Free Republic

DEMOCRATS ARE BLOCKING RESOLUTION TO HONOR LADY THATCHER Katherine Rosario April 11, 2013 One would naturally think it impossible that anyone would hesitate – even for an instant – to honor the woman who tackled communism head on as prime minister of Great Britain. Lady Margaret Thatcher was a principled politician who helped to foster the special relationship between Great Britain and the United States that we all benefit from today.A Senate resolution to honor Lady Thatcher was supposed to pass last night. However, per well placed sources on the Hill, Democrats have a hold on the resolution.To refuse to...

Beijing: China's new Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has warned cadres of a Soviet-style collapse if the party is confronted with ideological dissent, military disloyalty and corruption, the deadly mix that led to the dramatic disintegration of once mighty Soviet Union. China must heed the still "deeply profound" lessons of the former Soviet Union, where political rot, ideological heresy and military disloyalty brought down the governing party, Xi, 59, reportedly told party leaders during his tour of Guangdong province in December last year soon after his election as the General Secretary of the ruling party a month before. "Why did...

Germany’s socialist Left party want a 100 percent tax on anyone earning over €500,000 ($683,100) and will be including the policy in their general election campaign platform, a newspaper reported on Friday. “We are suggesting that no-one should earn over 40 times the societal minimum,” said The Left’s co-leader Katja Kipping in the party's draft election platform, which was seen by regional newspaper the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. The party paper said the total tax on those taking home over €40,000 ($54,648) per month would be used to fund social welfare and investing in the country’s future. …

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

Ramón Mercader from Barcelona killed Trotsky with an ice axe in Mexico City. On 20th August 1940, the exiled Leon Trotsky was fatally wounded at his home in a suburb of Mexico City when an ice axe was driven into his skull. He cried out to his guards as they burst into his study, ‘Don’t kill him! He must talk.’ Despite struggling fiercely, and even managing to bite the hand of his assassin, Trotsky died the next day, and the man who wielded the murder weapon was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He insisted throughout his trial and his...

memory hole reminder The first documentary evidence that Vietnamese communists were directly steering John Kerry’s group Vietnam Veterans Against the War has been discovered in a U.S. archive, according to a researcher who spoke with WorldNetDaily. Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2004/10/27207/#615wufvA5oZXKuWK.99

Rosa Brooks serves as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy. In May 2010 she also became Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and then Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy. She is running a new Pentagon office dedicated to those issues. She is on leave from her job as a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Brooks is known as a columnist (most recently with the LA Times) and at the Pentagon her portfolio has included both human rights issues and global engagement and strategic communication. Her mother, Barbara Ehrenreich, is...

For decades, it was one of the enduring disputes of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. Was Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, really a secret Communist, as the white-only government of the time alleged? Or, as he claimed during the infamous 1963 trial that saw him jailed for life, was it simply a smear to discredit him in a world riven by Cold War tensions? Now, nearly half a century after the court case that made him the world’s best-known prisoner of conscience, a new book claims that whatever the wider injustice perpetrated, the apartheid-era prosecutors were indeed...

The most striking proof that the Arab anti-Israel cause is a common meeting ground for both Nazis and Communists --and that the Arabs welcomed supporters of both ilks-- lies in the friendship of Carlos, the notorious master terrorist who served the PLO, with Fran*ois Genoud, an old Nazi, one of the leading Nazis in pre-War Switzerland, later a financier who provided funds for Habash's faction of the PLO. "Carlos" (his nom de guerre) was what is called a "red diaper baby." His fabulously rich father, a Venezuelan lawyer and owner of estates, gave "Carlos" the name Ilich, Lenin's patronymic, as...

I REGRET that it was only upon reading his obituary this month that I first learned of Nguyen Chi Thien. He was a courageous Vietnamese dissident who had spent nearly 30 years in prison for his opposition to communist repression, cruelty, and lies. Much of Nguyen's opposition was expressed in poetry, most famously "Flowers from Hell," a collection of poems he memorized behind bars, and only put down on paper after being released from prison in 1977. The poems were published after he audaciously handed off the manuscript to British diplomats at their embassy in Hanoi, the AP obituary recalled....

This is perhaps the most lucid, even-handed, and convincing examination to date of the threat that President Obama - and his potential reelection - poses to our republic. No one who reads I Am the Change will come away thinking this election is about the economy. In truth, this election pits America's founding principles against Obama's efforts to transform them. Obama noted as much in October 2008, declaring in a rare moment of candor, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." Kesler cautions: "Those words mean this will be a different country when he's...

Recently, a delegation from Tucson composed of some of the survivors of the mass shooting of January 2011, in which Rep. Gabby Giffords was gravely injured, met with the U.S. attorney general, urging him to take action and letting him know they expect President Obama to present a specific plan to reduce the horrific gun violence plaguing the nation. In the wake of the two mass shootings this summer, some American physicians consider this country's gun violence a social disease. Mass murders of citizens by other citizens occur here with a frequency seen in no other nation in the world....

The violence unleashed in Kyrgyzstan is being spun as ethnic rioting. The reality is a good deal more complex, and the blame can be laid directly at Russia's door. Russia's coup against the Bakiyev government which took power in the Tulip Revolution leveraged Uzbek separatists in the Osh Province to suppress Kyrgiz nationalist supporters of Bakiyev. Russia had been trying for a while to force out Manas Air Base, a US air force base that serves as a vital link to US forces in Afghanistan. Russia tolerated Bakiyev, so long as he was against the US base. But once Bakiyev...

Intra-party rivals may pull him down Prime Minster Nguyen Tan Dung's grip on Vietnam's government is weakening. The Vietnamese premier is under attack by intra-party rivals who don't like his rich friends and fault his management of the economy. If Dung goes down, important changes in Vietnam's management of economic and social issues are likely to follow. As a rule, Vietnam's Communist Party doesn't wash its dirty linen in public. Its spokesmen work hard to maintain the party's aura of competence and infallibility. Party members don't gossip with outsiders about party matters. Decisions made by the party's Politburo or its...

The Communist who's the subject of the stunning new biography by Paul Kengor is Frank Marshall Davis. He's the black poet, journalist, and activist whom the young Barack Obama hung out with as a teenager in Hawaii, then wrote a weird, disturbingly affectionate poem about entitled "Pop" while a student at Occidental College. He's the man whom President Obama describes as his mentor in the latter's autobiography, Dreams from My Father. Here's Kengor's summary of the man our president so admires:

Black radical WEB DuBois, who later joined the Communist Party, was the organization's first director of publicity and research, as well as editor of the group's monthly publication The Osiris. This publication gave DuBois an excellent outlet from which to pour forth all manner of racial invective against whites, supposedly in the name of "promoting equality." .... DuBois was known to have "hailed the Russian Revolution of 1917" and he travelled to the Soviet Union in 1926 and 1936. He especially liked 'the racial attitudes of the Communists'." In 1922 the NAACP started to receive grants from the Garland Fund,...

The New Haven People’s Center serves as the headquarters of the Connecticut Communist Party USA and several of its fronts including the Greater New Haven Peace Council and a city funded City of New Haven Peace Commission. It is lead by well known Communist Party leaders Art Perlo, Al Marder and Joelle Fishman – head of the Communist Party Commission, which is charged with working with the Democratic Party.

The evidence and documented testimony is overwhelming. If you study it, there can be no doubt regarding Obama’s ideological preferences and loyalties ... "Our goal as socialists is to abolish private ownership of the means of production,” explained David Green of the DSA National Political Committee. “Our immediate task is to limit the capitalist class’s prerogatives in the workplace….” America under the DSA would resemble the Soviet Union....

Opposition from state veterans groups prompted Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to reverse his support Monday for using state funds to repair a New Haven community center that houses a Communist newspaper. Malloy, whose administration has gone back and forth on whether to finance $300,000 in renovations for the New Haven People's Center, issued a brief statement during the State Bond Commission meeting before moving on to the next agenda item without discussion. And one of the two Republican legislators who spearheaded opposition to the funding, Rep. Sean J. Williams of Watertown, said after he would ask the Democratic governor's administration...

The state debt clock for Connecticut indicates that 10% of the state's population currently receives food stamps. Broken down by citizen, every state resident is approximately $11,000 in debt due to government spending. Given the state's unemployment numbers, approximately 8%, combined with tax rates and breaks, we know not all of them will pay much, if anything, in taxes. Now, meet Joelle Fishman. She is head of the state communist party and is associated with other far leftist causes and organizations. Joelle Fishman chairs the Connecticut Communist Party USA. She is a Commissioner on the City of New Haven Peace...