Free Republic

* Catherine Anaya of KPHO-TV in Phoenix claimed Carney told reporters that White House correspondents often tell him their questions ahead of time * 'If only this were true,' Carney told MailOnline * Anaya later walked back her story, but said that she was asked to submit a local-news question in writing before Wednesday's White House briefing * She conceded Thursday that she shouldn't have said the practice is common * Anaya also broke protocol by telling viewers about an 'off the record' meeting with Carney * She said in a statement that she was mistaken about that also, but...

One of Gov. Cuomo’s top Republican supporters ignited an uproar Tuesday by comparing populist appeals targeting income inequality to arguments made by Nazis in pre-war Germany. Kenneth Langone, the billionaire co-founder of The Home Depot and a chairman of Republicans for Cuomo, made the remark when asked by Politico how the rich view the political arguments made by Mayor de Blasio and other liberals.

The National Football League sent six of its lieutenants to Minneapolis the other day to advertise what essentially is a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Either you people give us the tax breaks we want so that we might not be fettered by the reasonable expectations of doing business or you don't get a Super Bowl. Capiche? "It's an incredibly competitive environment,'' said Frank Supovitz, NFL senior vice president of events. If Supovitz wasn't wearing a tie, he would have said, "Look, we've got other cities that will do what we want, so you either play by our rules or you can stuff...

A group of 28 state attorneys general are calling on Wal-Mart and other retailers to follow the lead of CVS Caremark and stop selling tobacco products in their stores with pharmacies — a move Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley backs but has not yet signed. The group’s letters to Wal-Mart, Rite Aid, Walgreens, Kroger and Safeway said there is a “contradiction in having these dangerous and devastating tobacco products on the shelves of a retail chain that services health care needs.” Woonsocket, R.I.-based CVS said in February that it would stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products at its 7,600-plus stores...

Dmytro Yarosh, a leader of the Right Sector movement, addresses a rally in central Independence Square in Kiev [Caption from] Reuters The leader of the far-right Ukranian Nationalist Pravy Sektor (Right Sektor) party has reportedly threatened to attack Russia's lucrative gas pipeline which travels through Ukraine to prevent the Kremlin from sparking a "Third World War.' ...

Want to see what America will become before the end of the Obama regime? Want to see where it is happening right now, and from which we are just days away? Want to see a society without law or legal recourse? Want to see how a government takes its cues from the winks and nods of its despot? Want to see how the low information voter idolizes its Dear Leader? Meet Masha Drokova who has been smitten with the kiss of Putin since the age of 15. Watch as she moves up the ranks of the Russian youth organization, Nashi,...

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...

Traditional American distrust of the centralized state is based on some lessons learned the hard way.Russia’s takeover of Crimea is already so complete that commercial flights to Kiev from the region’s main airport, located outside Simferopol, the regional capital 50 miles from Sevastopol, now leave from the international terminal instead of the domestic one as they did until last week. The shift suggests that Kiev and the rest of Ukraine are now classified as foreign territory. New York Times, March 6, 2014 There is no one who can be trusted with political power. Lord Acton’s famous epigram — “Power corrupts,...

The State of Connecticut says that all citizens must register rifles and high capacity magazines, or be charged will a felony. As many as 100,000 people could face heavily armed police smashing down their doors and be charged with a felony. The legislature of CT says that a registration is needed so they can know where the guns are. Yet at the same time, they are sending threatening letters to gun owners. So they already have records of who has purchased certain guns. The fact is, that the CT legislature fully intends to confiscate hundreds of thousands of firearms anyway......

We’re beginning to see more and more discussions about how the laws, policies and regulations of our federal, state and local governments are working to impoverish the people of this country and restrict their liberties. So much so that even the taboo topic of a potential Ukraine-style collapse right here in America is now being openly discussed in mainstream circles. In a recent panel discussion on Fox News the question of whether or not Ukraine rioting is the future of America came to the forefront and long-time political operative and former Presidential adviser Pat Caddell weighed in. Like many of...

On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism. Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the...

And what of the Great Disappointment of 2013? In the promiscuous blending of politics and culture that characterizes our age, the launch of the Obama campaign in 2007 marked the beginning of a politico-spiritual movement that promised a new beginning and a transformation of the nation. It was to be the “moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal [when we] restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.” Faith in the leader knew no bounds. Obamaism spilled out from the college campuses and tony enclaves of Manhattan and San...

In a recent speech in Hawaii, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made some interesting predictions about two of the Supreme Court’s most notorious decisions: Kelo v. City of New London, which ruled that government can condemn private property and give it to other private owners to promote “economic development,” and Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II. On Kelo, Scalia reiterated his 2011 prediction that the decision will eventually be overruled, stating that it “will not survive.” Kelo was a closely divided 5-4 decision (Scalia voted with the...

Republicans are unhappy that President Obama is invoking his executive powers to govern in the face of a do-nothing-in-2014 House of Representatives. To hear them talk, you would think our chief executive is modeling himself on the late Hugo Chavez and wants to seize dictatorial control. This, of course, is nonsense. In fact, Obama has in many ways been less aggressive in his use of executive authority than his predecessors. Take the matter of executive orders. According to the American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Obama issued 147 executive orders in his first term. This...

Government wants ‘social media analytic tool’ for ‘ongoing monitoring’The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is seeking a “social media analytic tool” that will give the government access to “full Twitter historical data,” according to a solicitation released on Tuesday. The agency is seeking feedback for a “possible future acquisition to provide near real time social media analysis.” HHS said it wants to use the tool for “ongoing monitoring” of public health issues. HHS provides a long list of requirements, including “access to real-time social media posts,” and “access to full Twitter firehose.” The agency requires an archive that...

Bureaucracy: The FCC jumped the shark with its outrageous plan to police America's newsrooms. This grasp for a new mission signals an agency that has outlived its purpose. We have a better idea: Just scrap the FCC. There's nothing worse than a federal agency that has lost its original mission, has nothing productive to do and, as a result, is restlessly rustling around for something to justify its existence. That describes the Federal Communications Commission, an old-line agency founded in the 1930s to regulate a limited supply of television airwaves divided among three networks, which is now gone with the...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Darren Wolfe gave this presentation at the Citizens for Liberty meeting on August 20, 2013 near Norristown, Pennsylvania. Below are links to source material so readers can do their own research and come to their own conclusions. Many of the quotes used in the presentation are parts of essays or speeches that are well worth reading start to finish. This first series of quotes is from John Trenchard's 1697 book “An Argument Shewing, that a Standing Army is inconsistent with a Free Government, and absolutely destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy” (http://www.reformation.org/john-trenchard.pdf): And if we enquire how these...

Apparently it's not enough to use the IRS and FCC to shut down the opposition. What does an aspiring democrat Senator wannabe do when he doesn't like an opposition TV ad? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpjyr1x7mC0Attack the woman cancer victim in the ad, and then threaten to take the station off the air. While Julie Boonstra of Dexter, Mich., struggles to survive leukemia, she now also has to cope with being called a liar by the Democrat who wants to be her next senator. And the campaign of Rep. Gary Peters is also going after television stations airing ads in which her story is...

The Eurasian movement of Putin and his allies draws from both Nazism and Stalinism. Dear Reader (Including the trenchcoat-wearing FCC minister with breath like he’s been sucking a urinal cake looking over my shoulder, tapping his BIC pen on his glass eye, and sighing every time I write something he doesn’t like), I’ve got to bang out this “news”letter pretty quickly. I’m sitting in a too-small fake wicker chair at the coffee shop at the Broadmoor (one of my favorite hotels, btw). The time difference here puts me two hours behind at six in the morning. Plus, I don’t want...

Earlier today, John noted that “everywhere we look, our friends on the right are under attack.” In nearly all cases, the Obama administration is doing the attacking, be it through ridiculous criminal prosecution or harassment via the IRS, the FBI, the EPA, and even OSHA. We shouldn’t be surprised. Obama has been attacking his political opponents through trumped up charges of unlawful activity since he first ran for president. Hillary Clinton’s backers were Obama’s first victims. Again, this isn’t surprising. Clinton was Obama’s first important presidential opponent. As Kim Strassel has pointed out, in the spring of 2008, the general...