Hello and greets from the beautiful Genesee Valley of western New York State. Today is Wednesday, May 20, 2026. It's World Bee Day, National Rescue Dog Day, National Be a Millionaire Day, National Kiss a Frog Day, National Pick Strawberries Day, and National Talk Like Yoda Day.
1830: The first railroad timetable is published in a newspaper (the Baltimore American).
1862: President Abraham Lincoln signs the Homestead Act into law to provide cheap land for the settlement of the American West (80 million acres by 1900).
1873: Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis patent the first blue jeans with copper rivets.
1892: George Sampson patents the clothes dryer.
1899: The first speeding infraction by a New York cabbie driving an electric car at 12 mph on Lexington Avenue.
1927: At 7:40 a.m., Charles Lindbergh takes off from New York to cross the Atlantic for Paris aboard the Spirit of St. Louis in the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight.
1932: Amelia Earhart departs Newfoundland on her journey to become the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic.
1939: "Three Little Fishies" by Kay Kyser swims to #1.
1954: Decca Records releases Bill Haley & His Comets' hit single "Rock Around the Clock."
1980: Drummer Peter Criss quits rock band Kiss.
Birthdays today include: John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, political economist, and utilitarian; William Fargo, founder of Wells Fargo and American Express Co.; John Marshall Harlan II, lawyer, jurist, and 91st Supreme Court justice (1955-71); James Stewart, actor (The Philadelphia Story; It's a Wonderful Life; Mr Smith Goes to Washington; Vertigo); Bill Hewlett, engineer and businessman (co-founder Hewlett-Packard); Moshe Dayan, Israeli military leader and politician (Minister of Defense 1967-74); George Gobel, comedian and TV host (The George Gobel Show); Vic Ames, pop singer (Ames Brothers); "Joe" Cocker, English rock vocalist ("With A Little Help From My Friends," "Cry Me A River," "You Are So Beautiful"); Cher, actor and singer ("I Got You Babe," "If I Could Turn Back Time," "Believe"); Ron Reagan, radio host (The Ron Reagan Show) and son of Ronald and Nancy Reagan; and Susan Cowsill, American rock vocalist (The Cowsills - "Indian Lake," Hair").
If today's your big day, make it a good one.
* * *
Interesting Richard Pollack column this morning that PJ Media's Mark Tapscott links at Instapundit:
A great deal already has been written about the dishonest Nicholas Kristoff New York Times column which alleges Israeli atrocities against Palestinian prisoners.
But behind this latest case of deceitful Times coverage is the fact that from its inception, the ownership of the company has been controlled by a family trust, deliberately designed to be insulated from any public accountability.
[…]
Later, during World War II, the Times continually downplayed the consequences of the Holocaust on the Jews. And when the Times published a front-page story on the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, it never mentioned the word Jew, according to Tifft-Jones.
Adolph Ochs, the founder, ”toiled to ensure that The Times never earned the moniker ‘too Jewish,’ according to Anna Baldwin in a review of the Tifft-Jones book.
“Ochs assiduously declined to promote Jewish editors,” according to Baldwin.
After Adolph, Arthur Hays Sulzberger led the paper from 1935 to 1961. He was a reform Jew. Sulzberger was an enthusiastic supporter of the American Council for Judaism, founded in June 1942 to oppose Zionism. It was Hays who ignored the Holocaust and the plight of the Jews.
I’ll suggest you go read the article to get the details, but suffice it to say — well, I guess I can let Pollack give the punch line:
Without any stockholder interference, the insular Times board and its family trust are able to publish anything it wants without any real public accountability.
Now, with that backdrop firmly in place, let's revisit the piece I wrote the other day on Nicholas Kristof's unhinged column — the one that went to bat for Hamas by laughably claiming Israel trained German Shepherds to rape Hamas prisoners.
So today, we find that The New York Times — proud ancestral home of the morally repugnant Walter Duranty — is pulling out all the stops to defend his spiritual successor, the equally abhorrent Nicholas Kristof, who now is going to bat for an equally repugnant group: Hamas. And wonder of wonders, Kristof is also a Pulitzer winner. As Instapundit’s Sarah Hoyt often says, this is my shocked face.
About that whole mess, Y Net says:
The storm over Nicholas Kristof’s column in The New York Times continues to reverberate a week after publication, and has created an internal rift between the newspaper’s newsroom and its opinion section.
The column, titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” includes allegations of systematic sexual abuse by Israeli prison guards and soldiers against Palestinian detainees. It cites testimony from 14 Palestinians alleging the use of batons and carrots, threats to rape family members and dogs used for sexual assault while prison staff laughed and filmed the incident.
Funny how that film has never materialized. Y net continues:
The article drew widespread reactions around the world, including protests and calls to cancel subscriptions. On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar threatened to file a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper for libel against the State of Israel. Israeli officials and the Israel Prison Service have completely denied the claims, and Netanyahu called them baseless.
Despite the official backing given to the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, many newsroom journalists have expressed significant distrust with the facts presented. According to an extensive report in Puck, later echoed by the New York Post, newsroom reporters suspect the sources behind the allegations would not have met their own professional standards.
(Dry chuckle)
Ed Driscoll links The New York Post’s Miranda Devine:
Brilliant demolition of the NYT's BS dog rape story - by veteran Australian editor Alan Howe:
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) May 20, 2026
What NYT should’ve asked before publishing its Palestinian rape story https://t.co/Jkee8Y6XMW pic.twitter.com/Ff4Jle1KXi
Yeah — that they didn't ask speaks volumes. It should have been the first clue.
Look, I will set aside — just for a moment — what I actually think of the Times and its precious "professional standards" to suggest that all this hand-wringing about a civil war inside that over-glorified paragraph factory in Queens — over one column, and over Kristoff himself — adds up to exactly one thing in the end: noise. The fact is, Kristoff still has a job because the Sulzberger clan likes his output. Period. Full Stop.
Go read the Pollack piece. If you still believe the ownership of The New York Times loses a single night's sleep over credibility that now ranks somewhere below the Titanic's hull — or that they spare even a passing thought for the supposed civil war brewing in their own newsroom — Pollack will dismantle that delusion quickly.
OK, that moment is over.
Now, consider the rich irony: The only reason the newsroom crew clutching their pearls the hardest over "professional standards" at the Times hold their jobs is because they abandoned professional standards in favor of an ideological bias long before they entered the offices at the Times. Absent that bias, The Times would never have hired them in the first place.
And before you start: True, I'm not unbiased, either. The difference being, I've never claimed or tried to be. I have never seen that as my role.
That said, let's kill this myth of unbiased reporting at The New York Times once and for all: It never existed, even before Walter Duranty, the record of whom I dove into the other day.
Related: From the Holodomor to Hamas: The New York Times Stays True to Form
And let's say the quiet part loud: The Times tilts hard left (which in this case means anti-Israel) because ownership wants it that way, and no amount of screaming from the rank and file — the soldiers in the trenches — will move that needle even slightly. Nor, for that matter, that of the stockholders, or readers.
That said, this so-called civil war does tell us something useful. Things have gotten so grotesque that even the hard-left staff — people who treat wealth redistribution and spreading untruth to support their leftist worldview as a positive personality trait — now find Kristof embarrassing enough to storm management over.
It comes down to this, gang: When the radicals running the newsroom decide management’s gone too far, that’s not just a crossed line. It means both Kristoff and the management backing him have gone completely off the map. That's the real story in all of this. And it's a story the Times will never print.
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