Free Republic

Though there are important differences in the the flavors of UKIP and the Tea Party in the US, both groups represent a pro market, pro entrepreneur, deeply middle class, anti centralized government, and anti-establishment perspective. Both represent a reemergence of classical liberalism (with exceptions on both sides) on a large scale.

This is the power of social media. This is the power of personal video cameras. This is the power of citizen journalists. And the next time Senator Feinstein calls for “licencing” only “legitimate journalists,” that the 1st Amendment only extends to people who work at the New York Times, Washington Post, or MSNBC, remember this moment. This is how the bullies with the power, the cronies and their allies, are turned back. Dianne Feinstein First Amendment Is A Special Privilege This is not about a rancher owing the Bureau of Land Management money. This is about a federal government which...

Conservatives and liberals had entirely different reactions to the recent confrontation between Attorney General Eric Holder and Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert. After the event, Holder expressed his view that no previous attorney general or president had ever had to deal with such treatment and that the reason had to do with race. Gohmert, on the other hand, said he was just performing congressional oversight because he didn't think Holder was doing his job. This is the latest episode in an American tragedy that has been unfolding since the English first settled colonies in North America. In July 1619, the first...

Do you know Ally Financial Inc.? You've no doubt seen their commercials. They used to be all over the tube hawking their high-yielding certificates of deposit. Now they're all over the tube with their "no hidden fees" campaign. . . . But Ally isn't funny. It recently announced that it's launching an initial public offering (IPO) of its stock at a price per share of $25 to $28. The shares will be offered by the U.S. Treasury as part of its planned exit of its investment in Ally during the subprime crisis in 2008. I've heard some analysts say this...

Former Sen. Jim DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, writes in his new book—“Falling in Love With America Again”—about the cozy relationship between big business and big government. “Almost all big corporations benefit from, advocate for, and downright like big government,” DeMint writes. […] “These big companies like to write regulations that make it harder for the smaller companies to compete with them,” DeMint said. “The large companies can deal with a regulatory maze much better than the small companies can. Like the big tobacco companies wanted the FDA to regulate cigarettes because they knew the smaller companies could...

Representative Jim Moran (D-Va.) said on Monday that the $174,000 salary a member of Congress makes is not sufficient to live in the District of Columbia, even as he introduced legislation last month to raise the pay for federal workers by 3.3%—an increase that would provide a salary 114% less than the average made by lawmakers. “I think the American people should know that the members of Congress are underpaid,” Moran told CQ Roll Call. “I understand that it’s widely felt that they underperform, but the fact is that this is the board of directors for the largest economic entity...

Hungary’s governing party is tipped to win parliamentary elections Sunday, while a far-right party is expected to make further gains, according to polls. Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party and its small ally, the Christian Democrats, are expected to win easily and they may even retain the two-thirds majority in the legislature gained in 2010 which allowed them to pass a new constitution, adopt unconventional economic policies, centralize power and grow the state’s influence at the expense of the private sector.Polls predict Fidesz will win around 45-50 percent of the votes, with a close race for second between a coalition...

Tapping pension funds and encouraging online crowd funding are at the heart of plans unveiled by the European Commission to kickstart business investment. Speaking on Thursday (27 March), financial services commissioner Michel Barnier said the Commission’s blueprint on “long-term financing” published the same day was needed to further encourage alternatives to traditional bank lending which remains stagnant more than five years since the start of the financial crisis. “Our financial system must regain and increase its ability to finance the real economy,” he said, adding that “we need to diversify financing sources in Europe and improve access to finance for...

I can barely put 2 pieces of code together but I’ll bet I could have made a website which enrolled at least one person at this point. Well I could have hired someone anyway. Oregon couldn’t even do that. (From Breitbart.com) Rep. Jason Conger, the other Republican on the panel, says officials in charge including executive director Rocky King, who left his job in December, should have known better than to try to pull off a project of this scope without hiring an IT contractor to run it. “I think it reflects a certain amount of arrogance that it...

President Barack Obama is getting some help from the country's tech giants in his effort to show Americans how climate change will affect their communities. The Obama administration thinks that local data, which may have a real-world effect on Americans' lives, will provide a convincing argument for steps to prevent climate change. The risk rising sea levels have on individual communities will be the focus of a new website, climate.data.gov, which uses government data to put environmental changes in context. The White House also called on tech companies to develop tools for Americans to better get a grasp on how...

Historians will one day look back at the presidency of Barack Obama and highlight the administration’s dangerous willingness to short-circuit the Constitution when convenient. From refusing to enforce immigration laws and disregarding rules governing presidential appointments to the outright takeover of our health care system, President Obama has repeatedly painted outside the lines to reward his friends, punish his enemies or to achieve his legislative and political objectives. There can be little debate that Hollywood and the recording industry have been some of the president’s strongest allies. They invested millions in his reelection campaign and are often credited with helping...

Regular readers may have noticed that I generally say that advocates of big government are “statists.” I could call them “liberals,” but I don’t like that using that term since the early advocates of economic and personal liberty were “classical liberals” such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Jean-Baptiste Say. And proponents of these ideas are still called “liberals” in Europe and Australia. I could call them “socialists,” but I don’t think that’s technically accurate since the theory is based on government ownership of the means of production. This is why I’ve been in the strange position of defending Obama...

There is a common saying on Capitol Hill that those who do not come to the table will become the lunch. This refers to those who fail to hire sufficiently well connected lobbyists or make large campaign contributions. Even those who do come to the table may get carved up. When President Obama called the parties making money from medicine into the White House to discuss what would become of Obamacare, most of the special interests tried to make a deal. With the Democrats controlling Congress and the White House, they knew that defiance would likely backfire. The major insurance...

President Obama next week will champion his health care law on WebMD, which bills itself as the “leading source of health information for consumers and health care professionals.” The White House says Obama will answer questions about health care and the Affordable Care Act from WebMD users during a conversation with the site's health care reform expert, Lisa Zamosky. The interview will air March 14 and WebMD users can pose questions atWebMD.com/AskObama.

Warren Buffett's conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway posted a record profit in 2013, jumping 31 percent over the previous year, the company said in its annual report, released on Saturday. Profit for the full year rose to $19.5 billion from $14.8 billion in 2012. Net income rose to $4.99 billion in the fourth quarter, or $3,035 per Class A share, from $4.55 billion, or $2,757 per share, a year earlier.

Top Illinois politicians say a multimillion-dollar institute bound for Chicago will be the nation’s flagship research site for digital manufacturing. Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Gov. Pat Quinn on Sunday publicly heralded Chicago’s selection by the Defense Department as the site of one of two manufacturing institutes. …

President Obama is dividing America into two nations—one rich, the other increasingly poor, and both more likely to elect Democrats. Americans growing richer support his policies, and those growing poorer are increasingly dependent on Democratic politicians for government handouts. In this century, the economy has not performed well, and a jobs shortage has driven down the income of most Americans. Obama’s “recovery” has managed only 2.4 percent growth, but George W. Bush’s expansion scored about the same rate and then collapsed altogether. Since 2001, when Bush took office, the U.S. economy has created only 4.7 million jobs—about 30,000 a month...

The Bible says that “the wages of sin is death,” but the same can’t be said of Washington, DC. The bureaucrats, lobbyists, politicians, contractors, insiders, cronyists, and influence peddlers have rigged the system so that they get rich by diverting money from people in the productive sector of the economy. How bad is the disconnect between Washington and real America? Well, according to Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index, people in every state have a negative outlook. But there is one outpost of giddy prosperity, and that’s the District of Columbia, where residents have a 20-point gap compared to the most optimistic...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The U.S. government has picked a Google subsidiary to run and renovate a federal airfield that is frequently used for the personal flights of the Internet company's billionaire executives. The decision announced Monday clears the way for Google's Planetary Ventures LLC to take over management of the 1,000-acre Moffett Federal Airfield, a former U.S. Navy based 4 miles from Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. The airfield, which was built in the 1930s, has been managed by NASA's Ames Research Center for the past 23 years. Financial terms of the new arrangement still must be worked out...

Once thought of as a possibly more conservative alternative to establishment Republican Speaker John Boehner, establishment Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA-7) long ago proved he is fully invested in Boehner’s lobbyist-driven legislative agenda. The Murray-Ryan budget and Amnesty for illegal aliens are just the latest in a long list of betrayals conservatives have suffered at the hands of Eric Cantor. From breaking the spending caps in the sequester, to voting for the Wall Street bailout through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), when faced with a choice between business -as -usual and fighting for limited- government constitutional conservative...