Free Republic

THE BUSH-ABRAMOFF PHOTOS: A MONEY MOTIVE? [Byron York]  There appears to be a game of hide-and-seek going on with pictures of the president and Jack Abramoff. Time magazine reports that it has seen five such pictures that "suggest a level of contact between [Bush and Abramoff] that Bush's aides have downplayed." Democrats jumped on the news, sending out e-mails yesterday calling the photos "further evidence of the White House's involvement in the Abramoff scandal." But at the same time, Time suggests that the photos might not be a very big deal: Most of the pictures have the formal look...

January 18, 2006 The Times Can't Define a "Whistleblower," But It Knows One When It Sees One by John HindenrakerThe New York Times reports on David Barrett's investigation into alleged misdeeds by Clinton cabinet officer Henry Cisneros. Barrett's report will be made public tomorrow, but in the meantime someone leaked it to the Times. The Times' angle on the story is that Barrett's eleven-year investigation exemplifies what went wrong with the independent counsel statute, "an important post-Watergate law." (So important that it has been repealed, to pretty much everyone's relief.)What most struck me about the Times story was how...

Photo fakery at the New York Times January 16th, 2006   Is a fake staged photo fit to print? What if it staged in a way that makes the US forces fighting the War on Terror look cruel and ineffective? The evidence argues that yes, it can run, and in a prominent position - at least in the case of the New York Times website. It appears that the Times, once-upon-a-time regarded as the last word in reliability when it comes to checking before publishing (which makes them so much better than blogs, of course), has run a fake photo on...