Free Republic

Fighting Bob Fest will return to Baraboo next month after taking place in Madison for the past three years. The political festival, set for Sept. 13 at the Sauk County Fairgrounds, was first held in Baraboo in 2002 to honor the legacy of the late U.S. senator and former Wisconsin Gov. Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette. La Follette is considered one of the founders of the progressive movement and organizers say the intent of the festival is to honor his contributions and energize progressives by providing a forum for speakers, networking and camaraderie. The annual festival, which draws thousands, was...

Evan Goldstein, a social media coordinator for College Democrats of America (CDA) believes those who support Israel’s right to defend herself are “dou#@*bags” who should “go f&^k” themselves. He is secure in this knowledge because he is a perfectly formed liberal Democrat. To be a Democrat in 2014 is to hate America and Israel as our main ally in the Middle East. This hatred must extend to anyone who dares defend America and/or Israel and must be expressed in the vilest most personal manner in order to prove how truly progressive one is. More than this, to be a really...

It’s a tradition as old as time – blaming someone else for one’s own problems. It’s called “scapegoating,” and humans have a long history of it. We blame others for our own hardships because, well, it’s easier than dealing with the fact that most, if not all, our problems are the result of choices we made. How many people do you know who’ve been fired from a job and said something along the lines of “My boss hated me?” People have been fired out of spite, but for the most part, it doesn’t happen to great employees. Know any...

It's astonishing that an ideology which such an unbroken track record of failure has adherents who are so incredibly pleased with themselves. It's like a soda pop executive whose proudest achievement was thinking up New Coke. For the liberals who aren’t liberal solely because someone is handing them checks for plopping onto the couch all day instead of working, liberalism has become less an ideology than an attitude. It’s an attitude of serene superiority over everyone else based upon absolutely nothing more than liberals’ utter certainty of the rightness of their collectivist cause. That history shows that collectivism always leads...

They were the ultimate symbol of the lawlessness and blight of the 1980s and early 1990s — and now they’re making a comeback. Squeegee men are menacing motorists across New York City, including spots near the Holland, Lincoln and Queens-Midtown tunnels, as well as the Queensboro Bridge, The Post has learned. Residents and drivers who pass through the areas said the panhandlers are spraying and wiping windshields without permission to shake down drivers for cash. Benthins, who has also been seen with a squeegee near Times Square, was using a wadded-up copy of the amNewYork free newspaper as a rag....

‘My great fear,” Neil deGrasse Tyson told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in early June, “is that we’ve in fact been visited by intelligent aliens but they chose not to make contact, on the conclusion that there’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth.” In response to this rather standard little saw, Hayes laughed as if he had been trying marijuana for the first time. All told, one suspects that Tyson was not including either himself or a fellow traveler such as Hayes as inhabitants of Earth, but was instead referring to everybody who is not in their coterie. That, alas, is...

Progressive group Think Progress has been putting on a bit of poverty theater over on Twitter. If you look up #livethewage you’ll find a number of progressive Congressmen pretending to live on $77 worth of groceries for an entire week. It’s all theater, meant to shock people into supporting an increased minimum wage. Thus sardines and saltine crackers are a regular purchase, for no other reason than they’re meant to shock us. In reality, these Congressmen shock us by their inability to budget or shop sales. In one case, Rep. Barbara Lee budgeted $5 for toothpaste. My wife can buy...

Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette and his supporters pioneered long-shot primary challenges, strong ideology, and populist rhetoric a century ago.

Two Oracle facilities may be sheltering unaccompanied migrant children soon– one in midtown Tucson at Oracle and Drachman and one tucked into the Catalina Mountains in Oracle, Arizona. While liberals in Tucson are welcoming the children and touting the 250 jobs the migrant shelter and processing center will bring to a struggling part of the city, rednecks north of town are planning a Murrieta-style ugly American protest to greet 40 children who could be housed at the Sycamore Canyon Academy on the back side of Mountain Lemmon. (KVOA story here.) You’ll remember that several days ago Murrieta, California made headlines...

SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. — Populist Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) got a rock-star reception during a standing-room-only campaign rally here Monday, as hundreds of liberal activists cheered her broadsides against corporate interests and voiced hopes that her presence might shift the political winds in an increasingly Republican state. The rally on behalf of Senate candidate Natalie Tennant was the latest in a string of recent Warren appearances in red and blue states alike, where Democratic base voters have embraced her fiery message as an envoy to working-class voters frustrated with both Wall Street and the Obama administration. “Our job is to fight...

– Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) expressed opposition Friday to a proposed plan to allow women to buy birth control without a prescription, saying the proposal would put “more barriers between women and contraceptives.”"I believe it would put more barriers to women's health and contraception," Udall said at a July 11 press conference, according to the Associated Press.The plan proposed by the man challenging Udall for his Senate seat – Rep. Cory Gardener (R-Colo.) - would give women over-the-counter access to birth control, but customers would have to pay the cost charged by drug stores and other retailers for contraceptives.At the press...

Trevor Loudon’s The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the US Congress is to be turned into a “game changing” movie. Timed for release in August 2015 “The Enemies Within” will be like no other film ever released in America. Production standards will be Hollywood quality. Guiding values however, will be 100% American. The Enemies Within will name names, and and go where no one has gone in modern times, in its quest to awaken Americans to the enemies within their own government.

. July 7, 2014 Newt Gingrich : President Obama's Border Absurdity ===================================================== President Barack Obama is in Texas today. Texas is the center of the current crisis at the border. From Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, thousands upon thousands of children are pouring into the United States. This flood of foreign children is not a problem of border security. They are not sneaking across the border illegally. Under the Feinstein Amendment of 2008, unaccompanied minors from these countries can present themselves at a legal border crossing, claim to be political refugees and seek asylum. The argument on the left is...

Organizers of Netroots Nation, America’s largest annual gathering of progressive activists, took the wraps off of a major and welcome surprise this afternoon with the announcement that Vice President Joe Biden would be coming to Detroit to speak to the convention during a special Thursday afternoon general session. It will also be Biden’s first appearance at Netroots Nation. He was invited to participate in the Presidential Leadership Forum held in Netroots Nation’s second year, in Chicago (back then, the convention was known as YearlyKos), but declined to attend due to his desire to participate in another event. The other contenders...

Two years ago, on the morning of the 2012 election in the United States, I got an email with an urgent subject line: "You should write the story of how Facebook blew an opportunity to turn out 300k voters." The sender, a veteran progressive online activist who would prefer to remain anonymous, was upset for good reason. The election was bound to be close, and as of 10am that morning he hadn't yet seen an "I'm Voting" button on his Facebook page, nor had another colleague of his. Nor was one on my own Facebook page. Given that when Facebook...

As we celebrate the Fourth of July, who can argue that our democracy is working the way the Founders intended? And who can deny that most of the blame for dysfunction must fall to the Republican Party? George Washington distrusted all political parties. He warned in his farewell address that, as they alternated power, parties would act in “the spirit of revenge” — rather than, presumably, in the best interests of the nation. The “disorders and miseries” that resulted, Washington feared, would inevitably threaten democracy. Whatever the motivation, Republicans have paralyzed our government in a way that would have shocked...

It was a revealing convergence Monday when the five-member conservative Supreme Court majority delivered the Hobby Lobby contraception decision even as President Obama announced that House Republicans had officially shelved immigration reform. Both disputes reaffirmed the GOP's identity as the champion of the forces most resistant to the profound demographic and cultural dynamics reshaping American life—and Democrats as the voice of those who most welcome these changes. And both clashes captured a parallel shift: While Republicans took the offense on most cultural arguments through the late 20th century, now Democrats from Obama on down are mostly pressing these issues, confident...

As you prepare to celebrate Independence Day, I thought I’d take this opportunity, while it still exists, to mock our progressive friends. You can spot them at your barbecue. They’re the ones who brought the tofu hockey pucks they call veggie-burgers, the 6-pack of micro-brew beer they keep in a small cooler that never leaves their side so no one can grab one – as if anyone would – and smoking American Spirit cigarettes. They also haven’t showered in a while, so the flies are a dead giveaway. When you come across these tolerant people gleefully judging everyone to...

Big name Republicans giving their full-throated support to the Obama Administration’s Common Core education reforms don’t dwell too much on what they are. They don’t look good in close-up. Common Core State Standards “Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in math were developed to address the criticism that national math curriculums were ‘a mile wide and an inch deep,’” Sarah Perry writes in a Family Research Council (FRC) issue brief. “The drafters sought to develop more focus and coherence through the standards, with the belief that those students who can explain mathematical rules would have a better chance at succeeding in...

In the history of politics, there is only one fundamental, abiding issue: It is individualism vs. collectivism. Do individuals have the right to pursue their own happiness, as Thomas Jefferson thought and as the Declaration of Independence deemed self-evident? Or do we have an obligation to live our lives for the community or the state, as most societies have claimed throughout most of history?Yet if this is the paramount political issue, why is it not forthrightly debated in presidential elections and in other contests for public office? The reason is that American political debates tend to be dominated by...