Hollaback, features a moderately attractive woman, Shoshana Roberts, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, walking in silence through Manhattan for ten hours. The trek was recorded on a hidden video camera, carried by Roberts’s boyfriend, who walked in front of her. The camera picked up over 100 instances of street harassment in one day, according to the group, ranging in severity from men shouting “good morning,”...

<p>On Tuesday, Slate and everyone else posted a video of a woman who is harassed more than 100 times by men as she walks around New York City for ten hours. More specifically, it’s a video of a young white woman who is harassed by mostly black and Latino men as she walks around New York City for ten hours. The one dude who turns around and says, “Nice,” is white, but the guys who do the most egregious things—like the one who harangues her, “Somebody’s acknowledging you for being beautiful! You should say thank you more,” or the one who follows her down the street too closely for five whole minutes—are not.</p>

The New York Times Company said on Thursday that its third-quarter revenue increased by less than 1 percent from a year ago, as growth in its digital business offset declines in print circulation and advertising. The Times planned to spur revenue growth in 2014 with the introduction of several new digital subscription products, but those products have not caught on as the company had hoped. Total revenue during the third quarter increased 0.8 percent to $365 million, compared with $362 million in the same period last year. In a call with investors, the company’s chief executive, Mark Thompson, said that...

A woman who had been quarantined at Newark Airport due to stricter screening protocols on Friday after reporting contact with Ebola victims was seen exiting an ambulance in a hazmat suit later that evening as she made her way into an isolation unit at University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said the woman arrived at the airport on a flight on Friday from West Africa. He earlier announced that additional screening protocols were being implemented at JFK and Newark International Airports. The woman, who initially showed no symptoms of the deadly virus, just hours later...

Asked to comment on the recent ax attack in NYC by an apparent lone wolf jihadist that left a rookie cop critically injured, Republican congressman Peter King had some very tough words for the New York Times. Appearing on today's Morning Joe, King condemned the Times for having "smeared" the police and spread the feeling that "the police are an occupying force, that they're profiling Muslims, they're going after Muslims." According to King, deranged lone wolves like the ax attacker are prone to respond and be inspired by such talk. View the video here.

A front-page obituary of David Greenglass published this week in the New York Times is seriously flawed. Not only does it contain inaccurate statements of fact, it also misrepresents the views of historians about the Rosenberg atomic espionage case. The obituary stated that there is a “consensus among historians” that “the Greenglass-Rosenberg atomic bomb details were of little value to the Soviets, except to corroborate what they already knew, and that Ethel Rosenberg had played no active role in the conspiracy.” As five historians who have written six books on Soviet espionage, three specifically on the Rosenberg network and three...

Whether it's his IRS targeting his political opponents, his NSA spying on journalists, his EPA blowing an oil spill, his HHS fumbling a Website designed to sell only one product (ObamaCare), or his CDC proving itself so inept you wonder if anyone there has even bothered to see the movie "Outbreak," President Obama's Palace Guards in the mainstream media are always there to assure us the President is very, Very, VERY angry and disappointed. As though the guy in charge is the helpless one, the real victim. With the federal government's unforgivable mishandling of Ebola threatening to finally consume his...

Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This piece is reprinted with permission and can be found on Abrams' blog "Pressure Points" here. The New York Times, whose hostility to Israel is visible in both its news and its editorial ‎pages, was at it again this week. In an editorial (about the symbolic vote in the U.K. ‎parliament backing Palestinian statehood) titled "A British Message to Israel," The ‎Times's editorial board unloaded yet again with a barrage of advice, opinion -- and untruths.‎ Here are some of the key words:‎ "The...

There’s one man, some Republicans say, who kept the public from learning about the chemical shells littered around the Iraqi battlefield. He was Bush's most important political adviser. Starting in 2004, some members of the George W. Bush administration and Republican lawmakers began to find evidence of discarded chemical weapons in Iraq. But when the information was brought up with the White House, senior adviser Karl Rove told them to ‘let these sleeping dogs lie.’ The issue of Iraq’s WMD remnant was suddenly thrust back into the fore this week, with a blockbuster New York Times report accusing the Bush...

No one with an Israeli visa in their passport is welcome on a New York Times-sponsored tour of Iran, part of its luxury line of Times Journeys. Although the tour includes a stop in Hamadan, where travelers will be able to “explore the biblical tomb of Ester and Mordechai, regarded as the most important pilgrimage site for the Jewish community in Iran,” Israelis don’t qualify. According to the New York-based Algemeiner Journal, representatives of the tour stated on the phone that “anyone with a page in their passport with an Israeli visa will be declined.” Representatives also suggested that travelers...

The New York Times has the rather annoying problem of having to make actual facts fit their confirmation bias.  By making journalistic pretzels of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, they’ve backed into the fact that W.M.D.’s really did exist in Saddam’s Iraq, despite their protestations. In 2004, an NYT public apology declaredTo anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken. [emphasis mine] Ten years later, above the fold “The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons” dances like...

Friday on PBS's "News Hour," syndicated columnist Mark Shields pointed out, "among young Republicans, 61 percent of Republicans -- young Republicans under the age of 30 are in favor of same sex marriage." New York Times columnist David Brooks "applauded," the GOP for "doing absolutely the right thing in withdrawing" and letting the country have its way. Brooks said "I sort of applaud the minimalism here. Sometimes you let the country have its way and you don't try to determine the shape of the country, you sort of modestly step back and let the country figure out what it believes....

Holy Mustache, Batman! How can you tell when Thomas Friedman has given up and stopped bothering? Is there even a way to tell when a man who tried to turn global flattening into a thing has just given up?Friedman just wrote an article half of which consists of Batman quotes. The rest is his usual mix of random drivel, references to Fukuyama and staged wisdom. ItÂ’s why Orit Perlov, an Israeli expert on Arab social networks, keeps telling me that since I canÂ’t visit the Islamic State, which is known as ISIS, and interview its leaders, the next best...

As rumors swirled that Noerdlinger would resign amid disclosures, de Blasio spokesman Phil Walzak released a statement late Friday afternoon praising Noerdlinger as 'a valued member of our team.' Another day, another embarrassing revelation about top City Hall aide Rachel Noerdlinger. And after nearly 10 hours of silence, another vow of support by Mayor de Blasio for his embattled appointee, a former top confidante of the Rev. Al Sharpton. The new disclosures concern an incident on Aug. 27, 2011, in Edgewater, N.J., when a cop spotted Hassaun McFarlan, Noerdlinger’s ex-con boyfriend, driving her Mercedes-Benz into oncoming traffic. ... McFarlan was...