Free Republic

The collapse of the Soviet Union had many effects but one was a split in the Communist Party USA. A number of Communist Party officials and activists, with the Soviet Union no longer there to offer instructions and funding, and disillusioned with the dictatorial rule of Party leader Gus Hall, left to form their own group, the Committees of Correspondence (CoC), also known as the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) Mitchell, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which she called “the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe”, complained that it “left the United States in...

Is there something fishy about algae? Is it the revolutionary new fuel source opportunity the Obama administration represents it to be? Last February, in a University of Miami campaign speech intended to pacify prospective pump price-panicked patrons, the president said: "We're making new investments in the development of gasoline and diesel and jet fuel that's actually made from a plant-like substance, algae...You've got a lot of algae out there, right? If we can figure out how to make energy out of that, we'll be doing all right. Believe it or not, we could replace up to 17% of the oil...

The Obama campaign is pushing back against reports that voter registration is eroding among key constituencies like Hispanics and blacks. "Registration among Latinos and African Americans has never been higher. There are more Americans of both backgrounds registered to vote today than there were when President Obama was elected," Clo Ewing, director of constituency press, wrote in a blog post attacking a recent Washington Post story on registration erosion. The Post reported last week, using Census data, that Hispanic voter registrations declined 5 percent nationwide, while black voter registration declined 7 percent nationwide. The state-by-state picture showed Hispanic voter registration...

Overcoming injustice and eliminating disparities is something that America still struggles with, as the case of Trayvon Martin has become national news. In a speech to the Detroit chapter of the NAACP on Sunday, Attorney General Eric Holder mentioned the case of Trayvon while talking about the violence and crime involving young people in today’s inner cities. As Holder told the NAACP: "This (violence) is an issue that has -– rightly -– garnered significant national attention in recent months, as our nation has struggled to make sense of the tragic shooting death of a Florida teenager named Trayvon Martin. As...

The Senate should take action. The House of Representatives should take action. Where are they?

...the Maraniss book published last week in Vanity Fair reveals a portrait of Obama that might have enriched the voters' understanding of him in the 2008... The excerpt focuses on Obama's brief time in New York after his graduation from Columbia University. The son of a Kenyan father and an American expatriate mother, Obama emerges as a man questioning whether he viewed himself, or wanted to be viewed by others, as an American. Not in a citizenship sense -- Obama was born in the United States and that was that -- but in the sense of how he saw the...

“Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes…” ***** President Obama was quick to invite France’s Socialist president-elect to Washington for a visit, but the White House also had some rather perplexing advice for Francois Hollande: President Obama’s spokesman warned the new socialist president-elect of France not to implement his campaign agenda of ending austerity measures, indicating that such a reversal could damage the world economy. “A balanced approach . . . Both fiscal consolidation and efforts to boost the recovery is the right approach for Europe,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters today. “That’s an approach that he thinks...

Over the past six months the public has watched the current liberal intellectual movement crumble as its leaders have failed to provide a tenable solution to the serious problems facing our nation. President Obama is desperately searching for a way to convince the public he should be reelected. But his liberal ideology is no longer capable of providing effective answers to the questions of the 21st century. Today's liberalism has been reduced to an opposition movement, rather than a coherent ideological alternative to conservatism. The Democratic Party all but confirmed this notion with their latest slogan for the 2012 campaign:...

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows Mitt Romney earning 47% of the vote and President Obama attracting 45% support. Three percent (3%) would vote for a third party candidate, while four percent (4%) are undecided. The candidates have been within two points of each other for ten of the last 11 days. During that time, Obama has had a slight advantage on six days, Romney on five. All signs indicate that the race for the White House is a pure toss-up with six months to go. See tracking history. The candidates are just three points apart...

It only took nearly six years for the media to begin vetting President Obama’s past. Today, Vanity Fair released an excerpt from a new biography of Barack Obama by David Maraniss. The excerpt discusses Barack Obama's first love affair, with a white Australian woman named Genevieve Cook. It's a telling examination of who Obama was as a young man -- and it shows a self-absorbed "internationalist" with delusions of grandeur. Photo credit Vanity Fair. The book itself sounds like an ode to Obama. Maraniss writes, “At age 20, Obama was a man of the world … He could not be...

Harry Truman famously complained about his economic advisers, who wouldn't give him simple, straight answers. "All they say is 'On the one hand this, and on the other hand that,'" he was quoted. "I'm looking for a one-handed economist!" Well, ol' Harry could have found economists who were absolutely cocksure -- and wrong. Take Paul Krugman, the Jeremiah of the new New York Times Agit-Prop page. Dr K is absolshshtutely, posilutely sure that another trillion bucks of deficit spending will fix the US economy. Other economists may have their doubts, but Dr K knows the answer in his bones. Krugman...

Politics: The Preezy of the United Steezy, as Barack Obama lets Jimmy Fallon refer to him, opens his re-election bid to a partially-filled stadium and a letter from his rival asking this year's key question: Where are the jobs? There were no faux Greek columns when the president with the composite girlfriend and taste for canine filets officially began his 57-state campaign Saturday at Ohio State University's 18,300-seat Schottenstein Center that was only partially filled with those wearing faded "hope and change" T-shirts hoping to get their student loans paid off. According to recent stats, only half of OSU graduates...

The Obama campaign is floundering before our eyes, even if the Obama media won't characterize it that way. From the thousands of empty seats at the Ohio campaign kickoff on Saturday and the mystery burka woman ejected from the follow-on Richmond event to today's embarrassingly incompetent press release, the Axelrod PR machine is a shadow of its 2008 mastery. Reminding the American people of the Obamas' penchant for his & her luxury vacation travel via government jets is an unforced error on Team Axelrod's part.According to report by ABC News and MSNBC, the Obama campaign took umbrage to statements made...

After months on the sidelines, major liberal donors including the financier George Soros are preparing to inject up to $100 million into independent groups to aid Democrats’ chances this fall. But instead of going head to head with the conservative “super PACs” and outside groups that have flooded the presidential and Congressional campaigns with negative advertising, the donors are focusing on grass-roots organizing, voter registration and Democratic turnout. The departure from the conservatives’ approach, which helped Republicans wrest control of the House in 2010, partly reflects liberal donors’ objections to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which paved the way...

Washington, D.C.- Nevada Senator Harry Reid issued the following statement after U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar dedicated the Silver State North Solar Project, the first large-scale solar energy project to be built on public land in Nevada: “I commend Secretary Salazar and the Obama Administration for their commitment to Nevada’s clean energy future by helping to move the Silver State North Solar Project quickly through the environmental review process. This important clean energy project will generate affordable electricity for thousands of homes with no air pollution or waste production.  Developing similar projects in Nevada should be an essential...

In case you missed it, the presidential campaign is underway. How do we know? That’s a good point, actually, because the incumbent has been campaigning non-stop ever since his last campaign ended. But TV ads are rolling out, so this must indicate a new phase, at least, if not the starting point. What, you may ask, is President Barack Obama pointing to as his great accomplishment? First, ask yourself . . .

“In a second term,” Mitt Romney darkly warned in a speech to the National Rifle Association last month, President Obama “would be unrestrained by the demands of reelection.” But Romney was cagey about what, exactly, that would mean: His only specific prediction was that Obama would “remake” the Supreme Court. So it was helpful when, at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner a week ago, the president opened up about the “secret agenda” he has planned. “In my first term,” he joked, “we ended the war in Iraq; in my second term, I will win the war on Christmas. . . ....

...After Supporter Says President ‘Should be tried for treason’ The Obama campaign slammed Mitt Romney Monday for not confronting a supporter who said during a town hall event in Cleveland that the president “should be tried for treason.” “We have a president right now that is operating outside the structure of our Constitution,” a woman said during a question-and-answer session. “And I want to know — yeah, I do agree he should be tried for treason — but I want to know what you would be able to do to restore balance between the three branches of government and what...

The United Nations treaty called Law of the Sea was negotiated by the State Department, and then presented to Ronald Reagan for signing as soon as he became President in 1981. Reagan immediately recognized it as a bad treaty that would restrict U.S. sovereignty and require us to pay an international body half of all our royalties from offshore drilling. UN bureaucrats would then distribute the money as they wanted, because the U.S. would have only one vote out of 160. Reagan rejected the Law of the Sea Treaty, and we thought that took care of the problem. The American...

Via the Examiner, what are the odds that Joe Biden and Arne Duncan and, oh, 99.9 percent of the rest of the liberal intelligentsia support legalizing gay marriage but The One doesn’t? It’s getting harder every day to sustain this charade, which is why Axelrod is suddenly eager to change the subject: Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod on Monday pivoted sharply to Mitt Romney’s views on gay marriage when reporters pressed him on the president’s stance on the issue. On a conference call with reporters, Axelrod said there’s a “clear distinction” between Obama’s views on gay-rights issues and the presumptive...