Free Republic

It happened years ago in Calgary, Alberta, where the National Conference of Editorial Writers was holding its convention that year. Was it in the '70s or '80s, and does it matter? Much has changed since then, and not for the better. The organization started as a simple meeting of a few editorial writers to shoot the bull, but by now it's cast its web wider and vaguer, becoming the Association of Opinion Journalists, whatever "opinion journalists" are. Anybody who ever started his own blog or wrote a letter to the editor? The disappearance of the old-fashioned editorial writer has...

The campaign to win amnesty for illegal immigrants is “a very substantial civil rights movement,” according to New York Times reporter Julia Preston, who, along with other progressive journalists, spoke about the issue on an immigration reform panel to a Washington, D.C. audience on Friday. Preston is the New York Times’ primary immigration reporter — and the paper is cheering on the push by progressives and employers to grant amnesty to 11 million illegal immigrants during an extended recession. The Gray Lady also backs the simultaneous campaign to double legal immigration, which would bring in 22 million additional immigrant workers...

The latest atrocities in the Syrian civil war, which has killed more than 100,000 people, demand an urgent response to deter further massacres and to punish President Bashar al-Assad. But there is widespread confusion over the legal basis for the use of force in these terrible circumstances. As a legal matter, the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons does not automatically justify armed intervention by the United States. There are moral reasons for disregarding the law, and I believe the Obama administration should intervene in Syria. But it should not pretend that there is a legal justification in existing law....

Christine Quinn, the Democratic Choice Ms. Quinn, the City Council speaker, offers the judgment and record of achievement anyone should want in a mayor. Two opponents—Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, and William Thompson Jr., former comptroller—offer powerful arguments on their own behalf. But Ms. Quinn inspires the most confidence that she would be the right mayor for the inevitable times when hope and idealism collide with the challenge of getting something done. … For Republicans, Joseph LhotaYou might find it odd to see this page endorsing the mayoral candidacy of Joseph Lhota, a Republican who made his mark in...

On Nov. 12, 2010, Tina Brown gathered the staff of her Web site The Daily Beast in the third-floor conference room at its Chelsea offices with its commanding views of the Hudson. Brimming with the fervor she has brought to all her endeavors, she delivered some surprising news: the Web site would merge with Newsweek, a once-proud but struggling magazine brand.

The system failed him when everyone in the courtroom raised racial bias in roundabout ways, but almost never directly — for example, when the defense held up a picture of a shirtless Martin and told the jurors that this was the person Zimmerman encountered the night he shot him. But in fact it was not the way Zimmerman had seen Martin. Consciously or subconsciously, the defense played on an old racial trope: asking the all-female jury — mostly white — to fear the image of the glistening black buck, as Zimmerman had.

“It is the duty of every honest person to write the truth about Stalin,” Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, a Soviet historian and dissident, wrote in the preface of his seminal book “The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny,” published illegally in 1981. A survivor of the gulag whose parents died in Stalin’s purges, Mr. Antonov-Ovseyenko spent a lifetime in almost fanatical devotion to that duty, working until his death on Tuesday in Moscow at 93 to expose the darkest truths of the Soviet era. His books cracked through the shell of Soviet censorship that surrounded much of the Stalin-era brutality, offering...

On September 10, 2010, the day before our enormous freedom rally at Ground Zero protesting the Ground Zero victory mega-mosque, the New York Times profiled a Muslim named Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam, who had no place to pray. The whole story was a subtle advertisement for the Ground Zero mega-mosque. But as it turns out, Sinclair Hejazi Abdus-Salaam is not quite the "moderate" that the leftist NYT dhimmis assumed he was, but calls openly for the murder of apostates from Islam -- here in the U.S. Here again we see The NY Times legitimizing and norming the most extreme voices. They...

In its upcoming Sunday magazine, it acknowledges most women turned away from clinics are happy they gave birth.Talk about burying the lead. In a piece in its upcoming Sunday magazine, the New York Times allows in an absurdly roundabout way that a recent study has found that the vast majority of women denied abortions end up glad that they gave birth. If you blink, you might miss the decisive quote from the researcher, Diana Greene Foster. It comes very late in the piece: “About 5 percent of the women, after they have had the baby, still wish they hadn’t. And...

Paul Krugman, an outspoken liberal economist known for his support of the Obama administration, today said the United States has become an “authoritarian surveillance state.” Part of a panel on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Krugman offered his take on the bombshell NSA spying revelations: “…there are different kinds of surveillance states. You can have a democratic surveillance state which collects as little data as possible and tells you as much as possible about what it’s doing. Or you could have an authoritarian surveillance state which collects as much as possible and tells the public as little as possible. And...

An editorial published late Thursday said the administration was using the "same platitude" it uses in every case of overreach -- that "terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us." The editorial continued: "Those reassurances have never been persuasive -- whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency's phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism -- especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility." The editorial board claimed Obama "is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is...

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...