Free Republic

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...

Police have detained a Chinese journalist on suspicion of causing trouble after he openly alleged that a senior government official was negligent with his public duties, lawyers said Saturday. Si Weijiang, a lawyer for Liu Hu, said the journalist was detained by Beijing police Friday at his home in the southern city of Chongqing and taken to Beijing. … In postings on his personal microblogs, Liu had urged authorities to investigate Ma Zhengqi, deputy director of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, saying Ma was derelict while working in Chongqing. He also shared information that raised questions over possible...

The European Union will review relations with Zimbabwe given its “serious concerns” about the conduct of the southern African state’s election, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said on Thursday. The EU’s verdict on the fairness of the elections will be crucial to a decision on whether it continues to ease sanctions against Zimbabwe. Ashton did not broach the issue of such sanctions in her statement. President Robert Mugabe is to be sworn back into office soon after winning the July 31 election, extending—at age 89—his 33-year rule dating back to independence from Britain. The United States said earlier this...

The U.S. government on Tuesday filed two civil lawsuits against Bank of America for what the Justice Department and securities regulators said was a fraud on investors involving $850 million of residential mortgage-backed securities. The Justice Department and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed the parallel suits in U.S. District Court in Charlotte, according to the court filings. The securities date to about January 2008, the government said, putting them just at the beginning of the global financial crisis.

The U.S. government’s growing surveillance of Americans has transformed the nation into an “electronic concentration camp,” top civil-liberties attorney John W. Whitehead says. “It’s moving so rapidly you have to feel creepy because you're being watched. Everybody has a file if you do anything electronically,” Whitehead, author the new book “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,” told Newsmax TV. … Whitehead—who founded the Rutherford Institute in Virginia, which helps promote civil liberties and human rights—has been researching the growth of the National Security Agency since the 1980s. The agency has been under fire for its collection of...

Barack Obama, to hear his advisers tell it, has finally found The One he has been looking for: John McCain. “We have been looking literally for years for someone we can cut deals with, and finally someone has stepped up,” a White House official said. West Wing aides say they now talk with McCain roughly every other day. McCain, to hear fellow Republicans tell it, has finally found The Two he has needed to make such conversations worth the bother: Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat who can actually get things done in the Senate, and Denis McDonough, a White House...

On one occasion, so it was narrated, Stalin called for a live chicken and proceeded to use it to make an unforgettable point before some of his henchmen. Forcefully clutching the chicken in one hand, with the other he began to systematically pluck out its feathers. As the chicken struggled in vain to escape, he continued with the painful denuding until the bird was completely stripped. “Now you watch,” Stalin said as he placed the chicken on the floor and walked away with some bread crumbs in his hand. Incredibly, the fear-crazed chicken hobbled toward him and clung to the...

Would you trust thousands of low-level Federal bureaucrats and contractors with one-touch access to your private financial and medial information? Under Obamacare you won’t have any choice. As the Obamacare train-wreck begins to gather steam, there is increasing concern in Congress over something called the Federal Data Services Hub. The Data Hub is a comprehensive database of personal information being established by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to implement the federally facilitated health insurance exchanges. The purpose of the Data Hub, according to a June 2013 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, is to provide “electronic, near real-time...

The UK wants to repatriate 35 EU-wide police and justice laws out of some 130 in its wider efforts to claw back power from the EU. “We believe the UK should opt out of the measures in question for reasons of principle, policy, and pragmatism,” UK home secretary Theresa May told ministers in London on Tuesday (9 July). Tory right-wingers want to repatriate all 133 laws, but May said the UK should retain its cooperation with the EU police agency Europol and the EU’s joint judicial authority Eurojust. … The European Arrest Warrant will also figure into UK’s provisional opt-in...

Did you actually believe that they were not going to use the precedent that they set in Cyprus? On Thursday, EU finance ministers agreed to a shocking new plan that will make every bank account in Europe vulnerable to Cyprus-style bail-ins. In other words, the wealth confiscation that we just witnessed in Cyprus will now be used as a template for future bank failures all over Europe. That means that if you have a bank account in Europe, you could wake up some morning and every penny in that account over 100,000 euros could be gone. That is exactly what...

An Internal Revenue Service manager who described himself as a "conservative Republican" told congressional investigators that no one in the agency's Cincinnati office was trying to target tea party organizations for political reasons, according to an interview transcript released Tuesday. The manager, John Shafer, said he and an employee in his screening unit decided to pull applications for tax-exempt status filed by political groups and send them to managers in Washington. He said they were aware of the controversy over the groups and wanted to ensure they were treated uniformly. "Because of media attention that he had seen, he had...

The White House is reporting progress on President Barack Obama’s initiatives to reduce gun violence, but says the most important step would be getting a reluctant Congress to pass new firearms laws. Vice President Joe Biden was announcing Tuesday that the administration has completed or significantly advanced 21 of the 23 executive actions that Obama ordered in January in response to the Connecticut elementary school shooting that killed 20 first-graders and six staff members.

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - The Totalitarianism at the Heart of the Obama ScandalsPosted By Mark Tapson On June 10, 2013 @ 12:34 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 76 Comments 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...

Sales of George Orwell’s ’1984′ are up 69 percent on Amazon, according to a list on the website.The book’s 60th anniversary was on June 6th, amidst a flurry of real-world news stories on secret government surveillance. ... Update: As of 3:22 p.m. EST, sales of Orwell's '1984' are up 91 percent on the Amazon "Movers and Shakers list."

Scary. Unacceptable. This is not America. Those are some of the comments that I have heard about the revelations regarding government snooping on our cell phones. The statement that one man made that something is wrong with you if you don’t think something is askew here -- that would be about right. If you are not upset about this situation then you are clueless. There is a dangerous extension of government that no true American could possibly endorse or accept. Our government has no right to randomly rummage through our cell phone or email records. If you think that the...

The potential for social unrest in European Union countries is higher than anywhere else in the world and the already yawning gaps between rich and poor, a major trigger, are likely to widen globally, the International Labour Organisation said on Monday. Those most vulnerable, the report said, were Cyprus, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain. However the risk of social unrest had declined in Belgium, Germany, Finland, Slovakia and Sweden since 2010. Overall, the risk of unrest in the EU "is likely to be due to the policy responses to the ongoing sovereign debt crisis and their impact...

From the movie "True Stories." Apologies for the forced commercial at the beginning of this YouTube excerpt.

The EU financial crisis has prompted centralization of economic and budgetary powers in Brussels, while national parliaments struggle to fulfill their role as democratic watchdogs. The issue will be highlighted on Wednesday (29 May) when the European Commission publishes detailed budget recommendations for member states, potentially touching on sensitive areas such as wage-setting, pension age or social spending.“I am worried about the degree of influence of the country-specific recommendations,” said Eva Kjer Hansen, head of the Europe committee in the Danish parliament. …

There is a reason why snobby elites on the Upper West Side of Manhattan generously donate to leftist causes and support leftist politicians. Snobs and radicals often act in accord because they are not opposites, as some believe, but rather spiritual cousins - equally despising "the bourgeois," sharing a low view of humanity as herd animals, and sorting people not on their individual merits but by color, income, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and any other characteristic except the content of their minds. Elitists share the presumption that people of the world cannot think for themselves and have no room in their...

The European Commission has been forced to beat a hasty retreat from a proposed ban on jugs of olive oil in restaurants after the idea met with widespread ridicule. Barely a week after it was announced for “hygiene” and “consumer protection” purposes, the EU commissioner in charge, Dacian Ciolos, rushed to the same press room on Thursday (23 May) to announce he was withdrawing the measure. … The proposal would have banned jugs and dipping bowls of olive oil in restaurants from next year and was meant to prevent restaurant-goers from being served any old inferior oil. It had been...