Free Republic

Not long after Mayor Bill de Blasio sat beside the Rev. Al Sharpton at a July summit meeting on police reform, a political adviser gave the mayor a blunt assessment: You have a problem with the cops. Rank-and-file officers felt disrespected by the mayor, the adviser explained, and were dismayed to see Mr. Sharpton, a longtime critic of the New York Police Department, embraced at City Hall. But Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, rejected the notion that officers disliked him. His message, the adviser later recalled, was clear: Everything was under control. That confidence would last until late last month,...

It would have given great offense, had anyone known it was there. For the first half of the 20th century, an eight-foot-tall marble statue of the Prophet Muhammad overlooked Madison Square Park from the rooftop of the Appellate Division Courthouse at Madison Avenue and 25th Street. Sixty years ago, the statue was quietly removed, in an episode that now looks, in light of recent events in Paris, like the model of tact, restraint and diplomacy. What had spared the sensibilities of Muslim passers-by from 1902 to 1955 was that “Muhammad,” by the Mexican sculptor Charles Albert Lopez, was among nine...

The New York Times' Executive Editor Just Called Someone An A------ On Facebook SHANE FERRO JAN. 9, 2015 In response to a Facebook post by USC Annenberg journalism professor Marc Cooper about the New York Times' decision not to publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons this week, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet had this to say: Screen Shot 2015 01 09 at 4.07.24 PM Facebook screenshot Here's Marc Cooper's original post, which has more than 50 comments already: Screen Shot 2015 01 09 at 4.12.59 PM

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against retired Gen. David H. Petraeus for providing classified information to his former mistress while he was director of the C.I.A., officials said, leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison. The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Mr. Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell, an Army Reserve officer who was writing his biography, and focuses on whether he gave her access to his C.I.A. email account and other...

The New York Times, which has already faced criticism for its decision not to publish images of the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons that may have provoked the attack on that magazine’s Paris offices Wednesday, is now under fire for apparently removing a quote from an article about reactions from survivors of the attack. Earlier today, the website Ace of Spades posted this excerpt from a story by reporter Liz Alderman about the shooting as experienced by those who survived it: Sigolène Vinson, a freelancer who had decided to come in that morning to take part in the meeting, thought she...

Politico senior political reporter Maggie Haberman has been scooped up by the New York Times. “Thrilled to say I am joining [the New York Times], and very grateful for the opportunity. I remain incredibly grateful to Politico for an amazing run,” Haberman said in a tweet. Her forthcoming move to the Times was announced by Politico in an internal memo Friday. At the Times, Haberman will anchor First Draft, the newspaper's political webpage, and will "help drive [the newspaper’s] campaign news during the day," New York Times Washington Bureau Chief and Political Editor Carolyn Ryan said in a memo.

A dozen people may have been murdered by Islamic terrorists in Paris Wednesday morning, but The New York Times can’t help but note the real tragedy behind the shooting: the growth of Islamophobia. (RELATED: The Ever-Growing List Of Cowards Refusing To Publish The Mohammad Cartoons)The attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for its publication of images of Muhammad is “sure to accelerate the growth of anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe, feeding far-­right nationalist parties like France’s National Front,” frets Times reporters Steven Erlanger and Katrin Bennhold in an article entitled “Paris Attack Reflects a ‘Dangerous Moment’ for Europe.”[Snip] The Times...

Apparently, pedophilia is an entrenched part of Hollywood culture — but you wouldn’t know that if you only consulted The New York Times for news. Check out this Fox News account of just some of the muck that underlies Hollywood’s glamorous gilding: If a spate of recent allegations proves true, Hollywood may have a hideous epidemic on its hands. The past two weeks have brought three separate reports of alleged child sexual abuse in the entertainment industry. Martin Weiss, a 47-year-old Hollywood manager who represented child actors, was charged in Los Angeles on Dec. 1 with sexually abusing a former...

He was a victim! The man who cold-bloodedly shot Officers Ramos and Liu gets a shocking amount of sympathy and understanding from the New York Times today. The three (!) writers assigned to the story, Kim Barker, Mosi Secret and Richard Fausset present us empathy as: In reality, Mr. Brinsley’s short life was a series of disappointments. He was the difficult teenager who was passed around from home to home, the adult who could make nothing work, not a T-shirt company, not even an attempt on his own life at a former girlfriend’s house. Everyone seemed to betray him. The...

After the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, it didnt take long for environmentalists to cry gloom and doom and for the media to hype those claims. From caribou dying to earthquakes to all hell breaking loose, there was no shortage of catastrophic predictions though the Alaska pipeline now boasts great success roughly 30 years later.      Construction on the pipeline began in 1975, and oil first moved through it on June 20, 1977. Former Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton summed up its success in 2003 that Today the pipeline produces 17 percent of our domestic petroleum. It...

Although many of the images are striking and well worth viewing, there's also a dose of the liberal politics of the New York Times on display in its "Year in Pictures" in today's paper. The very first photo sets the Times' tone, depicting a Ferguson demonstrator with hands up confronted by a heavily-armed phalanx of police. But it is the accompanying commentary in another photo that really gives the Times' game away. Seen from the inside of a car, the text reads [emphasis added]: "Ignacio, an illegal immigrant, pulled into a convenience store in Tulsa, where a simple traffic stop...

The metropolitan police department for the largest city in the United States is ceasing to function, according to a report in The New York Post.While the New York Police Department has continued its work of policing dangerous and violent criminal activity, quality of life policing has nearly come to a complete halt when statistics from December 20 to December 30, 2013 are compared with that same period this year. Citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame.Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from...

When women first started coming forward to accuse Bill Cosby of rape last month, the public was surprised due to his flawless reputation as 'America's dad'. It has now been revealed that a team of lawyers and publicists worked tirelessly to keep his image pristine for decades, by silencing alleged victims and keeping the media from reporting their claims, the New York Times reports. That apparently all-male team includes $850-an-hour Hollywood lawyer Martin Singer (whose clients include Charlie Sheen and Arnold Schwarzenegger), former William Morris agent Norman Brokaw, his publicist son David, and New York lawyer John P Schmitt.

A remarkable report by Anne Barnard of the New York Times this weekend confirms my multiple reports here at PJ Media about the increased alliance between the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.As Barnard reports: In northern and eastern Syria, where Mr. Assad’s opponents won early victories and once dreamed of building self-government, the nationalist rebel groups calling themselves the Free Syrian Army are forced to operate under the extremists’ umbrellas, to go underground or to flee, according to Syrian insurgents, activists and two top commanders of the American-financed F.S.A. groups. Two weeks ago...

They want peace. No really. And the New York Times is just a dispassionate observer looking for reform and change. Not mass murder.But Nicholas Kristof had one of his “Take the Mask Off Moments” when the radical left shows how ugly and unhinged it really is despite its facade of dinner parties and book clubs and that its media outlets promote violence.And so he invited readers to send in poems about the usual stuff. Bunnies. Flowers. Killing all white people and burning America to the ground. And the emphasis was not on the bunnies and flowers.Here’s a deranged screech of...

Stock prices were slumping in early December, for good reasons, including global economic weakness. But they have surged ever since the Fed stated its intention not to raise rates in the near term. The challenge for the Fed is to hold rates low without inflating bubbles. The way to do so is to control speculation through stepped-up regulation of banks and other financial institutions. Instead, the Fed has been inclined to ease up on regulation. On Dec. 19, it delayed a core provision of the Volcker Rule, a part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law that bans speculative trading...

For a long time, the U.S. ostracism of Cuba has been like the vintage American cars on the streets of Havana: obsolete but imperishable. It didn't topple the Castro government, didn't force human rights progress and didn't unite the world behind us. Yet failure was no enemy of longevity. There are many reasons for its endurance. But if you're parceling out responsibility, you have to start with a curious invention of the founding fathers that we know as the Electoral College. Without it, our Cuba policy never would have persisted for so many years -- which is a reminder that...

Couldn't the New York Times put aside its hostility to traditional religion on Christmas Day and feature a column by a believing Christian? No, it couidn't. Instead, believers who blunder onto the online op-ed page today are hit with a lead column entitled "Religion Without God." And just in case you didn't get the message, there's a second column called "An Atheist’s Christmas Dream."

Mayor Bill de Blasio, confronting the gravest crisis of his young administration, has been by turns composed and defiant, empathetic and indignant, urging calm in one moment and lashing out in frustration the next. In other words, he has acted like himself: a confident but mercurial leader whose singular political style has not wavered, even in the face of a potentially career-defining flash point over the police and race. In a sharp turn from his predecessors — the pugnacious, prosecutorial Rudolph W. Giuliani and the business-minded Michael R. Bloomberg — Mr. de Blasio, a political professional who promised a warmer,...

Unbelievably, the New York Times Editorial Board is calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to conduct a criminal investigation of Vice President Dick Cheney and other members of the Bush administration. They call the enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) “sadistic” crimes and cite that 25% of those detained are innocent. How quickly they forget what happened to their fellow New Yorkers on September 11, 2001. They worry about the 25% supposedly innocent yet ignore the approximately 30% who were released and returned to the battleground, a figure cited by Obama administration officials. For example, Baghdadi, who was in the...