Free Republic

Venezuela's army is to be backed by civilians grouped into ancillary security units, to tackle food shortages and public unrest, under a state of emergency decree published on Monday. The decree, published in the government gazette, brings into effect for at least 60 days sweeping powers President Nicolas Maduro announced on Friday. The measures give his government and security forces broad authorization to ignore most constitutional safeguards in a bid to keep order and supply basic food and services, and to counter a crippling energy shortage. But the opposition, which controls the National Assembly and is seeking Maduro's ouster through...

GGambia is facing its biggest protest movement in years. It will either be a breakthrough or a bloodbath. Since taking power in a bloodless coup in 1994, Yahya Jammeh has presided over the worst dictatorship you’ve never heard of. The eccentric Gambian president, who performs ritual exorcisms and claims to heal everything from AIDS to infertility with herbal remedies, rules his tiny West African nation through a mix of superstition and fear. State-sanctioned torture, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary executions — these are just a few of the favored tactics employed by his notorious security and intelligence services. Elsewhere in Africa,...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Now, usually, ladies and gentlemen, the pattern for Donald Trump during the primary season has been that when he has lost a primary, he immediately changes the narrative the next day, usually by announcing an endorsement. So you got Christie endorsing, which changed the narrative of a Trump loss. Sometimes the endorsement happens the night of a loss, usually next morning. Same thing happened with Dr. Carson after another Trump loss. Carson comes out and endorses Trump, and that changes the narrative. It's smart. Trump has no new endorsements to announce, so what he has done today...

There is a line from John Adams of which conservatives, particularly those of a moralistic bent, are fond: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people." The surrounding prose is quoted much less frequently, and it is stern stuff dealing with one of Adams’s great fears - one that is particularly relevant to this moment in our history. John Adams hated democracy and he feared what was known in the language of the time as "passion." Adams's famous assessment: "I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run,...

In his remarks today at a rally in Fort Worth, Tex., Donald Trump knew he’d make news. “I’ve never said this before,” he declared. We’ll await the word of the Washington Post Fact Checker on the integrity of the statement, but Trump did appear to be veering into a new talking point. A media-law talking point, that is: One of the things I’m going to do, and this is going to make it tougher for me…but one of the things I’m going to do if I win…is I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely...

Shock surrounding the mysterious death of Justice Scalia is compounded by the realization that President Obama may take the extreme authoritarian step of using a recess appointment to put Scalia’s successor on the bench. This would allow Obama to put a far-left jurist on the court to swing the balance on important cases on the docket this year dealing with Obamacare, gun control, abortion, illegal immigration, religious liberty, energy and environmental regulation, labor union power, voting rights, and affirmative action.... Sources in Congress tell us that this week would be the most opportune time for Obama to make a recess...

Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto is ranked among the top three most frequently assigned texts at universities and colleges, and Marx is the most assigned economist in college courses. At present, we have around 1.1 million syllabi, drawing predominantly from the past decade of teaching in the US. We think the total number of US, UK, Canadian, and Australian syllabi for the past 15 years is in the range of 80-100 million.

After a Texas grand jury this week rejected criminal allegations against Planned Parenthood related to a series of controversial undercover videos released last year, House Democrats are accusing their Republican colleagues of being "all too eager to jump to conclusions at the risk of women's health." (snip) Representative Jan Schakowsky, the top Democrat on the House panel investigating the organization, has said Republicans now should admit they are wrong in the wake of the indictment. The DCCC hasn't yet called for the committee to be disbanded but "absolutely believes" it should be, says Meredith Kelly, DCCC national press secretary. "House...

The new guidelines, updated for the first time since 2009 and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, come from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force—an independent volunteer panel of primary care doctors that makes prevention-based medical recommendations. The panel previously advised that adults should be screened for depression when mental health services were available, a limitation the panel says is no longer needed now that screening services are more widely available and accepted as a part of mental health care. Better yet, the panel gave its recommendation a "B" grading, which means depression screening must be covered...

The State of the Nation: A Dictatorship Without Tears John W. Whitehead "There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."--Aldous Huxley There's a man who contacts...

A question I have been pondering for the last two years(OK more like the last 25 years) is "Just what would it take for the Republican party to rise up and fight the Left?' The nightmare scenario that keeps haunting me is that Hillary loses in November and Obama just refuses to leave office. He has shredded all the other parts of the Constitution so I don't think this is all that far fetched. I don't think it is all that far fetched that the Republican establishment would roll over and play dead at this either -- Particularly if the...

Miami-Dade is pursuing a ferry service from PortMiami to Cuba. CBS4 news partner The Miami Herald reports county officials want to transform an empty waterfront property on the port's southwest corner into a terminal for the ferry. This is the same property David Beckham wanted to use for a new soccer stadium. The new terminal would serve passenger and cargo runs to Cuba.

On January 7 President Obama will hold a live gun control town hall on CNN with Anderson Cooper. The town hall will take place three days after Obama meets with Attorney General Loretta Lynch to finalize executive gun controls which are expected to be announced in the coming days.

Every group (and especially an empire) needs its good or evil spokesperson, leader, or figurehead to focus upon: the embodiment of the particular group or nation. The size of the group is irrelevant: there simply must be a leader that exemplifies the characteristics of the group. History is replete with great leaders, however, benevolence and goodness are not necessarily a leader's qualities. For every good leader, it seems there are a plethora of those who are self-serving, power-hungry despots whose aims are either not for the people or (the other end of the spectrum) against the people. To be...

Google’s chairman wants algorithms to censor the internet for hate speech - Quartz In an op-ed for The New York Times (paywall), Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, inserted himself directly into the middle of a heated debate about the line between fighting terrorism’s online reach and internet censorship. “It’s our responsibility to demonstrate that stability and free expression go hand in hand,” he writes. “We should build tools to help de-escalate tensions on social media—sort of like spell-checkers, but for hate and harassment.” His words came just after Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, called...

Sprint became the first U.S. telecommunications company to provide direct roaming mobile phone service to foreigners in Cuba, after a striking a deal at the Havana International Fair. Sprint says it expects the number of visitors in Cuba to reach 5 million a year within the next decade. The U.S.-based firm Sprint signed a deal with Cuba’s state telecommunications agency Etecsa, with the objective to reach millions of tourists expected to visit the island in coming years. The move comes as Washington and Havana continue to explore business opportunities, since restoring diplomatic relations in July for the first time in...

The Obama administration's increasingly controversial Justice Department, in partnership with the ultra-leftist Southern Poverty Law Center, announced the creation of a new czar position to focus on “domestic terrorism” — especially the alleged threat from Christians and Americans with “anti-government” views. While ostensibly created to serve as a coordination office overseeing domestic terror cases, critics and analysts are sounding the alarm, warning that the administration is plotting to go after its political opponents with the full force of the federal government. The impetus for the Obama DOJ's new focus on conservatives, libertarians, Christians, and others appears to be the Southern...

The video of the series is avialable at The Atlantic:Repairing the Cracks in America’s Leadership Colin Powell hosts( I don't know if he does so every telecast0

Companies that are founded from next year onward plus a range of sectors of the Greek economy will only be able to accept payment via debit or credit card, according to a plan being drawn up by the government as a means of stamping out tax evasion. The plan, which has yet to receive the final approval from the country’s lenders, foresees all new companies having to be equipped with point of sale (POS) terminals that can accept credit and debit cards. The same will apply to numerous professions. These will include doctors, lawyers, electricians and plumbers, which are all...

Coeur d‘Alene, Idaho, city officials have laid down the law to Christian pastors within their community, telling them bluntly via an ordinance that if they refuse to marry homosexuals, they will face jail time and fines. The dictate comes on the heels of a legal battle with Donald and Evelyn Knapp, ordained ministers who own the Hitching Post wedding chapel in the city, but who oppose gay marriage, The Daily Caller reported.