Free Republic

The Obama administration, which has a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and prosecuting leakers, has failed to offer a credible justification for secretly combing through the phone records of reporters and editors at The Associated Press in what looks like a fishing expedition for sources and an effort to frighten off whistle-blowers.

New York Times Co reported a decline in quarterly revenue on weak advertising sales but said it would try to grow out of the slump by expanding its suite of digital products. The 11.2 percent drop in advertising revenue in the first quarter underscores the pressure that the New York Times faces to increase its subscription revenue, especially for its digital products, and find new veins of income.

ONE man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago. I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity. I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial. I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here. Years ago the military said I...

BE afraid. That’s the takeaway for both investors and taxpayers in the 307-page Senate report detailing last year’s $6.2 billion trading fiasco at JPMorgan Chase. The financial system, thanks to dissembling traders and bumbling regulators, is at greater risk than you know. After bailing out the nation’s banking system in 2008, taxpayers and investors have been assured that such a crisis will not happen again. The Dodd-Frank legislation was supposed to make our system safe from the kinds of reckless banking activities... --SNIP-- But the true value in this Senate investigation is its spotlight on the ability of bank executives...

Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster on Attorney General Eric Holder’s refusal to rule out drone strikes against U.S. citizens, which ended early Thursday morning, was absent from the front page of Thursday’s New York Times. The Times buried its coverage of Paul’s striking “talking” filibuster, in which he held the floor for nearly 13 hours, ostensibly in opposition to Obama’s choice of John Brennan for CIA director. Brennan was serving as a proxy for Paul’s demand that Holder rule out drone strikes on American citizens or on U.S. soil. … The Washington Post, by contrast, teased the filibuster on its...

THE average price of gasoline in the United States, $3.78 on Thursday, has been steadily climbing for more than a month and is approaching the three previous post-recession peaks, in May 2011 and in April and September of last year. But if our goal is to get Americans to drive less and use more fuel-efficient vehicles, and to reduce air pollution and the emission of greenhouse gases, gas prices need to be even higher. The current federal gasoline tax, 18.4 cents a gallon, has been essentially stable since 1993; in inflation-adjusted terms, it’s fallen by 40 percent since then. ......

The New York Times Company, owners of the Boston Globe newspaper, is once again trying to find someone to take the struggling Massachusetts newspaper off its hands. The Times previously tried to sell the Globe in 2009 but canceled the sale process after it received concessions from is unions (love the irony there). More from Reuters: The sale is expected to come at a big loss. Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell Research, estimated that the Globe could fetch about $150 million. The New York Times paid $1.1 billion for the newspaper in 1993. The New York Times is putting...

The New York Times has an article today titled, "Inquiry of Democratic Senator Started With Partisan Push." The story by Eric Lipton describes our success in getting media coverage for our original research about Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and his relationship with a major donor, Dr. Salomon Melgen. Lipton then states that to Menendez and his staff our work is "proof that the news media frenzy focusing on his actions to help a Florida eye doctor is at least in part a political smear." The only problem with this story line is that that New York Times approached us shortly...

Peter Barker has written a column for the NY Times in which he compares Barack Obama to George Bush: Obama’s Turn in Bush’s Bind. For Times readers, that’s like comparing Obama to Hitler. It means that the Times is wondering if this White ...uh ... Authentically Black Knight is for real. He starts: Four years into his tenure, the onetime critic of President George W. Bush finds himself cast as a present-day Mr. Bush, justifying the muscular application of force in the defense of the nation while detractors complain that he has sacrificed the country’s core values in the name...

A New York appellate court has ruled that the New York Times's request for a list of gun owners in New York City, under the Freedom of Information Law, violates the state's statute. The ruling overturns in part a lower court's ruling.

The deadline for New York Times newsroom managers to take voluntary buyouts came and went yesterday — without reaching the target of 30 takers. Now, insiders are worried that involuntary cuts — layoffs — will start. Jill Abramson, the executive editor overseeing the process, declined to comment yesterday as the deadline passed but several insiders worried that as few as a dozen raised their hands and volunteered — meaning up to 18 heads must roll.

Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth. When even the free-market-oriented magazine The Economist argues — as it did in a special feature in October — that the magnitude and nature of the country’s inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong. ... There are four major reasons inequality is squelching our recovery. The most immediate is that our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically...

In Sunday's New York Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal claimed, as the title of her article put it, "More Guns = More Killing." She based this on evidence that would never be permitted in any other context at the Times: (1) anecdotal observations; and (2) bald assertions of an activist, blandly repeated with absolutely no independent fact-checking by the Times. There is an academic, peer-reviewed, long-term study of the effect of various public policies on public, multiple shootings in all 50 states over a 20-year period...It concluded that the only policy to reduce the incidence of, and casualties from, mass shootings are...

Set aside for now the troubling changes in the Obama administration’s position on whether former Bush officials should be prosecuted for suggesting tough interrogation tactics against terrorists. Set aside the manifest unfairness of prosecuting lawyers merely for doing their job of giving legal advice. Set aside the raft of other reasonable objections to the proposed prosecutions, including a justifiable aversion to witch-hunts. Instead, consider how flagrantly President Barack Obama violated his repeated promises that he would run a transparent and honorable administration. His administration’s selective and highly prejudicial release of only partial information about CIA interrogations clearly was designed to...

The Obama administration’s crackdown on leaks to the press has snared a high-profile conviction of an FBI linguist, who was sentenced to 20 months in prison Monday after pleading guilty to giving classified information to a blogger. The sentence for Shamai Leibowitz is likely to become the longest ever served by a government employee accused of passing national security secrets to a member of the media. His case represents only the third known conviction in U.S. history for a government official or contractor providing classified information to the press. And it reflects a surprising development: President Barack Obama’s Justice Department...

As Michael Bloomberg begins the last year of his third and final term as New York City mayor, the 70-year-old shows no sign of slowing down. Bloomberg, who founded Bloomberg L.P. in the early 1980s, is considering another big splash in the media business by acquiring The Financial Times, according to the New York Times. Meanwhile, USA Today reports that the New York Times itself is a Bloomberg acquisition target, but the New York paper has refrained from reporting that. …

House Republicans said on Thursday that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner presented the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a detailed proposal to avert the year-end fiscal crisis with $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, an immediate new round of stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits. The proposal, loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts, was likely to meet strong Republican resistance. In exchange for locking in the $1.6 trillion in added revenues, President Obama embraced $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other entitlements, to...

Is the head of the New York Times a liar/ Friday, November 16, 2012 By William Donohue Mark Thompson, the former BBC chief and current president of the New York Times Company, has said all along that he knew nothing about a spiked BBC exposé on BBC child rapist Jimmy Savile. Most astounding of all, on October 13, he said, “During my time as director general of the BBC, I never heard any allegations” about Jimmy Savile. As I wrote on October 26, “If this is true, it makes him a rare find for the Times: everyone else had at...

While the staff of the New York Times has been absorbed in hurricane and election coverage, it’s also kept a wary eye on a big story brewing in its own headquarters—the imminent arrival of the new CEO, Mark Thompson, the former director-general of the BBC who starts at the paper on November 12. He does not arrive with the full confidence of the Times’ journalists. “People are going to start paying closer attention, and that probably isn’t good for newsroom morale,” says one Timesman, “because there’s now a widely held sense that this guy’s story doesn’t add up.”

By tomorrow night we’ll likely know the name of the next president. But we already know the loser in this election cycle: political reporters. They’ve disgraced themselves. Conservatives have long complained about liberal bias in the media, and with some justification. But it has finally reached the tipping point. Not in our lifetimes have so many in the press dropped the pretense of objectivity in order to help a political candidate. The media are rooting for Barack Obama. They’re not hiding it. Consider Benghazi. An American consulate is destroyed and a US ambassador murdered at a time when the president...