Free Republic

The office of former BBC director-general Mark Thompson was formally alerted twice about child abuse accusations concerning Jimmy Savile. In May and again in September, his aides were told of allegations concerning the late television presenter's abuse of minors on BBC premises, but his spokesman has denied the claims were passed on to Mr Thompson. -snip- A YouGov poll for newspaper revealed that 48 percent of respondents believe Mr Thompson, who is to become chief executive of The New York Times next month, has not been honest about the affair. Mr Thompson said in an interview with The Times last...

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

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...

The New York Times is developing a bad habit of sending its columns to the Obama administration for approval. Daniel Harper at the Weekly Standard reported yesterday on a no-no committed by then-contributing Times columnist Peter Orszag, former director of Obama's Office of Management and Budget and an Obama-care booster in an October 20, 2010 column, "Malpractice Methodology." Halper wrote in part: The latest Bob Woodward books reveals that Peter Orszag, at the time a columnist for the New York Times, sent a draft of an article to White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett for review and comments before publishing....

A new survey conducted by the NY Times, MSNBC and the DNC shows, for the first time, President Barack Obama taking the lead in the battle-ground states of Texas and Oklahoma. The poll of 1,000 likely adults* conducted in the days following the inspiring Democrat National Convention shows Obama ahead 52-48 in Oklahoma and 53-47 in Texas. Both candidates have seen their images improve with these generally backward voters in the wake of their respective party conventions. Obama is now at break-even in his approval rating at 48% after being below par at 46/51 a month ago. Romney's numbers are...

New Orleans is now the largest city in the U.S. to not have a daily newspaper and is also one of the first cities to hurl itself into the digital age. However, the shift to a primarily digital medium threatens an integral component of journalism: the daily journalist.

The double standards operating against outspoken conservatives are legion. Perhaps no one knows this better than talk radio host Rush Limbaugh who has been the target of the left's hatred for decades now. Watching the latest news in the business of sports, he's got to be shaking his head in dismay. If you're a liberal like Bill Maher, a generous donor to a Super PAC support Barack Obama's re-election efforts, and you invest as much as $20 million to buy a part of the New York Mets, the New York Times gives you favorable coverage. Completely leaving out Maher's recent, and...

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...

The New York Times, never considered a model of objective journalism, is being accused of having an editorial double-standard after it published a full-page ad aggressively critical of the Catholic Church, but refused a nearly identical one critical of Islam. The anti-Catholic ad run in mid-March by the atheist group Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), was framed as an “Open Letter to ‘liberal’ and ‘nominal’ Catholics,” declaring that “It’s Time to Consider Quitting the Catholic Church.” The “letter,” from FFRF heads Annie Laurie Gaylor and Don Barker, is a thinly disguised canvassing drive, offering lapsed and liberal Catholic believers “a...

WASHINGTON — The burst of job growth in January gives President Obama a fresh — but tricky — opportunity to revise the grim economic narrative of his presidency while offering Mitt Romney a choice: embrace a new optimism or campaign against a sinking economy even as it shows signs of turning around. The Labor Department reported on Friday that the unemployment rate had fallen all the way back to the level of President Obama’s first full month in office, to 8.3 percent, from a high of 10 percent in late 2009. Yet unemployment also remains higher than it has been...

“First base, second base, third base, home run,” Al Vernacchio ticked off the classic baseball terms for sex acts. His goal was to prompt the students in Sexuality and Society — an elective for seniors at the private Friends’ Central School on Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line — to examine the assumptions buried in the venerable metaphor. “Give me some more,” urged the fast-talking 47-year-old, who teaches 9th- and 12th-grade English as well as human sexuality. Arrayed before Vernacchio was a circle of small desks occupied by 22 teenagers, six male and the rest female — a blur of sweatshirts and...

Hours after being evicted by the police, protesters returned to Zuccotti Park on Tuesday, without tents and sleeping bags Emergency-service trucks rumbled up Broadway to positions on two sides of Zuccotti Park. Powerful klieg lights blinked on, illuminating about 220 protesters in tents and sleeping bags. The one-square-block plaza was as bright as day. But it was only 1 a.m. Voices of the police, booming from loudspeakers, echoed through the financial district. Officers swept through the park, picking their way around tents and over sleeping bags, handing out leaflets. Dozens of protesters linked arms and shouted “This is our...

Although scholars of the history of the NY Times Op-Ed pages may be able to find a more vile Op-Ed, I dare them. From Paul Kane, a suggestion that the United States sell-out Taiwan to China in exchange for forgiveness of $1.14 trillion in debt, To Save Our Economy, Ditch Taiwan. http://legalinsurrection.com/2011/11/sell-out-taiwan-for-debt-foregiveness-possibly-the-most-vile-ny-times-op-ed-ever/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6uNWzzt-n3s

One of the questions surrounding the sex-abuse case against Jerry Sandusky is why a former district attorney chose not to prosecute the then-Penn State assistant coach in 1998 after reports surfaced that he had inappropriate interactions with a boy. In 2005, divers searched the Susquehanna River in Lewisburg, Pa., for Ray Gricar, who was a Centre County prosecutor. The answer is unknowable because of an unsolved mystery: What happened to Ray Gricar, the Centre County, Pa., district attorney?

It has been 47 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and 46 years since the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And yet the political leaders of this nation of liberty cannot seem to muster the courage and principle to sweep away one remaining example of institutionalized, government-sanctioned discrimination: The 1996 law that denies the right of marriage to same-sex couples. The law, the Defense of Marriage Act, was passed in the heat of election-year fear and bigotry against men who want to marry other men, and women who want to marry other women. It was a...

President Obama’s re-election campaign has been hammering Mitt Romney from many angles in recent weeks. And now Democrats are beginning a new push against him, this time using the issue of reproductive rights in a bid to raise doubts about Mr. Romney among women. The Democratic National Committee has scheduled a conference call for Thursday with Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the party chairwoman, who, according to the committee’s press release, will “slam G.O.P. presidential candidate Mitt Romney for voicing support for such efforts which could endanger women’s lives.” The Democratic offensive is built around Mr. Romney’s statements on...

BELMONT, Mass. — In ticking off his credentials on the campaign trail — management consultant, businessman, governor — Mitt Romney omits what may have been his most distinctive post: Mormon lay leader, offering pastoral guidance on all manner of human affairs from marriage to divorce, abortion, adoption, addiction, unemployment and even business disputes. Bryce Clark was a recipient of Mr. Romney’s spiritual advice. Late one summer night in 1993, distraught over his descent into alcoholism and drug use, Mr. Clark, then a 19-year-old college student, decided to confess that he had strayed from his Mormon faith. So he drove through...

The Republican establishment is no longer terrified of the Tea Party, The New York Times' Matt Bai reports. It's now figured out how to absorb them like a slow-moving but powerful star that's swelling into a red giant. [snip] Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol tells Bai that the Republican presidential nominee merely has to be conservative enough. Kristol told me just after Perry entered the race, a development that essentially ended [the more radical Michele] Bachmann’s brief ascent. Establishment Republicans may prefer Romney to Perry, but their assumption is that either man can be counted on to steer the party...

The latest Fox poll offered Republican voters a menu of 11 candidates and found...not only were voters scattered across the conservative landscape, but 1/4 of the Tea Party adherents sampled were still “not impressed” with anyone. It’s hard to impress a movement that only knows what it is against. Now, barring some wild twist of fate, there are two men standing: Mitt Romney, the methodical, thrill-free, ideologically elastic technocrat from Massachusetts, who has made himself the default nominee; and the last hope of the hard core, the Not Mitt: Rick Perry. snip ...whatever you think of his deviations from Tea...