Free Republic

The newest person named to the Biden administration has devised and implemented radical left-wing policies at the highest levels of government, including attempts to revolutionize the teachings of an entire Christian denomination, critics say. President Joe Biden announced Monday that he would replace Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry with John Podesta. The longtime Democratic fixture served as chief of staff to Bill Clinton, adviser to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, and president of the influential left-wing think tank Center for American Progress (CAP). Podesta, who acted as a “fixer” inside the troubled Clinton White House, promotes...

~They're saying it out loud now: Ireland's Green Party Sen. Pauline O'Reilly: "We are restricting freedom but we're doing it for the common good...Yes you have rights, but they are restricted for the common good."pic.twitter.com/A1JN1yMyVv — Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) November 27, 2023 The obvious objection is that this is the rationale of totalitarian monsters throughout history. But, in our time, it's worse than that - because, when "diversity is our strength", there is no "common good". Because to have a "common good" you have to have something in common - and increasingly, in the vibrantly diverse multiculti hellhole our rulers...

WEST OLIVE, Mich. — The eight new members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners had run for office promising to “thwart tyranny” in their lakeside Michigan community of 300,000 people. In this case the oppressive force they aimed to thwart was the county government they now ran. It was early January, their first day in charge. An American flag held down a spot at the front of the board’s windowless meeting room. Sea-foam green carpet covered the floor. The new commissioners, all Republicans, swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the...

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen defended the Biden Administration's multi-trillion dollar spending spree, saying "it will help tamp down inflation. Inflation is caused by too much private sector spending. Increased government spending will siphon money out of the private sector by first driving up the cost of consumer goods making them too expensive to purchase. This will force consumers to cut back on their spending." "Second, the efficiencies stimulated by the build back better plan will start to kick in as people switch from their selfish attitudes toward how they spend their own money toward a more public-spirited willingness to sacrifice...

Over the past year, conservatism has changed. At least, the way conservative intellectuals and some politicians talk has changed. Many now speak of orienting our society toward the common good, and about using government power to pursue that good. But has anything really changed within the Republican party? Politics and policy often run a course independent of philosophical debate. Are policymakers ready to go on offense and commit to a different strategy for combatting transgender ideology and the gay agenda? The answer seems to be yes.Last month, NBC News announced: “Dozens of anti-LGBTQ state bills already proposed in 2020, advocates...

“If you don’t think Tucker Carlson has more influence on national security policy than many of the guys on the National Security Council, you’re wrong,” Stephen K. Bannon declared Wednesday tonight to a small group of wealthy Manhattan elites in a baronial Fifth Avenue apartment. Thus, at a meeting of the Common Good lecture series in the modern art-festooned living room of New York plutocrat Richard Cohen, the president’s exiled former chief strategist revealed that America’s global interests are being guided by a Fox News host, a favorite of white nationalists, who recently proclaimed on his primetime show that he...

A new video from the American Association of Evangelicalsreveals how George Soros, through his many funding ventures, has been busily infiltrating the Christian base in America to divide, and ultimately conquer, the religious minded within the Republican Party. Truly, with the left, political wars know no bounds. Nothing’s sacred; not when it comes to the leftists’ drive to succeed. Here’s what AAE put out in a press release: “Democrat ministers Rev. Jim Wallis and allies are now touring many states on ‘Vote Common Good’ buses to … split the evangelical vote before the mid-term elections. The AAE video features the...

Hillary Clinton headlined a major fundraiser for a political action committee shortly before the group steered nearly $500,000 to the wife of the FBI official who oversaw the Clinton email investigation, DailyMail.com has learned. Clinton's ties to the Common Good VA - a Virginia state PAC run by Clinton's long-time friend and advisor Terry McAuliffe, its governor - came under scrutiny this week after the Wall Street Journal reported that the group donated heavily to the state senate campaign of Jill McCabe. Her husband Andrew McCabe led the FBI investigation into Clinton's emails. Andrew McCabe, now the deputy director of...

A recently revealed connection between Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a local Virginia politician and the FBI exposes, at the very least, another deceptive conflict of interest that was likely intended to help protect the viability of Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. These politicians believe they can get away with such actions because they trust that they can count on a complicit mainstream media to cover for their corruption. A case in point is the funding McAuliffe arranged for Dr. Jill McCabe, the wife of the future deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe. McAuliffe steered nearly $500,000 from his political action...

It is now impossible to deny that Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United have worked for years to undermine and manipulate Catholic leadership John Podesta smiles after meeting Pope Francis after the canonization Mass for Sts. John XXIII and John Paul II in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican April 27, 2014. (CNS photo/Paul Haring) Beginning in 2007, orthodox Catholic writers including myself wrote dozens of articles in an attempt to expose the funding and duplicitousness of two fake Catholic groups: the George Soros-funded Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United. (For example,...

A federal judge has ruled that a controversial regulation that would give the Environmental Protection Agency jurisdiction over small streams and ditches is bureaucratic overreach and has halted the implementation of the rule. The judge was not pleased with the EPA, who said they would go ahead and implement the regulation in the 37 states that did not sue to end it.

Vid at link.

The unforeseen difficulties of implementing the Affordable Health Care Act (aka Obamacare) have key proponents scrambling for answers. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), one of the leading writers of the Obamacare legislation, now calls the program “complex beyond comprehension. We had hoped that somehow, someone would've come up with sensible procedures for how the thing is supposed to work, but no such luck. The system's as opaque as the day we passed it. Our high hopes are crashing down around us.” US Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius blames Republicans for the mess. “Instead of rolling up their sleeves...

NEW YORK – A 1995 video depicts Barack Obama calling for “democracy with a small ‘d,’” while pushing a society based on collectivism and “common good.” In the video unearthed by KleinOnline, Obama hails unions and collective bargaining as encapsulating the societal “common good” of which he speaks. Obama urges society to collectively move “forward” – a word that would later serve as his 2012 campaign slogan. Obama was speaking in an Aug. 11, 1995 interview pushing his just published book, “Dreams From My Father.” At the time, Obama was a community organizer planning to launch a political career. Obama...

[This article was e-mailed to me by a fellow Catholic who wanted help refuting it from a Catholic social justice perspective. IOW, not just "Aw, Ezra Klein is a WaPo Socialist", but a real analysis of the legitimacy (if any) and limits of collective bargaining in the public sector, Have a look at it, and at my few comments below. Looking to y'all for some enlightening discussion. You've probably heard politicians fret that state governments - or, worse, the federal government - will default on their debts. House Speaker John A. Boehner called the prospect of a federal default "a...

In our political discourse, there are many words and phrases which mean entirely different things to different people. Justice, charity, and "the common good" come to mind. When Glenn Beck began warning people to run from houses of worships which preach "social justice" earlier this year, many critics took it as a stand against charity. Variations of "how could you be against 'social justice?" reverberated throughout the media.Perhaps the most prominent response came from Simon Greer of Jewish Funds for Justice. In a Washington Post op-ed, Greer took issue with Beck's charge to "make sure your church puts God first...

What Is Social Justice? What, exactly, is social justice? (snip) Are we to gather from this that the term social justice is simply a synonym for living out the beauty of the Beatitudes? I once heard a professor at the Catholic University of Ružomberok, Slovakia, say that he thought of social justice as “an ideal arrangement of society, in which justice and charity are fully served. Until then, one cannot say that social justice has been realized.” Does this mean that social justice is a social ideal by which some people measure reality and toward which they strive, progressively, to...

After World War II, the U.S. government invested an enormous amount of money in medicine; medical research, medical procedures and medical technologies. This investment made contemporary scientific medicine into American medicine, characterized by a continuing flow of new treatment possibilities. These advances raised all kinds of ethical questions. Some were personal and individual, others were social and political. Both type questions are addressed by a new academic discipline called bioethics. The first attempt to develop a scientific medicine took place in Greece in the 5th century B.C. It was called Hippocratic medicine. Closely linked with this first scientific medicine was...

Let us call to mind Pope John XXIII’s famous definition of the common good, as slightly reformulated by the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “the sum total of the conditions of social life which allow people, either as groups or individuals, to reach their own perfection more fully and more easily.” The perfection of each citizen is the goal of civil society and is, therefore, an essential part of the common good. A few examples of the many required social conditions are the legal protection of life, the legal recognition of marriage as a union between a man and woman,...

WALLACE: But the question, of course, is what kind of change. I want to put up something that the liberal economist Paul Krugman wrote in a column in the New York Times this week. Let's put it up. He wrote, "This year's presidential election was a clear referendum on political philosophies, and the progressive philosophy won." Do you agree? PODESTA: Yes, I do. I think that the program that that - again, that was - that - that the Obama-Biden ticket put forth in the campaign focused on providing opportunity for everyone, focused on the common good. And I think...