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Hillary Clinton has not yet declared her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination — but you wouldn't know it from The New York Times Magazine to be published on Sunday. The cover story, titled "Planet Hillary," is illustrated by a graphic showing a solar system with a huge planet at the center which features Clinton's smiling face. The teaser for the article by Amy Chozik, a national political reporter for the Times, reads: "The gravitational pull of a possible 2016 campaign is bringing all the old Clinton characters into her orbit. Can she make the stars align, or will chaos...

With the endless gridlock of modern Washington, it’s tempting to want to ditch the whole American constitutional system and install a king, who could at least get things done. This is essentially what David Brooks is proposing in his column this month, though he doesn’t quite come out and say it. Brooks is right that gridlock is stifling desperately needed policy innovation and reform, but is wrong about the cause and solution for it. The problem is too much power and authority is centralized in the federal government. The solution is to look to the states, which are already a...

For a senator who likes to hold himself out as the future of the Republican brand, Marco Rubio has come up with a remarkably retrograde contribution to the party’s chorus of phony empathy for the poor: Let the states do it. All anti-poverty funds should be combined into one “flex fund,” he said in a speech on Wednesday, and then given to the states to spend as they see fit. He actually believes that states will “design and fund creative initiatives” to address inequality. “Washington continues to rule over the world of anti-poverty policy-making, with beltway bureaucrats picking and choosing...

(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.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s inaugural was filled with “backward-looking speeches both graceless and smug” The The New York Times said in a scathing editorial Friday. The paper’s editorial board called out three inauguration participants for their demagoguery and defended former Mayor Michael Bloomberg from the speakers’ jabs at his tenure. “Worst among them, but hardly alone, was the new public advocate, Letitia James, who used her moment for her own head-on attack: on the 12 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg,” read the Times editorial. James, who now holds the office formerly held by de Blasio, brought a...

Benghazi: The attempt to rehabilitate Hillary Clinton begins as the New York Times revives the long-ago debunked "video clip" excuse for the well-planned Benghazi massacre while denying documented al-Qaida involvement. These days it's all the news that is fit to be made up that graces the pages of the once-proud Gray Lady that has morphed from a self-proclaimed "newspaper of record" to the house organ for the Obama administration. The latest example is a piece on the Benghazi terrorist attack of Sept. 10, 2010, titled, "A Deadly Mix in Benghazi." It resembles the infamous White House talking points — on...

After reading the David Kirkpatrick's NYT piece this evening, I decided to do a little cross-checking/fact-checking, as my web search came up bupkis. Specifically, I found no mention of a key suspect in the Benghazi attack in either the NYT piece nor any critique thereof. The suspect in question: Muhammad Jamal al Kashef. It didn't take long to find the UNSC addition of al Kashef to the Al-Qaida Sanctions List, as it had occurred in October and was easy to find. I also found several other casual 'honorable mentions' thereof such as this piece from Long War Journal in February...

Chinese recycling tycoon Chen Guangbiao said on Tuesday he is set to begin negotiations to buy the New York Times. “If I acquire the Times, the paper will only report the truth and must verify all information,” Chen told Reuters. Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. has said the paper is not for sale, and industry insiders doubt the Ochs-Sulzberger family would sell Chen the paper. But Chen told Reuters he believes the company is worth $1 billion and that money can change minds. “There is nothing that can’t be bought for the right price,” Chen told Reuters. Chen says he...

Chen Guangbiao, listed as one of China's 400 richest people and a man known as much for his publicity stunts as his wealth, claims he is in talks to buy the New York Times. "Soon, I will go to America to do three things," Chen told a crowd Monday night at a news media award reception in the southern Chinese boom town of Shenzhen, according to the semi-official China News Service. The first, he said, "is to go discuss the acquisition of the New York Times". Asked later to elaborate on his plans, Chen simply told reporters "the negotiation is...

An exhaustive investigation by The Times goes a long way toward resolving any nagging doubts about what precipitated the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The report by David Kirkpatrick, The Times’s Cairo bureau chief, and his team turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or another international terrorist group had any role in the assault, as Republicans have insisted without proof for more than a year. The report concluded that the attack was led by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s air power...

On Monday, the editor of the New York Times Editorial page was compelled to write that the publication has not decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 yet. His pronouncement came two days after the paper attempted to whitewash the Benghazi tragedy by printing a story that alleged that there was no al-Qaeda involvement in the attacks that killed four Americans (contradicting the paper's own reporting), murdered U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens had "little understanding" of the region, and that the terrorists were motivated by an anti-Muhammed YouTube video. On a blog post on the paper's website, Andrew Rosenthal...

Politico, trying to find a juicy angle on the latest chapter in the Benghazi saga, asks the arrogant question “Could the New York Times have saved ’60 Minutes’?” They are referring, of course, to “60 Minutes’” infamous use of charlatan Dylan Davies as a source when he did not, in fact, scale the compound wall the night of the attacks, nor see Ambassador Chris Stevens’ body in a Libyan hospital. Davies was outed by Washington Post sleuthing, and then by the New York Times, which spoke with the FBI about Davies. The FBI confirmed that this bad source had told...

The New York Times has published a new account of the deadly 9/11/12 terrorist attacks against two US compounds in Benghazi, Libya. Reporter David Kirkpatrick's sources, some of whom are anonymous, say there is little indication that international terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda were involved in the attack. Kirkpatrick's story also claims that the raids were not "meticulously planned," and were, in fact, touched off by an obscure YouTube video trailer that some say denigrated Islam. A snippet from the piece: Then, on Sept. 8, a popular Islamist preacher lit the fuse by screening a clip of the video on...

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....

**SNIP** But a New York Times report published over the weekend has angered sources who were on the ground that night. Those sources, who continue to face threats of losing their jobs, sharply challenged the Times’ findings that there was no involvement from Al Qaeda or any other international terror group and that an anti-Islam film played a role in inciting the initial wave of attacks. “It was a coordinated attack. It is completely false to say anything else. … It is completely a lie,” one witness to the attack told Fox News. The controversial Times report has stirred a...

David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times has published a lengthy account of the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. While much in Kirkpatrick's report is not new, the piece is receiving a considerable amount of attention because of this sweeping conclusion: "Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault." But how much effort did Kirkpatrick expend to uncover any...

Fifteen months after the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, the narrative of the attack continues to be shaped, and reshaped, by politicians and the press. But a New York Times report published over the weekend has angered sources who were on the ground that night. Those sources, who continue to face threats of losing their jobs, sharply challenged the Times’ findings that there was no involvement from Al Qaeda or any other international terror group and that an anti-Islam film played a role in inciting the initial wave of attacks. “It...

A senior Obama administration official said the White House does not dispute a New York Times article published Saturday about the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which found no evidence al Qaeda was involved. **SNIP** The newspaper said its investigation took months and was "centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context." It is not surprising the White House would welcome this report. Since the attack, Republicans have accused the Obama administration of downplaying the perpetrators' links to al Qaeda for political gain. The attack...

**SNIP** The cable was a last token of months of American misunderstandings and misperceptions about Libya and especially Benghazi, many fostered by shadows of the earlier Sept. 11 attack. The United States waded deeply into post-Qaddafi Libya, hoping to build a beachhead against extremists, especially Al Qaeda. It believed it could draw a bright line between friends and enemies in Libya. But it ultimately lost its ambassador in an attack that involved both avowed opponents of the West and fighters belonging to militias that the Americans had taken for allies. Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on...

The “American Dream”of a traditional nuclear family is getting harder and harder to come by, and the New York Times can hardly contain its glee. The Times’ entire Nov. 26 “Science Times” section was devoted to the “redefined” American family. In her featured articles, NYT reporter Natalie Angier identified traditional family as a thing of the past: “the old-fashioned family plan of stably married parents residing with their children remains a source of considerable power in American – but one that is increasingly seen as out of reach to all but the educated elite.” What’s taking its place? A lot...