Free Republic

In the first months after the Benghazi attack, the most urgent question, and one only rarely asked, was "What were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton doing during the seven and a half hours between the initial emergency communications from Benghazi and the final American deaths?" A negative answer was provided in February by Leon Panetta: they were not engaging with their subordinates; they were not contacting anyone to discuss options; they were giving no orders for action; they remained entirely uninvolved. We are left to speculate about the positive answer to that question. Were they sleeping? Curled up by the...

Wealthy Californians would like to thank you for buying them expensive automobiles. Didn’t know you that generous, eh? In fairly recent political history, left-of-center ideologues and other special needs people have advocated “public/private partnerships”. Once opposed to anything corporate, alleged progressives now embrace funneling tax funds to corporations of every ilk that sustain their ideology, regardless of how insane the plot sounds to common folks with common sense. No less of a man than Bill Clinton (and given his serial freelance philandering, there is no lesser of a man) has focused his face into television cameras proclaiming that government funded...

What are “progracists”? Progracists are people who continually classify individuals by “race” and yet can’t see how that is racist. Progracists hate Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of an America in which people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” because progressive policies are based on race consciousness, ethnic division, and identity politics. Progracists keep minorities addicted to government benefits and entitlements specifically to make sure they remain poor and economically enslaved, and therefore a reliable voting bloc. Progracists always seek to restrict everyone‘s freedoms because they think that’s the...

Monday, May 06, 2013 The Burglar-Terrorist Alliance Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 0 Comments (The following is an adaptation of a talk that I recently gave.) Every act of violence has two sides. The side of those who carry it and the side of those who let it happen. When a burglar breaks into a home and kills two people, we don't just discuss what made him do it, but why it was allowed to happen. That's a conversation we rarely have about terrorism. The left wants us to talk about terrorism as a reaction to...

I have set the link to start at the point where Evan really gets going. Evan Sayet is a genius. If you have never heard him talk or read his book 'The Kindergarten of Eden' you are truly missing out. Listen to him and the illogical reasoning of Progressives and political correctness will become clear. The Laws of Modern Liberalism 1. Indiscriminateness – the total rejection of the intellectual process – is an absolute moral imperative. 2. Indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policies. It leads to siding only and always with the lesser over the better,...

In the health-care insurance debate, one of the mantras of the left is to condemn those evil, greedy insurance companies that would charge higher rates to people with "pre-existing conditions." But in a commercial aired on last night's Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, there was "Progressive Insurance," whose chairman Peter Lewis is a huge donor to liberal causes including Moveon.org, condemning as "rate suckers" people with bad driving records who drive up good drivers' rates! View the video here.

In The Republic, Plato argued that philosophers must be made kings for the ideal city-state to be born. In the pages of The New Republic, Cass Sunstein argues for the benevolent paternalism of the nanny state and its philosopher-kings. It’s an old Sunstein theme and the one that brought him to the attention of politicians who dearly love to imagine themselves in the roles of those philosopher-kings. One of those politicians, Barack Obama, even made Sunstein his Regulatory Czar. Sunstein debuted as the philosopher-king of the technocrats with his book Nudge. Now having left his D.C. Czardom, Sunstein is back...

This blog post searches for the philosophical foundations of left-wing politics, asking this question: The conservative movement rests on a series of great thinkers: Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Burke, Mill, Hayek, von Mises, etc. Where are the intellectual foundations of the Left?...There is an intellectual tradition behind the contemporary Left, stretching back to Plato’s Republic and including Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Marcuse, Alinsky, etc. But it’s a deeply totalitarian tradition. It’s the political philosophy that dares not speak its name in an election season, for it would garner few votes, and for good reason. The real intellectual vacuum underlies not the...

Margaret Thatcher was “barbaric” and “a terror.” She “hated the arts … hated the English poor [and] hated Greenpeace and environmental protectionists.” That’s the pronouncement of singer Morrisey, who has also come up with such astute political assessments as “If more men were homosexual, there would be no wars, because homosexual men would never kill other men, whereas heterosexual men love killing other men.” That’s certainly debatable. Morrisey is hardly alone in hating someone he brands a hater. A Labour candidate expressed disappointment Thatcher hadn’t been killed in a 1984 hotel bombing. And leftist politician George Galloway, who bears the...

Forward, in practice, means, and has always meant, the same things: death to multitudes of innocents; economic collapse; spiritual degradation; widespread poverty; a drudgerous, machinelike existence for "the masses," leavened only by mindless amusements designed to palliate the senseless waste of time that is life without genuine hope; and forced debasement in compulsory retardation and indoctrination centers (aka government schools).

Democrats and Republicans are debating whether an overhauled tax code should be as progressive as the current one, after the latest House GOP budget set up an aggressive framework for tax reform. Top Democrats are pushing to maintain the current progressivity in the code, after the party scored its long sought-after tax rate increase in the fiscal cliff deal. But with the top individual tax rate now 39.6 percent, some Republicans aren’t nearly as concerned about progressivity as they look to lower tax rates and eliminate tax preferences. “If this was easy, we’d have it done already,” said Rep. Pat...

Is an unborn baby “a life worth sacrificing?” The question is horrifying, but the argument was all too real. In a recent article, Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon.com conceded what the pro-life movement has contended all along — that from the moment of conception the unborn child is undeniably a human life. And yet, Williams argues that this unborn human life must be terminated if a woman desires an abortion. The child is a life, but, in her grotesque view, “a life worth sacrificing.” The abortion rights movement has always had a problem with language. The average American still hears...

Have you ever wondered why Fascism (essentially socialism) and Nazism (again, essentially socialism) are considered to be right-wing political philosophies? It's because the left-wing and its obedient lap-dog, the MSM, have gone to great lenghts to recast them as right-wing philosophies. In an effort to create as much distance as possible between Hitler and his socialist principles, Hitler has deliberately been mislabeled as extreme right wing by the socialist movement. Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists (the Nazi party) represented extreme left wing politics. Leftists are quick to cite the fact that one of Hitler's first actions was to get...

Seldom do I ever use anything in my post that originates from an e-mail, and I do mean its is rare. However I came across an e-mail I had previously read.This particular e-mail has around in cypher-space since 2006 and the essay has found its way back to my inbox once again. The e-mail essay was written by a squared away Retired Marine, Sgt Major J. D. Pendry.Snopes indicates that the essay was properly attributed to, and the content is authentic. After much consideration I decided to post the essay. In view of the upcoming sequestration, I felt the essay...

Forget that The Daily Caller is reporting Progressive USA’s claim that NRA donated $10,000 to Debbie Halvorson, and that the contender for the Congressional seat vacated by disgraced anti-gun head case Jesse Jackson Jr. calls for “Universal Background Checks and registration of all firearms … Making sure that background checks work so people do not fall through the cracks in the National Data Base [and] Ending the Gun Show loophole” on her campaign website. Those who play political chess will tell us Halvorson opposes banning semi-autos and some such, while hard-liners will point out the prospective ban is likely to...

Today the Jewish people celebrate the holiday of Purim. It’s an old and familiar story: An intolerant Jew-hater named Haman hatches a plan to annihilate the Jewish people in the ancient kingdom of Persia. It’s That Genocide Thing. Again. Most of the Jews in this multicultural Persian kingdom have been enlightened to the point where they enthusiastically attend royal feasts and gorge themselves off the golden plates and cups looted from the holy Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. But these court Jews have evolved past that old, tired Judaism. They’re all new-agey, progressive, and they know that Jewish history has moved...

Blueprint NC is “a nonprofit that coordinates the activities of liberal-leaning nonprofits” in North Carolina and when this 501(c) group’s communications director Stephanie Bass forwarded a strategy memo to member organizations, she included a disclaimer: “CONFIDENTIAL to Blueprint, so please be careful – share with your boards and appropriate staff, but not the whole world.” Oops. The memo got leaked to reporter Mark Binker at WRAL in Raleigh. The contents are quite disturbing and clearly partisan: “The most effective way to mitigate the worst legislation is to weaken our opponents’ ability to govern by crippling their leaders (McCrory, Tillis, Berger,...

<p>The Associated Press on Thursday updated its stylebook so that married individuals will be referred to as husband and wife, regardless of whether they are in a same-sex marriage. The change comes a week after the AP received criticism for an internal memo designating the word "partners" for individuals in same-sex marriages.</p>

It's been 80 years since Stalin's brutal reign. Close to 150 years since the end of slavery in the States. But now we have progressives arguing a way back to slavery and communism...for our own good of course: (h/t JeffG) ...[John Stuart] Mill offered a number of independent justifications for his famous harm principle, but one of his most important claims is that individuals are in the best position to know what is good for them. In Mill’s view, the problem with outsiders, including government officials, is that they lack the necessary information. Mill insists that the individual “is the...

Stop the Confirmation of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of DefenseClick here: https://www.votervoice.net/JBS/Campaigns/30628/Respond Confirming Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense may harm U.S. defense considering his record, words of praise from the Communist Party, and ties to far-left progressive organizations. Chuck Hagel a Committed Internationalist The New American 11 February 2013 The confirmation vote for Republican former senator of Nebraska Chuck Hagel (shown) to replace outgoing Leon Panetta as secretary of defense was postponed by another week after Hagel failed to meet the expectations of his former Republican colleagues during last week's Senate confirmation hearings. Even more troubling than Sen. Hagel's...