Free Republic

Political satirist Greg Gutfeld said: The media would not know a good story if they woke up next to it after they were drunk last night. For them Benghazi is like an ugly wallflower at the prom. They just want to dance with Obama all night. It's a way of life that's not without consequences to them or us. The Washington Post Co. reported Friday an 84% drop in first-quarter profit. To be sure waltzing Obama's not the only reason. There's the mindless drivel of the style section gushing over Michelle and her latest upscale food and clothing fancies; the...

The war on the English language from gender-neutrality advocates has reached new lows in Washington state, where the governor signed a new piece of legislation dictating that the terms “fisherman,” “freshman,” and “penmanship” all be replaced because of alleged sexism. “Fisherman” will now be “fisher”; “freshman” will now be “first-year student”; “penmanship” will now be “handwriting.”

If you're like me, your college alumni association floods your inbox with email invitations to contribute, often adding invites to football games and lectures by famous alums or popular professors. Except for the moment when an appeal made directly by an administrator turned out to be a multi-page swoon over Obama, most of these imprecations are politically content-free and were designed to play on my nostalgic memories of a college as it once was, not as it is today. Both my husband and I are very grateful to our university. Without scholarships neither of us would have had an opportunity...

George Soros isn't behind everything the left does, but it sure seems like he helps fund it all. The lefty magazine Mother Jones released a tape , reportedly obtained from a Democratic Super PAC in Kentucky, in an effort to hurt Mitch McConnell's bid for reelection in the U.S. Senate. But, Mother Jones has funding baggage of its own.Mother Jones is the news outlet of The Foundation for National Progress, the left-wing "umbrella organization that exists to publish and support Mother Jones." It also founded the Media Consortium. The FNP received $485,000 in Soros funding in 2008. The Media Consortium,...

I have watched over the years how publicly unaccountable foundations have amassed billions of dollars, tax free, and spend it on dangerous, leftwing, often anti-American and anti-Israeli outfits, conferences and promoters. Taxpaying citizens opposed to abortion without restrictions, open borders, balkanization of the country, erosion of their constitutional rights, dumbed down education of their children and environmental extremism are fighting opposition very generously funded by these groups. The irony of this development is that capitalists -- like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Pew -- who owed their fortunes to American free market policies, started most of these foundations. Further, the notion of...

(Also see: Inspector General Report on Racialist Dysfunction inside DOJ .) It took a few years, but the report issued this week by the DOJ inspector general confirms reporting ( here) by PJ Media: the powerful DOJ Voting Section ran an ideologically charged attorney recruitment and hiring effort that deliberately sought left-leaning lawyers. Sources familiar with the thinking of Civil Rights Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez report that he and others in the department believe the damning inspector general report actually vindicates the attorney hiring decisions over the last few years in the Civil Rights Division. In essence, Perez...

John Stuart Mill's classic essay "On Liberty" gives reasons why some people should not be taking over other people's decisions about their own lives. But Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard has given reasons to the contrary. He cites research showing "that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging." Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that "people make a lot of mistakes." Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes, including some that were very damaging. What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other...

I’ve always been a fan of Van Gogh’s paintings. I similarly like Renior, and Seurat. Although I like some of Picasso’s early work, most of it I find a bit odd. My favorite artist however is William Adolphe Bouguereau, a 19th century French artist whose works are the polar opposite of the impressionists, literally. From the 1870s his realistic portrayal of the human form was increasingly seen as passé in an art world increasingly captivated by Impressionism – a style which influenced both Van Gogh and Seurat. By the early 20th century Bouguereau’s work had completely fallen out of favor...

A top Jewish leader said that former senator Chuck Hagel is likely to be nominated by the White House for the position of Defense Secretary on Monday, according to audio of an interview with a Jewish radio show obtained by The Algemeiner. “It’s most likely that on Monday they will announce that Hagel will be the choice,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice President of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella group that represents 50 of America’s largest Jewish organizations, to Jewish talk show host Zev Brenner. The interview took place on Saturday night. While some...

From the moment Americans learned of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre last Friday, the entire left — editorialists, columnists, broadcasters, politicians — used the occasion to promote one idea: gun control. For the left, the primary reason for just about all American gun murders is the availability of guns. I have no interest in debating gun control here. I only wish to ask the left one question: We have a massive system of drug control laws. Yet, the left is the first to argue that the war on drugs has been a failure. And whether or not one deems...

Geithner’s fiscal cliff offer might not even be able to pass Democratic SenateTreasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner did what Washingtonians call the “full Ginsburg” on Sunday. The term refers to Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer, William H. Ginsburg, who was the first to appear on all five network Sunday interview shows in one day. Mr. Geithner’s whirlwind tour revealed more of the White House’s endgame for the fiscal cliff negotiations, and it’s evident President Obama is positioning himself to the left of his own party. For the first time, Mr. Geithner revealed to Fox News’ Chris Wallace the White House determination to...

Prominent gender and media studies professors from across the country converged recently to help host what was dubbed by organizers as a “Feminist, Anti-Racist Wikipedia Edit-a-thon” to create or influence dozens of entries on the online encyclopedia.

"Barack Obama won because he recognized a new America." Or maybe an America more fluid, more insubstantial than post-election wisdom is ready to grant. You can't always tell about "new" -- a truth the human race rarely acknowledges. We'll see whether James Carville's and Stan Greenberg's words from a Democracy Corps survey stand up better than the consensus of November 1965, following the Lyndon Johnson-led slaughter of almost every Republican downwind from Barry Goldwater. Johnson, father of the Great Society, was all but run out of Washington on a rail after mucking up the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, as everyone these...

The way in which the New York Times reports good vs. evil is one of the most important stories of our time. Take the war between Israel and Hamas that is taking place right now. This war is as morally clear as wars get. Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to annihilating the Jewish state. It runs a theocratic totalitarian state in Gaza, with no individual liberty and no freedom of speech or press. In a nutshell, Hamas is a violent, fascist organization. Israel, meanwhile, is one the world's most humane states, not to mention a democracy that is so...

Books that portray ‘traditional’ images of mothers caring for their children or fathers going out to work could be barred from schools under proposals from Brussels. An EU report claims that ‘gender stereotyping’ in schools influences the perception of the way boys and girls should behave and damages women’s career opportunities in the future. Critics said the proposals for ‘study materials’ to be amended so that men and women are no longer depicted in their traditional roles would mean the withdrawal of children’s classics, such as Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series, Paddington Bear or Peter Pan. …

If Europeans could vote tomorrow (6 November) in the US election, they would back President Barack Obama over challenger Mitt Romney, numerous polls have shown. In a survey released last week by British pollster YouGov, 90% of Europeans have said that they would vote for Obama if they could cast ballots. The reason behind it is that they don’t know much about Romney, the 65-year-old former equity investor, and find his ideas leaning too far on the right. … Criticized at home for being too European, Obama collects support on this side of the Atlantic for his policies of expanding...

In the vice presidential debate, the two candidates, both Roman Catholics, were asked about their religious beliefs, how they impact the candidates' political positions and specifically about abortion. This was the response of Vice President Joe Biden: "My religion defines who I am. And I've been a practicing Catholic my whole life. And it has particularly informed my social doctrine. Catholic social doctrine talks about taking care of those who -- who can't take care of themselves, people who need help. "With regard to abortion, I accept my church's position on abortion as a -- what we call de fide...

In the vice-presidential debate, the two candidates, both Roman Catholics, were asked about their religious beliefs, about how those beliefs impact their political positions, and specifically about abortion. This was the response of Vice President Joe Biden: My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life. And it has particularly informed my social doctrine. Catholic social doctrine talks about taking care of those who — who can’t take care of themselves, people who need help.With regard to abortion, I accept my church’s position on abortion as a — what we call de fide...

For at least the last hundred years, the world's most dynamic religion has been neither Christianity nor Islam. It is leftism. Most people do not recognize what is probably the single most important fact of modern life. One reason is that leftism is overwhelmingly secular (more than merely secular: it is inherently opposed to all traditional religions), and therefore people do not regard it as a religion. Another is that leftism so convincingly portrays itself as solely the product of reason, intellect, and science that it has not been seen as the dogma-based ideology that it is. Therefore, the vast...

Dear Askel5, For many years, I thought you were a bit of a nut. A very INTELLIGENT nut, but a nut nonetheless. Your constant harping about Gramscian politics was, to my mind, weird a little paranoid. It turns out you were one hundred percent right. The move to destroy America has been very below-the-surface, highly organized, and extremely effective ... and the model has been, indeed, Antonio Gramsci's.From the work Notes on Saul Alinsky and Neo-Marxism: Remember that the primary influence for Obama's strategy comes from Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals." With that in mind..."Alinsky's tactics were based, not on...

In a swipe at the GOP presidential ticket, senior Obama adviser David Axelrod on Tuesday defended President Barack Obama’s handling of Medicare. “The president … took away subsidies, unwarranted subsidies, to insurance companies, and he used that money to help lengthen the life of Medicare by nearly a decade,” Axelrod said on CNN’s Starting Point, referencing a provision of the new health care law. “So when Gov. Romney says he doesn’t support that, obviously … that’s problematical.” …

A rally will be held Monday night in Crystal Springs, Mississippi after a black couple wasn’t allowed to get married at their church because of their race. Continue reading The Wilsons were told they couldn’t wed at the town's First Baptist Church because it goes against tradition since a black couple had never been married there in its 129-year history. Charles Wilson and his fiance, Te'Andrea, wanted to get married there, but church members got upset. The paster then asked the couple to take their wedding elsewhere. "This had never been done here before, so it was setting a new...

Every fall, it seems, Americans are subjected to the ugly spectacle of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad coming to New York to address the UN General Assembly. There, at the podium, he is placed on a par with President Obama, Prime Minister David Cameron, France's Francois Hollande, and other leaders of civilized states. Ahmadinejad has used this podium to spew his anti-American, anti-Israel hatred. And yet he receives hearty applause from the Islamist delegates seated before him. Iran signed the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights as long ago as 1948. That's when Iran was ruled by the Shah. That UNDHR contains...

Suddenly, Barack Obama wants to ban AK-47 “assault” weapons because they belong only on “the battlefield of war,” even though the LEGAL AK-47s in the U.S. are dressed-up 22-caliber semi-automatic rifles NOT used in war. New York's Nanny Mayor Mike Bloomberg wants America’s police to go on strike until the federal government adopts stricter gun laws, although I would expect that if his own security police went on strike he’d become a little nervous. Lanny Davis, former special counsel to Bill Clinton, told Sean Hannity on the radio Tuesday that the federal government should be tracking the purchase of weapons...

There was a time, within living memory, when the achievements of others were not only admired but were often taken as an inspiration for imitation of the same qualities that had served these achievers well, even if we were not in the same field of endeavor and were not expecting to achieve on the same scale. The perseverance of Thomas Edison, as he tried scores of materials before finally trying tungsten as the filament for the light bulb he was inventing; the dedication of Abraham Lincoln as he studied law on his own while struggling to make a living —...

Rising numbers of children regularly have to go without food due to chaotic parenting and chronic neglect, a charity claimed today. They are unable to concentrate properly at school and risk infections, slowed growth and impaired brain development. Kids Company, a charity for disadvantaged children, believes that as many as one million children are living with ‘food insecurity’ and are unsure where their next meal is coming from. These children typically each just ten meals each week - 11 short of the 21 meals a week needed for children to stay healthy. The charity highlighted a series of cases including...

White House salaries have jumped by nearly $5 million in the three years since Barack Obama became president, official figures show. The 468 people who work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue earn $37.8 million, the White House's annual report to Congress shows. That compares to $33.1 million in George W. Bush's last year in the Oval Office, an increase of 14.1 percent. The report was released at 4.39 p.m. Friday, a notorious time for dumping bad news just before a weekend. By statute it hhad a July 1 deadline. The White House payroll is up nearly 2 percent on last year...

You cannot understand the left if you do not understand that Leftism is a religion. It is not G0d-based (some Left-wing Christians' and Jews' claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in Leftism have as many dogmas as the most fundamentalist Christian. One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the "military-industrial complex," and...

Patriotic Americans are raised with a respect for our Founding Fathers: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington being among the most famous. But there is a sizable segment of our population who have little respect for these intellectual and political titans; instead they admire a roster of radicals, revolutionaries, and reprobates.Rather than regurgitate a stale description of these great thinkers’ ideas, which is available all over the Internet, we shall take an irreverent look at what makes these figures significant in the minds of leftists. A quick look at the “Dirty Thirty” will hopefully be...

In unrelated cases that illustrate the high price communities pay for sanctuary policies, two illegal immigrants—both with extensive criminal records—were convicted of first-degree murder this week in different parts of a border state that has longed protected the undocumented. In San Francisco a jury found Edwin Ramos, a renowned gang banger, guilty of three first-degree murder counts for the 2008 killings of a 48-year-old man and his two sons. Ramos had a lengthy criminal record when he murdered the family, but San Francisco sanctuary laws shielded him from deportation. Judicial Watch obtained public records that show police knew Ramos was...

The European Commission will propose tomorrow (18 April) introducing a minimum salary in countries like Germany where it does not exist yet, and raise wages where they are considered too low, according to a draft seen by EurActiv. Having a job is not a recipe against poverty in Europe. Indeed, more than 8% of European workers live with salaries that keep them below the poverty threshold, EU figures show. “The risk of in-work poverty is high, particularly in countries with uneven earnings distribution and low minimum wages, among people with temporary contracts and in low work intensity and single parent...

<p>A French teacher faced disciplinary proceedings Friday for allegedly urging her class to observe a minute's silence for serial killer Mohamed Merah, the day after he was shot by police.</p> <p>Education Minister Luc Chatel called for the teacher to be suspended after her class reported she had called Merah a "victim" and said his links to Al-Qaeda were invented by the media and "Sarko", referring to President Nicolas Sarkozy.</p>

The Obama administration is weighing options for sharp new cuts to the U.S. nuclear force, including a reduction of up to 80 percent in the number of deployed weapons, The Associated Press has learned.

Right-wingers tend to be less intelligent than left-wingers, and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to have racist and anti-gay views, says a controversial new study. Conservative politics work almost as a 'gateway' into prejudice against others, say the Canadian academics. The paper analyzed large UK studies which compared childhood intelligence with political views in adulthood across more than 15,000 people. The authors claim that people with low intelligence gravitate towards right-wing views because they make them feel safe. Crucially, people's educational level is not what determines whether they are racist or not—it's innate intelligence, according to...

David Brock was smoking a cigarette on the roof of his Washington, D.C. office one day in the late fall of 2010 when his assistant and two bodyguards suddenly appeared and whisked him and his colleague Eric Burns down the stairs. Brock, the head of the liberal nonprofit Media Matters for America, had told friends and co-workers that he feared he was in imminent danger from right-wing assassins and needed a security team to keep him safe. The threat he faced while smoking on his roof? “Snipers,” a former co-worker recalled. ...more...

Language barriers are obviously an impediment to communication. If one man speaks Chinese and another Swedish, it may be hard for them to settle even simple matters, let alone the deep issues of the day. Yet there can be language barriers even within a language, such as when people use ill-defined terminology. In fact, some debates rage on endlessly partially because people who have the same tongue are, sometimes unknowingly, speaking a different language. This occurs to me when I hear many arguments about Left versus Right. For example, it’s not uncommon for conservatives and liberals to debate whether groups...

Only a fool believes that all those with whom he differs are bad people. Moreover, just about all of us live the reality—often within our own family—of knowing good and loving people with whom we strongly differ on political, religious, social and economic issues. That said, I have come to believe that the more committed one is to leftism, the more likely one is to become meaner. Two examples in just the past week offer compelling evidence. Prominent left-wing commentators used the way in which Rick Santorum and his wife handled the death of one of their children to attack—make...

  Kim Is Dead, South Korea Lives David C. Stolinsky Dec. 19, 2011 North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il is dead. His third son is believed to be in line to succeed him. Aside from the fact that Kim was a bloodthirsty tyrant, I have two additional complaints. The first is that his name cannot be written properly in Arial, the font I use. The problem is that a capital i is indistinguishable from a lower-case L. So Kim Jong Il looks like Kim Jong the Second. The only alternatives are to write il in lower case as Kim Jong-il,...

Today marks the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The slain president’s wife, his successor, and the liberal media blamed the murder on Dallas’ “climate of hate.” That smear cast a pall on the innocent citizens of that city for decades. I know, because I grew up in the shadow of Big D and in the shadow of Kennedy’s killing. For decades after Nov. 22, 1963, you could go anywhere in the country, tell anyone you were from Dallas, and if you spent enough time with that person, Kennedy’s assassination would inevitably come up. Frank...

The assorted "Occupations" may be drawing to a close as even liberal mayors have lost patience with the occupation of public space and the budget drain created by aging radicals, wannabe hippies and random homeless people, hucksters, scammers and professional activists, but it isn't over because it never really began. To the left protest is an identity, which is also why the Occupations never seemed to have much of a coherent message. The purpose of their protests is to protest, the romance of the protest is all the justification that it really needs. Creating permanent protest encampments turned protests from...

I think my Ukrainian heritage fuels my twin obsessions with Soviet history and economics. Sadly, this often puts me on opposing ideological ground from my good friends and fellow alumni of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which recently helped bring Utopia in Four Movements to Iowa City's local tax-supported theater. Sam Green, the filmmaker who narrated the exploration of "the battered state of the utopian impulse," on one hand described socialism has having gone "monstrously wrong" and on the other expressed open sentimentality for the Russian and Maoist revolutions. He showed pictures of executed Cambodians and also said a copy of...

A Massachusetts law professor has created a campus firestorm with an email to colleagues that declares it would be "shameful" to send care packages to U.S. troops "who have gone overseas to kill other human beings." Michael Avery, a professor at Suffolk University Law School, sent a five-paragraph email to colleagues in response to a school-wide appeal for care packages for deployed soldiers, Fox affiliate WFXT-TV reports. "I think it is shameful that it is perceived as legitimate to solicit in an academic institution for support for men and women who have gone overseas to kill other human beings," Avery...

Keywords- owspervs, owspedophilia,occupylist List of reported occupy wall street sexual deviancy- Woman charged with pimping teen recruited at Occupy NH rally Occupy Madison Loses Permit Because Protesters were "Publicly Masturbating" Police Investigating Possible Sexual Assault Of Teen At Occupy Dallas Occupy Toronto "This Man Was in my Tent Sniffing my Girlfriend’s Feet” "Occupy" Figure Is Wanted Man In Bizarre, Oily Case (drunk ,naked, and olive oiled) ‘Occupy Cleveland’ Protester Alleges She Was Raped Sex offender registered to Occupy Portland shares story Man accused of exposing self to children arrested [ Part of Occupy Wall Street in Seattle ]

Obama won the 2008 election by default, but believed he won with a mandate to implement progressive dreams. In pursuing an aggressively leftist agenda, he has done these United States a profound service; he has clarified the fundamental ideological battle at the heart of all politics -- statism vs. individualism -- and dramatized the results that flow from such statist public policies. As a result, the American people are angrier than ever with politicians of both parties. As I say, this is a very positive development. More Americans are focused on issues of Constitutional principle than ever before. They have...

Are the anti-Wall Street protestors demonstrating against themselves? The richest and most prominent Wall Street executives almost overwhelmingly supported and bankrolled Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2008. And on Wall Street, little distinction is made between liberal Democrats and avowedly socialist activist groups. The big banks financed ACORN. Although ACORN has disbanded in the wake of scandal, the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, formerly headed by White House Chief of Staff William Daley, continues to fund similar groups committed to undermining capitalism and debasing democracy. Goldman Sachs and other big financial institutions lobbied for Dodd-Frank, which institutionalizes the "too big to...

White House plans to circumvent Congress to spend moreIt’s official: President Obama is presiding over the worst era of unemployment in U.S. history since this nation was embroiled in World War II. On Friday, it was announced zero net jobs were created nationwide in the whole month of August. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis stammered, “I do believe that we’re going in the right direction, but we need cooperation and it begins with members of the House and the Senate agreeing to do something now.” Going in the right direction? It’s a perfect admission of the cluelessness of this White House...

The emotional substrate One-sentence summary of the major point in this article: BOTH Leftists and Rightists want to change the status quo (Have you ever heard of a conservative-dominated government that a lacked a legislative agenda?). But to begin from the beginning: I did my first piece of research into the psychology of politics in 1968. It was my Masters dissertation. I have been studying the subject ever since -- now with many academic publications on it behind me. So it seems reasonable that, over four decades later, I should look back and say what I have learned in the...

  Antivirus − Not for Computers, for Ourselves David C. Stolinsky Aug. 22, 2011 Viruses infect computers and cause serious harm. But some viruses attack not computers but human minds. They do similar damage – they interfere with information processing, corrupt memory, and ultimately may cause a crash. The WeShrinkEm Virus. The “core” inflation rate understates real inflation, because it omits food and fuel − hardly an insignificant omission. But beyond this, it omits shrinking value. Paper towels now come in a “Big Roll,” which is half the size of the old roll. A laundry detergent became watery, then...

A worker stands guard beside the charred remains of House of Reeves furniture shop in Croydon, south London, which was burnt to the ground in Sunday night's violence. Good editorial by Allister Heath today about the riots and the changes this event, and the poor, lackadaisical response by authorities, has wrought: ...From royal fairytale to banana republic in one summer: it has been a shameful, embarrassing disaster, not just for the tourism industries but also for foreign direct investment. The cost in terms of lost reputation – internationally but also domestically – will be hugely higher than the £100m insurance...