Free Republic

Going further than the Treasury Department's tacit support for debanking alleged "hate groups" after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, a State Department component that "strengthen[s] resilient democratic societies" developed a more sweeping plan for financially choking off disfavored narratives a month later. The U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a "Disinformation Primer" that appears to have been started in "late 2020," judging by a reference to the most up-to-date "social media initiatives" by Facebook and Twitter "to address disinformation and misinformation."It was still being written at least 10 days into the Biden administration, referring twice to the Jan. 31,...

Barack Obama’s pick for “regulatory czar,” Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein, may be the incoming president’s most popular appointment so far. Judging from his resume -- best-selling author, “pre-eminent legal scholar of our time,” and an endorsement from The Wall Street Journal -- we can almost understand why. Almost. Because as we’re telling the media today, there’s one troubling portion of the new Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator’s C.V. that has seems to have flown under everyone’s radar: Cass Sunstein is a radical animal rights activist. Don’t believe us? Sunstein has made no secret of his...

It is this reporter's opinion that often behind a great man is the driving force of a great woman. Never was this truer than in the case of Kateryna Chumachenko Yushchenko, the American-raised wife of the newly elected leader of the Ukraine. This tough-minded, savvy businesswoman hails from Chicago; the daughter of an electrician and a seamstress, Kateryna grew up steeped in the traditions of her ancestral homeland. She graduated from Georgetown University and became known for her commitment to freewheeling capitalism. But Ukrainian democracy was the zeal of her life. During WWII, Kateryna's parents were forced to emigrate to...

Dr. Philip Gossett, a retired music scholar and professor of music at the University of Chicago who was considered one of the world's foremost experts on 19th-century Italian opera, died Monday at his home in the Hyde Park neighborhood. He was 75. The cause of death was progressive supernuclear palsy, a rare degenerative disease, according to his son, Jeffrey. Gossett was widely respected as an authority on the operas of Gioachino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi, having served as general editor of the collected Rossini works and coordinating editor of the collected Verdi works. The latter edition was published by the...

WASHINGTON — Jermaine Anderson keeps going back to the same memory of Donald Trump, then a candidate for president of the United States, referring to some Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. "You can't be saying that (if) you're the president," says Anderson, a 21-year-old student from Coconut Creek, Florida. That Trump is undeniably the nation's 45th president doesn't sit easily with young Americans like Anderson who are the nation's increasingly diverse electorate of the future, according to a new poll. A majority of young adults — 57 percent — see Trump's presidency as illegitimate, including about three-quarters of blacks...

President Barack Obama heads to law school next week to push his nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Obama adviser Brian Deese said Friday that Obama will return Thursday to the University of Chicago Law School to argue for Senate consideration of the appeals judge’s nomination. Obama taught constitutional law at the university for several years before he entered politics. …

It all goes downhill after 30 — at least when it comes to happiness. “Adults over 30 are less happy than their predecessors,” concludes a study published online Thursday in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, which examined happiness data from more than 50,000 adults, gleaned from the General Social Survey, carried out by NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan, independent research organization, which has collected information about American adults since 1972. From 2010 to 2014, adults over 30 had an average happiness score of just 2.18, compared with 2.24 a decade ago. That’s significant considering happiness...

When I was a freshman at the University of Chicago in 1996, I heard the same thing again and again: Do not leave the boundaries of Hyde Park. Do not go north of 47th Street. Do not go south of 61st Street. Do not go west of Cottage Grove Avenue. These boundaries were fairly explicit, almost to the point of being an official university policy. The campus police department was not committed to protecting students beyond the area, and the campus safety brochure advised students not to use the “El” train stops just a couple of blocks beyond them unless...

The Obama administration's nominee for a senior legal position at the Pentagon is one of the congressional staffers accused by Republicans and intelligence officials of stealing classified documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, Fox News has learned -- and the controversy could imperil her shot at a major career promotion. Sources on Capitol Hill and in the intelligence community say Alissa Starzak, a majority staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) who has been nominated for the position of general counsel to the U.S. Army, is one of two SSCI employees accused by the panel's Republicans, and by...

Half of Republicans back carbon limits, poll says "Six in 10 Americans, including half of all Republicans, said they support regulation of carbon dioxide pollution, although they weren't asked how. Nearly half of Republicans said the U.S. should lead the global fight to curb climate change, even if it means taking action when other countries do not. And majorities across party lines said environmental protections "improve economic growth and provide new jobs" in the long run, a popular Obama administration talking point." [snip] The AP-NORC Center survey of 1,578 adults was conducted online Nov. 20-Dec. 1, using a sample...

Full title: The gift of life: Grandmother, 53, gives birth to her own grandchild after cervical cancer left her daughter infertile It is perhaps one of the greatest gifts a mother could give. A woman in her 50s has given birth to her own grandchild after becoming a surrogate mother for her infertile daughter. Cindy Reutzel, 53, gave birth to a healthy baby girl a week ago who will now be brought up by her 32-year-old daughter Emily Jordan.

May 16, 2012 Obamacare's Patient-Dumping, Privacy-Meddling Scheme Michelle Malkin The stench of Chicago cronyism over the White House just got fouler. Inhale this: A shadowy $10 billion Obamacare agency with zero oversight just awarded first lady Michelle Obama's pet patient-dumping scheme at the University of Chicago Medical Center a $5.9 million taxpayer-funded grant. It will enable Mrs. Obama's cronies to build a government-sponsored electronic medical record-sharing system. The Chicago program, known as the Urban Health Initiative, is run by one of President Obama's closest golfing buddies, scandal magnet Eric Whitaker, who has been entangled with Illinois corruption celebrities Rod Blagojevich...

Documents obtained by The Daily Caller show that President Barack Obama’s close friend Eric Whitaker, who runs the University of Chicago Medical Center’s Urban Health Initiative, spoke at Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Chicago-area church in 2006. Whitaker was a speaker at Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ during a Sept. 17, 2006 “Health Care Justice Forum,” according to a church bulletin TheDC obtained. The bulletin is no longer on the church’s website. Whitaker made headline news Monday when New York Times bestselling author Edward Klein alleged during a radio interview with Sean Hannity that Whitaker offered Wright $150,000 to stay silent...

Before she became first Lady Michelle Obama was had a $317,000 job as Vice President of the University of Chicago Medical Center. At her job she helped to create a program where the uninsured get sent to a different hospital. Imagine that, while her husband was pushing universal healthcare Michelle was doing her utmost to make sure the poor didn't come to her hospital. It seems as if the FLOTUS got more than a salary for her work denying health care to the poor. According to The Amateur” author Edward Klein, Dr. Eric Whitaker vice president of the University of...

DID YOU KNOW SOUTH AFRICA HAS A CONSTITUTION THAT'S FAR SUPERIOR TO OUR OWN? THAT'S WHAT ONE U.S. SUPREME COURT JUSTICE, AS WELL AS SHADOWY ACTIVITIST GROUPS WORKING BEHIND THE SCENES TO EFFECT CHANGE, BELIEVE. “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the Constitution of South Africa … a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights …” -Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jan. 30, 2012. That stunning disavowal—by an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court—of the Constitution she has sworn...

CHICAGO A 2-year-old Indiana boy and his mother contracted a rare and life-threatening infection from his soldier father's smallpox vaccination, according to a published report. The boy and his mother were being treated in a specially ventilated room at the University of Chicago's Comer Children's Hospital, the Chicago Tribune reported Saturday. The family's name and home town were not released at their request. The boy developed a virulent rash over 80 percent of his body earlier this month after coming in contact with his father, who had recently been vaccinated for smallpox before he was to be deployed overseas by...

WASHINGTON -- Key White House economics adviser Austan D. Goolsbee will resign from his role as chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, it was announced Monday. A statement from the White House said Goolsbee will return to his position as an economics professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in the fall term. "Prior to his time in the Obama Administration, he was a professor at the University of Chicago for fourteen years," the statement said.

Locked up, abandoned and forgotten, the vacant six-flat standing at the northeast corner of 57th and Maryland has no plaques or statues and few clues to its history. Now, the little-known childhood home of Ronald Reagan in Hyde Park could soon be torn down by the University of Chicago, which has quietly plotted its demolition, the Sun-Times has learned. The plan has made unlikely allies of conservatives who consider Reagan an icon and liberal Hyde Parkers who say the university’s secrecy is typical of how it has treated its neighbors for decades. It puts the school that provided the intellectual...

Not what it appears to be: the Archaic Mark LONDON. A clever bit of detective work by US scholars and scientists has proven that one of the jewels of the University of Chicago’s manuscript collection is, in fact, a skilled late 19th- or early 20th-century forgery. Although speculation as to the authenticity of the Archaic Mark codex has been rife for more than 60 years, prior to this definitive research many believed it was an early record (possibly as early as the 14th century) of the Gospel of Mark and the closest of any extant manuscript to the world’s oldest...

If sharing a bedroom with a student of the opposite sex is not your idea of appropriate college housing for your son or daughter, beware. The college or university to which you have just sent a deposit may have other ideas. ... “The University of Chicago has sent a letter to parents announcing that they’ll allow men and women to room together next year — and they won’t necessarily be informing parents about their children’s room arrangements.” My friend Maria has a child at the University of Chicago. It never occurred to me that the parents of Chicago students were...