Free Republic

Paul Krugman, an outspoken liberal economist known for his support of the Obama administration, today said the United States has become an “authoritarian surveillance state.” Part of a panel on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Krugman offered his take on the bombshell NSA spying revelations: “…there are different kinds of surveillance states. You can have a democratic surveillance state which collects as little data as possible and tells you as much as possible about what it’s doing. Or you could have an authoritarian surveillance state which collects as much as possible and tells the public as little as possible. And...

Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster on Attorney General Eric Holder’s refusal to rule out drone strikes against U.S. citizens, which ended early Thursday morning, was absent from the front page of Thursday’s New York Times. The Times buried its coverage of Paul’s striking “talking” filibuster, in which he held the floor for nearly 13 hours, ostensibly in opposition to Obama’s choice of John Brennan for CIA director. Brennan was serving as a proxy for Paul’s demand that Holder rule out drone strikes on American citizens or on U.S. soil. … The Washington Post, by contrast, teased the filibuster on its...

MIAMI — George Zimmerman, who is charged with second-degree murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin, is all but certain to take his case directly to a jury on June 10 and skip a highly anticipated pretrial self-defense hearing, his lawyer said Tuesday. At a “Stand Your Ground” hearing, the judge is tasked with weighing whether to grant immunity from prosecution under a Florida law that gives people who believe they are in imminent danger of being killed or seriously hurt the benefit of the doubt to protect themselves. A defendant who claims self-defense in Florida has a right to...

THE average price of gasoline in the United States, $3.78 on Thursday, has been steadily climbing for more than a month and is approaching the three previous post-recession peaks, in May 2011 and in April and September of last year. But if our goal is to get Americans to drive less and use more fuel-efficient vehicles, and to reduce air pollution and the emission of greenhouse gases, gas prices need to be even higher. The current federal gasoline tax, 18.4 cents a gallon, has been essentially stable since 1993; in inflation-adjusted terms, it’s fallen by 40 percent since then. ......

The New York Times says Chinese hackers repeatedly penetrated its computer networks over the past four months, stealing reporters’ passwords and hunting for files on an investigation into the wealth amassed by the family of one of China's leaders. … The attacks coincided with a Times’ investigation into how the family and relatives of Premier Wen Jiabao built a fortune worth more than $2 billion. …

Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth. When even the free-market-oriented magazine The Economist argues — as it did in a special feature in October — that the magnitude and nature of the country’s inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong. ... There are four major reasons inequality is squelching our recovery. The most immediate is that our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically...

A New York Times columnist has come under fire after retweeting a controversial message that referred to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the National Rifle Association (NRA) as “the 2 most pig like lobbies” in America. According to Adam Kredo of The Washington Free Beacon, Columnist Nicholas Kristof on Wednesday afternoon retweeted the message written by longtime Israel critic M.J. Rosenberg, which recalled the recently unearthed statements by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi that referred to Jews as “pigs.” “OBAMA told the 2 most pig like lobbies, AIPAC & NRA, to drop dead in same month. Next: Chamber...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said it is “frightening” that the Obama administration has never included progressive economists, who have “been right about everything so far.” “I think it’s frightening that at no point in this administration have there been any serious representation of what you might call the progressive economist wing, which is a pretty big part of Obama’s support,” Krugman said Sunday in an appearance on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. … Krugman, a Keynesian economist, has long advocated for more stimulus spending, saying the $833-billion stimulus package of 2009 did not spend enough. …

As Michael Bloomberg begins the last year of his third and final term as New York City mayor, the 70-year-old shows no sign of slowing down. Bloomberg, who founded Bloomberg L.P. in the early 1980s, is considering another big splash in the media business by acquiring The Financial Times, according to the New York Times. Meanwhile, USA Today reports that the New York Times itself is a Bloomberg acquisition target, but the New York paper has refrained from reporting that. …

MUCH of the coverage of Tuesday’s results has focused on the strength of Barack Obama’s coalition — minorities, women and young voters. But that analysis misses the real point. The contours of the 2012 presidential race were shaped less by the country’s changing demographics than by the underlying attitudes and values of American voters, who are always far more complex than they appear to pollsters. The president’s victory was a triumph of vision, not of demographics. He won because he articulated a set of values that define an America that the majority of us wish to live in: A nation...

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...