Free Republic

Did The New York Times just inadvertently tell us what the real goal of the raise-the-minimum-wage campaign is? A Times editorial last week cheered Los Angeles’ enactment of a $15-an-hour minimum wage — but noted that restaurants, particularly fast-food joints, don’t like it. Said The Times: “The restaurant industry . . . will not go down without a fight.” We didn’t think that bringing down an entire industry was what the campaign for a $15 minimum was supposed to be about. Oops. Back in March, we noted that a similar hikein Seattle’s minimum wage was leading to a spate of local restaurant closings, given that labor costs...

NEW ORLEANS — Nearly 10 years on, one might assume that the case of Hurricane Katrina is closed. That the catastrophic flooding of this city was caused not merely by a powerful storm but primarily by fatal engineering flaws in the city’s flood protection system has been proved by experts, acknowledged by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and underscored by residents here to anyone who might suggest otherwise. But the efforts to establish responsibility with ever more precision — to ascertain just how many of those flaws were due to engineering, politics or money — have not stopped....

WASHINGTON — They use words like “historic” and “charismatic,” phrases like “great potential” and “million-dollar smile.” They notice audience members moved to tears by an American-dream-come-true success story. When they look at the cold, hard political math, they get uneasy. An incipient sense of anxiety is tugging at some Democrats — a feeling tersely captured in four words from a blog post written recently by a seasoned party strategist in Florida: “Marco Rubio scares me.”

This Sunday, Oprah is sitting down with the renowned Al Sharpton to discuss how his work as a Civil Rights leader has changed over the years, why he made the decision to get healthy and his beginnings as a preacher. Stuff we probably already knew or wouldn’t be too surprised to learn about Al Sharpton. But in a surprising revelation, Sharpton talks about the moment that changed his life: his father leaving his family, taking Sharpton’s older, half sister with him and having a child with her. Yes, you read that correctly. And yes it was a complete a hot...

WASHINGTON — THE fall of the Iraqi city of Ramadi on Sunday, and of the Syrian city of Palmyra on Wednesday, is a big gain for the Islamic State, but not an utter disaster, as many observers fear. Rather than inducing panic in Western capitals, it should lead to a realistic assessment of the Islamic State’s strengths and weaknesses. One setback in a long war must not trigger hasty strategic shifts that lead to foreign countries’ becoming mired in Iraq once more. Palmyra has economic and cultural significance, as it sits among gas fields and is home to renowned ruins....

For a long time now the Liberal Media has waged a propaganda campaign to make you feel guilty for using electricity, claiming the planet was melting because of imaginary global warming. Now we are moving onto phase 2: since much of our food is grown in California, and since California is experiencing a drought (which has happened repeatedly thousands of years), and since growing food uses a lot of water, by eating food, the New York Times wants you to feel guilty for causing the drought in California. Really. California farmers produce more than a third of the nation’s vegetables...

A very important movie about the Holocaust made its way to New York City for the first time this week at the end of a tortuous journey that began 70 years ago when Allied forces and newsreel cameramen stumbled into Nazi concentration camps. Called “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey,” it is as unadorned as its title, a document shot in the moment to capture forever evidence of the unimaginable. Made under the auspices of the British Ministry of Information, produced by Sidney Bernstein, the founder of Granada Television, assembled with advice from Alfred Hitchcock, the movie was meant to ram...

Even while the Civil War raged, slaves in Cuba could be heard singing, “Avanza, Lincoln, avanza! Tu eres nuestra esperanza!” (Onward, Lincoln, Onward! You are our hope!) – as if they knew, even before the soldiers fighting the war far to the North and long before most politicians understood, that the war in America would change their lives, and the world. The secession crisis of 1860-1861 threatened to be a major setback to the world antislavery movement, and it imperiled the whole experiment in democracy. If slavery was allowed to exist, and if the world’s leading democracy could fall apart...

Emma Sulkowicz, known for carrying a mattress around campus for what she claims is a protest of Columbia University's failure to punish her rapist, is hoping to cash in on her alleged art project. Sulkowicz told the New York Times after her graduation on Tuesday — where she carried her mattress across the stage — that she would sell the mattress if offered. "If some sort of museum wants to buy it, then I'm open to that," she said, "but I'm not going to just throw it away." Sulkowicz has for the past year carried her mattress around for course...

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. …