Free Republic

What’s in an address? Saying “625 North Grand Avenue” in Orange County doesn’t sound the same as saying “Times Square” in my native New York City. But the Orange County Register has left the storied address it called home in Santa Ana for 60 years – and the paper was based in the city for a total of 112 years. New place? A modest headquarters location just south of Angel Stadium in Anaheim.

On the day that Digital First Media completed its purchase of Freedom Communications — parent company of the Orange County Register and the Riverside Press-Enterprise — a wave of layoffs hit the Register. Rob Curley, editor of the paper, confirmed Thursday that it would be his last day. He was among 70-plus staff members who were being let go from the editorial, circulation, advertising and marketing departments, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing the Register.

Digital First Media will be the next owner of The Orange County Register and The Press-Enterprise, a bankruptcy judge ruled Monday. U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Mark Wallace approved a request from Freedom Communications to approve the newspaper company’s sale to Digital First Media, the second-highest bidder in last week’s newspaper auction, a deal worth around $52 million to creditors. None of the major players objected to the deal. Digital First Media, the nation’s second-largest newspaper company by circulation, won after the auction’s top bid by Chicago-based Tribune Publishing, owner of the Los Angeles Times, ran into antitrust problems. Digital First...

Tribune Publishing, owner of the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, said Thursday it won the bankruptcy auction for The Orange County Register and The Press-Enterprise in the face of a looming antitrust fight. After a marathon, contentious auction that started Wednesday morning and went deep into the evening, Tribune said its $56 million cash bid was the winner over Digital First Media, publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News and Long Beach-Press-Telegram, and an investor group headed by Rich Mirman, CEO of Freedom Communications, owner of the Register and Press-Enterprise.

Freedom Communications Inc., owner of the Orange County Register, filed for bankruptcy protection Sunday, and its chief executive said he plans to lead a bid to acquire the troubled newspaper company. The Santa Ana-based newspaper firm, which also owns the Riverside Press-Enterprise, filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in U.S. Bankruptcy Court’s Central District of California. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-orange-county-register-bankruptcy-20151101-story.html

My favorite headline of the year so far comes from the Daily Mail in Britain: "Government Renames Islamic Terrorism As anti-Islamic Activity' To Woo Muslims." Her Majesty's government is not alone in feeling it's not always helpful to link Islam and the, ah, various unpleasantnesses with suicide bombers and whatnot. Even in his cowboy Crusader heyday, President Bush liked to cool down the crowd with a lot of religion-of-peace stuff. But the British have now decided that kind of mealy-mouthed "respect" is no longer sufficient. So, henceforth, any terrorism perpetrated by persons of an Islamic persuasion will be designated "anti-Islamic...

My favorite headline of the year so far comes from the Daily Mail in Britain: "Government Renames Islamic Terrorism As anti-Islamic Activity' To Woo Muslims." Her Majesty's government is not alone in feeling it's not always helpful to link Islam and the, ah, various unpleasantnesses with suicide bombers and whatnot. Even in his cowboy Crusader heyday, President Bush liked to cool down the crowd with a lot of religion-of-peace stuff. But the British have now decided that kind of mealy-mouthed "respect" is no longer sufficient. So, henceforth, any terrorism perpetrated by persons of an Islamic persuasion will be designated "anti-Islamic...

Have you been in an airport recently and maybe seen a gaggle of America's heroes returning from Iraq? And you've probably thought, "Ah, what a marvelous sight. Remind me to straighten up the old 'Support Our Troops' fridge magnet, which seems to have slipped down below the reminder to reschedule my acupuncturist. Maybe I should go over and thank them for their service." No, no, no, under no account approach them. Instead, try to avoid making eye contact and back away slowly toward the sign for the parking garage. You're in the presence of mentally damaged violent killers who could...

In other words, we don't have their excuse. Our war has one of the lowest fatality rates of any war ever, and, when they get so low that even Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid temporarily give up the quagmire bleating, the Times invents bogus stories to suggest that the few veterans lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive are ticking time-bombs ready to explode across every Main Street in the land. A few days before the Times series began, The National Journal published the latest debunking of a notorious survey: In 2006, the medical journal The Lancet reported...

The State Senate must approve the measure next, which isn't a sure thing. Senate President Don Perata, D-Oakland, wants to know first whether the gargantuan health care package would adversely affect the state's budget, which already is projected to be $14 billion in the red for fiscal 2008-09. Sen. Perata, on a Bay Area radio station Tuesday, said "I think [the plan is]DOA. I haven't found anybody yet … that can make any sense of it." He said he will not allow a vote until 2008. The saving grace is that the legislation amounts only to political grandstanding if voters...

As I say, the above demographic audit has become something of an annual tradition in this space. But here's something new that took hold in the year 2007: A radical antihumanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable. In Britain, the Optimum Population Trust said that "the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers – in other words, human beings," and professor John Guillebaud called on Britons to voluntarily reduce the number of children they have. "Every person who is born," says Toni Vernelli, "produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases and...

One could, I suppose, regard this as one of those unforeseen incremental consequences that happens in the darkest shadows of society. But that doesn't extend to Newark's official status as an illegal-immigrant "sanctuary city." Like Los Angeles, New York and untold others, Newark has formally erased the distinction between U.S. citizens and the armies of the undocumented. This is the active collusion by multiple cities and states in the subversion of U.S. sovereignty. In Newark, N.J., it means an illegal-immigrant child rapist is free to murder on a Saturday night. In Somerville, Mass., it means two deaf girls are raped...

That's the real flaw in Christopher Dickey's "Deliverance" metaphor: If Cheney is Burt Reynolds, and the rest of America is Jon Voight, and the river is Iraq, who are the hillbillies? Well, presumably (for he doesn't spell it out) they're the dark forces you make yourself vulnerable to when you blunder into somewhere you shouldn't be. When the quartet returns to Atlanta a man short, they may understand how thin the veneer of civilization is, but they don't have to worry that their suburban cul-de-sacs will be overrun and reduced to the same state of nature as the backwoods. That's...

On Thursday, Congress attempted to override President Bush's veto of the SCHIP expansion. SCHIP? Isn't that something to do with health care for children? Absolutely. And here is Bay Area Democratic Rep. Pete Stark addressing the issue with his customary forensic incisiveness: "The Republicans are worried that they can't pay for insuring an additional 10 million children. They sure don't care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you going to get that money? Are you going to tell us lies like you're telling us today? Is that how you're going to fund the...

Isn't it always? But enough about Iran, let's talk about me! The same university that shouted down an American anti-illegal-immigration activist and the same university culture that just deemed former Harvard honcho Larry Summers too misogynist to be permitted on campus is now congratulating itself over its commitment to "academic freedom." True, renowned Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo is not happy. "They can have any fascist they want there," said professor Zimbardo, "but this seems egregious." But, hey, don't worry: He was protesting not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presence at Columbia but Donald Rumsfeld's presence at the Hoover Institution.... Lots of prime...

In the video, which has made the rounds online and on television, Nugent stands onstage with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle in each hand. First he tells of his recent visit to Chicago, during which he claims he said to Sen. Barack Obama, "Hey, Obama! You might want to suck on one of these [guns], you punk!" Nugent adds, "Obama, he's a piece of s---, and I told him to suck on my machine gun. Let's hear it for him!" Nugent then relays details of a recent visit to New York, during which he putatively conveyed a similar message to another...

...[T]he shot heard around the world and so forth. Anyway, Gov. Patrick didn't want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: 9/11, he continued, "was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other." I was laughing so much I lost control of the wheel, and the guy in the next lane had to swerve rather dramatically. He flipped me the Universal Symbol of Human Understanding. I certainly understood him, though I'm not sure I could...

Likewise, those 9/11 families should know that, if you want your child's death that morning to have meaning, what matters is not whether you hound Boeing into admitting liability but whether you insist that the movement that murdered your daughter is hunted down and the sustaining ideological virus that led thousands of others to dance up and down in the streets cheering her death is expunged from the earth. In his pugnacious new book, Norman Podhoretz calls for redesignating this conflict as World War IV. Certainly, it would have been easier politically to frame the Iraq campaign as being a...

The catchphrase of America's famous cowboy humorist Will Rogers was "Never met a man I didn't like." Judging from the activities at the men's room of the Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills, many of the patrons of said facility evidently feel the same way. George Michael, the stubbly boy rocker of the Eighties, was arrested therein for attempting to play footsie with an undercover cop. "Guilty feet have got no rhythm," as George famously observed on his hit song "Careless Whisper." After pleading no contest, he subsequently made a rock video mocking the arresting officer, with George prancing...

So if this initiative were to get on the ballot and pass, it would mean that even if the state continued to vote for a Democrat for president, as it has for the past four elections, a Republican would still get some electoral votes. Under this method, Bush would have gotten 19 in 2000 and Gore 35. In 2004, Bush would have gotten 22 electoral votes and Kerry 33. Democrats are furious over the prospect of a district by district scheme. They say that unless such a change was made in every state in the union, it would be unfair...