Free Republic

City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said today that she would “consider” proposing a law mandating that the local legislature contain a minimum number of women. Days after rolling out a $20 million plan to recruit more young women into city agencies and civic life, the speaker appeared on the Brian Lehrer show to lament underrepresentation of her gender in government. Ms. Mark-Viverito is one of just 14 female members of the 51-member Council—down from 18 a decade ago—and one of five term-limited in 2017. She was receptive to the notion of a quota, which a number of countries in Europe,...

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times. The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in...

The crisis of leadership in American government is easily explained: thanks to a flawed presidential primary system that rewards strident rhetoric and hyper-partisanship, candidates tailor their messages to fringe elements in small, unrepresentative states. The result? A nasty, shallow and expensive process that rewards sound bites rather than solutions and gamesmanship instead of ideas. This year, however, we have witnessed a rare phenomenon in American politics. A candidate has emerged from the rough and tumble of the primaries with his dignity intact. The system has produced not a demagogue but a manager, a candidate whose experience is rooted in the...

"Let's see if your lies match up with your partner's lies." That trademark line, uttered by NYPD Blue's "Det. Andy Sipowicz" (Dennis Franz) to one or another suspect about to be interrogated, would be a fitting opening for the interrogation of any number of New York Times reporters and editors. But if I had my pick of TV detectives to grill the mopes at the Times, I'd call "Det. Frank Pembleton" (Andre Braugher) of the late series Homicide: Life on the Streets, up from Baltimore. Pembleton, a master interrogator and avenging angel ("We speak for the dead"), is particularly adept...

Meet the youth brigade of The New York Times. As Al Siegal and his investigative committee continue to hash out exactly how the 152-year-old institution allowed 27-year-old reporter Jayson Blair to invent datelines and events and imaginary vistas, 13 of the newspaper’s bright young things have been hammering away at a memo to Mr. Siegal and other members of the committee calling for changes in how the paper treats its young. Among the early drafts of the memo being circulated, the group calls upon Times management to end favoritism in the newsroom, develop transparent procedures for filling open positions, and...

Hooray. Break out the barbecue sauce and slather it on a fatted calf. Ron Rosenbaum declares he has left the Left. Who? Who the hell is Ron Rosenbaum, and why should I give a damn? Mr. Rosenbaum is a scribbler. After umpty-eight years on the Left, many of which were spent, he says, "...believing that the evils of Soviet Communism were a figment of J. Edgar Hoover's imagination," he has confessed error on the front page of the weekly New York Observer and it's been republished atop Ann Coulter in Frontpage magazine where it bears the engaging headline, Goodbye to...