Free Republic

"...And Leo was never a card-carrying communist; he was a Democrat all his life...he went to some meetings (Communist Party USA) and was interested in what they had to say..." - Eileen Ryan Penn, mother of Sean Penn, on her husband and Sean's father, blacklisted Communist...meeting attender...Leo Penn

Comrade Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, is starting to do all of the destructives things anyone with any brains could foresee. De Blasio is owned by two factions of the Left: the teacher’s union and the Working Families Party (WFP). The teachers union is closing in on an unheard of eight year contract. The teachers know they have to nail down their benefits now because things will be different when sanity returns to New York and de Blasio is shown the door. They looked at the stunts Wisconsin public service unions pulled and opted for guaranteed...

Kim Ji-gwan has a succinct explanation for why he, his father, and two brothers all chose to go to jail rather than be drafted into the South Korean armed forces. “It is very simple,” says Mr. Kim, chatting in a coffee shop in the city’s posh Kangnam district. “Jesus commanded all his followers to love your neighbor.” In the past, the US and many other countries accepted religious beliefs as grounds for opting out of military service. Not so South Korea, where men still serve a minimum of 21 months in the military. The UN Human Rights Council reports that...

Professor Rummel explained in the very first sentence of “Death by Government” that “Power kills; absolute power kills absolutely. … The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects.” That’s the long, tragic, ugly story of government: the elite’s use of government to dupe and forcibly impose its will on the masses. The masses are always duped by well-intentioned phrases. After all, what German could have been against “A Law to Remedy...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Monday warned Russian President Vladimir Putin against moving "overtly or covertly" into eastern Ukraine and said there was strong evidence that pro-Russian demonstrators in the region were being paid.

Sen. James Inhofe (R- OK) is taking a stand against the steady stream of job-killing, price-raising regulations coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency. Inhofe says he'll force Congressional review of any new EPA regulations relating to the Clean Air Act from going into effect until the agency conducts a full review of these policies and their impact on the American economy.

There is a pastime among liberal pundits — the latest is Nicholas Kristof — to quote a new center left global ranking (with unbiased titles such as “The Social Progress Imperative”) and then to decry that the United States is behind its major industrial competitors in things like “Internet Access” and “Ecosystem sustainability.” The subtext of these rants is that an illiberal, reactionary U.S. does not spend enough on government entitlements to promote parity, equality and social justice among its citizenry. These pessimistic rankings increase the angst about the American condition when viewed from scowling perches in Washington or New...

But now they’re baaaack. According to organizer David Swanson, “Awareness has grown, education has spread, and ideas have sunk in. People now know that we can’t lift up the poor without pulling down the plutocrats. It’s understood that we can have democracy or billionaires, not both. The notion of shifting priorities is even making headway; behind the screaming of ‘no cuts!’ and ‘less spending!’ there’s a steady, rising voice – ebbing and flowing like the ocean – insisting that we can move the money from the military and the oil corporations and the bankers to green energy and schools and...

Sinclair Lewis was wrong—when fascism came to America, it was actually wrapped in a rainbow flag and wearing an ascot. How else can one describe the ongoing left-wing commitment to the stamping out of free speech, whenever that speech contradicts the gay agenda, as well as other parts of the “progressive” platform? With the resignation of newly minted Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, the “progressive” Left, especially its social wing, has once again shown itself to be the enforcers a political correctness in speech and thought that ought to be chilling to any person who actually cares about individual liberty. It’s...

Agenda 21, the United Nation’s open plan for global sustainability, is widely understood to be voluntary. Critics of the scheme, however, insist the UN is engaging in double-speak, and that this so-called “volunteer” status is actually creating a world government through the interlinking of UN bureaucracies and international corporations. It is appears now they may be right, this time involving a place most households in the Western world cannot avoid, the grocery store. As it turns out, every item scanned at Wal-Mart, America’s top food reseller with an estimated 25% of market share, supports Agenda 21 through a little known...

“Common Core will be raising good little socialists, who are in tune with their feelings, not so much their critical thinking skills.” - Author unknown I have seen many educational fads come and go, trying to replace teaching methodology in our public schools with something so revolutionary and never tried before that would make teaching a “science” instead of an art and to place all children into a national standardized one mold fits all in spite of the human variability in intelligence, talent, aptitude, ability, and the desire to learn. All these fads were driven by the Department of Education’s...

Buenos Aires (AFP) - Argentine President Cristina Kirchner claimed Wednesday that the Falkland Islands serve as a nuclear base for the NATO alliance in the South Atlantic. Argentina, which calls the archipelago the Malvinas, claims the British overseas possession as its own, and fought a brief but bloody war for it in 1982. The islands, she said, "constitute a NATO military nuclear base in the South Atlantic -- this is the truth that they can't continue to hide." She alleged the archipelago is "among the most militarized areas in the world," saying some 1,500 soldiers and 2,000 civilian military personnel...

Russia wasn’t all bad for Ukraine. A 45% reduction in the price of natural gas and what was supposed to be an additional $15 billion in aid was a necessary “lifeline”, the International Monetary Fund’s Christine Lagarde said on Wednesday. Speakqing to PBS News Hour on April 2, IMF's Managing Director Lagarde said, “The economy of Ukraine was against the wall and heading for disaster. It’s an economy that needed reforms, that Ukraine needed profound transformation of its fiscal policy, monetary policy and on its policy on energy to mention just the key ones. Without the lifeline it was getting...

UPS is firing 250 Queens, N.Y., drivers for walking off the job during a 90-minute protest in February. The company dismissed 20 of the workers after their shifts Monday and issued notices of termination to another 230 employees, notifying them that they will be fired once the company has trained their replacements, UPS spokesman Steve Gaut told Business Insider. The workers were protesting the dismissal of longtime employee and union activist Jairo Reyes, who was fired over an hours dispute, according to Gaut. The New York Daily News first reported on the firings. Local politicians are threatening to cancel city...

KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s Parliament on Tuesday ordered law enforcement agencies to immediately disarm unofficial paramilitary groups, signaling growing resolve in the interim government to confront nationalists and other vigilantes who played a big role in the overthrow of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the country’s pro-Kremlin former president who was deposed more than a month ago. The bill, introduced and passed unanimously, ordered both the Interior Ministry and the Security Service of Ukraine, the country’s successor to the K.G.B., to disarm the groups because of the “aggravation of the crime situation and systematic provocations on the part of foreigners in southeastern...

More details are emerging about what was presented at the "White Privilege Conference" held in Madison, Wisconsin, where tax money was spent to train teachers how to annihilate "white privilege" and "white supremacy" in American schools. One session insisted that whites can never be cured of their permanent racist attitudes. On March 30, Breitbart reported on the conference, now in its fifteenth year. Over these years, teachers have been told that whites have been pushing "white supremacy" on kids since the country was created, and that whites are so infused with racism that they aren't even cognizant of their crimes....

A mother in Arkansas has expressed concern over her daughter’s recent Common Core school assignment that asked her to remove and replace two of the first ten amendments of the Constitution. The team assignment stated that the Bill of Rights is “outdated and may not remain in its current form any longer.” Here is a copy of the assignment:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE PHOTO The mother who spoke up said she was particularly troubled by the fact that her daughter’s Sixth Grade History class had received no prior training in civics or how to amend the Constitution, which may...

China Seizes An Insane $14.5 Billion Worth Of Assets From Family Of Former Security Official Benjamin Kang Lim and Ben Blanchard, Reuters Mar. 30, 2014, 8:38 AM BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese authorities have seized assets worth at least 90 billion yuan ($14.5 billion) from family members and associates of retired domestic security tsar Zhou Yongkang, who is at the center of China's biggest corruption scandal in more than six decades, two sources said. More than 300 of Zhou's relatives, political allies, proteges and staff have also been taken into custody or questioned in the past four months, the sources, who...

Saving The Planet: It used to be said that socialism was the opium of the liberal intelligentsia. But now the drug of choice for the elite is environmentalism. The dirty little secret of the modern green movement is that it's become a luxury good for the uber-rich who espouse policies — from carbon taxes to renewable energy standards to closing down coal plants — that impose high costs on poor people who can least afford to pay the green tab.

At 63, Chuck Schumer can still dance—for awhile. But eventually, age or ambition caught up with the New York senator. On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough grilled Schumer over Harry Reid's accusation, uttered on the floor of the Senate, that the Koch brothers are "un-American." For as long as he could, Schumer moonwalked away from Scarborough's question as to whether the Kochs are un-American. As one of Harry Reid's top lieutenants—and a lean and hungry senator who almost surely aspires to take Reid's leadership role when the opportunity arises—Schumer was on the spot. But Scarborough to his credit was relentless,...