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A US senator bemoaned Thursday morning that the constitutional right to due process “is what’s killing us right now.” Related Stories 'It makes even more sense today': Senate Democrats are reviving a controversial bill after the Orlando massacre Business Insider NRA: Gun sales to anyone on a terror watch list should be investigated, delayed Quartz Donald Trump Has Called for Blocking Gun Sales to Terror Suspects Bloomberg Republicans Seek Wider FBI Surveillance Power After Orlando Bloomberg Democratic senator reacts to Orlando shooting: 'Congress has become complicit' in mass shootings Business Insider How To: Fix Crepey Skin at Home [Watch] Beverly...

...Speaking on Echo of Moscow radio, I said I considered Vladimir Putin’s decision to run for a third presidential term to be a mistake. A regular changeover, a periodical renewal of the political establishment was essential and Putin could have set an example. “New people would appear who could move the process on. He would be leaving a legacy with much that was positive.” Oh, dear, that put the cat among the pigeons! United Russia stalwarts, rancorous Internet trolls, professional political fixers, the whole motley crew took as one to berating Gorbachev, as if I had said something subversive and...

The courts? Closed most days. The bureau to start a business? Same thing. The public defender’s office? That’s been converted into a food bank for government employees. Step by step, Venezuela has been shutting down. This country has long been accustomed to painful shortages, even of basic foods. But Venezuela keeps drifting further into uncharted territory. In recent weeks, the government has taken what may be one of the most desperate measures ever by a country to save electricity: A shutdown of many of its offices for all but two half-days each week. But that is only the start of...

For those who continue to wonder how the most powerful, most productive, most envied and most successful nation in history can be one short step from the 3rd class status of a Marxist dictatorship. 1. Teaching Math in 1950s A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit? 2. Teaching Math in 1960s A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit? 3. Teaching Math in 1970s A logger sells a truckload...

“It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you — something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of...

Welcome to life in totalitarian America, where even going to the bathroom and identifying the sex of an adult have now become intensely political acts. Totalitarianism is about the politicization of everything, and once people’s careers can be destroyed by the New Bathroom Order if they publicly object to the once-bizarre idea of men in the ladies’ room–we’re there. Ask the now-unemployed Curt Schilling. Totalitarianism is about using force to gain political goals. You can’t get more coercive than forcing the vast majority of people to endorse the utterly bizarre just to accommodate the allegedly hurt feelings of an almost...

Dystopian Fiction of Yesterday is the NWO of Tomorrow: “The Shift is Toward Totalitarianism” By Jeremiah Johnson SHTFplan.com Many of the things that are happening this very moment have direct parallels in the literature of the past. Whether it is an account such as the “Gulag Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn or a work of “fiction” such as “1984” by George Orwell is irrelevant. Elements of the history or the storyline (regarding the former and the latter works) are now becoming thoroughly inculcated into the fabric of modern reality. All of the measures taken by the Soviet Union to crush and control...

In his book The Snapping of the American Mind, David Kupelian asks the following painful question that millions of Americans like myself have pondered for years and will ponder for some time to come as America slowly rips itself apart. Kupelian writes, “How could it be that hundreds of thousands of Americans fought and bled – and many died – on foreign shores to contain an evil and metas-tasizing ideology variously called communism, Marxism, socialism, collectivism, or statism, and yet now, just a few years later, we would gaze up at the pinnacle of power in our own country and...

President Barack Obama signed legislation Wednesday that would extend some U.S. privacy protections to citizens of allied countries and let foreigners sue the U.S. government if their personal data is unlawfully disclosed.In a separate ceremony just a few minutes later, Obama signed into law a bill that beefs up trade enforcement and includes a ban on Internet access taxes. Obama said both bills had bipartisan support. The bill extending certain privacy protections was aimed at shoring up trust among European allies following leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Obama said the new law makes sure data is...

America is at a crossroads. History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom. Certainly, this is a time when government officials operate off their own inscrutable, self-serving playbook with little in the way of checks and balances, while American citizens are subjected to all manner of indignities and violations with little hope of defending themselves. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have moved beyond the...

At a dinner with the nation's governors, President Barack Obama says he's not naive in believing politics can be a noble endeavor. [...] Obama recounted how President Lyndon B. Johnson told a gathering of governors three days after John F. Kennedy's death that a government of checks and balances will only work when people are willing to work together for the common good. ...

Venezuela's Supreme Court has overruled the opposition-controlled congress and granted broad decree powers to President Nicolas Maduro. Congress last month had refused to approve Maduro's declaration of an economic emergency. The court ruled in a decision made public Thursday night that Maduro did not need congressional approval after all. The court said the declaration of emergency is now in effect, granting Maduro greatly expanded authority over the economy for 60 days. ...

Cultural totalitarianism did the impossible - it changed the very nature of man. An abstract ideology has suppressed the mind and senses - and the ability to feel compassion for real victims. ___ In my correspondence regarding the events in Cologne, an editor of a Russian newspaper asked me a natural, but discouraging question; "Where were the German men?" he enquired of me, perplexed. Indeed, for us who grew up in Soviet Russia, it would be inconceivable that some drunk young people could publicly mock and harass girls on New Year's Eve in the very center of Moscow or Saint...

Communism sucks. Socialism does too. Ask the people who survived both systems. As Fidel came to power in 1959, how many Americans slid onto rafts to get into Cuba? Or took the last ship to Havana? I'll need actual names. Attention to all you college kids out there so starry-eyed for Bernie - are you serious? But you're young. Far and wide you've been educated by Liberal pro-BDS professors, so you're not expected to know too much except that the two most reliable beacons of tolerance and liberty, the United States and Israel, are on the wrong side of history....

Newspapers hardly run obituaries unless somebody pays for them, so you probably didn't see the official death notice of the English language a couple of weeks ago. When the University of Missouri released a letter from 115 faculty members supporting their colleague Melissa Click and demanding that the school "defend her First Amendment rights of protest and freedom to act as a private citizen," words lost all meaning. "First Amendment rights," in this case, are Click's rights to order a mob attack on a student journalist who was covering a protest on the Missouri campus last November. Notice the absence...

President Obama proposed a new rule Friday that would require every large company in America to report employees' pay based on race and gender, an effort to reduce longstanding pay inequities for women and minorities.

Peter Drucker wrote the first version of this book during Hitler's rise to power. Most explanations for the rise of fascism focused on political reasons or economic ones, while Drucker explains the social movements that made leaders like Mussolini and Hitler possible. It also explains what is (and isn't) fascism, how they hobble their own economies, and the social warpage they create. Peter Drucker updated "The End of Economic Man" in the 1960s, seeing horrifying parallels between the 1960s activism and the 1930s. And while history does not repeat, it rhymes - and this book explains the social trends that...

At the beginning of December, Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell asked Secretary of State John Kerry whether Charles and David Koch, two libertarian political activists, should be considered - his remarkable words - "an enemy of the state." He posed the same question about Exxon, and John Kerry, who could have been president of these United States, said that he looked forward to the seizure of Exxon's assets for the crime of "proselytizing' impermissibly about the question of global warming. An enemy of the state? That's the Democrats' theme for the New Year: totalitarianism. Donald Trump may talk like a...

The international climate pact passed Saturday "represents the best chance we have to save the one planet we've got," President Obama said hours after the historic agreement was signed. "No nation, not even one as powerful as ours, can solve this challenge alone," Obama said of the deal, which the United States and nearly 200 other countries agreed to in Paris Saturday after two weeks of intensive talks. "And no country, no matter how small, can sit on the sidelines. All of us had to solve it together."

The Paris climate talks have mostly wound to an end. There are still a few details to clean up over the weekend, but we’re being told that representatives from hundreds of nations have come together and are prepared to release their final agreement on how to save the world from climate change. Or maybe not: even as of this morning nobody seemed to be able to agree as to whether or not there was an agreement. (CNN) “Obviously, nobody will get 100% of what they want,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Friday as he discussed the “balanced and as...