Free Republic

They came to the nation’s capital on buses and planes and minivans and trains, from Florida, Detroit and Staten Island, led as much by the families, friends and supporters of African-American men and boys killed at the hands of the police as by civil rights leaders. Thousands of people marched along the National Mall on Saturday to protest the deaths, mirroring protests planned around the nation Saturday, ranging from hikes in canyons in the West to marches down the streets of the nation’s urban centers. The demonstrators here — many of them wearing T-shirts that read “Black Lives Matter” and...

Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson is joining Harvard University as a visiting lecturer this coming school year, the university announced Thursday. Abramson will teach undergraduate courses on narrative nonfiction in the fall and spring semesters, the school said. Abramson, a 1976 Harvard graduate, said in a statement that she is excited to be returning to her alma mater. "Narrative non-fiction journalism is more important than ever," she said. "Its traditions and how it is changing in the digital transition are fascinating areas of study."

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, released a statement Saturday afternoon detailing his decision to fire the newspaper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson. He was responding to a growing controversy over accusations by Ms. Abramson’s supporters that gender played a role in her dismissal. The decision to remove her, which was announced on Wednesday, “has been cast by many as an example of the unequal treatment of women in the workplace,” Mr. Sulzberger wrote. Instead, the statement said, it “was a situation involving a specific individual who, as we all do, has strengths and weaknesses.”

Lesson No. 1: Publicly questioning the motives and intentions of a woman who is seriously ill with cancer can land you in a heap of controversy. Writer Emma Gilbey Keller and her husband, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, seem to have found this out over the past few days. In a successive pair of columns in different publications, the Kellers opined about the prodigious tweets of a woman named Lisa Bonchek Adams, a Stage IV breast cancer patient in New York — and both reaped a whirlwind of outrage in the process. For months, Adams, a mother...

For a senator who likes to hold himself out as the future of the Republican brand, Marco Rubio has come up with a remarkably retrograde contribution to the party’s chorus of phony empathy for the poor: Let the states do it. All anti-poverty funds should be combined into one “flex fund,” he said in a speech on Wednesday, and then given to the states to spend as they see fit. He actually believes that states will “design and fund creative initiatives” to address inequality. “Washington continues to rule over the world of anti-poverty policy-making, with beltway bureaucrats picking and choosing...

Fifteen months after the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, the narrative of the attack continues to be shaped, and reshaped, by politicians and the press. But a New York Times report published over the weekend has angered sources who were on the ground that night. Those sources, who continue to face threats of losing their jobs, sharply challenged the Times’ findings that there was no involvement from Al Qaeda or any other international terror group and that an anti-Islam film played a role in inciting the initial wave of attacks. “It...

The New York Times has apologized for the picture it chose to go along with an article it published about last week’s brutal murder of IDF soldier Eden Atias. Rather than showing a photo of the soldier, the article entitled “Attack on Israeli Worsens Tensions With Palestinians” instead featured a photo of the 16-year-old terrorist’s mother as she was visited by her relatives. On Tuesday, the newspaper’s public editor Margaret Sullivan posted a blog in which she admitted that using the mother’s photo was the wrong decision.

It is far from clear how badly the country’s environment will be damaged by the government shutdown. But the immediate prospects are not promising. Republicans who detest the Environmental Protection Agency were not bothered in the least by the fact that the agency furloughed more than 90 percent of its 16,000-plus full and part-time employees. But people living near toxic waste sites will be bothered. Forced to perform what amounts to emergency triage, agency officials said they had no choice but to stop work on about 500 of the nation’s Superfund sites, more than 60 percent of the total, with...

House Republican leaders — bowing to the demands of their conservative wing — will put to a vote on Friday a stopgap spending measure that would strip all funding from President Obama’s signature health care law, increasing the likelihood that the government will shut down in two weeks. The decision to embrace a showdown on the health care law came after months of pushing by conservatives – and resistance by Republican leaders — to link it to the government financing measures that Congress must address this fall. For their part, Democrats appeared almost gleeful that the Republican leadership had chosen...

One welcome surprise in gun safety occurred this year in Colorado, where the Democratic-led Legislature dared to defy the gun lobby and mandated universal background checks on firearm sales and 15-round limits on ammunition magazines. The ink was barely dry, however, before the National Rifle Association was vindictively pressing for recall votes against two supporters of the stronger law, the State Senate president, John Morse, of Colorado Springs, and State Senator Angela Giron of Pueblo. The recall vote, set for Sept. 10, could hardly be more important as a barometer of whether the public, which repeatedly registers support for tougher...

(snip) Lost in this confusion and anxiety is the possibility that a basic consensus on guns exists among Americans. Opinion polls suggest that a majority recognize a right to bear arms, subject to reasonable regulations protecting public safety. This strong dual commitment, if clarified and entrenched in our Constitution, could reassure most, though not all, of us. Before you mock the idea of a constitutional amendment, consider that hardly anyone is happy with our unstable status quo: gun enthusiasts fear their rights are under constant threat; gun-control advocates point to the danger of illegal guns and easy access to firearms....

Remember how the NYT lionized the Occupy Wall Street vigilantes? What a shock to learn about the barrels-full of money it has thrown at its own bigwigs. Is it time to say kaddish for the New York Times? Investors in the paper may already be doing so. The last time they received a dividend was in late 2008. The NYT, considered by many to be the global paper of record, has incurred more than $300 million in net losses since 2005, and its advertising revenues have been declining for five consecutive years. In fact, the paper’s own financial report...

Stories about Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on Libya were prominently displayed on the front pages of major newspapers throughout the United States on Thursday morning. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, for example, both led with the story, meaning that editors placed it in the primary news position on their front pages. But The New York Times was not among them

Stories about Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on Libya were prominently displayed on the front pages of major newspapers throughout the United States on Thursday morning. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, for example, both led with the story, meaning that editors placed it in the primary news position on their front pages. But The New York Times was not among them. The six stories on The Times’s front page included one on affirmative action at universities, one on Lance Armstrong’s drug allegations, two related to the presidential election, one on taped phone calls at JPMorgan Chase, and one on...

There’s no point in putting it gently: Mitt Romney had one of his worst polling days of the year on Wednesday. It began with a series of polls from The New York Times, CBS News and Quinnipiac University, released early Wednesday morning, which gave President Obama leads of between 9 and 11 points in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Later in the day, Mr. Romney got polls showing unfavorable numbers for him in Colorado and Iowa. Unlike many recent days, when Mr. Obama’s national polls were slightly less euphoric than his swing state surveys, Wednesday’s national polls seemed to support the...

For weeks, Republicans in Ohio have been watching with worry that the state's vital 18 electoral votes were trending away from Mitt Romney. The anxiety has been similar in Florida, where Republicans are concerned that President Obama is gaining the upper hand in the fight for the state's 29 electoral votes. Those fears are affirmed in the findings of the latest Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News polls of likely voters in both states, which show that Mr. Obama has widened his lead over Mr. Romney and is outperforming him on nearly every major campaign issue, even though about half said...

Forget voter ID laws. What this country needs are laws to keep stupid people from voting. Now, I’m not talking about folks who can’t recite the preamble to the Constitution, or who can’t tell you what the 1st Amendment covers, or how many Supreme Court justices there are. I’ll even exempt those poor souls who don’t know who the first president was, or can’t name the two houses of Congress, or don’t know the name of their representative. But, if you were to show up at the polls in November, and the poll worker were to ask you “Is President...

It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. .... underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be. Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” .... it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation. “He is determined that he will make these decisions about...

How goes the state of the union? Well, the state of the economy remains terrible. Three years after President Obama’s inauguration and two and a half years since the official end of the recession, unemployment remains painfully high. But there are reasons to think that we’re finally on the (slow) road to better times. And we wouldn’t be on that road if Mr. Obama had given in to Republican demands that he slash spending, or the Federal Reserve had given in to Republican demands that it tighten money. Why am I letting a bit of optimism break through the clouds?...

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about. One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information. Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama...