Free Republic

Van Jones Slams the Tea Party Again: ‘The So-Called Patriots…Smashing Down Every American Institution’By Madeleine Morgenstern | The Blaze – 14 hrs ago **SNIP** “At this point in this struggle, it’s the so-called patriots who are the ones who are smashing down every American institution….It’s the so-called patriots, the ones who come out here with their Tea Party and the flags and call themselves patriots — they’re the ones that are smashing down our unions, smashing down public education, smashing down every American institution that we built, and our parents built, and our grandparents built to make this country great.”...

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s campaign is taking aim at rival Mitt Romney’s tenure at the helm of Bain Capital..... [SNIP] Back in January, when Perry and Gingrich were hitting the former Massachusetts governor hard on his Bain tenure, Santorum had told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “I hate to sit here and be a defender of Mitt Romney, but to me this is federal capitalism, and I have to say that this is an attack probably not warranted.” “Bain Capital, at least from the record I looked at, had a lot of success,” Santorum said at the time. “I mean they...

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum touted an 11th-hour endorsement from conservative Christian leaders on Sunday ahead of South Carolina's crucial nominating contest but it appeared to have little influence on churchgoers. With South Carolina's January 21 primary approaching, time is running short for Santorum and other Republican candidates who hope to slow front-runner Mitt Romney's march to the Republican presidential nomination..... ....."I make decisions for myself and I don't listen to what a bunch of leaders say to do," said Victoria Jaworowski, who was attending the Cathedral of Praise mega-church in North Charleston. The Christian leaders meeting in Texas only...

SPARTANBURG, S.C. — Newt Gingrich signaled Wednesday that he believes his criticism of Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital is a mistake — and that he’s created an impression that he was echoing Democratic rhetoric. Gingrich conceded the problem when pressed by a Rick Santorum supporter at a book-signing here Wednesday. “I’m here to implore one thing of you. I think you’ve missed the target on the way you’re addressing Romney’s weaknesses. I want to beg you to redirect and go after his obvious disingenuous about his conservatism and lay off the corporatist versus the free market. I think it’s...

It wouldn’t shock anyone who knows me to hear that I’m not favorably disposed to the Occupy Wall Street crowd. But my opinion was reinforced while reading the latest novel by my favorite author, Philip Roth. Anyone who reads Nemesis would quickly conclude that the entire Occupy generation is a bunch of soft, overindulged whiners. Although fictional, Nemesis accurately describes conditions in Newark, New Jersey, toward the end of World War II. While many brave Americans were overseas risking their lives to fight fascism, the home front was battling the scourge of polio that was devastating the nation’s youth. The...

Even as Bank of America and other major lenders back away from charging customers to use their debit cards, many banks have been quietly imposing other new fees. Need to replace a lost debit card? Bank of America now charges $5 — or $20 for rush delivery. Deposit money with a mobile phone? At U.S. Bancorp, it is now 50 cents a check. Want cash wired to your account? Starting in December, that will cost $15 for each incoming domestic payment at TD Bank. Facing a reaction from an angry public and heightened scrutiny from regulators, banks are turning to...

Elizabeth Warren, anti-capitalism crusader and U.S. Senate candidate from Massachusetts, claimed she is the author of the intellectual foundation for OWS. As the arrests, violence and bodies continue to pile up, she’s walked that back some, but she did say it and did mean it, and, in many ways, it is true. So it does make sense the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency made by and in the image of Warren, would be a kindred spirit to the mutants of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Like Warren, the White House has gone largely silent on the “Occupiers.� The daily...

The camp forced St Paul's to close for the first time since the Blitz and is costing local businesses thousands of pounds a day. But footage shot by The Daily Telegraph on a thermal imaging camera appeared to show most of the dozens of tents in the cathedral churchyard were empty. And when the remaining protesters realised what The Telegraph was attempting to verify this, the mood turned ugly. The site was quiet at around 12.30am with the faint smell of marijuana smoke in the air. A handful of police officers stood back on the fringes of the encampment. Some...

. . . Due To Liberal "Generosity." 50 million Americans are recorded as living below the poverty line, and nearly 50 million citizens are receiving Food Stamps, compliments of the rest of the tax paying populace. Lyndon Baines Johnson originally alloted a little over 1% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product to fight the War on Poverty, which we are miserably losing. Now, over 14% of America's GDP is spent on poverty programs. Dividing the estimated GDP of $14,000,000,000,000 by 50,000,000 "poor" Americans equates to each poor American receiving some sort of welfare in the amount of $280,000 per person. Don't...

Progressive TV and radio star Thom Hartmann took time off from covering Van Jones and his “Rebuild the Dream” movement on Wednesday to briefly talk to this columnist about his relationship with the Vladimir Putin regime of Russia. The conversation quickly went sour when Hartmann objected to questions about how much he is being paid by Moscow. He grabbed my video camera, covering the lens briefly in the process, and stomped away, objecting to “gotcha” questions.The entire spectacle was captured on camera and posted on YouTube.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9Rz9fKXXdE During another embarrassing incident, Van Jones refused to sign a copy of his...

Obama is the first US president to address the joint houses of parliament [Reuters] Barack Obama, the US president, has addressed the British parliament, saying that Western influence remains strong in the world, despite emerging world powers such as China, India and Brazil. In a speech to both houses of parliament on Wednesday, Obama said that Western powers still had a responsibility to uphold "universal rights", but stressed that this work must be done through multilateral forums like the G20. "Even as more nations take on the responsibilities of global leadership," Obama said, "our alliance will remain indispensable to the...

. . . . .NOTE:  This post will be constantly updated with more details throughout the Glenn Beck radio program.  Glenn has announced that copies of this have been delivered to JP Morgan Chase, the FBI, and the Justice Department.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvlvejSxBVQ&feature=player_embedded] "Steven Lerner, reported to have visited the White House on at least four separate occasions, formerly of SEIU and the architect of the SEIU's groundbreaking Justice for Janitors campaign.  He led the union's banking and finance campaign and has partnered with unions and groups in Europe, South American and elsewhere in campaigns to hold financial institutions accountable. As director of...

FULL Title - Former SEIU Official Reveals Secret Plan To Destroy JP Morgan, Crash The Stock Market, And Redistribute Wealth In America A former official of one of the country's most-powerful unions, SEIU, is detailing a secret plan to "destabilize" the country. Specifically, the plan seeks to destroy JP Morgan, nuke the stock market, and weaken Wall Street's grip on power, thus creating the conditions necessary for a redistribution of wealth and a change in government. The former SEIU official, Stephen Lerner, spoke in a closed session at a Pace University forum last weekend.

The Doofus Defense is under attack. As longtime readers know, I coined that term leading up to the trial of Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, who, facing criminal charges, suddenly claimed to be woefully ignorant of their company's actions. In the recent financial crisis, bank executives were among the biggest doofuses (doofi?). Most insisted they couldn't have seen the crisis coming. No one could. It was — cue the Wall Street cliché machine - "the perfect storm." Consider, for example, Lehman Brothers, whose bankruptcy precipitated the Great Recession in September 2008. Lehman's CEO, Dick Fuld, had one reported...

Bill Clinton: Drilling delays 'ridiculous' By: Darren Goode March 11, 2011 04:55 PM EST Former President Bill Clinton said Friday that delays in offshore oil and gas drilling permits are “ridiculous” at a time when the economy is still rebuilding, according to attendees at the IHS CERAWeek conference. Clinton spoke on a panel with former President George W. Bush that was closed to the media. Video of their moderated talk with IHS CERA Chairman Daniel Yergin was also prohibited. But according to multiple people in the room, Clinton, surprisingly, agreed with Bush on many oil and gas issues, including criticism...

On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in Midtown Manhattan. The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential. Drawn from giants like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the bankers form a powerful committee that helps oversee trading in derivatives, instruments which, like insurance, are used to hedge...

Oliver Stone's uber-villain Gordon Gekko is back in the new film, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which (surprise!) features greedy capitalists behaving badly.

“I don’t get it,” my friend said, shaking his head. “Obama is supposed to be so smart and such a brilliant politician … ” “Right,” I said. “So?” “So everything he has done or wants to do is a disaster! It’s all opposed by the majority of the American people. Even Democrats are running away from him as fast as they can. If he’s such a great politician, why does he keep doing things most people hate? And that’s not the worst part. When people complain, he calls them too dumb to appreciate what he’s doing for them!” Why indeed....

Several months ago a huge billboard appeared near Wyoming, Minnesota, with a beaming photo of George W. Bush with the caption “Miss me yet?” The answer to that question is clearly yes, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research poll, which shows the former president staging a remarkable political recovery despite having largely disappeared from public life since leaving office: By 47 to 45 percent, Americans say Obama is a better president than George W. Bush. But that two point margin is down from a 23 point advantage one year ago. ...The CNN poll is of course deeply humiliating for the...

Anarchists have used the black flag as a symbol at least since the early 1880’s. The origin of the symbol is not clear, but it was adopted and bonded to anarchism during the latter half of the 19th century. Some claim it has its origin in the use of black flags by pirates, which ships were navigated over the seven seas through the work of free men and the captain usually elected and subject to instant recall. Pirates were also thoroughly hated by the ruling class(es) and the pirate symbol due to these circumstances to some extent embodied the spirit...

It was decided at the Communist Party, USA's recent national convention that the Party will continue to mobilize primarily in order to combat the efforts of the ultra-right. This article is meant to illustrate the basic reasoning behind two ideologies most exhibited by the modern right-wing. It is not meant to address specific issues with which one differs from the right, but to assist in responding to such issues by summarizing the right's ideological foundations. The ideologies of the right may seem non-sensical to those who do not count themselves among the conservative camp, but their ideological systems are actually...

Earth Day on April 22 isn’t just about environmental rallies and the mounds of trash in their wake. It’s also a reminder that there’s a lot of green to be made from green companies. The IBD 100 list of the very best stocks based on fundamental and technical factors includes several eco-friendly firms: 3. Aixtron (AIXG) The German company makes equipment used to make LED, or light-emitting diode, chips. LEDs are fast gaining steam as a green lighting alternative. They use far less power than incandescent bulbs without the mercury of fluorescents. LED chips are used in many different types...

Arrayed around a long mahogany table in the White House state dining room last week, the CEOs of the most powerful financial institutions in the world offered several explanations for paying high salaries to their employees — and, by extension, to themselves. * * * But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that.” “My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”...

(snip) "LeBlanc also wants the “peace movement” to help President Obama overcome the opposition to achieving his goal of a world free of nuclear weapons. The nuclear disarmament movement in the US and around the world is beginning to rebuild, premised on the idea that if President Obama is able to challenge those who want to maintain nuclear superiority, it is going to take a grassroots movement like the one in the 1980s that compelled a nuclear disarmament agreement and moved the US government to sign treaties. Now at this point the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which has been languishing...

Barack Obama has a thing for Marxists. He befriends them, listens to their counsel, and he even hires them to work in his campaign. And they seem to feel the warmth.

Gather at 12noon at the White House (Lafayette Park) People from all over the country are organizing to converge on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq. On Saturday, March 20, 2010, there will be a massive National March & Rally in D.C. Gather at 12 noon at the White House (Lafayette Park). There will be coinciding mass marches on March 20 in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The national actions are initiated by a large number of organizations and prominent individuals. To see a list of the...

Oliver Stone's latest attack on American capitalism - "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" is finally hitting theaters April, 2010, twenty-three years after its predecessor. According to Michael Lewis, who interviewed the moviemaker for his latest Vanity Fair piece, Stone's biggest problem with the sequel was making a movie based on helplessly diabolical bankers, actually watchable. Lewis wrote that Stone - an ardent left-wing ideologue, friendly acquaintance to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, and director of "W" and "Platoon" - felt an obligation to reverse the societal damage and unintended consequences of the first installment. "As a vehicle of change ......

The Obama college years remain a black hole in Obama's past. We really don't know much about Obama's college years other than the first few college years were a blur of drug usage and partying.

While frantically falling over each other to associate Bush-hating suicide bomber Joe Stack with the Tea Party movement (I thought Tea Parties were supposed to be an 'astroturf' front group for the GOP), the news media have conveniently managed to leave out the fact that he rejects capitalism, sympathizes with communism and has never in any way been affiliated with the Tea Party movement...

Clues about what led to Thursday incident were few, but attention was directed at a message on a Web site registered to Stack appears to be a suicide note. "If you're reading this, you're no doubt asking yourself, 'Why did this have to happen?' " the message says. "The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time." In the lengthy, rambling message, the writer rails against the government and, particularly, the IRS. See text of the note (PDF)

Today Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi accused the pilot of the plane that smashed into the IRS building in Austin, Texas of being a teabagger terrorist.

Second of two parts. The pending federal effort to lessen carbon emissions, especially from coal-fired power plants – called the “cap-and-trade program” – has one single goal: To improve air quality and slow down global warming – if, that is, global warming actually exists. As environmentalists favor cap-and-trade as an incentive to decrease harmful emissions, while the bill moves from the House of Representatives to the U.S. Senate, opponents say it will cause nothing but an economic disaster, especially for Pennsylvania’s coal industries. And there are two extreme views on global warming. From the National Geographic: “Glaciers are melting. “Sea...

Obama said the White House forum will gather CEOs, small business owners, economists, financial experts and representatives from labor unions and nonprofit groups "to talk about how we can work together to create jobs and get this economy moving again." "We all know that there are limits to what government can and should do, even during such difficult times. But we have an obligation to consider every additional, responsible step that we can take to encourage and accelerate job creation in this country," he said.

Apparently science has discovered the one force in nature that can silence Michael Moore: The Oprah Winfrey Show. With the premiere of his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, looming on September 16 at the Toronto Film Festival, normally you’d expect to find Moore filling up every inch of media, shocking the bourgeoisie with his trademark Angry Guy Banging on the Palace Walls shtick, providing Matt Drudge with a new outrageous quote every news cycle. But Moore has been strangely silent in this run-up and the LA Times‘ Patrick Goldstein has learned that he plans to keep a lid on...

WASHINGTON – The White House is turning to the Internet to hit back at a Web posting that claims to show President Barack Obama explaining how his health care reform plans eventually would eliminate private insurance.

Four of the most powerful business leaders in America arrived at the White House one day last month for lunch with President Barack Obama, sitting down in his private dining room just steps from the Oval Office. But even for powerful CEOs, there’s no such thing as a free lunch: White House staffers collected credit card numbers for each executive, and carefully billed them for the cost of the meal with the president.

Modern American liberalism, as it emerged in the 1920s, was animated by a revolt against the masses. Liberal thinkers accused the great unwashed of smothering creative individuals in a blanket of materialist, spiritually empty cultural conformity. The liberal project was, so to speak, to refound America by replacing its business civilization—a “dictatorship of the middle class,” as Vernon Parrington put it—with a new, more highly evolved leadership. But along with the ideal of the spontaneous, creative individual, liberals also embraced government economic planning, which depended on making people more predictable. The tension between the two aspirations was resolved, rhetorically at...

Rasmussen Poll: Just 53% of Americans Say Capitalism Better Than Socialism... Developing...

The Obama administration wants to reduce oil consumption, increase renewable energy supplies and cut carbon dioxide emissions in the most ambitious transformation of energy policy in a generation. But the world’s oil giants are not convinced that it will work. Even as Washington goes into a frenzy over energy, many of the oil companies are staying on the sidelines, balking at investing in new technologies favored by the president, or even straying from commitments they had already made. Royal Dutch Shell said last month that it would freeze its research and investments in wind, solar and hydrogen power, and focus...

You know you're in trouble when Old Europe chastises you for being too socialist. But, hey, nobody's perfect — except maybe Michelle Obama, who landed in London with a huge Obama entourage, wearing a daffodil yellow dress and looking like a confident ray of U.S.A. sunshine. As President Obama renegotiates the terms of American leadership this week in Europe, those of us left at home struggle to get over our affluenza. That condition, the bane of the middle class, is defined in a book of the same name as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and...

London - Angry protestors shouting "shame on you" and "storm the banks" clashed with police outside the Bank of England during anti-globalization demonstrations in London Wednesday. Some 4,000 demonstrators converged on the central bank in the City of London, where windows of banks and offices were smashed. Police said 11 people had been arrested by lunchtime and riot police had been deployed. At one point, several hundred demonstrators attempted to break through barriers to reach the heavily-guarded and boarded-up central bank building. Windows at the Royal Bank of Scotland, which has been a key target for critics during the banking...

By Michelle Malkin  •  March 25, 2009 11:48 AM Have you seen this? It’s the handiwork of an “anti-capitalist vigilante group calling itself Bank Bosses Are Criminals.” The broken window is in the home of Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland. His car was also vandalized. The thugs are threatening other targets: The ex-banker’s £3 million Edinburgh house was targeted in the early hours, with at least four ground-floor windows smashed and a black Mercedes vandalised. Police were called at around 4.15am to Morningside, a leafy suburb of the Scottish capital lined with substantial, stone-built...

Some WallStreet economists think President Obama could have voiced some sympathy about the plight of frightened shareholders when he compared the stock market's plunge to an election tracking poll that "bobs up and down, day to day." They worry that the president is underestimating the important role the stock market plays in the economy's performance, and that the markets' precipitous slide is actually a vote of no confidence in the administration's handling of the economy. There's also a suspicion that Mr. Obama and his advisers think only wealthy people own stocks. "There is some of that feeling that rich people...

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama is comparing the stock market to the daily tracking polls used during campaigns, saying that paying too close attention to Wall Street's "fits and starts" could lead to bad long-term policy. Obama spoke to reporters Tuesday after meeting in the Oval Office with visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Obama said he is not measuring policies against "the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market," but by whether lending is flowing more freely, businesses are investing and the unemployed are going back to work. He said he is "absolutely confident" that those things will happen....

Dow 6,919 -144.24

By contrast, the implosion of Wall Street, followed by Paulson's escalating series of multibillion-dollar rescues, has fired up populist sentiments that were already building in American politics, promising to reshape legislative battles over everything from tax and trade policies to federal regulation. Union leaders like the AFL-CIO's John Sweeney suddenly sound as if they're in the mainstream of public opinion with statements like this: "One thing is certain. No one - no politician, no investment banker, no television commentator, no economist - should be able to say again with a straight face that here in the United States we just...

A moratorium on the opening of new fast food restaurants in one of the poorest areas of Los Angeles moved one step closer to reality on Tuesday in a measure aimed at countering obesity.A Los Angeles city council planning committee unanimously approved a one-year ban, which could be extended for a further year, on new fast food outlets in a 32-square-mile (82-sq-km) area of Los Angeles.

Barack Obama told a group of Florida donors Friday night that Republicans will try to make voters afraid of him, and suggested they would use his race to scare up votes for John McCain. Apparently girding for a nasty general election fight, the Illinois senator has in recent days predicted that independent GOP groups are waiting in the wings to attack him, and said his presumptive GOP rival is already “fear-mongering” when it comes to foreign policy. But his comments Friday night in Jacksonville, Fla., seemed to reflect elevated concerns that his campaign to be the first black president would...

Ideologies: Once in a while the truth accidentally tumbles out on global warming activists' real agenda. That's exactly what happened at the U.N., when Bolivia's leader called for ending capitalism to save the planet. Delivering the keynote address at the United Nations forum on Indigenous People on Monday, Bolivia's President Evo Morales told the adoring crowd that "if we want to save our planet earth, to save life, to save mankind, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system."Morales elaborated on that by calling for an end to "unbridled industrial development, extraction of natural resources, excessive...