Free Republic

Attention, parents: Have your little ones been subjected to "TS Gold" in school yet? If you care about student privacy, data mining and classroom intrusions, you might want to start asking questions and protecting your children now before it's too late. What's happening here in Colorado with this onerous testing regime is happening everywhere. Informed families and teachers from all parts of the political spectrum agree: It's a Big Government/Big Business "gold" rush you don't want to join.... Last spring, parent Lauren Coker discovered that TS Gold assessors in her son's Aurora, Colo., public preschool had recorded information about his...

21st Century SocialismThe attempt to destroy democracy in Latin America.  The Obama administration started out on the wrong foot in world affairs. It used techniques better suited for domestic political campaigns — popularity contests — in its foreign policy. In our own hemisphere, the result was confusion for our allies and our enemies alike. The overriding objective of U.S. policy — in Latin America and elsewhere — should be to advance U.S. national interests, not to curry favor with foreign leaders. If we can be liked while advancing our interests, so much the better. But when we try to befriend...

In the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, the Supreme Soviet, as its separatist legislature is known, is nationalizing coal mines and reviving collective farms. At parades, people wave hammer-and-sickle flags; school officials talk of revising the curriculum to celebrate the triumphs of the Soviet Union. There is now a secret police force called the M.G.B., reminiscent of the K.G.B. Some rebels call it, only half-jokingly, the N.K.V.D., the notorious Stalin-era secret police force. The unrecognized separatist mini-states in eastern Ukraine, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, were rescued from a near-death experience last month, when a Russian military incursion routed...

Almost 400,000 Soldiers of Chaos descended on New York City over the weekend to ostensibly demand the US do something about climate change. What a load of bull crap. And someone (I hope) is checking those attendance numbers, because as we all know, these jack wagons literally aren’t capable of telling the truth. Behold the brown green shirts who are Marxists, Communists, Socialists, Progressives, Islamists, radicals… They all want to transform America into some form or other of a hellish tyranny that benefits a few and suppresses the rest. They call themselves the People’s Climate March, but they are nothing...

I'm not afraid of being on the “wrong side of history” on gay “marriage”; I've been there before. I spent the first part of my life being told that the global triumph of Communism was “inevitable.” “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Among the stratagems employed by the cultural Left to discourage, dispirit, and dissuade the plurality of culturally sane Americans from opposing same-sex “marriage” is the all-encompassing insistence that the fight has already been lost. The phrase of choice is that proponents of traditional marriage...

Just as today’s opinion makers seek to divorce Islam from its impact — for example brutal conquest, forced conversion, religiously-sanctioned sex slavery, beheadings — past opinion makers worked equally hard to divorce communism from its impact — for example, brutal conquest, forced collectivization, concentration camps or gulags, mass murder. And this worked. …Unlike Nazism, Communism has never been judged guilty or even held responsible for the carnage and suffering it has caused. On the contrary, it remains a source of liberal, statist ideas... ...these belief systems [Communism and Islamic supremacism], both hostile to our Constitutional liberties remain protected by silence....

It’s hard to imagine that any school would have a problem with a book about a Christian family that helped Jews escape the Holocaust. But Springs Charter Schools in Temecula, Calif., not only had a problem with “The Hiding Place,” they also took issue with any other book that was written by a Christian author or included a Christian message. “We do not purchase sectarian educational materials and do not allow sectarian materials on our state-authorized lending shelves,” Superintendent Kathleen Hermsmeyer wrote in a letter to attorneys at the Pacific Justice Institute (PJI). Pacific Justice Institute is representing a parent...

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to...

BEIJING -- The fourth plenary session, one of China's top political meetings, will carry the theme rule of law and has been scheduled for Oct. 20-23 in Beijing. The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee set the date for the fourth plenary session of the CPC 18th central committee during a meeting chaired by General Secretary Xi Jinping on Tuesday. This will be the first time a plenary session of the CPC Central Committee has taken rule of law as its central theme, earlier reports said. The Tuesday meeting also discussed the same topic, as...

The Islamists are coming for us. For them, it's a fight to the death. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can get to work arranging for their death Is Islamism a Totalitarian System Like Nazism and Communism? The concept of a totalitarian state was an invention of the twentieth century. The notion of a state or nation whose government could control virtually all aspects of its citizens’ lives was not conceivable in prior times. It is certainly true that in monarchies throughout history, the average subject had little capability to individually alter his finances, geographical mobility or political...

Instagram has reportedly been blocked in China following a weekend of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Photos shared on Weibo, a microblogging platform similar to Twitter, also seem to be hidden if they contain certain keywords. Searches for phrases like "Occupy Central" and "Hong Kong students" are blocked, says the BBC's Beijing bureau. Instagram told the BBC it was aware of the reports and was looking into the situation. "It's commonplace for China's internet censors to go into overdrive during politically sensitive events," said Celia Hatton, the BBC's correspondent in Beijing.

Strange thing about Flood Wall Street, the financial-district protest that followed the People’s Climate March: Nobody had much to say about the climate — what they came to talk about was capitalism. “Stop Capitalism,” “End Capitalism,” “Capitalism Kills,” the placards read. Kshama Sawant, the socialist Seattle city-council member who funds her crusade against capitalism by being married to a man with Microsoft money, called for a “radical, militant” movement linking environmental concerns to such traditional socialist enterprises as heavy government intervention into targeted industries, including energy and transportation. Question: What happened to the environment the last time people with radically...

Climate change captured the nation’s attention over the past week as an estimated 400,000 people marched through the streets of New York City to raise a collective voice of alarm about the effects of a warming planet. Just days before the march, the issue got a spotlight in Flagstaff thanks to a visit from Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian and climate scientist who is becoming one of the rising stars in the climate change conversation. Her message about the harmony between faith and climate change earned her a spot on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in...

People in the Baltic states cannot feel secure. Russian President Vladimir Putin has a plan he has been working on for over a decade. So says former adviser to President Putin, Andrey Illarionov. Giving a presentation at a conference in Palanga, Lithuania, Illarionov, who advised Putin on economic policy in 2000-2005, referred to a question that was raised in the recent Riga Conference 2014: Can people in Riga sleep peacefully at night? “The same question could be raised in Tallinn, Vilnius, Palanga, Bucharest and other cities. No one in Riga could reply to it in the positive,” Illarionov said. “From...

Can you imagine the reputation of a literary figure surviving the disclosure that he worked (however briefly and ineffectually) for Hitler's Abwehr? Yet Ernest Hemingway worked for Stalin’s KGB and nobody (among the “smart set”) seems to bat an eye. According to KGB defector Alexander Vassiliev "the 42-year-old Hemingway was recruited by the KGB under the cover name "Argo" in 1941, and cooperated with Soviet agents whom he met in Havana and London. This comes from a book published in 2009 by Yale Univ. Press (not exactly a branch of the John Birch Society.)"Castro's revolution," Hemingway wrote in 1960, “is...

Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall. Ah, Progressives! You really have to – well, not admire them exactly – but if not admire them then at least grant them a grudging respect for the tenacity of their beliefs. Unfortunately for them, the Socialist utopia is a Cryptid, which, according to Wikipedia’s serviceable definition, is “a creature whose existence has been suggested but has not been discovered or documented by the scientific community.” Here’s another example of a cryptid: it’s called the Loch Ness Monster. Like the socialist utopia, the Loch Ness Monster requires a lot of...

While President Obama challenged China at the United Nations to follow the U.S. lead in pushing for drastic reductions in national carbon emissions to save the planet from “climate change,” it appears that China has dramatically different ideas. As in: No. According to a document deposited at the UNFCCC in advance of a planned meeting next month, China insists that the U.S. and other developed countries endure most of the economic pain of carbon emission cutbacks, and need to make significantly more sacrifices in the months ahead. Carbon emission cutbacks by China and other developing countries, the document says, will...

Alana Goodman’s revelation at the Washington Free Beacon of previously unknown correspondence between Hillary Clinton and Saul Alinsky shows that Clinton has not been honest about her far-left past. The lost Alinsky letters also remind us of what we ought to know but have forgotten: Hillary is not “Clintonian.” While Bill and Hillary have worked, schemed, and governed as a couple for decades, Hillary has always been to the left of Bill. As president, she would govern more like Obama than like her husband. Hillary Clinton was the Elizabeth Warren of her day, the leader of the left-wing of the...

Father Gjergj Simoni speaks with CNA in Tirana, Albania on Sept, 21, 2014. Credit: Daniel Ibanez/CNA. Tirana, Albania, Sep 22, 2014 / 07:44 am (CNA/EWTN News).- An Albanian Catholic priest shared his story of encountering persecution for his faith by the country's repressive state atheism, noting how he waited decades before his dream to be ordained was fulfilled. “When I first said I wanted to be 'like Him,' a priest told me that it was a dark path to take, but I replied: 'I see no darkness,'” Father Gjergj Simoni said. In a Sept. 21 interview with CNA, he recalled...

Clorox is shutting down all operations in Venezuela, citing restrictions by the government, supply disruptions and economic uncertainty. […] The consumer products company said that for almost three years its affiliate, Corporación Clorox de Venezuela S.A., had to sell more than two-thirds of its products at prices frozen by the Venezuelan government. Over that same time span, there was a sharp rise in inflation that resulted in significantly higher costs for Clorox. …