Free Republic

War is what Obama does best. The War on Women. War on Poverty. Class War. Race War. Walk up to a union member snoozing on a bus, a Latino man crossing the street, a gay cowboy poet earning minimum wage, and community organize him along with a few hundred thousand others into the latest battle in the social justice war that never ends. “Fight for card check, for birth control, for gay marriage and illegal alien amnesty.” Every time a battle is won and an election ends, a new source of social conflict is dug up and deployed for war....

I can't quite believe that I've just sat through ten minutes of BBC television in which British journalists Owen Jones and Zoe Williams have defended Karl Marx as the prophet of the End of Capitalism. Unbelievable because I had thought Marxism was over with the fall of the Berlin Wall – when we discovered that socialism was one part bloodshed, one part farce. But unbelievable also because you'd have to be a pretty lacking in moral sensitivity to defend a thinker whose work sent millions of people to an early grave. I don't want to have to rehearse the numbers...

As reports continue to flood in about President Obama’s massive surveillance state, media powerhouse Glenn Beck says, “There wouldn’t be a Jew alive on the planet today if Hitler had this technology.” Beck made the statement Friday on his radio program while interviewing NSA whistleblower William Binney. Binney worked at the National Security Agency for nearly four decades, and said the secret surveillance of Americans began in October 2001. He believes the NSA is storing information on 3 billion phone calls every day. Want to know how and why America has so rapidly come to resemble the totalitarian society described...

Survival Doc (the videographer) and Mark M. are arrested for not obeying an officer and Mark was also charged with resisting arrest. Did he resist arrest? You be the judge. Oh, and they never read us our Miranda Rights. We spent 24 hours in the St. Charles Count Jail with Missouri Hwy Trooper Jenkins acting as judge, jury and executioner.

The IRS targeting scandal is best understood as part of a larger effort to limit the political speech of conservatives and business groups. That became clearer last week regarding the Federal Election Commission, and now evidence is spreading to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Senior Republicans on the House Oversight Committee recently wrote to new SEC Chairman Mary Jo White to report on disturbing events that occurred under her predecessor, and to request agency documents. As at the IRS, there's an emerging pattern at the SEC of senior officials rolling over career staff to politicize the work of a powerful...

Wow. In one of the best smack-downs of Barack Obama I have ever seen, Clary Daly, an angry Irish politician calls Obama a “war criminal” for supporting the radical rebels in Syria while talking about “peace” in Ireland. Remember, Obama just recently publicly blasted Catholic schools in Ireland, blaming them for division — while turning a blind eye to the fact that he’s soon to be dumping money and weapons on radical Islamic radicals in Syria. Wouldn’t it be amazing if more of our own politicians stood up to the hypocrisy and the lies and the destructive actions of Obama?...

The Obama administration’s legs are wobbling under the weight of so many scandals lately that whole chunks of the edifice – the IRS, the NSA, the DOJ – are threatening to implode, particularly without support from the normally adoring media. Even the New York Times – the New York Times! – is no longer willing to bolster an administration whose totalitarian urges have been exposed to the light. Let’s begin with the Internal Revenue Service’s thuggish targeting of conservative groups. From April 2010 to April 2012, the IRS placed on hold the processing of applications for tax-exempt status received from...

America’s younger generations are being groomed for totalitarianism. We begin In Polk County, Florida, where students at an elementary school, a middle school and a high school had their irises scanned—without parental permission—as part of what officials are characterizing as a “student safety” program. “It simply takes a picture of the iris, which is unique to every individual,” wrote Rob Davis, the school board’s senior director of support services, in a letter sent to parents. “With this program, we will be able to identify when and where a student gets on the bus, when they arrive at their school location,...

Appearing on MSNBC, singer and former civil rights icon Harry Belafonte told President Barack Obama how he should take control of the political debate. His answer? Jail opponents. “That there should be this lingering infestation of really corrupt people who sit trying to dismantle the wishes of the people, the mandate that has been given to Barack Obama, and I don’t know what more they want,” Belafonte told race hustler Al Sharpton. “The only thing left for Barack Obama to do is to work like a third world dictator and just put all these guys in jail.”

MEDFORD, Ore. (CBS Seattle) — A military veteran is facing criminal charges after firing a warning shot at a suspect trying to break into his house. KDRV-TV reports that 36-year-old Corey Thompson fired a warning shot from his AR-15 rifle at 40-year-old Jonathon Kinsella after he tried to break into Thompson’s house through the back door.

The Progressive believes in precisely two things: his own magnificence and the constructive power of brute force. In combination, they lead him naturally from the role of pestiferous busybody to brutal dictator. Where the productive man dreams of the things he might create if only left alone by his fellows, the Progressive dreams of the world he could create if only the lives and property of his fellows were at his disposal. The roots of his pathology lie in that oldest and most destructive of all human vices, the desire for the power to rule over other men. As...

Vice President Joseph R. Biden said in a wide-ranging magazine interview that gun-control legislation will pass eventually because several senators who voted against it are experiencing a public backlash. “To use the vernacular, there’s suddenly a lot of senators out there who have seen the Lord,” Mr. Biden told Rolling Stone magazine. “You find out that the senator from New Hampshire [Republican Kelly Ayotte] is in trouble; she voted no. I can name you four senators who called me and said, “Jesus, I guess you were right —maybe we can find some other way of doing this. Can we bring...

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...

(Reuters) - The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters. The proposed plan represents a major step by U.S. intelligence agencies to spot and track down terrorist networks and crime syndicates by bringing together financial databanks, criminal records and military intelligence. The plan, which legal experts say is permissible under U.S. law, is nonetheless likely to trigger intense criticism from privacy advocates. Financial institutions that operate...

Some in anguish, some in fear, Venezuelans raced for home on Tuesday after the government announced the death of President Hugo Chavez, the firebrand socialist who led the nation for 14 years. Vice President Nicolas Maduro's voice broke and tears ran down his face as he appeared on national television to announce that Chavez died at 4:25 p.m. local time (3:55 p.m EST; 1755 GMT) "after battling hard against an illness over nearly two years."

A high-stakes trial started Monday to assign blame and help figure out exactly how much more BP and other companies should pay for the nation’s worst offshore oil spill. Attorney Jim Roy, who represents individuals and businesses hurt by the spill, said BP executives applied “huge financial pressure” on its drilling managers to “cut costs and rush the job” before the blowout of its Macondo well triggered an explosion that killed 11 workers and spawned the massive spill. The project was more than $50 million over budget and behind schedule at the time of the blowout, Roy said. “BP repeatedly...

The outrageous rhetoric and threats coming from some Democrats demonstrates the necessity of the Second Amendment. In the period immediately before the Civil War, the most ferocious rhetoric came out of the mouths of Southern Democrats who were soon known as “fire-eaters.” They got that nickname because of the strength of their rhetoric in support of slavery and their willingness to talk about secession as a response to the possibility of abolitionists gaining influence in Congress, and even winning the White House. The louder and more ferocious speeches they gave, the stronger the abolitionist position seemed to become. Today,...

The Weirdest Monuments Of The Communist Era That Are Still Standing After the fall of the Soviet Union, many Communist statues and sculptures were destroyed, while others were moved to statue parks or museums. But many of them remained in the same place for the last 20 years, while the former Soviet areas were transformed into modern countries. Here are thirteen of the most incredible ones. Click to enlarge images below. 1. Lenin's giant head, Ulan-Ude, Republic of Buryatia, Russia The 42 ton, 25 foot tall head of former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin is standing in Ulan-Ude. Built in 1970,...

Best Future Dystopias Where The Liberals Have Won The Republican Party is gathering in St. Paul, to put forth its vision of the future. And over the next few days, you'll be hearing a lot about the horrendous futures that could take shape if gormless liberals were allowed to run the show. Which makes us wonder: what does science fiction, the literature of the future, have to say about liberal-run dystopias? And it turns out, there are plenty of horrendous futures blighted by the heavy hands of our zinfandel-spitting liberal elites. Here are the scifi stories John McCain should mention...