Free Republic

The high-school-student-organized March for Our Lives this weekend has put politicians in an unusual spot: the back seat. Although students are the driving force behind the D.C. march and sister marches around the country, elected officials and candidates from the District, Maryland and Virginia are finding ways to participate — chartering bus loads of constituents, speaking at pre-march rallies and simply planing to be in the crowd. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) is leading a contingent of D.C. students, joined by most members of the D.C. Council and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D). They will meet at Folger Park...

According to media reports, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) invited the 192 Democrat Members of the House of Representatives out to dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C. Saturday during the first day of the government shutdown. Politico’s Jake Sherman was first to report on Pelosi’s dinner. ✔ @JakeSherman PELOSI hosting a dinner for all House Dems tonight at aqua al 2..... 3:28 PM - Jan 20, 2018 The Hill’s Scott Wong reported the menu, “On the menu at Pelosi’s dinner at Acqua al 2: cheeses and meats, pasta, lots of wine and for dessert … cheesecake...

“The greatest good for the greatest number” really is: Socialism’s big lie After witnessing how mendacious, megalomaniacal dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin used linguistic trickery to tout “the greatest good for the greatest number,” thereby manipulating whole nations of people into accepting increasingly oppressive levels of collectivism, author George Orwell focused his inimitable satirical skills on debunking the type of social injustice they promoted. In Animal Farm, Orwell anthropomorphized barnyard creatures to demonstrate how evolution from a progressive welfare state to totalitarian tyranny is a self-replicating cycle. He did so by endowing animal characters with a skill authoritarian autocrats...

"if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." Just two or three generations ago, most Americans understood that George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 were written to explain how freedom is lost to totalitarianism and the intolerance that accompanies it. Big Brother, a term that many people still casually use to describe an all-knowing governing authority, comes right out of 1984. In the society that Orwell describes, all citizens are continually reminded that “Big Brother is watching you,” by way of a constant surveillance through the pervasive...

Full headline: Would you eat a burger made from INSECTS? Mealworm-based food line set to hit grocery stores in Switzerland next week Switzerland's second-largest supermarket chain, Coop, announced it would begin selling an insect burger, and insect balls, based on protein-rich mealworm. ... Swiss food safety laws were changed last May to allow for the sale of food items containing three types of insects: crickets, grasshoppers and mealworms, which are the larval form of the mealworm beetle. These insects, long used in animal feed, must be bred under strict supervision for four generations before they are considered appropriate for human...

Calling the campaign a harbinger of things to come, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders stumped Saturday for Democrat Rob Quist, who seeks to wrest Montana’s only congressional seat from Republican control. “I don’t want to make you nervous, but the eyes of this country are on Montana this week,” Sanders told an estimated 3,500 people gathered inside the University of Montana’s Adams Center in Missoula. “If you can do it in Montana, we can do it all across this country,” Sanders said. “We can create a political revolution that restores power to the working class, not just the billionaire class. That’s...

Back in 2014 Mark Zuckerberg paid $100 million to purchase 700 acres of beachfront property on the North Shore of Kauai. The estate includes 1,000's of feet of pristine shoreline providing the perfect "safe space" for the 30-year-old Silicon Valley Billionaire and his family. Unfortunately, there was just one little problem with the purchase...technically the sellers didn't own the title to all of that land due to the so-called Kuleana Act, a Hawaiian law established in 1850 that for the first time gave natives the right to own the land that they lived on. So now, according to the Honolulu...

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George Orwell might have been amused. Academia is well on its way to quite literally becoming Animal Farm. Indeed, the very first day of the latest Modern Language Association (MLA) convention featured a panel on "New Animals: Critical Theory After Posthumanism." "The animality of the dog is very different from the animality of the whale," Moira Weigel, a Ph.D. candidate from Yale explained. She is trying to "present alternatives to the language of domination and violence that still dominates the treatment of animals in films." "Moira's academic interests revolve around the intersections of film, literature, and philosophy," her web site...

The secret file that MI5 kept on the author from 1929 until his death in 1950 is being declassified Tuesday by the National Archives. It reveals that in contrast to the fictional "Big Brother," the cruel and all-seeing secret police of Orwell's classic "1984," MI5 took a surprisingly benign view of the writer. Orwell savaged the totalitarianism of Stalin's Russia in "Animal Farm" and "1984." But he was also a socialist who railed against inequality in earlier works such as "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier." The documents show Orwell _ whose real...

The Endangered Species Act has wreaked havoc for decades on rural communities, but a newly filed lawsuit could force San Francisco urbanites like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to share their pain. A federal complaint filed this week contends that the Hetch Hetchy Project, which supplies water to San Francisco and the Bay Area, has unfairly enjoyed an exemption from the “severe cutbacks” required in rural California in order to save endangered fish species. Craig Manson, who heads the Center for Environmental Science, Accuracy and Reliability (CESAR) in Fresno, said the lawsuit is aimed at addressing the “double standard” that...

Suspected dissidents disappear after midnight visits to their homes; chilling screams can again be heard from Idi Amin's infamous torture chambers, reopened after a quarter of a century of disuse. From the few that escape come tales of punishment beatings and even mass executions. Welcome to President Yoweri Museveni's Uganda. One of Britain's favourite African states in recent years has, almost unnoticed in the West, become a sinister land where a corrupt regime uses its secret police to rule through fear. The reasons for this transition are not hard to fathom. Mr Museveni has ruled Uganda since 1986, when his...

A snippet of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber speaking candidly has resurfaced, but this time it’s about himself rather than American voters. “I’m an ivory tower guy at heart and do my thing and figure I’m an honest guy and people will trust it,” Gruber told Politico in Jan. 2010. The self-description is likely to resonate with the public after several videotaped recordings surfaced this week of Gruber calling Americans “stupid” and bragging about how “a lack of transparency” was necessary to pass Obamacare. Gruber called himself “an ivory tower guy” after it came to light that he had been paid...

Tuesday night the Houston Chronicle published a story about the grand jury that indicted Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Those grand jurors who spoke with the Chronicle broke the law to do so, and they knew that they were breaking the law. They claimed that they were speaking to the newspaper to counter Gov. Perry’s “spin” on the case. That’s not the job of a grand jury, by the way. One of them is a woman named Rho Chalmers. Chalmers tried to get around her lawbreaking by attempting to build this wall of implausible deniability. Rho Chalmers, who name matches that...

The school teachers lounge is a respite from more than just bratty kids. It’s a safe zone from the long arm of Michelle Obama’s food police. Students are already revolting against the newly-implemented school snack regulations that affect what is sold in vending machines. They will probably be equally upset to learn the vending machine just across the hall – in the teachers lounge – is exempt from the regulations.

That's the title of a new book by Fred Jerome, a compilation of essays from these and other noteworthies: This anthology features essays by revolutionary thinkers, activists, and artists-including Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, civil rights activist Angela Davis, incarcerated journalist Mumia Abu Jamal, and economist Rick Wolff- addressing various aspects of a new society and, crucially, how to get from where we are now to where we want to be, living in a society that is truly fair and just. I suppose that's one way to describe their vision. I might ask the question, "fair and just for whom"?...

Actor Andy Serkis is set to direct an upcoming movie adaptation of George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm. But there will be a slight deviation from the story’s original focus: rather than serve as a cautionary tale about Communist totalitarianism, this updated version will address Hollywood’s predictable, go-to embodiment of evil, the Darth Vader of our time: corporate greed. Orwell’s brilliant allegory Animal Farm was written during World War II as a satire on Soviet Communism (and very nearly wasn’t published, critical as it was of our Russian ally). It has since been adapted to film twice, a British animated...

I'm annoyed that so many Hollywood celebrities hate the system that made them rich. Actor/comedian Russell Brand told the BBC he wants "a socialist, egalitarian system based on the massive redistribution of wealth." Director George Lucas got rich not just from movies but also by selling Star Wars merchandise. Yet he says he believes in democracy but "not capitalist democracy." Actor Martin Sheen says, "That's where the problem lies ... It's corporate America." And so on. On my TV show, actor/author Kevin Sorbo pointed out that such sentiments make little sense coming from entertainers. "It's a very entrepreneurial business. You...

As CNN points out, that is simply false: Sebelius is actually legally allowed to get insurance over the exchange but she would have to forego the employer contribution to her premiums. In the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan, that employer contribution accounts for a majority of her premiums. In order to get a private health insurance plan through Obamacare, Sebelius would have to pass up what surely amounts to more than $10,000 in annual compensation.

Apparently not satisfied with just setting fire to the 4th Amendment, NSA boss Keith Alexander's next target is the 1st Amendment. In an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog , it appears that Alexander felt he'd have a friendly audience, so he let loose with some insane claims, including suggesting that the government needs to find a way to "stop" journalists from reporting on the Snowden leaks . As noted by Politco, General Alexander isn't a fan of journalists doing anything about these documents: "I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents,...