Free Republic

Sept. 1, 1939 Nazis Invade Poland Overcrowding in Germany Cited Sept. 2, 1939 For Nazis, a Hard Time To Be Europeans Neighbors’ Suspicions Caused Stress, Resentment Sept. 3, 1939 In Central Europe, Other Countries Invade Their Neighbors, Too Sept. 4, 1939 When Fuhrers Snap Rallies, Pogroms Took Toll on Leader

It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan. I base this conclusion on three principles. First, when I think back on all the moments of progress in that part of the world — all the times when a key player in the Middle East...

Victory for Obama Over Military Lobby CHRISTOPHER DREW October 28, 2009 When the Obama administration proposed canceling a host of expensive weapons systems last spring, some of the military industry’s allies in Congress assumed, as they had in the past, that they would have the final say. But as the president signed a $680 billion military policy bill on Wednesday, it was clear that he had succeeded in paring back nearly all of the programs and setting a tone of greater restraint than the Pentagon had seen in many years. Now the question is whether Mr. Obama can sustain that...

<p>Those who read the New York Times's coverage of the unsuccessful results of Barack and Michelle Obama's attempt to seal the 2016 Summer Olympics bid for Chicago on Friday afternoon ('For Obama, an Unsuccessful Campaign") might want to read it again.</p>

For Obama, An Unsuccessful Campaign By PETER BAKER October 2, 2009 COPENHAGEN — President Obama not only failed to bring home the gold, he could not even muster the silver or bronze. A dramatic 20-hour mission across the ocean to persuade the International Olympic Committee to give the 2016 Summer Games to Chicago proved such a miscalculation that his adopted hometown finished fourth of four candidate cities. Rarely has a president put his credibility on the line on the world stage in such a personal way and been slapped down so sharply in real time. While Chicago may have lost...

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration plans to announce on Thursday that it will scrap former President George W. Bush’s planned missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic and instead deploy a reconfigured system aimed more at intercepting shorter-range Iranian missiles, according to people familiar with the plans. President Obama decided not to deploy a sophisticated radar system in the Czech Republic or 10 ground-based interceptors in Poland, as Mr. Bush had planned. Instead, the new system his administration is developing would deploy smaller SM-3 missiles, at first aboard ships and later probably either in southern Europe or Turkey,...

Obviously, the "main stream" media are hard of hearing and seeing. About 2 million mad-as-hell taxpayers assembling in Washington, D.C. for the largest-ever (most well-behaved ever, most respectful ever) protest did not make it onto their radar screens (or our TV screens). They need our help. Maybe we cannot repeat an assembly of 2 million mad-as-hell taxpaying patriots in one place, but surely those who longed to go and couldn't would love to be a part of Operation "Can You Hear Us Now?" I'll bet for every one patriot who went to D.C. there are 10-20 more who wished they...

The news media's credibility is sagging along with its revenue. Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the news stories they read, hear and watch are frequently inaccurate, according to a poll released Sunday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. That marks the highest level of skepticism recorded since 1985, when this study of public perceptions of the media was first done. The poll didn't distinguish between Internet bloggers and reporters employed by newspapers and broadcasters, leaving the definition of "news media" up to each individual who was questioned. The survey polled 1,506 adults on the phone...

For the first time in my life, I feel sympathy ofr Sarah Palin.Levi Johnston — you will remember him from his featured role as the father of Bristol’s baby at the Republican convention — has written an article for the new issue of Vanity Fair. It’s his take on the Palin home life, which Johnston says was “much different from what many people expect of a normal family.”Given the fact that Johnston is a 19-year-old high school dropout whose mother was arrested last year on six felony drug counts, it is conceivable that he is not the perfect arbiter of...

Report Shows Tight C.I.A. Control on Interrogations By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI WASHINGTON — Two 17-watt fluorescent-tube bulbs — no more, no less — illuminated each cell, 24 hours a day. White noise played constantly but was never to exceed 79 decibels. A prisoner could be doused with 41-degree water but for only 20 minutes at a stretch. The Central Intelligence Agency’s secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking, eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy. The first news reports this week about hundreds of pages of newly released documents...

The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing Central Intelligence Agency employees and contractors to prosecution for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects, according to a person officially briefed on the matter. The recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, presented to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in recent weeks, comes as the Justice Department is about to disclose on Monday voluminous details on prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the C.I.A.’s inspector general but have never been released. When the C.I.A. first referred its inspector...

New York Times book critic Dwight Garner on Wednesday enthused over a new biography of Friedrich Engels, cooing that Marxism is “back in vogue” and adding that the founding communist comes across as a “jovial man of outsize appetites” in Tristram Hunt’s new biography “Marx’s General.” Garner opened the review by insisting that decrying capitalism is now hip again: “Thanks to globalism’s discontents and the financial crisis that has spread across the planet, Karl Marx and his analysis of capitalism’s dark, wormy side are back in vogue.”

Palin Hairdresser: NYT Was Lying About "Hair Thinning" Claim By Tim Lindell Chalk this up as Stupid Palin Meme of the Week: In a July 12th hit piece published on the front page of the New York Times, reporters Jim Rutenberg and Serge Kovaleski (assisted by Kim Severson and William Yardley in Alaska) made the following claim: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Friends worried that she appeared anxious and underweight. Her hair had thinned to the point where she needed emergency help from her hairdresser and close friend, Jessica Steele. “Honestly, I think all of it just broke her heart,” Ms. Steele said in...

WASILLA, Alaska — Politics and parody converge in the new Alaska. Right there on Wasilla Lake not long ago, in clear view of the former residence of Gov. Sarah Palin, two Russian pastors dipped seven Russian teenagers into the water as their mothers and fathers sang Russian hymns on a brilliant morning.

Republicans were just starting to breathe a little easier. The news that Senator John Ensign had had an affair with a former aide who was married to another former aide was fading. Polls showed some voter impatience with President Obama’s policies, if not with the president himself. And the Politico, the insidery Web site that is widely read in the capital’s political precincts, even featured an article exploring the possibility of a Republican Party comeback. Then Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, a fiscal conservative seen by many Republicans as an attractive standard-bearer for the next presidential campaign, went missing....

no link, just headline

CONFLICT-of-interest stories make great front-page headlines -- except when the newspaper that revels in breaking them is itself in the middle of an ethical morass. Take The New York Times. The Times acknowledged this weekend that it had spiked a story on possible illegal coordination between left-wing activist groups ACORN and Project Vote and the Obama campaign just before Election Day. The charges involved Team Obama sharing top campaign-donor lists with ACORN's supposedly nonpartisan canvassing arm, Project Vote (the same group Obama worked for as a community organizer). New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt tried to spin it as...

A case could be made that New York Times Co. shares are worth nothing as the newspaper company’s debt load threatens to overwhelm its earnings power, a Barclays Capital analyst said Wednesday. “Net debt to (operating profit) is way too high,” Barclays analyst Craig Huber said in a research note. “We could argue the stock to zero given the high debt load.” -snip- "In our opinion, the long-term viability of the company may be at stake, though.”

Seriously, can someone check on Fox News host Glenn Beck? I ask because it certainly looks like the poor guy's finally gone completely 'round the bend, and at the very least someone should do him the favor of checking his molars to make sure that whatever alien radio station his fillings are receiving plays some good music occasionally. On his show Thursday night, the ever-eccentric Beck seemed to be pushed over the edge by that New York Times report saying -- as the president had said repeatedly when on the campaign trail -- that the Obama admistration plans to move...

Saturday's New York Times front-page story by Shaila Dewan from Columbia, S.C., was a hostile profile of the state's conservative Republican Gov. Mark Sanford, who has been unpopular on the Times news pages ever since he dared challenge Barack Obama's expensive spending ideas. Dewan mocked Sanford's "extreme" frugality (an odd thing to make fun of in these recessionary times) in "Rejecting Aid, One Governor Irks His Own." Showing her own frugality, Dewan squeezed two insults into her first line:

Did the Times spike a story linking the left-wing activist group ACORN to the Obama campaign? A Republican lawyer made that claim at a House hearing two weeks ago, claiming information from ACORN whistleblower Anita Moncrief. The Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper reported on Monday: A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”

A federal judge threw out a lawsuit questioning President Obama’s citizenship, criticizing the case as a waste of the court’s time. Mr. Obama has been dogged by rumors, spread on the Internet, that he is ineligible to be president because he is not a “natural born citizen” as the Constitution requires. In response last summer, his campaign posted his Hawaiian birth certificate on its Web site. But the lawsuit argued that the certificate was a fake and that Mr. Obama was actually born in his father’s homeland, Kenya. The judge, James Robertson of Federal District Court, said the case could...

RUSH: This is from September 30th, 1999. Headline: "'Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending' -- In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders. The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials...

MEXICO CITY (Dow Jones)--Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's decision to loan the New York Times $250 million gives a vote of confidence to a debt-strapped publisher at a time when the financial viability of print is being widely questioned in the age of the Internet. The New York Times Co. (NYT) said Tuesday it will use the money to refinance existing debt, but also continues to seek other financing and will press ahead with cost-cutting measures. Slim's move to expand his involvement with the Times raised some eyebrows given difficulties faced by newspaper publishers seeing double-digit declines in advertising revenue.

It will be interesting to see if The New York Times runs negative stories on Obama's inauguration. They slammed President Bush in an Op-ed piece on the cost of his inauguration and then had the audacity to state that the Iraq war should have been cause for restraint in spending for the inauguration. The New York Times on the Bush inauguration. At the rate President Bush's supporters are giving money, his second inauguration threatens to stand out in the history books like the common folks' muddy boot prints on the White House furniture at Andrew Jackson's gala. The $40 million...

Neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Durbin was invited by Mr. Blagojevich to offer advice, the Democrats said. “We all have varying levels of cooperation with the governor. Mine was extremely limited,” Mr. Durbin said in an interview. “I believe President-elect Obama could say the same.” He added, “I knew there was a process in place in the governor’s office, but I had no idea what it involved.” Mr. Emanuel was among the few people in Mr. Obama’s circle who occasionally spoke to Mr. Blagojevich. He declined to answer questions on Wednesday, waving off a reporter who approached him as he...

CAN radio save itself?

Americans have watched in horror as President Bush has trampled on the Bill of Rights and the balance of power. The list of abuses that President-elect Barack Obama must address is long: once again require the government to get warrants to eavesdrop on Americans; undo scores of executive orders and bill-signing statements that have undermined the powers of Congress; strip out the unnecessary invasions of privacy embedded in the Patriot Act; block new F.B.I. investigative guidelines straight out of J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook. Those are not the only disasters Mr. Obama will inherit. He will have to rescue a drowning...

An American journalist was kidnapped by Taliban militants in the Afghan province of Logar, located 60 kilometres south of the capital Kabul. David Rohde, a journalist working for the US daily The New York Times, was abducted along with his driver and interpreter by a Taliban group known as Siraj Haqqani and has been taken to eastern Afghanistan, sources told Adnkronos International (AKI). War-torn Afghanistan has seen a surge in kidnappings of foreigners by Taliban militants recently. On Monday, Canadian journalist Mellissa Fung was freed in Kabul after being held in captivity for four weeks by militants.

NYT MONDAY: SECRET ORDER LETS U.S. RAID AL-QAIDA IN MANY COUNTRIES... Dozen previously undisclosed attacks against al-Qaida and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere...Developing...

Stunning election news! NY Slimes Endorses Obama!

The New York Times Co. reported a steep drop in third-quarter profits on Thursday, the latest gloomy earnings report in an industry battered by online competition and falling print advertising revenue. The New York Times Co. said net profit fell by 51.4 percent in the third quarter to 6.5 million dollars, or five cents per share, from 13.4 million dollars, or nine cents per share, in the same period a year ago. The company, which owns About.com, The Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune and 16 other daily newspapers besides the flagship The New York Times, said overall advertising revenue fell...

(CNN) – The New York Times issued a renewed scolding of John McCain in a sharply-worded editorial Wednesday morning, the latest salvo in the ongoing back-and-forth between the paper of record and the Arizona senator's White House bid. "Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have been running one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember," the Tuesday editorial said. "They have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent’s record — into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia. Senator Barack Obama has taken some cheap shots at Mr....

Senator John McCain was on a roll. In a room reserved for high-stakes gamblers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, he tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table. When the marathon session ended around 2:30 a.m., the Arizona senator and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings. A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino...

Today the New York Times launched its latest attack on this campaign in its capacity as an Obama advocacy organization. Let us be clear about what this story alleges: The New York Times charges that McCain-Palin 2008 campaign manager Rick Davis was paid by Freddie Mac until last month, contrary to previous reporting, as well as statements by this campaign and by Mr. Davis himself.

THE CONSERVATIVE ELITES ATTACK! In today's New York Times, David Brooks launches a critique of Sarah Palin, essentially concluding that her populist appeal is dangerous and ill-conceived. He yearns for the day when "conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement," one that stressed "classical education, hard-earned knowledged, experience, and prudence." Brooks, like a handful of other conservative intellectuals, believes Palin "compensates for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness." Well, at the risk of appearing brash, let me say that I am glad to see my old friend finally pushed to the point where he has to make...

The New York Times does the all-so predictable Sarah Palin bill of indictment for its Sunday front page. It certainly sounds compelling in the paragraph called the “nut graf”: "Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.?" But what is so remarkable is how little there is in the page after page of minutiae thrown against the wall by the Times. And indeed there’s plenty of favorable...

INCREDIBLE SHRINKING TIMES FEELS THE 'PINCH' By KEITH J. KELLY Posted: 4:36 am September 6, 2008 The New York Times yesterday said it will cut back the number of sections it has in the daily paper it sells in the metro New York area beginning next month, the latest cost-saving move at the beleaguered newspaper. The change returns to four the number of sections in the paper, and represents an about-face from the daily's fanfare-filled move in 1997 to expand to six sections and incorporate color onto its pages. As part of the move, the Sports section will now be...

<p>New York Times Co. said Tuesday that its July revenue from continuing operations fell 10.1 percent this year as advertising revenue slipped 16.2 percent. Overall revenue dropped to $235.9 million in July from $262.3 million in July 2007, the publisher said.</p>

Chemist Dr. Martin Hertzberg’s response to NYT’s Paul Krugman: 'Hysteria is based on half-baked computer models’ By EPW Blog Tuesday, August 5, 2008 Dr. Martin Hertzberg’s response to NYT’s Paul Krugman: ‘Hysteria is based on half-baked computer models’ (Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry, is one of the more than 500 scientists featured in the U.S. Senate’s report of scientists dissenting from man-made global warming fears. See this U.S. Senate report.) Hertzberg Excerpt: I am a lifelong liberal Democrat, but I am also a scientist. […] In this morning’s article “Can This Planet...

AFTER a lecture to the Marine Memorial Association last week, a reporter thrust a mike toward me and asked if I thought I should be tried for war crimes for my columns in The Post supporting our military. The reporter - who avoided revealing what outlet he was with - thought he was being wonderfully clever, but what fascinated me about the silly encounter (it was in San Francisco, after all) was how unintentionally revealing it was about the shameless hypocrisy of the left. Think about it: For expressing my views to readers like you on these pages, hardcore leftists...

NYT REJECTS MCCAIN'S EDITORIAL; SHOULD 'MIRROR' OBAMA Mon Jul 21 2008 12:00:25 ET An editorial written by Republican presidential hopeful McCain has been rejected by the NEW YORK TIMES -- less than a week after the paper published an essay written by Obama, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. The paper's decision to refuse McCain's direct rebuttal to Obama's 'My Plan for Iraq' has ignited explosive charges of media bias in top Republican circles. 'It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece,' NYT Op-Ed editor David Shipley explained in an email late Friday...

Life on the fringes of U.S. suburbia becomes untenable with rising gas costs ELIZABETH, Colorado: Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the outer edges of metropolitan areas. As the realization takes hold that rising energy prices are less a momentary blip than a restructuring with lasting consequences, the high cost of fuel is threatening to slow the decades-old migration away from cities, while exacerbating the housing downturn by diminishing the appeal of larger homes set far from urban jobs. [...] Some...

Defence Minister: Poland not 51st US state Created: 23.06.2008 12:30 Poland’s Defence Minister Bogdan Klich has expressed outrage at an article in The New York Times alleging that “Poland has been the 51st state” of the USA acting as host to a secret CIA prison for terrorists. "That is unacceptable. The sheer fact that we are in tough negotiations with the Americans regarding the anti-missile defence shield suggests that we are indeed an independent state,” Minister Klich said on Radio ZET, Monday morning. The Saturday issue of The New York Times reopened the topic of the secret prison camp for...

In an astonishing stroke of irony, the New York Times has outed the name of the CIA operative who interrogated 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, over the objections of CIA Director Michael V. Hayden and a lawyer representing the operative. Agency officials and legal counsel told the Times that publishing the agent's name would "invade his privacy and put him at risk of retaliation from terrorists or harassment from critics of the agency." In an Editor's Note linked from the story on KSM's interrogation, the Times defended its decision by stating that "other government employees" had been "named publicly in...

May 28, 2008 Posted By Marc Morano – 3:33 PM EST – Marc_Morano@EPW.Senate.Gov New York Times Makes Factual Blunder Paper erroneously claims Senate last voted on global warming bill in 2003 A New York Times editorial today arguing in favor of the Senate’s upcoming mandatory global warming cap-and-trade legislation committed a blatant factual error. The May 28 Times editorial incorrectly claimed, “The Senate last addressed climate change in 2003 when it cast 43 votes in favor of a bill sponsored by Mr. McCain and Mr. Lieberman.” (LINK) In their apparently hasty Google search of Senate history, the editors at the...

With each passing day, it seems a little less likely that the next president of the United States will wear a skirt — or a cheerful, no-nonsense pantsuit. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now in what most agree are the waning days of her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. To use her own phrase, she has been running “to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling” in American life, and now the presidency, or even a nomination that once seemed to be hers to claim, seems out of reach. Along with the usual post-mortems about strategy, message and money,...

There is a lot of talk that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now fated to lose the Democratic nomination and should pull out of the race. We believe it is her right to stay in the fight and challenge Senator Barack Obama as long as she has the desire and the means to do so. That is the essence of the democratic process. But we believe just as strongly that Mrs. Clinton will be making a terrible mistake — for herself, her party and for the nation — if she continues to press her candidacy through negative campaigning with disturbing...

A state appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the Port Authority was liable for damages caused by the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, because it knew about but chose to ignore “an extreme and potentially catastrophic vulnerability that would have been open and obvious to any terrorist who cared to investigate and exploit it.� The ruling unanimously upheld a jury’s verdict that the agency was 68 percent liable for the bombing and the terrorists 32 percent liable. Under state rules, because the Port Authority’s liability was more than 50 percent, it can be forced to pay all the damages to...

NEW YORK Print circulation continues on its steep downward slide, the Audit Bureau of Circulations revealed this morning in releasing the latest numbers for some of the country's largest dailies in the six-month period ending March 31, 2008. When a full analysis appears it is expected to find, according to sources, the biggest dip yet, about 3.5% daily and 4.5 for Sunday. The following circulation compares the new data to the same period a year ago. Daily circulation is the Monday-through-Friday average. -- The New York Times lost more than 150,000 copies on Sunday. Circulation on that day fell a...