Free Republic

Last week, I described Gail Collins' condescension to what she sees as the bumpkins of Middle America. The New York Times columnist is back at it again this morning, suggesting that illegal immigration is not so much a problem as an issue exploited by Republican candidates to stir the passions of gullible Republican rubes.The jumping-off point for Collins' [p.p.v.] Of Mitt, Monks, and Mowers is the criticism Mitt Romney has levelled at Rudy Giuliani for the latter's embrace of New York's status as a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants when he was Big Apple mayor. Note that Rudy has since...

Actual op-ed column, or parody of Upper West Side liberal mockery of Middle America? You be the judge of this p.p.v. opus today by Gail Collins, New York Times columnist turned Editorial Page Editor now returned to her column-writing roots. We'll begin with the title, Republicans in the Straw, and proceed to these excerpts: Today 40,000 Republicans are expected to make a pilgrimage to a large tent in Ames, Iowa, where they will eat an enormous amount of free food and vote for a presidential candidate. Mitt Romney is going to serve barbecue, and one of his sons has just...

by Mark Finkelstein October 13, 2006 - 08:13 If you have a look at this NewsBusters item of mine, you'll note it is dated August 14th, 2006. It was, as noted there, the first one written after I "broke down" and subscribed to the New York Times 'Times Select' section that gives access to the work of its in-house columnists. In that historical first item, I wrote that in their pay-per-view columns, Paul Krugman and Lionel Herbert had sounded the nearly-identical theme: that the Bush administration allegedly sees terrorism as something to be "exploited." In the ensuing weeks, I wrote...

NEW YORK Andrew Rosenthal, deputy editorial page editor, has been named editorial page editor of The New York Times, effective January 1. He will succeed Gail Collins, the newspaper announced this afternoon. She plans to take a leave of absence to complete a sequel to her 2003 book "America's Women." When she returns to the paper it will be to write an Op-Ed column starting next July. How this might alter the paper's Op-Ed lineup is not known

Part of the limited amount of enjoyment one gets from reading the New York Times editorial page comes from seeing how they acknowledge what should be celebrated as good news. During Republican administrations, that usually means a healthy dose of caveats, irrelevancies, and redirected credit intended on convincing people that the good news amounts to little more than potential bad news, and if it doesn't turn out badly, it all happened in spite of the Republicans in charge. Today's acknowledgement of the success in establishing a democratic political dynamic in Iraq provides a delightful case in point: It has been...

A New York Times editorial published on May 5 and titled ''The Torture Photos'' begins with the following words. ''It seems gloomily possible that in years to come, when people in the Middle East recall the invasion of Iraq, they will speak not of lost American lives or the toppling of a brutal dictator. The most enduring image of the occupation may be those pictures of grinning American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners.'' Now, I don't know who the author of this piece is, because the Times on-line edition doesn't include the name of the author. Maybe the print edition does,...