Free Republic

As the end of the year approaches, it is time to reflect back to the last time we spent a couple of weeks writing the wrong year on checks – those of us who still write checks, that is. Also, it is the time of lists. “Best of” lists. “Worst of” lists. “Best of the ‘Best of’” lists and the like. I don’t generally jump on bandwagons, but I’m not above hitching a ride every now and then. Stuffed with so many Thanksgiving leftovers that turkey is haunting my dreams, I want to take this week’s column to recount the...

Far-left social justice teachers never miss an opportunity to push their agenda in the classroom. As you’ll see in my upcoming book, “Indoctrination: How ‘Useful Idiots’ Are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism,” leftist teachers use moments like the #OccupyWallStreet protests around the country to push their agenda of shifting America leftward away from a free market system. One such teacher, Bob Peterson, who moonlights as the president of the Milwaukee teachers union, fawned all over a music video produced with footage from the various protests. He called it “a great video rich with teaching possibilities.” In one part,...

The left is on the ropes. Their Keynesian tactics to “revive” the economy are making it far worse instead. Conservative Tea Party types pushing the Republican Party to the right and taking over the House of Representatives are making it difficult for tax-and-spend liberals to continue on their road to bankrupting the country. The Supreme Court is poised to declare Obamacare unconstitutional. President Obama is sinking in the polls. The European Union, the ideal welfare-state leftists used as a model for decades, is disintegrating. Pundits claim that if the election were held tomorrow, Democrats would lose the Senate and the...

Despite claims that she was joking, North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue is "dead serious" with her suggestion that the 2012 congressional elections be suspended, according to radio host Rush Limbaugh, and at least one group is now calling for the Democrat's impeachment. "No, she wasn't joking," Limbaugh said today. "If they could get away with canceling elections, they would do it. That is who the Democrats of today are. That's what the American left is all about." During a speech yesterday in Cary, N.C., Perdue stated: "You have to have more ability from Congress, I think, to work together and...

In an effort to scratch up Rick Perry’s bourgeoning presidential campaign, some on the left (with the usual sort of help from some on the right) have trotted out the familiar tale of a conservative war against science. The themes are just as they were in the middle of the last decade (although the embryonic stem cell debate has yet to rear its head this year), and the arguments of the left are pretty much as you would find them in Al Gore’s 2007 book The Assault on Reason (which, despite what the title might lead you to expect, was...

Listening to the liberal commentators on MSNBC, the left cannot stand Governor Rick Perry hosting an event of prayer and fasting in Texas. The left is irritated by the freedom to express one's religion in public. They said the governor is overstepping his boundaries in the separation of church and state. The problem with this criticism is that Rick Perry is not forcing his religion on Texans. He is not transforming the Texas government into a theocracy. Separation of church and state does not mean taking away religion from the public square. It means the government cannot force a religion...

With a little over a year to go until the next national election cycle is complete, it has become apparent that from an economic standpoint, the SS Liberal has officially run out of steam.  Hull weighted down with the barnacles of false promises and rudder crippled by the reckless mismanagement of a spendthrift captain from Chicago, she sits there floundering in a sea of unemployment and malaise not experienced since Jimmy Carter was at the helm.And despite all the rosy window dressing provided by the beaming ship attendants of the mainstream media, who pretend to be shocked every time another...

British blog “Liberal Conspiracy,” which bills itself as the “UK’s most popular left-of-centre [sic] politics blog,” ran an article last week discussing an interview (or as they spell it Across the Pond, “interviewe”) between Julian Assange and Ian Hislop, the editor of news magazine (or, as British people say, “gumþéod”) Private Eye. Eye is the “UK’s number 1 best-selling news and current affairs magazine,” according to their website. Liberal Conspiracy writer Sunny Hundal writes that, “The article is titled, ‘A Curious Conversation With Mr. Assange’—and it is the phone version of a horrible car crash. While I support WikiLeaks as...

Last fall, leftist ideological groups of socialists and communists teamed up with American labor unions to march together for “One Nation.” Now, as labor leaders struggle to maintain a stranglehold on collective bargaining privileges in Wisconsin, the same groups are once again marching together under a banner claiming unions are the heart of the American dream.As we’ve reported, former White House green jobs czar Van Jones this week issued a rallying call for the progressive movement to “renew itself and become again a national force with which to be reckoned.” On Saturday, progressive groups and labor unions are reportedly planning...

The Communist Party USA is promoting widespread protests across the United States in support of leftist and labor protesters in Wisconsin. Reports Ohio Communist Party leader Rick Nagin reported from Columbus; Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, the state AFL-CIO and its affiliates have called for a massive turnout for a rally Tuesday at the Statehouse in Columbus to protest a Republican bill to repeal collective bargaining for public employees. In robocalls and emails sent throughout the state, Strickland said "the fate of Ohio's middle class is on the line" and urged people "to join with the thousands who will gather...

In a bid to keep their meal ticket going, WorldNetDaily is pushing a new poll that allegedly reveals that “only 3 in 10 members of the GOP believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States”: With the issue still disputed in a number of court cases and under review by nearly a dozen states considering laws that presidential candidates document their constitutional eligibility, the poll by Public Policy Polling found that only 28 percent of the Republicans surveyed believe Obama was born in the U.S. while 51 percent do not. Another 21 percent say they are not sure."Any...

Bill Kristol is entitled to his optimism about democratic revolutions in the Islamic world. Perhaps the elections in Egypt will turn out better than those in Gaza where Hamas now rules a terrorist state; Iraq, which has instituted an Islamic Republic; Lebanon, where Hezbollah now rules a terrorist state; and Afghanistan, which is a kleptocracy wooing the terrorist theocracy in Iran. What he should not be doing as a conservative leader is demonizing Glenn Beck, who has done more to educate Americans about the unholy alliance between the secular left and the Islamic jihadists than anyone else. Kristol needs to ...

The recipe for regulatory tyranny is simple. Identify something basic, like air or water. Suggest the existence of a crisis. Call for sweeping regulation to address the purported crisis. For the left, the regulation of something as basic as water holds great appeal. Every home, every industry, every school and office uses large quantities of water as part of production, sanitation, heating and cooling, and other functions. If government can control water use, it can control much of our lives. Water usage, for example, was the EPA pretext for the 2009 ban on mountaintop mining, in which natural mining debris...

At Big Journalism, Kristinn Taylor and Andrea Shea King comment on the "Palin Pledge" news blackout being organized at DNC house organ The Washington Post by leftist writer Dana Milbank: Milbank’s call for a Palin boycott is reminiscent of behind the scenes coordination by members of Journolist. In this case however, Milbank and The Post are making viral a campaign that has been wished for by others in the media who hate Palin and do not want to see her become president of the United States. The Post’s campaign against Palin even has a logo... [...] Milbank’s editor Marisa Katz......

Democrats are good at a lot of things (that damage our country) but in particular they are very talented in the business of exploitation for political gain. The entire Democrat strategy can be summed up in one unguarded sentence uttered by Rahm Emanuel.You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Democrats are ghoulish. It's hard for regular folks to understand the depths of their depravity because normal people are sad when tragedies happen. Those on the Left get gleeful. They even go so far as to wish tragedies on America in order to further their political gains. The...

For over a week we have heard the pundits on the left try to pin the blame for the horrible Tucson shootings on the Tea Parties, Sarah Palin, and/or Right Wing Radio hosts. However there was no evidence that anything coming out of these sources had anything to do with Jarred Loughner’s disgusting attack. Yet some progressives continue to attack Conservatives for the inciting Loughner’s hate.

Fortunately, the leftist smear that Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, "Bushitler," the March of Dimes, international bankers, Israel, and Winnie the Pooh created the "climate of hate" that somehow drove a severely mentally ill, largely apolitical man to shoot up a townhall meeting in Tucson on January 8 seems to be dying out. Over in the fever swamps of the left just a hard core of mendacious radicals such as Markos Moulitsas, the entire staff of the hate site Media Matters, and of course Paul Krugman and Chris Matthews, is sticking with (and in some cases doubling down on) this classic Big Lie....

The surest way to become a folk hero on the Hard Left is to kill a human being. As Mumia Abu-Jamal, Joe Hill and Huey Newton could have attested, murder trumps even treason for establishing radical credentials. You certainly don’t get invitations to deliver commencement addresses, become the subject of folk songs, or hang with the likes of Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda by protesting a traffic ticket. Taking the life of another person elevates a radical to cause celebre status like nothing else can. So why all the carping about “violent rhetoric” from people wearing “Che” T-shirts and imploring...

...a deranged 25-year-old Jordanian named Sirhan Sirhan slithered through a crowd toward Sen. Robert Kennedy...Sirhan shot and killed Kennedy, wounding several others. The ensuing investigation showed that Sirhan was a raging anti-Semite who’d become fixated on Senator Kennedy because of the latter’s support for Israel. Two people profoundly impressed by the assassination were the terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. In 1974, they dedicated their own communist manifesto, Prairie Fire, to Sirhan, hailing him as a courageous political prisoner. In the book itself, they and the rest of the Weathermen went on to identify themselves proudly as “communist underground in...

It took less than 24 hours for the political Left to seize upon the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six people on Saturday to blame the political Right for the shooting. Perhaps the most egregious example came from Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who wrote "We don't have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was." (The newspaper that published plagiarized and fabricated accounts of the "D.C. sniper" by affirmative-action hire Jayson Blair in 2003 is still publishing unsubstantiated suppositions without "proof," eh?) "[Giffords'] father says that ‘the...