Free Republic

White house officials claim they were unaware that ornaments of Mao Tse-tung were hung upon a Christmas Tree there.

Major media organisations protest against being shut out of president's events in favour of official photographer Barack Obama's White House has been accused of producing Soviet-style propaganda by press photographers who are furious at being denied access to the US president. Mr Obama's aides routinely block independent photographers from capturing him at work, before distributing flattering pictures shot by Pete Souza, his official photographer. During a tense meeting at the White House, the practice was described by Doug Mills, a veteran photographer for The New York Times, as “just like TASS,” the Soviet Union state news agency. More than 30...

MOSCOW AND BOSTON — Lee Harvey Oswald’s Russian was still shaky in 1961, when he was working as a factory metalworker in the provincial Soviet city of Minsk. It fell to a young student engineer named Stanislav Shushkevich to help him out. "He was a simple martinet, and I found nothing in common with him. His Russian at that point was passable. We had about a dozen lessons in all, after that we had no contacts,” Mr.Shushkevich told the Monitor in an interview. “My main concern later on was that he would be given the task of fabricating equipment I...

In fact, a weird, recent phenomenon emerges from the perpetual miasma, confusion and drama composing the life and times of Barack Obama. Many strain at the question—What drives the man? In office he has appeared arrogant and self-satisfied to a degree remarkable even for a US president. Further, he has so often seemed ignorant or obtuse to his surroundings, and of the topics presented to him. Seemingly he is satisfied by the roar of the crowd as if this were the same thing as excellence. Obama is both the most disdainful of opinion of others, and yet the most dependent...

President Obama will get a short-term lift for his nominees, judicial and otherwise, but over the immediate horizon, the strong-arm move by Senate Democrats on Thursday to limit filibusters could usher in an era of rank partisan warfare beyond even what Americans have seen in the past five years. Ultimately, a small group of centrists — Republicans and Democrats — could find the muscle to hold the Senate at bay until bipartisan solutions can be found. But for the foreseeable future, Republicans, wounded and eager to show they have not been stripped of all power, are far more likely to...

The video is here. This is pretty straight forward - Van Jones is a revolutionary communist, he has plainly admitted that. So what I would like to do is take the opportunity to remind everybody about the STORM manifesto. When it comes to Jones and 'communism', there is no name calling involved. It's what he actually believes, and this manifesto goes a long way towards helping you make a valid argument. Below are the chapter by chapter recordings on You Tube. This took me a lot of time to record at the time. Please pass it on to others you...

"..................Jarrett’s official job description is “somewhat vague,” Becker writes, noting that at least part of her role is to serve as “chief liaison to the business community, state and local governments, and the professional left,” but her influence is undeniable. She commands a staff of nearly three dozen and has a hand in decisions ranging from the invitation list to state dinners and what gifts to give foreign leaders, to who should be nominated to the Supreme Court, appointed to a vacant ambassadorship, or awarded the President Medal of Freedom. When Warren Buffett visits to the White House for lunch,...

I made this statement to my 93 year old mother who watches Fox News all day and she retorts...no way. He's black (according to Rev Al)...he is protected by threat of civil/race war. This is the Democrat Party ace in the hole. But on the other hand...if he were ever vulnerable--now is the time.This will be a fine needle to thread...he has lied and denied any knowledge.If he didn't know, he is incompetent. If he did know, he is a crookMost likely, he is an incompetent crook.My hope and prayer...his beneficiaries will abandon him...and he will crash and burn.What does...

Just when you think things can't get much worse with Obamacare, another shoe drops. Correction: This thing has enough dropping shoes to fully fit a centipede. That Obama deliberately lied (please excuse the redundancy, but it is apparently necessary to clarify one's meaning in this postmodern age) in telling people they could keep their plans and doctors is now beyond dispute. He and his handlers have tried to obfuscate the issue with further deception but have fallen way short of passing the laugh test. Some liberals have taunted me on Twitter that all politicians lie. Well, that certainly ends the...

SEATTLE — Seattle City Councilmember-elect Kshama Sawant told Boeing machinists her idea of a radical option, should their jobs be moved out of state “The workers should take over the factories, and shut down Boeing’s profit-making machine,” Sawant announced to a cheering crowd of union supporters in Seattle’s Westlake Park Monday night.

"A State with No Republicans!" Very interesting...Note this. A US State with zero Republicans in office - The State of Illinois. Think about this. Some interesting data on the 'state' of Illinois ... There are more people on welfare in Illinois than there are people working. Chicago pays the highest wages to teachers than anywhere else in the U.S. averaging $110,000/year. Their pensions average 80-90% of their income. Wow, are Illinois and Chicago great or what? Be sure to read till the end. I've never heard it explained better. Perhaps the U.S. should pull out of Chicago ? Body count:...

A full-time professor on the faculty of the newly-minted Texas A&M University School of Law called for the repeal and replacement of the Second Amendment on Friday. The professor, Mary Margaret “Meg” Penrose, made her controversial declaration during a day-long panel symposium on gun control and the Second Amendment at the University of Connecticut School of Law in Hartford. UConn’s main student-run journal, The Connecticut Law Review, organized the event, according to Connecticut Public Radio. It was well-attended, primarily by law students, law professors and local attorneys.

Change: China's communist leadership announced an unsettling mix of accelerated capitalism along with a greater centralization in leadership. It signals how little Beijing knows about what makes free markets work. The four-day huddle of China's Communist Party leaders, whose gobbledygook official title was the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist China Central Committee, pretty well lived up to its billing as rule by committee — a weak one that can't make up its mind. Each of the calls for reform in its vague, 5,000-word communique released on Tuesday — whether of farms, businesses, banks or the judiciary — was...

The Obama administration was accused Wednesday of providing cribbed answers to 23 questions in the form the Senate received for the hearing of its nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security -- as the nominee also ran into criticism from one senator who said he won't vote for him unless he makes a major border security pledge. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., got into a heated exchange with nominee Jeh Johnson, pressing him to commit to boost border security to 90 percent effectiveness. Johnson did not make the pledge. McCain said he, then, could not support his nomination. That was...

Looters: Venezuelan troops storm a local electronics retailer in the name of enforcing "fair prices," brazenly blaming the private sector for state policies. Sounds familiar — and not just because it's a communist takeover. With municipal elections just around the corner on Dec. 8, it's no surprise to see Venezuela's failing socialist government turning to pork-barrel handouts to lure voters — as it always has. Shovel the goodies to the red-shirted low-information voters and gain just enough votes in upcoming elections to claim a dictatorship is really a democracy. Not coincidentally, President Nicolas Maduro declared that Venezuela would celebrate the...

Chinese state-run media revealed for the first time this week that Beijing’s nuclear submarines can attack American cities as a means to counterbalance U.S. nuclear deterrence in the Pacific. On Monday, leading media outlets including China Central TV, the People’s Daily, the Global Times, the PLA Daily, the China Youth Daily and the Guangmin Daily ran identical, top-headlined reports about the “awesomeness” of the People's Liberation Army navy’s strategic submarine force. “This is the first time in 42 years since the establishment of our navy’s strategic submarine force that we reveal on such a large scale the secrets of our...

Today, Team Obama isn’t getting any support from its normally active cheering section at CNN. Bob Laszewski, an executive who provides consulting services to many major American insurance companies, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “The White House is exerting massive pressure on the industry, including the trade associations, to keep quiet.” Here’s what’s Bob is talking about: Insurers who expose Obamacare’s most sinister effects are told they can’t become authorized Obamacare insurance providers – that means they’d be denied access to the largest market in the country just for telling the truth about how many people are being forced off their...

Like all Wyoming political races before it (probably?), the Wyoming Senate primary race between Republicans Mike Enzi and Liz Cheney is currently embroiled in a fishing-related controversy — specifically, whether Enzi, the three-term incumbent, and Cheney's dad, the appropriately named Dick, were ever "fishing buddies." Enzi, in an effort to portray Cheney the Younger's challenge as a personal back-stabbing of the highest order, claims that they were. On Sunday, Dick begged to differ. "Mike also said he and I are fishing buddies, which is simply not true," Cheney said. "Never happened." But Enzi insisted to Politico that they were too...

It’s just one tweet, but the sheer mendacity requires its own post. With the media finally in “now it can be told” mode since Obamacare passed and President Obama was reelected, pretty much everyone is admitting what all of us knew four years ago— that no, not everyone would be able to keep their plans if they liked their plans. And, yes, the Obama administration knew it just as sure as its critics did. It was a lie and an obvious one, but the administration, much of the media, and Obamacare supporters happily acted as if it were true and...

Vid at link.