Free Republic

The New York Times bestseller list hasn't waited a millisecond to put Hillary Clinton's book atop its influential chart after just a week of sales, but has totally ignored another top-10 hardcover from noted conservative and critic of President Obama, Dinesh D'Souza. His new book, on sale for three weeks, isn’t just absent from the top 10 lists already set for the next two Sundays, but totally missing from the list of the nation’s top 25 nonfiction hardcovers despite having sales higher than 13 on the latest Times chart.

On Thursday, the editorial board at the New York Times, reacting to the growing firestorm over the release of five hardened terrorists from Gitmo in return for the Army's Bowe Bergdahl, went after Bergdahl's "army unit’s lack of security and discipline." It then incredibly claimed that a classified army report described in a separate Times dispatch that day suggested that those alleged conditions were "as much to blame for the disappearance" of Bergdahl as ... well, the sloppy editorial didn't specifically say. On Sunday, two Times reporters continued the offensive against Bowe Bergdahl's platoon and its members, apparently wanting readers...

... In many jurisdictions, people who know they are H.I.V.-positive are legally required to disclose this status to potential sexual partners, even when they intend to engage in relatively safe and protected sex. Why do our disclosure policies single out this group, and not, for example, people with other incurable, or possibly fatal, infectious diseases? Why do most policies demand transparency between sexual partners in regard to their H.I.V.-status, but not in regard to past behaviors that may have caused a yet undetected H.I.V. infection, such as intravenous drug use or unprotected sex with partners who do not regularly get...

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough tore into the leadership at the New York Times on Friday morning for what he characterized as a misleading self-defense over the reasons for the firing of former Executive Editor Jill Abramson. He observed that the Times admitted that the pay discrepancy issue was a factor even after they denied it at first. The appearance of a cover-up on this issue led Scarborough’s co-hosts to predict a backlash against the paper and even a wave of cancelled subscriptions from female subscribers. Reading from the latest piece in the New Yorker, Scarborough noted that the Times...

The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction. While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades. After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada—substantially behind in 2000—now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans. The numbers, based on surveys conducted over the past 35 years, offer some of the most detailed publicly...

COLUMBUS, Ga. — Republicans, poised for strong gains in the midterm elections, are offering starkly conflicting messages about President Obama to rally their voters. In one moment, they say the president is feckless and weak. But in the next, they say Mr. Obama is presiding over an “imperial presidency” that is exercising power that verges on dictatorial. So far, they are succeeding in having it both ways. Representative Paul Broun, Republican of Georgia, who has criticized Mr. Obama for “leading from behind” on foreign policy, stood before a gathering of Republican women here recently, his voice loud and deliberate, as...

A New York Times columnist has expressed substantially more negative sentiments about FiveThirtyEight since it left The New York Times, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. The columnist, Paul Krugman, who writes about economics and politics for The Times, has referred to FiveThirtyEight or editor-in-chief Nate Silver 33 times on his blog. FiveThirtyEight classified each reference based on whether it expressed a favorable, unfavorable or neutral sentiment toward FiveThirtyEight. …

New York Times reporter James Risen called the Obama administration “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation” on Friday, explaining that the White House seeks to control the flow of information and those that refuse to play along “will be punished.” Poynter reports that Risen made the remarks while speaking at Sources and Secrets conference — a meeting of journalism and communication professionals held in New York City. The foreign policy reporter, who is currently fighting a fierce court battle with the federal government over his protection of a confidential source, warned...

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...