Free Republic

The good news is health care costs are going up more slowly. The bad news is that families continue to see larger medical bills. The typical cost to cover a family of four now exceeds $22,000, including the amount paid in insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs, according to the latest Milliman Medical Index for 2013. Milliman, an actuarial and benefits consultant, puts the cost at slightly less than the amount a family might pay to send a child to an in-state public college for a year. This year’s increase over last was only 6.3 percent, according to the analysis from...

The people of Los Angeles would be up in arms if some out-of-town billionaires tried to buy the Dodgers and institute a rule that only right-handers could play on the team. Petitions would be signed, protests would be organized and politicians would rise up to condemn the sale. It would be nice if there were a similar outcry at the prospect of the Koch brothers buying the Los Angeles Times. After all, as exciting as it may be for a city to have a major league sports team, a good newspaper is a far more valuable asset.

Two New York Times columnists embarrassed themselves over the weekend, betraying anti-gun ignorance in the paper's Sunday Review. Frank Bruni went hunting for the first time (with the chef of a ritzy Manhattan restaurant), and remarked "what an unfair fight" hunting is, as if he was the first person to think that up. After lamenting "how thoroughly a weapon can be romanticized and fetishized," he pivoted to easy access to guns in "this country of ours." "I could forget, when not aiming at a bird, to keep the gun pointed toward the sky or the ground. Or my pivot as...

A fiendishly deceptive article about the New York Police Department in the New York Times has set back the cause of public safety not just in New York but nationally. A front-page story on Friday twisted a police commander’s exhortation to an underperforming officer to work harder against crime into an injunction to target blacks on the basis of race. The commander’s statements were captured on a tape secretly recorded by the officer and replayed last Thursday during a federal racial-profiling trial directed against the New York Police Department’s stop, question, and frisk policy. The officer had already joined the...

The Sunday Times marked Holocaust Memorial Day in a less-than-traditional manner, running a virulently anti-Israel cartoon depicting a big-nosed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu paving a wall with the blood and limbs of writhing Palestinians. The cartoon included a caption beneath the image entitled "Israeli elections- will cementing peace continue?" Drawn by Gerald Scarfe, the cartoon appeared in the national paper on Sunday. “This cartoon would be offensive at any time of the year, but to publish it on International Holocaust Remembrance Day is sickening and expresses a deeply troubling mindset,” said European Jewish Congress President Dr. Moshe Kantor. “This insensitivity...

The New York Times´s Manny Fernandez greeted the opening of the biannual Texas legislative session in Austin in Wednesday´s paper: "Texas Budget Surplus Proves as Contentious As a Previous Shortfall." After explaining how Texas has become flush with cash over the last two years, going from a budget deficit to surplus, Fernandez couldn´t help working in a cut against the "far-right" Tea Party. Shortly after noon inside the Capitol’s Senate chamber, Gov. Rick Perry told senators that the comptroller’s revenue estimate released the day before was good news, but cautioned them to retain the state’s fiscally conservative model.

Georgetown University constitutional law professor Louis Michael Seidman has just about had it with the focus of his 40 years of academic study. As he writes in the New York Times on Monday, it is the Constitution itself which has allowed for the series of legislative follies that finally resulted in the “fiscal cliff.” Seidman says that it is time for Americans to realize what lawmakers have known since the constitution’s inception – it is okay to ignore it. “As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government...

A spokeswoman for Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill’s re-election campaign told The Daily Caller that the senator and her husband first learned the criminal background of the man speaking out McCaskill’s husband’s business dealings from The New York Times. McCaskill spokeswoman Caitlin Legacki told TheDC on Friday that she thinks McCaskill and her husband Joseph Shepard discovered Craig Woods’ criminal background “[w]hen the New York Times told me in June that he’s a felon.” TheDC reported Thursday that Woods, a former employee of Shepard’s, alleged in a 2011 audiotape that Shepard used the U.S. Senate dining room to cut business...

I think everyone agrees we're nearing the final days of the Earth as we know it. But what signs have you seen? Jews gathering in Israel to me was a huge sign that we're very close. You also see radical Islamists taking over Middle Eastern governments one by one. Once they have a majority I would suspect it won't be much longer. When will Israel attack Iran? All bets are that it happens before the election for a couple of reasons. A winter strike would be impossible. Plus, the Israeli's aren't taking the chance that Obama gets re-elected. Plus.. October...

This week, Breitbart News offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who produced the infamous 2003 tapes of Barack Obama at an event honoring Palestinian anti-Israel radical Rashid Khalidi. And today, James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times took to his keyboard today to write a diatribe defending the Times’ refusal to make public those tapes. While Rainey gives several justifications for not releasing the tape itself – guarding the source of the tape being the most prevalent – he offers no justification for why the Times refuses to offer even a complete transcript of that evening’s events. Rainey rips the...

n a letter to the editor published Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder accused the Washington Times of running an “ill-informed” and “offensive” editorial in late August that criticized new hiring policies at the Department of Justice. Holder also blasted the Times for making what he called “inaccurate” and “truly shameful” characterizations of people with mental disabilities. “Your Aug. 23 editorial about people with disabilities was ill-informed, offensive and a stark reminder that persistent prejudices and stereotypes remain too prevalent in our society and must not go unchecked,” Holder wrote in a letter to the Times’ editor. The Times had criticized...

A New York Times front page story today — New York Times! — might have killed President Obama’s re-election hopes.The story is called “The Competitor in Chief — Obama Plays To Win, In Politics and Everything Else.” It is devastating.With such a title, and from such a friendly organ, at first I thought Jodi Kantor’s piece would be a collection of Obama’s greatest political wins: His rapid rise in Illinois, his win over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the passage of health care, and so on.But the NYT piece is not about any of that. Rather, it is a...

Presumptive Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan was heckled Monday by protesters at a campaign event in Iowa. Time senior political analyst Mark Halperin told MSNBC's Chris Matthews these were Democrats "on duty" (video follows with transcript and commentary, photo courtesy Des Moines Register): CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Anyway, Paul Ryan was met by a loud group of protesters today who joined his supporters at the same state fair event in Iowa. They booed and yelled throughout his ten minutes, but he handled it pretty well. Let's watch. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) PAUL RYAN: My guess is - [Interrupted by protesters] -...

In perhaps the least self-aware review of the politics of "The Dark Knight Rises" yet, Steven Zeitchik of the Los Angeles Times is befuddled at the idea that left-wing thought could ever be portrayed negatively. First, he admits his own incompetence: [M]ore politics doesn't mean your movie's message is more consistent or decipherable. Or perhaps the politics of "The Dark Knight Rises" is perfectly consistent and decipherable … and Zeitchik just doesn’t get it. In the next few lines, he shows that he has no clue what he’s talking about: Contradictions abound in "The Dark Knight Rises."

In 2008 The LA Times withheld a video that contained footage of Barack Obama celebrating with a group of Palestinians who were openly hostile towards Israel. Barack Obama reportedly even gave a toast to a former PLO operative, Rashid Khalidi, at this celebration. This was something the LA Times hid from the American public before the election. The media refused to release the video.

Now that any thinking person can see that the sensitive security information leaked to the NY Times in an apparent effort to aggrandize the President's national defense credentials had to have come from Obama's inner circle-- regardless of how much feigned offence he purports to take at the suggestion, even Dianne Feinstein is livid. As for the identity of that highly-damaging mystery leaker.. there's plenty of reason to suspect it just might be VP Joe Biden. Not only is Biden the most dispensable member of the President's cabinet, Slow Joe also fancies himself a foreign policy expert -never mind the fact he's...

The Los Angeles Times refuses to disclose the contents of a video tape in its possession that reportedly shows Barack Obama lavishing praise on his friend Rashid Khalidi, a close associate of Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat, at a 2003 Chicago dinner party sponsored by the Arab American Action Network and attended by Bill Ayers. The Times does, however, have all kinds of time to vet Ann Romney, going so far as to dig into a lawsuit she was part of involving a horse: It was the end of a long day in a stuffy Simi Valley office building. Ann Romney...

Caught cocooning in public: Here’s what the NYT‘s story on its latest poll told readers: In recent weeks, there has been much debate over the government’s role in guaranteeing insurance coverage for contraception, including for those who work for religious organizations. The poll found that women were split as to whether health insurance plans should cover the costs of birth control and whether employers with religious objections should be able to opt out. If the Times says women were “split,” you know that must mean they were actually narrowly against the NYT‘s preferred position. Sure enough, when asked, “Should health...

The New York Times Company suffered a net loss of almost $40million in 2011, with its fourth quarter profits falling by 12.2 per cent compared to the same period in 2010. The company is grappling with sinking advertising revenue and a recent change in the top management after losing CEO Janet Robinson, who received a multimillion dollar severance package. They said it continued to add subscribers for its digital products in the fourth quarter.

SOMEONE has been kind enough to send me a copy of a prophetical magazine issue just fourteen years ago (August, 1880). My unknown friend gives no indication of his reason for sending me this paper; but one article contained in it attracts my attention, and I seize on it "to point a moral." "THE CRISIS OF THE END" is the startling title of this article, and its avowed purpose is to meet the unbelievers objection to the study of prophecy that no two expositors agree. To refute this it gives a list of 120 writers—many of them authors of repute,...