Free Republic

Party leaders must learn from the GOP and listen to their base, which skews as progressive as the Republicans’ does reactionary. Senate Democrats on Monday voted overwhelmingly to end the government shutdown without protections for the DREAMERs - who were protected from deportation and allowed to legally work by the Obama-era DACA policy eliminated by President Trump in 2017. For the Democratic Party’s progressive base, their capitulation was a disappointing end to a moment in which it seemed like the party might finally take a real stand against abhorrent Republican policies. The DREAMERs were meant to be an unassailable group...

All 50,000 of them? That’s how many texts the FBI apparently “lost” in their retention system during the period of time in which agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page carried on an extramarital affair — and might have injected partisan bias into the probe of Russian interference in the election. The bureau previously turned over 375 messages to congressional investigators, but when the panels asked for a broader range of messages, the FBI discovered that the messages had been deleted. Jeff Sessions pledged to “leave no stone unturned” in getting those texts back, while Donald Trump continued to slam the...

It is now well over a year since Vladimir Putin's Russia passed 'anti-missionary' laws and more than 180 cases have since been brought. Activities ranging from prayer meetings in homes, posting worship times on a religious website and praying in the presence of other citizens have been interpreted as 'missionary activity' with Christians making up the vast majority of the law's victims. One case is that of Donald Ossewaarde, an American Baptist preacher living in Oryol, who was expelled for hosting a church meeting in his house. Having lost appeals throughout the Russian judiciary system, Ossewaarde's case is now with...

There’s a Russian candidate for president who is wildly popular on YouTube, where he slams the policies of President Vladi­mir Putin. He has a nationwide political machine and a constituency of millions who are fed up with the current Kremlin occupant and his oligarch friends. Although Putin is overwhelmingly favored to win a new six-year term March 18, this contender has as good a chance as anyone to come in second. And no, his name is not Alexei Navalny. It’s Pavel Grudinin, the surprise nominee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, named last month to replace Gennady Zyuganov,...

Maybe I’ll say something that someone might dislike, but that’s the way I see it,” Putin said in an interview for the documentary Valaam, an excerpt of which was broadcast on Russia 1. “First of all, faith has always accompanied us, becoming stronger every time our country, our people, have been through hard times. “There were those years of militant atheism when priests were eradicated, churches destroyed, but at the same time a new religion was being created. Communist ideology is very similar to Christianity, in fact: freedom, equality, brotherhood, justice – everything is laid out in the Holy Scripture,...

Now, let us begin by answering the question which our sermon topic raises: Can a Christian be a communist? I answer that question with an emphatic “no.” These two philosophies are diametrically opposed. The basic philosophy of Christianity is unalterably opposed to the basic philosophy of communism, and all of the dialectics of the logician cannot make them lie down together. They are contrary philosophies. Now, there are at least three reasons why I feel obligated as a Christian minister to talk to you about communism. The first reason grows out of the fact that communism is having widespread influence...

The city is moving to dump its investments in fossil fuels, and suing five big oil companies charging they are responsible for global warming that has cost the city billions. Mayor de Blasio and City Controller Scott Stringer plan to announce at a press conference Wednesday that the city's pension funds will aim to divest from $5 billion in investments of more than 190 fossil fuel companies within five years. And the city filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against five big oil companies — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell — looking to force them to...

MOSCOW -- Increasingly frequent snowfalls in the Sahara Deseret are evidence of the much talked about global warming trend, just like the unusually warm winters in Russia, bitter cold spells in the US and floods in Europe, Head of Russia’s Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring Roman Vilfand told TASS. On January 7, snow blanketed the Sahara Desert north of Algeria’s city of Ain Sefra. The snow cover was about 40cm deep but melted by night. A year earlier, in December 2016, snow fell in the region for the first time since 1979. "Such situations, including snowfalls in Sahara,...

In the second season of the TV show “24,” President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) is removed from office for failing to launch a war against three Middle East countries purportedly behind a nuclear attack on U.S. soil. Palmer has reason to doubt his intelligence agencies’ assurances of who was behind it, and it turns out the attack was orchestrated by a cabal of business and military leaders who want to launch a war for personal gain. The means by which Palmer is removed from office during the 4:00-5:00a hour on Day 2 is the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,...

Academia turns a blind eye to the reality of actual socialism, the ideology practiced by Marxists while they sought the perfection of communism...someday. Socialism is ruining Venezuela today, and the whitewash pervades elite culture, even when the evil strikes close to home for an elite American small college. I attended Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio) in the mid-1970s. I enjoyed my time there, made some great lifelong friends, and graduated with a sincere appreciation of the benefits of having a liberal arts education as it was practiced at the time. Over the years, my political perspective has moved well away from...

In mid-December, a science editor for BuzzFeedUK, Kelly Oates, tweeted, “All I want for Christmas is full communism now.” Once this tweet was noticed, she withdrew it and issued an apology. A month earlier, another BuzzFeedUK staffer, Blake Montgomery, had responded to a tweet from President Trump. The president had declared November 7, 2017 as “National Day for the Victims of Communism.” Montgomery then tweeted, that “victims of Communism” was just a “white nationalist talking point.” He has since withdrawn the tweet and apologized. The apologies notwithstanding, this shows how there is a great deal of ignorance about Communism and...

As America begins preparations for Sunday’s New Year’s Eve festivities, some might be celebrating another holiday — that of the formation of the Soviet Union. The USSR, established Dec. 30, 1922, by Vladimir Lenin, was born out of the same needless bloodshed that would later define it. Five years prior in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution began, sparking a civil war that would leave millions dead, many by sheer acts of murder committed by competing factions.

If all this were true, Obama would do precisely what he did for eight years. He worked hard to turn Americans against their own country, and against each other. He worked in every way to weaken America—militarily, economically and spiritually. When he spoke of American exceptionalism in other countries, it was clear that he had an ardent dislike for his own country. Of course, he defied the Constitution with an amnesty for millions; that was certain to further weaken the nation. This act was particularly menacing: it signifies that he intended to devastate America beyond repair. Hillary Clinton would have...

How should comtemporary Russians remember Soviet-era political repressions?OrthoChristian.com continues its endeavor to publish material on the theme of the 1917 revolution towards the end this centennial year. In this article, Vasiliy Shchipkov, who holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Moscow State Institute of International Relations, discusses the Christian approach to remembering the terrible time of Soviet repressions vs. a mentality of retribution.Great Consecration of the Church of the Resurrection of Christ and the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church in Sretensky Monastery. Photo: G.Balayants / Pravoslavie.ru My family knows about repressions, about political and religious persecutions, not from...

The U.N. General Assembly has decided to mark the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth by holding a high-level meeting focusing on world peace ahead of the annual gathering of world leaders in September 2018. […] In 2009, the General Assembly established “Nelson Mandela International Day” on July 18, the date he was born in 1981. The U.N. asks people around the world to mark the day by making a difference in their communities. …

BEIJING (AFP) - At least 10,000 people were killed in the Chinese army's crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, according to a newly released British secret diplomatic cable that gives gruesome details of the bloodshed in Beijing. "Minimum estimate of civilian dead 10,000," the then British ambassador Alan Donald said in a telegram to London. The document, made public more than 28 years after the event, was seen by AFP at Britain's National Archives. The estimate, given on June 5, 1989, the day after the crackdown, is almost 10 times higher than estimates commonly accepted at...

Why the idea to return Dzerzhinsky monument to Lubyanka is too bad. Two news almost simultaneously came this week. News is number one. Communist Party leader Zyuganov appealed to Putin with a request to restore the monument to Dzerzhinsky on Lubyanka Square. News number two. According to polls, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Zyuganov fell to the third place in the list of the most popular presidential candidates: not only Putin, but Zhirinovsky (of Liberal Democrat Party of Russia), is ahead of Gennady Andreyevich. The coincidence in the time of these two news, of course,...

A man who battered his common-law wife into a coma and filmed it to show off to his friends is facing 15 years in jail after she died. Maxim Gribanov, 34, assaulted Anastasia Ovsiannikova at their home in the city of Lebedyan, western Russia, after she said she told him she wanted to leave him. After savagely kicking and punching her black and blue for several hours he filmed her horrific injuries to boast to his friends about how he had her 'under control.'

Before the question, how about a few statistics? The 20th century was mankind's most brutal century. Roughly 16 million people lost their lives during World War I; about 60 million died during World War II. Wars during the 20th century cost an estimated 71 million to 116 million lives (http://tinyurl.com/ya62mrqa). The number of war dead pales in comparison with the number of people who lost their lives at the hands of their own governments. The late professor Rudolph J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii documented this tragedy in his book "Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900."...

Venezuela — Kenyerber Aquino Merchán was 17 months old when he starved to death. His father left before dawn to bring him home from the hospital morgue. He carried Kenyerber’s skeletal frame into the kitchen and handed it to a mortuary worker who makes house calls for Venezuelan families with no money for funerals. Kenyerber’s spine and rib cage protruded as the embalming chemicals were injected. Aunts shooed away curious young cousins, mourners arrived with wildflowers from the hills, and relatives cut out a pair of cardboard wings from one of the empty white ration boxes that families increasingly depend...