Free Republic

WILL the New York State Legislature ultimately put itself on the right side of history by allowing same-sex couples to marry? Many of us in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, amazed at how quickly public opinion has evolved on this issue, are eager for this historic civil rights victory. My hope comes with some worry, however. While many in our community have worked hard to secure the right of same-sex couples to marry, others of us have been working equally hard to develop alternatives to marriage. For us, domestic partnerships and civil unions aren’t a consolation prize made...

Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitizer prize winning reporter who has worked for the Washington Post and Huffington Post, has revealed that he is an illegal alien in a coordinated media push with the New York Times and ABC News seeking amnesty for illegal aliens like him.Vargas also revealed that he breached White House security by using a fake ID, including when he covered a state dinner. And that a superior at the Washington Post knew and approved of his actions.Vargas made the revelations in an article he authored published in the upcoming New York Times Sunday Magazine.Vargas writes that at...

On Saturday, trail-blazing American political icon Geraldine Ferraro passed away at age 75 after a battle with a blood cancer called multiple myeloma. Ferraro made history when she became the first woman to be nominated to a major party presidential ticket in 1984. Accompanying Walter Mondale on the Democratic ticket in 1984, Ferraro charted new territory for women in American politics. Unfortunately, Geraldine Ferraro held a pro-abortion position. Despite describing herself as “personally pro-life” due to her Catholic faith, Ferraro did not support legal protection for unborn children. The Mondale-Ferraro ticket ultimately lost in landslide to the pro-life Republican ticket...

The New York Times has announced that four of its journalists are missing in Libya, where they were working, covering the conflict that has roiled the country. According to a post on the paper’s Media Decoder blog, editors in New York lost contact with the journalists on Tuesday, and have since received “second hand reports” that the reporting team “in the port city of Ajdabiya had been swept up by Libyan government forces.”

NEW YORK -- The New York Times says four of its journalists reporting on the Libya conflict are missing and were last heard from Tuesday.

There seems to be little question remaining over whether or not there is a rather blatant agenda in some segments of the media when it comes to natural gas drilling in this country. For the latest example, one need look no further than Ian Urbina’s latest piece in the New York Times with the excitable title, Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers.Never one to soft sell a good meme, the Times skips right past any of the normal environmental hazards associated with energy exploration and goes right for… radiation! With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a...

In 2009 and 2010 the New York Times covered protests against the Obama administration’s stimulus spending bill and health care plan as the barely legal revolt of an unwashed and uncivil band of reactionaries determined not only to halt what the paper considered progress but also to thwart democracy. But anyone looking at the Times’ front page article on Saturday describing protests against the effort by Wisconsin’s newly elected governor and legislature to balance the state’s books got a very different view of a protest movement. According to the Times, the activities of the Wisconsin public sector unions — whose...

Three weeks of historic protests in Egypt upended President Hosni Mubarak’s regime on Friday with the world looking. But here at the Conservative Political Action Conference, hardly anyone took any notice. For the past 36 hours, television news broadcasts have been glued to the central square in Cairo as Mr. Mubarak appeared to be clinging to power before finally stepping down as president on Friday. Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s leading presidential hopefuls for 2012 gave major speeches to the faithful that gave no hint — with one exception — of the turmoil playing out in the Middle East. Mitt Romney,...

The New York Times pay wall will go up in early 2011, possibly as early as January. Last week, Slate.com asked readers how much they thought the Times would charge per month, with choices between $5 and $25. Most of the roughly 8,000 people who responded guessed that the cost would be $10 per month or under, with an average of $8.20. The Times presumably has more finely tuned research. The paper has already established that it's going to construct a metered pay-wall system. A certain number of stories will be accessible free in a given time period, and after...

The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. The New York Times and a number of publications in Europe were given access to the material several weeks ago and agreed to begin publication of articles based on the cables Sunday online. The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.

(WBEN) - While he takes his pit bull around from campaign event to campaign event, Carl Paladino's dog Duke is attracting attention-- so much so that the campaign is featuring him in an open letter advising the media to engage in more original reporting. From the Paladino campaign, here's the text of a statement released by and attributed to campaign manager Michael Caputo Thursday. Media Colleagues: The Office of Vital Statistics for the City of Buffalo alerted the Paladino family that the New York Times visited City Hall asking to see Duke's dog license. I want to alert the media...

The talk of the town for the next few days will be this big piece by Peter Baker in the NYT on President Obama. The piece paints a picture of a despondent administration: Yet even if the White House saw it coming, this is an administration that feels shellshocked. Many officials worry, they say, that the best days of the Obama presidency are behind them. They talk about whether it is time to move on. While not in the 30s, Obama’s approval rating in surveys conducted by The New York Times and CBS News had fallen to 45 percent last...

WASHINGTON — Democratic candidates across the country are opening a fierce offensive of negative advertisements against Republicans, using lawsuits, tax filings, reports from the Better Business Bureau and even divorce proceedings to try to discredit their opponents and save their Congressional majority. Opposition research and attack advertising are used in almost every election, but these biting ads are coming far earlier than ever before, according to party strategists. The campaign has intensified in the last two weeks as early voting begins in several states and as vulnerable incumbents try to fight off an onslaught of influences by outside groups. As...

Nearly every Sept. 11 since Sept. 11, Hadidjatou Karamoko Traoré has made sure that her three children were dressed in their best clothes, and taken them from their tidy brick home in the Bronx to the pit where the World Trade Center stood, and where her husband, their father, worked and died. After the attacks, all that was found of Abdoul-Karim Traoré, a cook at the Windows on the World restaurant, were his leather wallet, his identification cards and a few coins. “I like to go down there and pray and see the place and remember,” said Mrs. Traoré, a...

On a Saturday in August when most of the political class has escaped this city’s swelter, 50 Tea Party leaders have flown in from across the country to jam into a conference room in an office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, apparently unconcerned that the fancy address does not guarantee air-conditioning on weekends. They have come to learn how to take over the country, voter by voter. Look for houses with flags, they are instructed; their residents tend to be patriotic conservatives. Marine flags or religious symbols, ditto. Take doggie treats with you as you canvass neighborhoods — “Now they are...

The New York Times has hired a new public editor, Arthur Brisbane, to be an “advocate” for readers and to uphold “the highest standards in journalism.” Let’s hope he means it because a backlog of complaints about the publication’s coverage of Israel and the Middle East awaits him. Among unresolved matters is one evidently too hot for editors to handle. It concerns Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner’s statements on MSNBC revealing a strikingly jaundiced view of Israelis generally. He claimed in a March 8 broadcast that unfavorable views of Barack Obama on the part of the Israeli electorate reflected not...

NEW YORK--Answering a question from a reader as to whether a teacher should post a cartoon on his door that disparages President Obama as a socialist, New York Times columnist Randy Cohen writes: [W]hile this teacher does not transgress ethically, he does seem to fall short intellectually, offering not deft political analysis but slogans and clichés... Incidentally...how does it defame a person to call him a “socialist” (outside of nutty far-right circles) — a set of ideas many advanced Western democracies find congenial, what with the accessible health-care, affordable higher education and good public transportation? Cohen, who writes the Times'...

President Obama’s relationship with America, like many a young marriage, is growing sour. That’s my surmise after reviewing recent polling and watching the carping that followed his Oval Office speech (which I thought was just fine, by the way). It is becoming increasingly apparent that the magic has drained away. Even among his most ardent supporters, there now exists a certain frustration and disillusionment — not necessarily in the execution of his duties, but in his inability to seize moments, chart a course and navigate the choppy waters of public opinion. What’s left for many is a big plume of...

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons, even in self defense. But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation. Discussing his approach to nuclear security the day before formally releasing his new strategy, Mr. Obama described his policy as part of a broader effort to edge the world toward making nuclear weapons obsolete, and to...

The mercury is running high, all right, and it has nothing to do with the weather. Public displays of political anger have been a staple of the American scene for the last eight months or so, but in recent days a handful directed at members of Congress have gone a bit further than noisy, sign-carrying assembly to window-smashing, spitting, threatening faxes and phone calls, even a cut propane line on a barbecue grill. ..." VARYING DEGREES OF RAGE - The Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, second from right, during the Days of Rage in 1969, and anti-health reform protesters in Washington...