Free Republic

You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from...

There’s a meme circulating on social media that goes like this… If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative....

In the November elections, Democrats won in the 20 richest congressional districts. An ebullient Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), currently vacationing during the "cruel" government shutdown at the Fairmont Orchid resort in Hawaii (where room rates range from $900 per night for a regular room to $5,000 for a suite) bragged that "the ultimate demise of the Republican Party is imminent. Democrats own the Black vote, the Hispanic vote, the immigrant vote, the welfare vote. We have more campaign money from wealthy donors than Republicans can ever hope to see." "The coalition of small business owners, farmers, middle-income wage-earners, craftsmen, and...

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Monday afternoon added his voice to a swiftly growing list of Republicans calling for the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of South Carolina’s state house. “Now is the time to do what is right, and I support the call by Governor [Nikki] Haley and South Carolina leaders to remove the Confederate battle flag from state house grounds,” Priebus said in the statement.

What’s with rich liberals who blast other people for being rich? In early October, Barack Obama went to a $32,000-a-head fundraiser at the 20-acre estate of the aptly named billionaire Richie Richman. The day before he charmed his paying audience of liberal 1 percenters, Obama had sent out an e-mail alleging that Republicans were “in the pocket of billionaires.” Does that mean that Republicans who accept cash from billionaire supporters are always in their pockets, but that when the president does likewise, he never is? And if so, on what grounds is he exempt from his own accusations? In mid-October,...

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s PAC has raised tens of thousands of dollars from wealthy Democrats, including a top President Obama donor and a close friend of Hillary Clinton’s — even as the Bay State lawmaker travels the country blasting big business and the super rich. Among the most recent donors with the deepest pockets who gave to Warren’s PAC for a Level Playing Field, according to its latest federal filing: • Barbarina Heyerdahl, a Democratic activist in Vermont who has given heavily to President Obama. She gave $5,000 to Warren’s PAC last month; Heyerdahl has donated more than $190,000 to...

<p>Apple, Google, and Facebook 1-percenters are much too sophisticated to call these booming apartheid prep schools “academies,” but they are burgeoning in reaction to worries that the flood of illegal service workers from Latin America has finally lapped up to the outskirts of Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Once-topnotch public schools like Menlo-Atherton are now whispered about as “problematic,” given the growing enrollment of the children of illegal aliens.</p>

Jon Feere is the Legal Policy Analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) appears in a new television advertisement designed to promote the immigration amnesty bill currently being debated in Congress. The minute-long advertisement calls the proposal "conservative immigration reform" and attempts to make amnesty appealing to Republican voters. Partisan politics aside, the amnesty ad is misleading on a number of counts, outlined below.The ad was produced by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg who created the floundering FWD.us, an advocacy group aimed at promoting amnesty. One of the group's offshoots is something called "Americans for a Conservative Direction",...

AN Italian minister has called for “luxury taxes” and visitor levies to be imposed on holidaymakers in tourist hot spots including the islands of Capri and Sicily and chic Alpine ski resorts. Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, a Green environment minister in the centre-left government, has urged local authorities to copy the Mediterranean island of Sardinia by taxing yachts, private aircraft and second homes belonging to foreign visitors. The taxes prompted protests in Sardinia when they were introduced this summer. Flavio Briatore, the Renault Formula One manager and former boyfriend of Heidi Klum and Naomi Campbell, the models, hosted a “gala VIP...