Free Republic

The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Tuesday that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of full-time workers by 2.5 million over the next decade. That is mostly a good thing, a liberating result of the law. Of course, Republicans immediately tried to brand the findings as “devastating” and stark evidence of President Obama’s health care reform as a failure and a job killer. It is no such thing. The report estimated that — thanks to an increase in insurance coverage under the act and the availability of subsidies to help pay the premiums — many workers who felt...

The New York Times changed the lede of its explosive story about former New York Port Authority official David Wildstein on Friday. Whereas the original story stated that Wildstein has the evidence to prove Gov. Chris Christie knew about the George Washington Bridge lane closings when they were happening, the new version has Wildstein saying “evidence exists.” […] This seemingly minor change carries a big difference in meaning. The original lede reads as though Wildstein is saying he specifically has evidence that links Christie to knowing about the bridge lane closures. The second lede suggests only that “evidence exists,” not...

Bill Donohue comments on bias at the New York Times: There is no newspaper in the United States that is more extreme in its defense of abortion-on-demand and homosexual rights than the New York Times. It regards the defense of partial-birth abortion to be a “moderate” position, and its reporters have openly bragged about the record number of homosexuals who write feature stories. Today’s edition offers more support to the accusation that it is biased in its coverage on these issues. There is a front-page story about a homosexual vice principal in Seattle who was asked to step down when...

PARIS — It is difficult to go more than a day in France without hearing someone express the conviction that the greatest problem in the country is its ethnic minorities, that the presence of immigrants compromises the identity of France itself. This conviction is typically expressed without any acknowledgment of the country’s historical responsibility as a colonial power for the presence of former colonial subjects in metropolitan France, nor with any willingness to recognize that France will be ethnically diverse from here on out, and that it’s the responsibility of the French as much as of the immigrants to make...

The New York Times story concluding that the Benghazi attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility was not al-Qaida-related and was spurred by an anti-Muslim video will win the newspaper a Pulitzer prize, says Democratic operative James Carville. Carville, appearing Thursday on Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," defended reporter David Kirkpatrick's journalism, even suggesting he testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. After all, Carville said, Kirkpatrick's six-month investigation was the most exhaustive probe anyone has made.

(CNSNews.com) – The New York Times Company says it’s not for sale, but a high-profile Chinese businessman and philanthropist eager to buy what he views as the world’s most influential newspaper plans to fly to New York City this week to push ahead with his bid. Chen Guangbiao on Wednesday told the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party-affiliated paper, that he has a meeting scheduled Friday with a city firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions, followed by dinner on Sunday with “a middle-level leader” from the Times.

Front-page editorials, disguised as news stories, have become such familiar features of the New York Times that it should have been no surprise to discover in the December 28th issue a front-page story about a professor of finance at the University of Houston who has been a paid consultant to financial enterprises. Since professors of all sorts have been paid consultants to organizations of all sorts, it is questionable why this was a story at all, much less one that covered an entire inside page, in addition to a central front-page opening, under the headline "Academics Who Defend Wall St....

Fear swept through Borough Park, Brooklyn, as soon as the news got out: A young man was randomly assaulted by strangers early Friday morning, and the attack was possibly part of the so-called Knockout Game. Four men were arrested, but on Friday night only one was charged and the others were released. The attack added to a growing log of reports of such crimes in the Northeast and beyond. Young assailants were randomly picking unlucky targets and trying to knock them out with just one punch. Yet police officials in several cities where such attacks have been reported said that...

The New York Times brought out the big guns in defense of Obamacare. Faced with a growing chorus of complaints about the keystone health insurance reform that bears Obama’s name, the New York Times shrugged. They shrugged because that’s all they have left. The shoulder shrug, by the way, is a sign of the lie. The Times shrugged off the problems with the website, the problems with rising insurance premiums and the major problem with the president’s promise that if you like your insurance you get keep it. The problem the Democrats face is that when Obama promised Americans...

especially interesting in a New York Times story from Friday on Iran, where they found it advantageous to edit out an America-hating Iranian who wished the Times building would burn down: “He is a war veteran, a good manager and a religious person,” said Noushin Sobhani, 31, a gynecologist. She and her parents voted at the Imam Sadegh University, where most of Iran’s cadre of bureaucrats are trained. “We hate America,” her father said, smiling. “I hope The New York Times building burns down.”

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...