Free Republic

They were a part of history, bringing the biggest news events — from Watergate, to the 9/11 terror attacks and raging local wildfires — to San Diegans’ doorsteps. And now, the presses at The San Diego Union-Tribune are themselves history, with the final print run in Mission Valley coming to a close at 1 a.m. Sunday. Starting with Monday’s paper, the Union-Tribune is being printed in Los Angeles, a byproduct of the U-T’s sale last month to the Tribune Publishing Co., parent company of the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles entrepreneur Elon Musk has built a multibillion-dollar fortune running companies that make electric cars, sell solar panels and launch rockets into space. And he's built those companies with the help of billions in government subsidies. Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups. "He definitely goes where there is government money," said Dan Dolev, an analyst at...

Did The New York Times just inadvertently tell us what the real goal of the raise-the-minimum-wage campaign is? A Times editorial last week cheered Los Angeles’ enactment of a $15-an-hour minimum wage — but noted that restaurants, particularly fast-food joints, don’t like it. Said The Times: “The restaurant industry . . . will not go down without a fight.” We didn’t think that bringing down an entire industry was what the campaign for a $15 minimum was supposed to be about. Oops. Back in March, we noted that a similar hikein Seattle’s minimum wage was leading to a spate of local restaurant closings, given that labor costs...

Saaliha Khan scrolled through her Facebook feed and pored over posts expressing sadness, dismay and disapproval, the kind of messages that always appear after an attack carried out in the name of Islam. It was just past midnight on Monday, and two Muslim gunmen had been killed about six hours earlier in a shootout outside a controversial cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, which featured images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. “If you want to defend the honor of the Prophet, do so in a way that is consistent with prophetic manners and ethics, not violence,” Omid Safi, director Duke University’s...

Electronic music pioneer Moby (real name Richard Melville Hall) went on quite the Twitter tirade on Saturday, railing against “racist, xenophobic, ignorant” Republicans who “support war” and “hate immigrants.” The musician, who has campaigned for and written open letters to President Obama, began his rant in standard fashion, calling Republicans “loathsome” and linking to a Los Angeles Times article about NASA funding:

Living down to our worst expectations, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology voted Thursday to cut deeply into NASA's budget for Earth science, in a clear swipe at our agency's manipulation of climate data. The committee's markup of the NASA authorization bill followed what appears to be a deliberate attempt to keep (us) Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the committee's rank Democrat, and her caucus in caucus "we understood why.", Rep. Eddie B whined.

... Statues of ... historical figures stand in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall, where each state has two representatives cast in bronze or marble ... [Father Junipero] Serra could be the first and only actual saint in Statuary Hall -- Pope Francis recently announced plans to canonize him -- yet he's also a polarizing figure. Is it time to send Serra to the sidelines (or more accurately, move his statue to the California Capitol grounds)? ... Take our pointedly unreliable poll, leave a comment or do both! ...

"....In Walker's defense, Tim Graham of the Media Research Center (“Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias”) offers this exegesis: “Walker, the son of a Protestant minister, hears the question very differently: asking if someone is a Christian is a very personal question, asking whether someone has committed themselves to Jesus in their heart. It’s like asking if he knows how often Obama prays. His reluctance to answer for someone he doesn’t know is not a ‘No.’ " Nice try, but the political context of the question was clear and it’s the one Milbank mentioned: the conviction that “Obama is a...

On February 19, the Los Angeles Times reacted to the growing momentum for Campus Carry legislation across the country by referring to the NRA as “crackpots” and reminding the organization that it is the government’s “responsibility to protect the public through reasonable gun control laws.” In other words, “shall not be infringed” does not mean shall not be regulated and/or controlled. According to the Times, the NRA has hit a new low by promoting the idea that an expansion of Campus Carry means “gun-toting women would be armed to defend themselves in the event of sexual assaults.” The Times claims...

The Los Angeles Times announced Tuesday that it is partnering with Jose Vargas, an openly illegal immigrant, for a new editorial venture. The project is "a multimedia platform which will explore the evolving American identity in the 21st century," read a release. Vargas is an outspoken activist for immigration reform, particularly reform that would include amnesty for the millions of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. He is also a veteran journalist who came out in 2011 as an unlawful American resident.

Charles Champlin, the former Los Angeles Times arts editor, film critic and columnist whose insightful, elegantly written reviews and columns informed and entertained readers for decades, died Sunday at his Los Angeles home. He was 88. The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, said his son, Charles Champlin Jr. The Harvard-educated Champlin had worked 17 years at Life and Time magazines before joining The Times as entertainment editor and three-times-a-week columnist in 1965.

(GRAPHIC-AT-LINK)The Los Angeles Times leads Thursday with a story entitled: "Gaza's dilemma: Deadly war or suffocating Israeli embargo." According to the story, Palestinians in Gaza are left with no choice but to wage war, because if they do not fire rockets at Israeli civilians, they must accept an Israeli [sic] "embargo." The article omits the obvious point that if Hamas would stop trying to kill Israelis, neither the embargo nor the war itself would be necessary. The authors, Alexandra Zavis and Batsheva Sobelman, accept that Hamas started the war--and even suggest that most Palestinians in Gaza support it, though there...

Pasadena city officials placed Public Health Director Eric Walsh on temporary paid administrative leave Thursday after they learned of controversial statements he had made about homosexuality and evolution in online videos and audio clips. In sermons uploaded to various websites, Walsh, a Seventh-day Adventist preacher, calls evolution "a religion created by Satan," compares Disney to a "dark empire" of superstition and witchcraft, and criticizes homosexuality.

- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com - Rashid Khalidi’s False Narrative of Israeli HistoryPosted By Andrew Harrod On May 1, 2014 @ 12:40 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments Palestinian-American Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi addressed America’s role in the Arab-Israeli peace process on April 17, 2014, at Washington, DC’s Jerusalem Fund, a pro-Palestinian think tank.  Describing Israel’s “entirely false narrative” into which “we have all been brainwashed,” Khalidi revealed his own myopia before an audience of about forty mostly likeminded, middle-aged people.John Halaka’s “Portraits of Denial and Despair” photo exhibit currently displayed in Jerusalem Fund hallways set a worrying...

On April 1, Washington Mayor Vincent Gray was denied a second term, defeated in the primary by upstart city councilwoman Muriel Bowser. The beginning of the end came on March 10, when U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen struck a plea bargain with a wealthy businessman who confessed he'd spent $668,000 on an illegal "shadow campaign" to fund get-out-the-vote efforts that helped Gray win the mayoral office in 2010. So the corrupt mayor of America's most important city is thrown out. A political scandal? The same networks that were utterly breathless over the local story of Gov. Chris Christie's aides slowing traffic...

NEW YORK Managing Editor Paul Steiger of The Wall Street Journal and Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. of The Washington Post were both asked to be part of last weekend's unique joint Op-Ed piece by the editors of The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, which defended the publication of stories about the secret SWIFT bank monitoring program, E&P has learned. But each declined. "We had talked about doing something together," Steiger said. "But when I looked at it and thought about it, our position was so different from theirs -- that nobody asked us not to publish [our...

<p>LOS ANGELES TIMES EDITORIAL Making The Case Against Syria President Obama was right to seek Congress' approval on taking military action. But he also must ensure that any such mission remains limited.</p> <p>September 3, 2013.</p> <p>Last week, the Obama administration was signaling that it would take unilateral military action against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad for what the administration insists was the deliberate use of chemical weapons to kill hundreds of civilians. On Saturday, the president abruptly — and appropriately — changed course, saying that he would seek support in Congress for action to "hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons, deter this kind of behavior and degrade their capacity to carry it out."</p>

I am having a back and forth with Japan Today regarding their publishing of an article which appeared in Capitol Hill Blue that has subsequently been exposed to be false.Japan Today did not get the article from Capitol Hill Blue though. They got it from Truthout.org, a leftist propaganda outfit.I wanted to see if Truthout.org even had the story up on their site. I went to their main page, Truthout.org and checked. Nothing. I noticed a search box up at the top. So I took a phrase from the original article, sought significant quantities and hit search.Bingo.Here is what the...

On April 8, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Boston conference on ''media reform.'' She was joined by four other congressmen, a senator, two FCC commissioners, a Nobel laureate and numerous liberal journalists. The 2,500-person event was sponsored by a group called Free Press, one of more than 180 different media-related organizations that receives money from liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros, who first made a name for himself in investing and currency trading, now makes his name in politics and policy. Since the 2004 election, the controversial financier has used his influence and billions to push a laundry list...

On May 21, Los Angeles voters will go to the polls to select a new mayor. Who will govern Los Angeles, however, is only the second-most important local question in the city today. The most important, by far, is who will buy the Los Angeles Times. The Times is one of the eight daily newspapers now owned by the creditors who took control of the Tribune Co. after real estate wheeler-dealer Sam Zell drove it into bankruptcy. Others include the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and the Hartford Courant. The Tribune board members whom the creditors selected...