Free Republic

The abortion movement is generally split into two camps: Those who believe abortion is a “necessary evil,” but necessary nonetheless, and those who believe that abortion is an objective social good. For years, the abortion movement got angry when pro-lifers referred to them, quite accurately, as “pro-abortion.” Such outrage is still occasionally conjured up for the media, but for the most part, it has been abandoned in the wake of dozens of articles and blog posts by various abortion activists openly proclaiming that they think abortion is a good thing. The fine ladies over at Salon.com usually fall into the...

Here’s how you profile Ann Coulter by the numbers. Job well done, Daily Beast! Lloyd Grove’s new piece has it all — multiple Ted Kennedy cracks, a sexy description of what she’s wearing, provocative but not too serious conversation about immigration, and finally an Adolf Hitler kicker. Here are the highlights! Ann Coulter arrives. The Daily Beast swoons: “She wears tight, seemingly painted-on jeans, a hint of midriff showing beneath her blouse; at 53, she still rocks that “Vixen of the Right” thing that once prompted Playboy to ask her to take it all off. In a rare display of...

[full title] GOP’s demonic new crusade: Right-wing zealots look for even crueler ways to treat the poor like garbage Happy Memorial Day! But if you’re in Wisconsin, and relying on food stamps, remember that Republicans don’t want you to have ketchup on your hamburger. They’d probably rather you didn’t have a hamburger at all, but Wisconsin farmers and ranchers have clout, and so proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program made room for Wisconsin products. But they still don’t want you to have “crab, lobster, shrimp, or any other shellfish.” Or ketchup. Or spaghetti sauce. Really. For now, that’s...

Salon.com is happy to see David Letterman go. Not because they think he was unfunny, but because he had too many white people on his show, particularly in its final days. In an article titled, "The unbearable whiteness of the Letterman farewells: Let this truly be the end of a show-business era," Salon took Letterman to task for inviting white actors and actresses on his final shows, but few minorities. "You'd never know" that American culture has a large minority presence, Salon author Scott Timberg writes. Referencing the last few shows before Letterman left the air, Timberg writes, "Some of...

http://media.salon.com/2015/05/hillary_warren_de_blasio.jpgEarlier this week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with a gaggle of bored reporters and some boldfaced names in the progressive movement, unveiled a “Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality.” Much like the media event that accompanied its unveiling, the agenda is supposed to be understood as a kind of 21st-century, liberal version of the storied “Contract with America,” the PR stunt that, as legend (erroneously) has it, rocketed Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party to power after the 1994 midterm elections. As my colleague Joan Walsh reported on Thursday, this backward-looking attempt to lay out a...

Whatever her views on other matters are, Pamela Geller is right about one thing: last week’s Islamist assault on the “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest she hosted in Texas proves the jihad against freedom of expression has opened a front in the United States. “There is,” she said, “a war on free speech and this violent attack is a harbinger of things to come.” Apparently undaunted, Geller promises to continue with such “freedom of speech” events. ISIS is now threatening to assassinate her. She and her cohorts came close to becoming victims, yet some in the media on the right and...

In just the past two days, so-called "respected" members of the liberal media have belied their utter intellectual impotence by once again resorting to name calling of their conservative opposition by referring to them as "clowns" and "zombies" in the press. Margaret Carlson, who chose a pithy title for her Bloomberg View piece on GOP Presidential candidates, Can Republicans Keep the Clown Posse Out, only to be outdone by Salon's Heather Digby Parton who bemoaned that the right simply wont acquiesce social issues to the left in her hit-piece Rise of the GOP's Culture-War Zombies. While these are headlines one might expect from...

The GOP’s destructive Vietnam mythology: How the right’s self-glorifying delusions led to decades of avoidable war It only took about five years from the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, for the American right to succeed in burying the moment under mounds of revisionist horse shit. Ronald Reagan, speaking at a campaign appearance in the summer of 1980, said, It is time that we recognized that [the American War in Vietnam] was, in truth, a noble cause… We dishonor the memory of 50 thousand young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt...

Way too many of us believe in a magic book negated by science and peppered with all manner of misanthropic myths. A lawyer and an associate dean at Liberty University, a columnist for Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the founder of WND’s Christian fundamentalist site Barbwire.com, Matt Barber might seem like an evangelical fringe character, but, clearly, he means to have his voice heard and his pronouncements taken seriously: his work appears under the portentous slogan RELATIVISTS BEWARE: TRUTH TOLD HERE. Yet he is affiliated with Glenn Beck, so, in pursuit of Truth-Telling, he sees fit to publish such essays...

In the ongoing battle between squishy Senate RINOs who actually understand how to achieve gains and the Real Conservatives whose every maneuver backfires, the Real Conservatives have taken the momentary advantage. Sen. Tom Cotton, the freshman statesman from Arkansas, last seen on Twitter challenging the Iranian foreign minister to a debate over the Constitution, has defied Sen. Bob Corker’s well-managed plan to get the Iranian review bill through the Senate. He and Sen. Marco Rubio — whom you may have heard is running for president, and is firmly in the business of looking after Marco Rubio’s interests — used an...

As a nation, we fail to comprehend Black political strategy in much the same way we fail to recognize the value of Black life. We see ghettos and crime and absent parents where we should see communities actively struggling against mental health crises and premeditated economic exploitation. And when we see police cars being smashed and corporate property being destroyed, we should see reasonable responses to generations of extreme state violence, and logical decisions about what kind of actions yield the desired political results. I’m overwhelmed by the pervasive slandering of protesters in Baltimore this weekend for not remaining peaceful....

New research reveals we're not the nation of Bible thumpers Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee like to tell themselves. The 2016 presidential campaign has really and truly started now, and already the religious pandering is getting silly. Despite wanting voters to think of him as a “libertarian” Rand Paul was recently bleating about how this country needs a religious revival, specifically “another Great Awakening.” Ted Cruz made a big fancy speech at Liberty University where he highlighted his defense of state promotion of religion, which he erroneously called “religious freedom,” even though having the state push faith on you is...

Three sitting Republican Governors interested in seeking a promotion to become U.S. President, represent states that have posted well-below average job growth over the past four years. From 2011 to 2015, the United States experienced 8.21 percent job growth. The states governed by Republican presidential hopefuls Scott Walker (WI), Bobby Jindal (LA), and Chris Christie (NJ), saw much lower rates of job growth over the same time period. Using figures provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics from January 2011 to January 2015, Paul Rosenburg at Salon, noted that Wisconsin, Louisiana, and New Jersey, all experienced very sluggish job...

GOP candidates constantly invoke the Constitution. A Yale Law professor reveals what they all fail to understand. With the 2016 election cycle having kicked into first-gear already, any American who hasn’t inured themselves to the monotonous (and often ultimately meaningless) repetition of the word “Constitution” is advised to get to self-desensitizing — and quick. Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have already made a fetishized version of the U.S.’s supreme governing document central to their campaign rhetoric; and even politicians less beloved by the supposedly Constitution-crazy Tea Party, like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, are likely to soon follow suit....

This Season of Unreason will end with the elections of November 2016, but its consequences – validation of the idea that belief without evidence is a virtue, that religion, and especially Christianity, deserves a place in our politics, our Constitutionally enshrined secularism notwithstanding – will live on and damage the progressive cause. But it does not have to be this way. There will almost certainly be no (declared) atheist or even agnostic among the candidates. This is scandalous, given the electorate’s gradual, relentless ditching of religion. A survey just out shows that 7.5 million Americans have abandoned their faith since...

In a brilliant tweet, the horror master perfectly sums up the state of the 2016 presidential race. Stephen King has unloaded on the Republican presidential field on Twitter — the horror master’s latest dive into savvy GOP bashing. This tweet takes on the nightmare that is the current field of right-wing senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. Stephen King ✔ @StephenKing Cruz, Paul and Rubio, all running for President. Hey, I thought I was supposed to write the horror stories. 2:25 PM - 16 Apr 2015 In recent weeks, King has jumped into the debate over Indiana’s religious...

Aspirants to the White House, both Democratic and Republican, have, as we all know, begun “announcing,” thus initiating, from a rationalist’s point of view, a media carnival featuring, on both sides, an array of supposedly God-fearing clowns and faith-mongering nitwits groveling before Evangelicals and nattering on about their belief in the Almighty and their certainty that if we just looked, we could find answers to many of our ills in the Good Book. The candidates will cloak their true agendas – serving the Lords of Wall Street far more zealously than Our Father who art (or really, art not) in...

Ted Cruz thinks Americans should arm themselves against "tyranny," and Lindsey Graham thinks that's crazy. As incredible as it sounds, there’s an argument going on right now between two Republican senators (and, potentially, two Republican candidates for the presidency) over whether the American citizenry should be ready to fight a war against the federal government. The two senators in question are Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, and they can’t seem to agree whether the Second Amendment serves as bulwark against government “tyranny.” It all started with a fundraising email Cruz sent making the case that “The 2nd Amendment to the...

Ever heard of the Army of God? Or Concerned Christians? As far as Salon and other leftist media outlets are concerned, they’re just as lethal as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda – and the only reason why you haven’t heard of them but have heard of the Islamic terror groups is because of the mainstream media’s deeply ingrained “Islamophobia.”If this sounds absurd, it’s only because it is. The mainstream media, especially organs like Salon that are even more leftist than the others, are always avid to exonerate Islam and establish the claim that Christianity is just as likely to incite...

Salon.com is tired of how ignorant white people are when it comes to race. In a new article titled, “Black people are not here to teach you: What so many white Americans just can’t grasp,” author Kali Holloway says she has had enough. “America loves teachable moments, those real-life Very Special Episodes of supposed cross-cultural exchange and transracial learning,” she beings. “The problem with those teachable moments,” she scoffs, “is that the same people always end up doing all the teaching.” No more, says Holloway. “In matters of race, the marginalized are tasked with being educators,” she writes, “That is,...