Free Republic

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D- Mo.) says Republicans are “misleading people” about ObamaCare, which she calls a “free market solution". McCaskill told MSNBC viewers on Nov. 14 that ObamaCare, which mandates that people buy only government-approved insurance and has resulted in the cancellations of millions of policies, is a “free market solution”.“I think we just want people to get the right information, instead of the misinformation that Republicans love to spread about this reform,” McCaskill said. “Scaring people, misleading people, this is a free market solution and we hope people take advantage of it.”(video at link)Earlier that same day, McCaskill was...

This year is the 96th anniversary of the Russian revolution, one of the most earthshaking events in human history. The terms "history" and "96th anniversary" are apt to cause the eyes of many if not most Americans to glaze over, but American life today is being molded directly by the ideas and events set in motion in Russia in 1917. Distilled down to the most important elements, the Russian revolution had three key ideological elements: first, the state as almighty, a replacement for God; secondly, a political elite to guide the "masses"; thirdly, the use of the state's police power...

<p>On the afternoon of July 12, 1974, House and Senate Democratic leaders were arriving early at the White House — well before their demoralized Republican counterparts. And were they ever pumped! As they trouped into the President’s office for their photo-op, it became clear they considered this a victory party. They almost literally pranced around the Oval Office giving each other the 1970s equivalent of high-fives and chest bumps.</p>

Two technology stories have filled the airwaves in recent days: the impending Twitter IPO, which is predicted to raise more than $1 billion; and the Obamacare online roll-out, which has crashed in a welter of locked-out applicants and frozen exchanges. The connections between the two events are deeper than you might think – and they represent the latest milestones along the diverging responses by industry and government to the birth of the technology revolution more than a century ago.

Leading climate scientists said on Friday they were more certain than ever before that mankind was the main culprit for global warming and warned the impact of greenhouse gas emissions would linger for centuries. A report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), played down the fact temperatures have risen more slowly in the past 15 years, saying there were substantial natural variations that masked a long-term warming trend. It said the Earth was set for further warming and more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels as greenhouse gases built up in the atmosphere. The oceans would become...

At a home-school community meeting deep in the woods of Baden-Württemberg, children kick around balls and parents grill sausages while chatting about their latest run-ins with the state. An American woman who just gives her name as “Teri” says she and her German husband started home-schooling their two daughters so they could learn both English and German. “We want them to be fluent in both languages, in both cultures and in both politics,” she says. But when local authorities discovered their daughters were not going to school, Teri and her husband received a letter demanding they enroll them. “The letter...

Nothing about the political battle between conservatives and liberals is new — not the passion, not the beliefs and not the absolute certainty on both sides that the country is doomed. You could go back to the nation’s founding, and you would find similar disputes such as we are engaged in today. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson waged a fierce fight over the notion of a central bank, for instance, and the same underlying themes were apparent then that are now being discussed regarding the need for federal oversight of health care, education, law enforcement, marriage and virtually every other...

Every so often the wonks of wishful thinking give us an article about how blacks are becoming Republicans, how Hispanics are supposedly a natural GOP constituency, or, as is the subject here today, how the millennial generation is turning "conservative." Perhaps pundits asserting the last thing recall Winston Churchill's observation, "If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain." And perhaps they overlook that it's possible to raise a brainless generation. Don't think, as one might, that this will be a typical analysis sneering at the proverbial...

A publication of the international socialist movement has explicitly stated it is promoting abortion and gay “marriage” as part of a multi-pronged campaign to “replace global capitalism” with Marxism. The admission came on Monday in an article entitled "How Can We Change the World?" by Todd Chretien in the Socialist Worker, which is published by the International Socialist Organization. The ISO proudly “stands in the tradition of revolutionary socialists Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, and Leon Trotsky.” The article was putatively about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. However, it hailed the socially liberal views of...

I love it when liberal progressives actually speak their true beliefs for us all to hear. However, you have to probe deeply and get them riled up enough to blow their cool in order to hear their unvarnished agenda. Liberals know that sane people do not agree with their policies or their goals, so they must always cloak them in a shadowy cloud of lies. It's always, "it's about the children!" or "where's your compassion?" with them in order to mask their true goals. Once you get under their skin, you can expose their lies and twisted words as they'll...

If you come from a broken or dysfunctional family, or bad neighborhood, how enticing and deceptive this indoctrination is… Via The Blaze: Fourth-grade students in Illinois are learning that “government is like a nation’s family” because it sets rules and takes care of needs such as health care and education. So says a worksheet for social studies homework that was distributed to students at East Prairie School in Skokie, Ill, complete with a drawing of Uncle Sam cradling a baby that represents the citizens. Students are then prompted to answer 10 questions comparing government and families, including how their family...

Good news. President Obama has vastly expanded the concept of “rights” in America by decree. He told a radio audience in his weekly address that health insurance is now a “right” that every American enjoys: Your health insurance isn’t something to play politics with. Our economy isn’t something to play politics with. This isn’t a game. This is about the economic security of millions of families. See, in the states where governors and legislatures and insurers are working together to implement this law properly – states like California, New York, Colorado and Maryland – competition and consumer choice are actually...

This is AP, so no quoting. Gist of article in comment below.

You’ve probably read that the series of speeches President Barack Obama started giving Wednesday are a “pivot” to the economy designed to rev things up. Well, they’re not. Obama’s speeches will be no less than the manifesto of a leftist president who plans to spend his remaining time in office installing as much of his big government “project” as possible by whatever means he can get away with. If you got the wrong message, it’s because Washington reporters too often have a poor understanding of people who have a systematic philosophy and truly believe in what they are doing. Obama,...

In 1975: 1.You could buy an airline ticket and fly without ever showing an ID. 2.You could buy cough syrup without showing an ID. 3.You could buy and sell gold coins without showing an ID 4.You could buy a gun without showing an ID 5.You could pull as much cash out of your bank account without the bank filing a report with the government. 6.You could get a job without having to prove you were an American. 7.You could buy cigarettes without showing an ID 8.You could have a phone conversation without the government knowing who you called and who...

Can the family die, as a legal and social institution in Italy? Such a question could not even have been asked 40 years ago in this country, but in that time, the social and demographic landscape has changed dramatically, and the unthinkable is going on around us. For some time I’ve been thinking about and reading various opinions on how the destruction of marriage as a legal and social institution in the formerly Christian West, has forwarded the aims of that nebulously defined, but apparently all-powerful, class of people I’ve come to call, simply, “the Statists” or “the Secularists.” It’s...

Part 1 in a new series examining the common fallacies committed by both statists and theists. This video covers the fact that both atheism and libertarianism are both negative philosophies, and therefore the burden of proof is on statists and theists ...

Amid all the emotion over same-sex marriage, the limited-government argument for marriage as uniting a man and a woman keeps getting short shrift. It fell to me to make that case during a discussion of marriage law and the Supreme Court with the worthy S.E. Cupp on a recent installment of “Real News from The Blaze,” and I’d like to flesh out those thoughts here. For starters, virtually every political community has regulated male-female sexual relationships. This is not because government cares about romance as such. Government recognizes male-female sexual relationships because these alone produce new human beings. For highly...

Tocqueville saw a nation of individuals who were defiant of authority. Today? Welcome to Planet Government.In "Democracy in America," published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. "The inhabitant of the United States," he wrote, "has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to it . . . only when he cannot do without it." Unlike Frenchmen, he continued, who instinctively looked to the state to provide economic and social order, Americans relied on their own efforts. "In the United States, they associate for the goals...

"Why are there no libertarian countries?" In a much-discussed essay for Salon magazine, Michael Lind asks: "If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?" Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question. Definitions vary, but broadly speaking, libertarianism is the idea that people should be as free as possible from state coercion so long as they don't harm anyone. The job of the state...