Free Republic

Everywhere we turn the Democrats are sounding more like Benito Mussolini every day. They’ve become the fascist party. Fascism is a system of government where the party in power forcibly suppresses opposition and criticism. We’re seeing over the issue of same-sex sexuality, ‘gay rights,’ homosexuality, whatever you want to call it. Any opposition will be shut down, fined, and put out of business. The call for toleration is the foot in the door to political, economic, and social repression, and once the objective has been achieved, toleration discarded. The ideological door is now shut. No more debates, and you will...

Israeli election watchdog orders TV and radio stations to impose five-minute delay on broadcast to allow editing out of "electioneering" sections...

"I am under 'investigation,'" professor Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado Boulder posted on his blog Wednesday. The top Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, sent a letter to university President Bruce Benson that asked the school to provide its financial disclosure policies and information on how they apply to Pielke, as well as any drafts and communications involving Pielke's testimony before Congress between Jan. 1, 2007, and Jan. 31, 2015. In 2013, Grijalva explained, Pielke told the Senate that it is "incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with...

While jousting with Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly a few years ago, Jon Stewart proclaimed him “the Mayor of “Bull---- Mountain.’’ But that image is imprecise. Fox News, the cable network beloved of conservatives, is less a mountain than a fortress, or maybe a tank. Firmly in the driver’s seat is O’Reilly, who worked at a Boston TV station and attended Boston University and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The network’s operational mode is the furthest thing from serene mountaintop remoteness: Day in and day out, Fox girds for ideological battle with what it sees as the...

[T]he Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is set to roll out something called the Critical Information Needs study, which will embed government “researchers” into media organizations around the nation to make sure they are doing their job properly. The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about “the process by which stories are selected” and how often stations cover “critical information needs,” along with “perceived station bias” and “perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.”

Apparently not satisfied with their effort to intimidate Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers, the left’s StopRush crusade is now allegedly targeting his spokesman. In their view, simply working for the talk host is apparently a crime, with an online and legal harassment campaign as punishment. Even sharing a surname with an EIB employee can now mean being pulled into this battle! As a result of his position with the show, longtime spokesman/ advisor Brian Glicklich has found himself on the receiving end of a harassment campaign after he began to investigate the inner workings of this secretive group. Considered one of the...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained that “different media” are dividing the country, making it impossible for people to even have a conversation with each other. Clinton made her remarks yesterday in an interview with Re/Code’s Kara Swisher. She criticized America’s “partisan bunkers” for getting in the way of confronting tough issues like racism, sexism and homophobia. “Nobody wants to associate with anybody who doesn’t agree with them politically,” she said. “You can’t have a conversation, people won’t listen to each other, they listen to different media, and those different media (outlets) tell different stories about the very same...

Two prominent House committee chairs are “deeply disappointed” in Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler for refusing to testify before Congress as “the future of the Internet is at stake.” Wheeler’s refusal to go before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday comes on the eve of the FCC’s vote on new Internet regulations pertaining to net neutrality. The committee’s chairman, Representative Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), and Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Fred Upton (R., Mich.) criticized Wheeler and the administration for lacking transparency on the issue.

Democrats on the Federal Elections Commission have begun the process of monitoring speech and press on the internet in order to supposedly tackle the issue of “too much money in politics.” The claim is that powerful corporations and rich “fat cats” are anonymously influencing elections through support of various blogs, news sites, and video publications online. The internet has turned the entire political dynamic in the United States on its head. People now have access to an unlimited wealth of information about every topic pertinent to policymaking. They don’t have to wait for an elected official or the mainstream media...

Concerned that “the low cost of Internet communications could adversely impact candidates who communicate by legitimate regulated paid media,” the Federal Elections Commission is considering regulations that would place a cap on blogs and tweets that conforms with campaign finance rules. Under the proposed scheme, the FEC would estimate the monetary value of every political comment made on these media. Once the accumulated value of comments reached the ceiling for contributions to a candidate or ballot measure, the blogger or tweeter would be ordered to stop making any additional comments prior to election day. Failure to do so would subject...

The internet is under assault. At the Federal Communications Commission, regulators are hard at work crafting a plan that would turn the internet into a taxable utility. In Congress, lawmakers are determining whether and how best to tax the sales that occur on the internet. And over at the Federal Election Commission, the regulation of political speech that takes place on the internet is back on the table. In October, then FEC Vice Chairwoman Ann M. Ravel promised that she would renew a push to regulate online political speech following a deadlocked commission vote that would have subjected political videos...

There's a reason we are in a cultural, military, and cyber messaging war with a twisted group called IS -- still widely called ISIS, its old name. It doesn't call itself HISIS; they don't claim to represent Hinduism. Nor BISIS; they aren't Buddhist radicals. CRISIS and JISIS would also be incorrect, since they aren't Christian or Jewish radicals, either. They may not represent mainstream Islam, but they wholeheartedly believe in their evil calling to establish a global Islamic caliphate based on a radical Sharia ideology -- affectionately and simply called the Islamic State. This diseased breed of Muslim fanaticism shares...

When San Francisco voters approved a minimum wage increase in the November election, Mayor Ed Lee sent what he called a loud and clear message to the nation: “We can give a well-deserved raise to our lowest-wage workers, and we can do it in a way that protects jobs and small business.” Yet a month after the initial phase of the increase took effect, Borderlands Books became the first business Sunday to cite The City’s higher minimum wage as the catalyst for its closure.The Valencia Street bookstore expects to clear its shelves and lay off employees by the end of...

Skynews is reporting on demonstrations in Madrid, Spain saying they are in response to austerity measures. The State Department has a travel warning to American's suggesting the demonstrations are regarding economic issues. BUT, a search shows that the demonstrations are in response to a 'security law' that limits demonstrations in Spain and an 'Anti-Islam' demonstration law. So I ask, which is it or is it both?

...recounting his experience as a German Communist in the 1930s, Koestler is...describing the post-Communist, postmodern, post-9/11 American condition. It is the sinister overhaul of language and thought—so familiar!—that he personally engaged in, and that was and is the primary tool of Marxist and Islamic subversion. “Not only our thinking, but also our vocabulary was reconditioned,” he explains. “Certain words were taboo.” Certain other words became telltales by which to identify dissenters or enemies. Literary, artistic, and musical tastes, he writes, were “similarly reconditioned” to support the renunciation of independent thought and logic necessary to submit to ideology.

The first amendment is dead; long live the reign of sensitivity. Ben Shapiro explores how Americans have forfeited their fundamental rights in the name of political correctness. See the video and transcript.... TRANSCRIPT: Millions of people from all over the world held candlelight vigils in honor of the French magazineCharlie Hebdo after an Islamic terror attack on its staff. But in reality, those of us in the United States – yes, even those of us who tweeted #JeSuisCharlie – gave up our First Amendment rights long ago. We gave them up in the name political correctness, and in the name...

A Turkish court ordered the nation’s authorities to block Facebook pages that they deem to be insulting of Muhammad

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck complained in a letter to Google’s chief executive on Dec. 30 that Waze could be “misused by those with criminal intent to endanger police officers and the community.” The Los Angeles Police Department said Monday it had not heard back from Google about whether it had addressed Beck’s concerns. Google purchased Waze for $966 million in 2013. There are no known connections between any attack on police and Waze, although Beck said Waze was used in the killing of two New York Police Department officers on Dec. 20. The Instagram account of the gunman...

File this under “the one where Friends fail to fits in with ‘modern gender politics'”. By the standards of circa-2015 political correctness, does the long-running sitcom pass the test? The show that brought a huge young audience to NBC’s primetime lineup in the 1990s was apparently a hotbed of anti-gay, misogynistic antics and all-around bigotry. That’s according to the historical revisionists over at Slate, where Ruth Graham has been taking notes while binge-watching reruns on Netflix. Could it be the next Amos ‘n Andy? Isn’t the problem obvious? In the 1990s, PC extremism was still confined to college campuses, while...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Oxford University Press bans pigs from children’s books, so here’s Porky Pig reciting the Pledge of Allegiance Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world.The Telegraph reports:The Oxford University Press has warned its writers not to mention pigs, sausages or pork-related words in children’s books, in an apparent bid to avoid offending Jews and Muslims.Jews?I’m Jewish, and I have neither been offended, nor heard of any Jew claiming to be offended, by pigs being mentioned in literature. On the contrary, I grew up with this stuff, and I love it. Here’s “Piggies” by...