Free Republic

If you aren’t creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren’t listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up. When a bunch of wealthy white women and elite Washington bureaucrats defend the trampling of religious liberties in the name of “increased access” to “reproductive services” for “poor” women, the ghost of Margaret Sanger is cackling. As she wrote in her autobiography, Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 “to stop the multiplication of the unfit.” This, she boasted, would be “the most important and...

The red line in this image shows the long-term increase in global sea level since satellite altimeters began measuring it in the early 1990s. Since then, sea level has risen by a little more than an inch each decade, or about 3 millimeters per year. While most years have recorded a rise in global sea level, the recent drop of nearly a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter, is attributable to the switch from El Niño to La Niña conditions in the Pacific. The insets show sea level changes in the Pacific Ocean caused by the recent...

Funny how some projects attract the EPA like flies to, well, you know and others? Meh. The LA Times reports: Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket. Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors — each the size of a garage door — are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will...

California continues its leading role as the national laughingstock of regulatory absurdity. This week, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), forged another link in its unbroken chain of disastrous environmental policies. New CARB regulations reflect a decision process heavily influenced by three primary sources: Joseph Stalin, Al Gore and Pee-Wee Herman. Let's look at the latest batch of lunacy from those swell 'crats in Sacramento. As an added bonus, we read from SFGATE, the reliable Left Coast mouthpiece that happily shills for the hard left Democratic mouth breathers. ".... the California Air Resources Board unanimously approved strict vehicle emissions regulations...

"The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional." -- Samuel Adams

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- A class reading assignment infuriates the parents of a 14-year-old Valley Traditional High School student. They said their daughter's questions about the book left them speechless. The book is called "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian." "She was masturbating and (describing) how to masturbate and how she did it and also giving a boy a (expletive) and going into great detail of how to perform it," said Vincent. Vincent took the book to her daughter's step-father, who became speechless. "Her being the age that she's in right now, you just freeze up. You don't know...

The following is edited from remarks given at the Nov. 11, 2011 meeting of the Communist Party National Committee.2012 is a big election year and as we know the stakes are very high. The right-wing Republican opposition unashamedly defends the wealth and privilege of the 1% over the 99% that includes tens of millions who are struggling to survive. These self-proclaimed patriots are willing to wreck our country in order to defeat Barack Obama in 2012 elections. Our party and youth league are an active part of the great democratic mass that is standing against them. These so called patriots...

President Barack Obama will ask Congress on Friday for authority to close the Commerce Department and create a new export agency, an overhaul that could save US$3-billion and help inoculate him against Republican election-year charges that he is a big-government liberal. White House budget official Jeffrey Zients told reporters the reorganization would fold together the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and other trade bodies now spread across Washington, giving businesses a single point of contact and ensuring federal spending goes further to boost exports. Obama was set to deliver remarks at 11:20 a.m. on the new, yet-to-be-named department that...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The most detailed data yet on emissions of heat-trapping gases show that U.S. power plants are responsible for the bulk of the pollution blamed for global warming. Power plants released 72 percent of the greenhouse gases reported to the Environmental Protection Agency for 2010, according to information released Wednesday that was the first catalog of global warming pollution by facility. The data include more than 6,700 of the largest industrial sources of greenhouse gases, or about 80 percent of total U.S. emissions. According to an Associated Press analysis of the data, 20 mostly coal-fired power plants in...

Obama recently signed a mysterious new law that proclaims all American soil is a "battleground," thereby allowing the president to indefinitely detain any American citizen without charges. Critics fear Obama will use his fun new unconstitutional powers to make his political enemies disappear, but that may not be necessary. The way things are going, most patriotic Americans will soon be six feet under, felled by apoplectic strokes brought on by reading the latest outrage committed by our "Commander in Chief." He may not have a limit to what he'll inflict; but our collective blood pressure may have a limit to...

The mask is fully off. Barack Obama is the most corrupt, power-mad president in this nation's illustrious history. By his actions in bypassing Congress and making appointments that should be subject to Senate approval while the Senate is still in session and innumerable extra-constitutional actions since he became president, he is following in the footsteps of the despots who dominated the 20th century. Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/obama_the_mask_is_off.html#ixzz1ig6BaFZv

Just as famed Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is preparing to release results of his investigation of Barack Obama’s eligibility for Arizona’s 2012 ballot, a top-gun activist who led a successful campaign to recall a key Arpaio ally is now targeting the sheriff himself.In the coming weeks, it will be decided whether transplanted radical attorney-activist and “community organizer” Randy Parraz can force Arpaio to resign before the sheriff’s Cold Case Posse has a chance to deliver a report in February.Parraz, who has made his career applying Saul Alinsky-style community organizer tactics for radical leftist movements in the U.S. and Canada,...

President Barack Obama rang in the New Year by signing the NDAA law with its provision allowing him to indefinitely detain citizens. It was a symbolic moment to say the least. With Americans distracted with drinking and celebrating, Obama signed one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties in the history of our country. . . and citizens partied only blissfully into the New Year. Ironically, in addition to breaking his promise not to sign the law, Obama broke his promise on signing statements and attached a statement that he really does not want to detain citizens indefinitely. Obama insisted...

To maintain flexibility, he says, he may not follow requirements that certain suspects be held by the military.President Obama signed a controversial military funding bill Saturday but vowed to interpret its measures regarding the treatment of detainees in ways that comport with his own judgment on how best to wage the fight against terrorists.In a signing statement released by the White House, Obama indicated that he might not strictly follow certain requirements spelled out in the new law, saying that "my administration will interpret and implement the provisions … in a manner that best preserves the flexibility on which our...

According to the ACLU, President Barack Obama just signed one of the most controversial bills into law since the Patriot Act. The sad part is that neither the House nor the Senate nor Obama seemed to think it was all that controversial, as it passed overwhelmingly in both the House and the Senate, and the president just signed it (even though he had at one time threatened to veto).

It didn’t take long for the See Something, Say Something campaign initiated by the Department of Homeland Security last year to show promising results. According to a report from St. Paul Minnesota’s KARE11 and NPR, actionable human intelligence is on the rise at the nation’s largest mall, and it’s being cross-referenced with personal information and threat assessments via the recently made public nationwide network of government Fusion centers. While a mystery to most Americans, the existence of Fusion centers recently made waves when they were brought to the mainstream public’s attention by talk show host Alex Jones and former governor...

The U.S. is not in desperate economic times. But we believe that we are. Years from now, when we look back at 2011, it may be remembered as one of the best worst years of the early 21st century. You’d be hard-pressed to come up with an extended period where people were more negative, yet remarkably, in the United States at least, not much actually happened. A summer debt impasse looked dramatic but in the end was resolved, and markets went up and down wildly yet ended largely where they started or better. Judged by every major economic indicator, it...

November 6, 2012

"Dear Dr. Husák", addressed to Dr. Gustav Husák, who was then the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, is Havel's first major public statement after being blacklisted in 1969. Dear Dr. Husák, In our offices and factories work goes on, discipline prevails. The efforts of our citizens are yielding visible results in a slowly rising standard of living: people build houses, buy cars, have children, amuse themselves, live their lives. All this, of course, amounts to very little as a criterion for the success or failure of your policies. After every social upheaval, people invariably come back in the...

Like millions across the world, Christmas is my favorite holiday. It’s a time to relax, spend time with family, and best of all receive obscene amounts of presents. However, Christmas has changed, and as I have grown, I have begun to see how deep the roots of political correctness have penetrated society and skewed the meaning behind the holiday. In our attempt to avoid offending others, we have lost our identity, and even though this nation is the melting pot of the world, we have strayed far from the values of our founding fathers.

In my first piece, Where the Body Is, The Vultures Are Gathered, or, For Whom the Toll Peals Part I, I introduced the work of Hilaire Belloc and his predictions for a post-Communist/post-Capitalist society, and began the discussion of the economics of simple purchases, using the example of a blacksmith shop. In the next piece, Where the Body Is, The Vultures Are Gathered, or, For Whom the Toll Peals Part II, I discussed the complications which intrude when one considers the presence of either multiple blacksmiths, or the presence of assistants, and presented counterexamples to the Marxist labor theory of...

In a prior piece, Where the Body Is, The Vultures Are Gathered, or, For Whom the Toll Peals Part I, I introduced the concept of transactions, values, and prices, for both labor and finished goods. In this section, I continue, looking at the Marxist theory of value and its applications and misapplication to the present day, and then move on to newer and/or more complex economic situations. We have seen how quickly an example of a simple exchange, between a blacksmith and a villager, becomes very complex with just the addition of more villagers, more than one blacksmith, and the...

The celebrated British apologist and essayist, G.K. Chesterton, had a good friend, Hilaire Belloc, who is now largely forgotten, but whose fame in his day caused George Bernard Shaw to refer to the pair as the “Chesterbelloc.” Among his many interests (such as writing a Foreword to a collection of P.G. Wodehouse short stories!), Belloc wrote a number of books and articles on the subject of economics. One of his most intriguing works was a book entitled The Servile State. In this book, written before the fall of the Russian Tsar and the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, Belloc...

"Is he a socialist?” asks FOX News’s blunt television host Bill O’Reilly. “I prefer to use the term that ‘he’s just over his head,’” the former governor of Massachusetts responds with what he must have thought was a safe answer. “Yeah, but you gotta’ look at his economic plan, and that economic plan was top down, federal leadership getting us out of the recession — we spent trillions of dollars–and people say, ‘Listen, the guy’s a socialist!‘ It’s class warfare; that‘s what he’s going to wage against you if you get the nomination,” O’Reilly says, gesturing towards Romney. “You’re a...

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011, essayist, provocateur, wit, atheist, Brit-American and honest man, passed away on December 15. A Socialist early in life who evolved into a Marxist and eventually into a Conservative Marxist (a distinction he coined), later in life; Hitchens played no favorites and took no prisoners with his writing, he sought victims from both the Left and the Right, using his views of incompetence and dishonesty to guide his sharp critiques of those he eviscerated with indifference and without remorse, but regardless of whether you agreed with him, and he almost always bucked public opinion, he had the ability...

Kwanzaa Is Wack: There, I Said It Kwanzaa is wack. The other day I said this on my Facebook page. Actually, what I said was:” Is it wrong of me to say that I love AFRICA, but I think Kwanzaa is wack? #ducksfromthebricks .” Now, when I said it, I meant it but gave no thought to how it might affect people. I’m kind of bad like that. A ton of people (some Black and some not) got on and said they thought Kwanzaa was wack to. I never thought about it again really. Just a funny little thread. Then...

Here's a sample of what your kids are learning at school. They're graduating with stockholm syndrome.

OAKLAND — As anti-Wall Street protesters attempt to regroup and settle in for winter after a series of police raids that stripped much of the movement of its signature camps, protesters on the West Coast are staging a comeback. On Dec. 12, Occupy movements from Seattle to San Diego say they will shut down their local ports, temporarily stopping the flow of capital on the West Coast. Organizers say they aim to disrupt the business of the “1 percent” — in this case, the corporations that own shipping terminals and do business at the ports. If successful, shutting down the...

It was a very uncomfortable Thursday for Attorney General Eric Holder on Capitol Hill as he testified before the House Judiciary Committee about Operation Fast and Furious. If it wasn’t clear that Fast and Furious was implemented as a way to push more gun control measures without the consent of Congress, it’s crystal clear now. Continued stonewalling from the Justice Department had Rep. James Sensenbrenner talking about impeachment Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers called for the enforcement of new gun control measures pushed through the Justice Department in July without the approval of Congress, requiring...

Nothing says middle-class triumph like more regulation, unionism, cronyism and endless spending. In Teddy Roosevelt's era, President Barack Obama explained to the nation this week, "some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress....But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can." And he's right. Even today there are people who believe they should have free license to take whatever they want from whomever they can. They're called Democrats. Yet the president, uniter of a fractured nation, the mighty slayer of infinite...

Most press accounts of Barack Obama's speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, Tuesday described it as delivered by the "president of the United States." And indeed the person delivering it analogized himself to Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton. In fact, the Osawatomie speech was not given by the President of the United States. It was given by the leader of the Democratic Party. Most of the time, this distinction isn't a problem in the United States because historically people have tended to think that the office of the presidency represents "all the people." This doesn't mean everyone...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Ah, you know, you people are so lucky. All you have to do is listen to this. I have to be the one to actually do it. And that's okay. This is Wednesday. Right. Okay. Pearl Harbor Day. A day that will live in infamy, absolutely right, Pearl Harbor Day. Of course yesterday was Pearl Harbor Day number two: The attack on the country by the president of the United States in that speech in Osawatomie Kansas. As I promised yesterday, we have the audio sound bites from that speech. I've studied it. It's depressing to actually...

A New Jersey high school admits that it “inadvertently” censored Christmas songs that include the words God, Jesus, Santa, Christmas and Chanukah – in place of music that would not be “belief-specific.” Colin Curran, a student at West Windsor – Plainsboro High School South, wrote about the incident in a Huffington Post blog titled, “Christmas, I mean Holiday, Music.” Curran wrote that he was in charge of creating a playlist for a holiday breakfast hosted by the student council for young children. He said the student council adviser told him to avoid any holiday music that included the words God...

Today in Osawatomie, Kan., Barack Obama laid bare his progressive agenda, calling for more federal involvement in education, increased spending on infrastructure, an extension of the payroll tax cut and increased taxes on the rich. He even invoked Teddy “the Trustbuster” Roosevelt, who, if you’ll recall, became increasingly socialistic as the sun of his national stardom began to set. Not surprisingly, Obama was disingenuous in a few places — but just a few. At one point, he said he had already signed $1 trillion in spending cuts into law. Presumably, he was referring to the cuts included in the debt...

THE EXECUTION OF THE SEAL TEAM SIX - PARTS 1 and 2 - By Ann Barnhardt - August 2011, #0, by macaense, 01 September 2011 08:26 PM THE EXECUTION OF SEAL TEAM SIX (PART 1) POSTED BY ANN BARNHARDT - AUGUST 6, AD 2011 4:08 PM MST You're damn right I said it. On May 5th I had an email conversation with a retired military man with spook contacts. All were in total agreement that the Bin Laden episode was pure theater. The SEALS were sent into a compound as evidenced by the lost chopper on site. But Osama Bin...

A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next, by David Horowitz (Regnery, 128 pp., $24.95) Death is every life’s inevitable denouement, but La Rochefoucauld told us that we can no more stare it in the face than we can stare at the sun. For the most part, we continue our daily round in a state of presumed immortality, and because we are so unfamiliar nowadays with death—it having been carefully put out of our sight by a host of professionals—we treat it as an unwarranted intrusion into our affairs rather than as an existential...

(podcast ... a must listen) Was the collapse of MF Global an accident or the calculated move of a political insider? Ann passionately lays the whole scheme bare, explaining the massive implications this has for our legal and financial systems, not to mention how investors should prepare in the face of massive corruption.

The “Occupy London” movement stormed the offices of a mining company called Xstrata today, as reported by The Australian, which found the story of great interest to its readers because Xstrata has extensive operations in Australia: About 60 protesters got inside Panton House, Occupy London Stock Exchange (OLSX) said, where the diversified Anglo-Swiss firm has its British office. Another 200 were held outside within a police cordon, in the heart of central London's West End entertainment district. Some covered their faces with masks as they swept through the building. The protesters reached the roof and unveiled a banner reading "All...

Every once in a while you need to bring yourself back down to Earth and make sure you’re prepared for hard times, no matter how optimistic you may be feeling. No, we’re not talking about the coming zombie apocalypse or the idea that the Patriots might still win the AFC East title this year. This is even more dark and foreboding. What would happen if Obama wins the election next November? That’s pretty much the point of a lengthy essay at Outside the Beltway by Doug Mataconis this week.After noting that Obama’s prospects are certainly looking dim, Doug reminds us...

The White House President Obama’s Thanksgiving Day Proclamation November 24, 2011 From my family to yours, I’d like to wish you a happy Thanksgiving! Like millions of Americans, Michelle, Malia, Sasha and I will spend the day eating great food, watching a little football, and reflecting on how grateful we are that my administration’s policies are beginning to take effect. We are especially thankful for your support that has made our achievements possible. But, there are many other blessings we share today. We’re grateful that men and women defending our country overseas can now freely love others of the same...

While necessity is the mother of invention, sloth and envy beget mediocrity and upheaval – the twin siblings of secular-socialism. It is in this vein that a rebellious and increasingly violent spirit of incoherent anarchy continues to fester in urban centers across the nation. This is most evident in the form of the envy-driven "Occupy wherever" nonsense embraced by the "progressive" establishment. Still, this Obama-supported effort to supplant, through lawless imposition, our free-market constitutional republic with some misguided conception of an outcome-based equalitocracy is rooted in much more than just good old-fashioned class warfare. Part and parcel of secular-socialism is...

Last week, I discussed how Occupy protesters are being directly aided by the mainstream media and indirectly aided by White House stimulus money, as well as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's and even Vice President Joe Biden's households. I also detailed how the mainstream media are accelerating their progressive blitz not only to hasten the second coming, or election, of President Barack Obama but also to help him and other progressives in reaching their final goal of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America." I believe the MSM are also bent to coronate a particular GOP candidate whom they feel...

“And so people in Hollywood have reached out to me, and I’ve started to put them together with each other. And they’re starting to realize that they need to figure out how to come out of the closet.” Andrew Breitbart Read on: Andrew Breitbart on Citizen Journalism, Cultural Marxism and the Tea Party | Independent Film, News and Media

“Workers of the World Unite” Karl Marx, the infamous German political philosopher had a vision. Marx, together with Joseph Engles predicted and even called for the dismantling of capitalist economic systems worldwide into a socialist and ultimately classless communist World. 24thState will be asking the question of the late Mr. Marx, “How is that working out for you?” CP USA In a series of columns, we will expose the 5th column in the United States. We will name names and expose the ties from David Axelrod, who just visited St. Louis referring to some GOP presidential contenders as “nutty folks“,...

The Occupy movement is stepping up its confrontational tactics, plotting “alternative forms of protest,” including flash mobs that can be deployed nationwide. Citing the success of last week’s so-called Day of Action protests, Take to the Square, one of Occupy’s main online planning forums, has devised an “Alternative Day of Action” to coincide with international Human Rights Day on Dec. 10. “Our freedom and dignity are under attack as a result of market dynamics and corrupt government institutions that are turning our local and global societies into increasingly unjust places,” the site complains. The Occupy forum calls for “alternative forms...

A rediscovered video from Barack Obama’s 2004 Senate race shows him road-testing his current rhetorical techniques, pitching far-left policies, and depicting business and the marketplace as negative forces. “We all have a set of mutual obligations towards each other — we are our brother’s keeper, we are our sister’s keeper — and that those mutual obligations have to express themselves through government policies,” he said at the tail end of a soft-focus, five-minute autobiographical video entitled “Introducing Barack Obama” that he released during his 2004 campaign for U.S. Senate. They’re “the kind of values that I’ve been trying to promote...

As cities across the nation clean up after the Occupy Wall Street peeps they are coming across all sorts of rubbish and filth. Needles, human feces, garbage, and now disease have all been found at the park where the occupies have been encamped. Now tomorrow the are threatening violence? I am more concerned with them associating with the public. Time to bring back leper colonies.

Obama, global labor union leaders and avowed Marxist organizations have openly, brazenly joined forces to promote Obama’s 2012 re-election. These groups are hell bent on ensuring Obama’s promised “fundamental transformation” of America is not stopped. Global redistribution of America’s “ill gotten” wealth is their common mission. Free enterprise and American capitalism is their enemy. The US media is providing 100% cover, aid & comfort for these OWS anarchists. ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, MSNBC and most print media publications are direct enemy combatants in this philosophical war against America.

Today is November 17, the two month anniversary since Occupy Wall Street began. Protestors have declared today to be an International Day of Action, calling for people to "occupy their block," to "shut down Wall Street" starting at 7:00 AM, and to "occupy the subway" starting at 3:00 PM. We have been hearing that protestors, and the NYPD, will be amassing all over the city today, and will be live blogging dispatches from our own Village Voice staff writers Rosie Gray (@_rosiegray) and Nick Pinto (@macfathom), as well as photographer C.S. Muncy (@CSMuncyPhoto), who are on the scene through out...