Free Republic

New York’s anti-cop forces have roared back to life thanks to a fatal police shooting of an unarmed man a week ago. The press is once again fawning over Al Sharpton, Herbert Daughtry, Charles Barron, and sundry other hate-mongers in and out of city government as they accuse the police of widespread mistreatment of blacks and issue barely veiled threats of riots if they do not get “justice.” The allegation that last weekend’s shooting was racially motivated is preposterous. A group of undercover officers working in a gun- and drug-plagued strip joint in Queens had good reason to believe that...

Here at NewsBusters, the last thing we'd want to do is sow discord among the liberal house columnists of the New York Times. But present purposes oblige me to let Bob Herbert know that his colleague Maureen Dowd doesn't read his column. That's the only way to explain Dowd's claim in her column this morning that the people "tut-tutting" about Barack Obama's presidential ambitions are Republicans. According to Dowd, those mean GOP types are putting Obama down because of his lack of foreign policy experience. You, mean, Maureen, as in this statement?: "In an appearance on “Meet the Press”...

Reading their respective pay-per-view columns this morning, it's a measure of just how far out Paul Krugman is on the port side of politics that his New York Times colleague Bob Herbert sounds positively moderate by comparison.In The Obama Bandwagon Herbert expresses salutary - and surprising - caution when it comes to the current outbreak of Obama-mania: "It’s a measure of how starved the country is for a sensible, appealing, intelligent, trustworthy leader that a man who until just a couple of years ago was an obscure state senator in Illinois is now suddenly, in the view of an awful...

by Mark Finkelstein August 24, 2006 - 07:32 Talk about your culture clash! A hip hop music site juxtaposes a report on Bill Cosby's condemnation of that musical genre with news of the latest criminal doings of hip hop stars. AllHipHop.com bills itself as 'The World's Most Dangerous Site.' Currently up on the site is an article reporting a recent speech in which Cosby . . . "went on the offensive against rap music." States the article: "'They put the word 'nigga' in a song, and we get up and dance to it,' Cosby said. "The two-hour Coppin State University-hosted...

by Mark Finkelstein August 17, 2006 - 07:00 Here are the facts: On 9/11, the occupants of a hotel right across from the WTC flee their rooms. A hotel security guard informs the FBI that in the room-safe of an Egyptian hotel guest, he found an aviation radio. The radio could be used to communicate with airborne pilots. The Egyptian, Abdallah Higazy, who is attending college in the US, is arrested, and undergoes tough interrogation, including suggestions that his family could be subjected to investigation by Egyptian security. After offering various implausible stories, the Egyptian admits that the radio is...

Fellow Americans, there comes a time every mans life when we must give up ourselves before we are worthy to recieve. There comes a time in this war on terror when in order to protect liberty, we have to give it up in the mean time for safty. That's right folks. Today, Americans have forsaken the creator for the creation and have decided that they would value our "civil liberties" than protecting western civilization and rich white people from the tender mercies of radical Islamic terrorists. Selfish liberals insist and whine that Bush has no right to spy on Americans...

NYT Editorial Columnist, Bob Herbert It will take a new movement to bring about the changes in values and behavior needed to halt the self-destruction that is consuming so many black lives. To continue reading this article, you must be a subscriber to TimesSelect.

Jack Kelly: No shame The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed Sunday, September 11, 2005 It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow. Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476). "Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency," wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth. Jason...

I remember the arrogance that accompanied the "shock and awe" bombing campaign that kicked off the war in Iraq more than two years ago. The war was supposed to be quick and easy, a cakewalk. The enemy, we were told, would fold like a dinner napkin. And then, in the neoconservative fantasies of some of the crazier folks in the Bush crowd, the military would gear up for an invasion of Iran. In one of the great deceptions in the history of American government, President Bush insisted to a nation traumatized by the Sept. 11 attacks that the invasion of...

  Few Men are Brave by NatureJune 2, 2005 Unnamed sources report that the NYT’s op-ed page reeks of tainted weenies.  In less time than it takes to digest a dirty water dog, the Times belched out three putridly namby-pamby “op-eds”.  The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene should rush over to the Times employee cafeteria and condemn it before any more damage is done.  What, besides an outbreak of food-poisoning, would induce the Times’ op-ed writers to put in print what should be deposited in their DEPENDS®. With the Times’ op-ed page spewing back-to-back polemic excrement from the...

Confession, they say, is good for the soul, and I have decided to end 2004 by giving mine a thorough dry-cleaning. For at least four decades, we conservatives have complained loudly that the major media in this country are biased in favor of the liberals. With the sole exception of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (its news pages are another matter), virtually every major source of information available to the American people has religiously followed the liberal line. The New York Times, The Washington Post, all three major television networks, and both newsmagazines (Time and Newsweek) have...

ARLINGTON, Va. The rows of simple white headstones in the broad expanses of brilliant green lawns are scrupulously arranged, and they seem to go on and on, endlessly, in every direction. It was impossible not to be moved. A soft September wind was the only sound. Beyond that was just the silence of history, and the collective memory of the lives lost in its service. Nearly 300,000 people are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, which is just across the Potomac from Washington. On Tuesday morning I visited the grave of Air Force Second Lt. Richard VandeGeer. The headstone tells us,...

"I am a Christian.... So, I have a deep faith. I'm rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people. "That there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and there's an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make those values lived." Thus, U.S. Senate candidate for Illinois Barack Obama in a campaign contribution by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Cathleen Falsani. Obama's...

"The issues don't really matter," says one party fund-raiser. "This guy is the dream candidate." The Economist, July 15 With the June 25 announcement by conservative Republican Jack Ryan that he was dropping out of the U.S. Senate race for Illinois, and legendary Chicago Bears tight end/coach Mike Ditka's July 14 announcement that he would not serve as the sacrificial lamb of the corrupt, Illinois Republican Party leadership, the seat falls to Democrat candidate Barack Obama virtually by default. Meanwhile, in what is taking on the airs of a coronation, Obama has been chosen (while Hillary Clinton has been snubbed)...

OPINION -- With the June 25 announcement by conservative Republican Jack Ryan that he was dropping out of the U.S. Senate race for Illinois, the seat falls to Democrat candidate Barack Obama virtually by default. But who is Barack Obama? Is the charming, handsome, articulate 42-year-old state senator who dominated a field of six in the March 16 Democrat primary with 53 percent of the vote, the herald of a “new kind of politics” or merely a new voice calling for the same old, racist, urban welfare politics the Democrat Party has promoted for forty years? On June 4, New...

A recent news story about a mouse born to two “mommies” [1] suggested that the feminist fantasy of parthenogenesis, in which women would bear children without any “input” from men, might someday be realized. But New York Times columnist Bob Herbert [2] went the pc feminists at the ABC one better: On June 4, he suggested that Illinois politician Barack Obama was birthed by Obama’s father, without a female (what used to be called a “mother”) playing any role in the matter. O.K., Herbert didn’t actually say that, though he’s said things just as outrageous in the past. What he...

A recent news story about a mouse born to two “mommies” suggested that the feminist fantasy of parthenogenesis, in which women would bear children without any “input” from men, might someday be realized. But New York Times columnist Bob Herbert went the pc feminists at the ABC one better: On June 4, he suggested that Illinois politician Barack Obama was birthed by Obama’s father, without a female (what used to be called a “mother”) playing any role in the matter. O.K., Herbert didn’t actually say that, though he’s said things just as outrageous in the past. What he did was...

The New York Times is outraged that President Bush failed to breach his own heavy security, and inform its reporters and editors in advance of his secret Thanksgiving trip to visit with American G.I.s in Baghdad. The President also failed to inform the al Qaeda and Baathist leaderships, respectively, of his trip. Security was so tight for the trip, since otherwise Saddam-loyalists and terrorists active in Iraq would surely have attempted to assassinate the President. On November 22, enemy fighters armed with shoulder-fired missiles hit an A-300 DHL Express freight plane in the left wing, as it took off from...

Send In The Clowns The Jayson Blair story is over. As New York cops might say to crime-scene spectators, ‘Move along, there’s nothing to see.’ I know this, because Times columnist Frank Rich told me so. On June 15 (six-and-a-half weeks after Blair’s resignation), in an essay entitled “15 Minutes Became 5 Weeks,” Rich described the Blair scandal as a “mediathon,” not unlike the coverage of Martha Stewart, for whom Rich suddenly had great sympathy. Rich defined a mediathon as "a relentless hybrid of media circus, soap opera and tabloid journalism we have come to think of as All...

Send in the Clowns The Jayson Blair story is over. As New York cops might say to crime-scene spectators, ‘Move along, there’s nothing to see.’ I know this, because Times columnist Frank Rich told me so. On June 15 (six-and-a-half weeks after Blair’s resignation), in an essay entitled “15 Minutes Became 5 Weeks,” Rich described the Blair scandal as a “mediathon,” not unlike the coverage of Martha Stewart, for whom Rich suddenly had great sympathy. Rich defined a mediathon as "a relentless hybrid of media circus, soap opera and tabloid journalism we have come to think of as All...