Free Republic

As ever with enviro-scholars, Professor Markham knoweth not what he hath wrought. Highlights: Germany is driving the Climate Change campaign. Many major international enviro-organizations (Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Birdlife International, etc.) are controlled by their German chapters. Several militant leaders of Germany’s confrontational early-1980s environmentalist protests were, a decade later, running government ministries. While Germany’s big enviro-organizations masquerade as citizens’ crusades, they are in fact top-down bureaucracies full of cynical well-paid careerists who work in tandem with state and corporate elites. Only 40 (forty) persons within Greenpeace-Germany’s half million members may vote for the board of directors. WWF-Germany has...

We’ve made a bit of a mistake as a conservative movement fixating so much on the race for the White House. There’s a behind the scenes fight happening in Washington right now. Congressional Republicans are not just selling us out, they are hell bent — and I really do mean hell bent — on destroying the conservative groups raising red flags about what they are doing.For so long the GOP in Washington could hide behind surveys like the American Conservative Union survey, which shows just how much more someone is Republican than Democrat. No one actually did a survey that...

This week, JD Foster and Curtis Dubay from the Heritage Foundation wrote an article arguing that repatriation was a bad idea right now. ATR disagrees with this (and this seems to be a departure from prior Heritage Foundation policy on this, as well). Below are our reasons why: What Is Repatriation? Under U.S. tax law, a company that earns a profit overseas must, in general, pay income tax to the overseas government AND to the IRS if they bring the remaining profit back to the U.S. The company gets a credit for the foreign income tax paid, but the difference...

This week, Heritage is releasing a first-of-its-kind television ad that will air on Fox News, Fox Business, and other networks. Featured in the ad are Heritage Trustee Steve Forbes and leading Heritage policy expert James Carafano. Have you seen it yet? With a potential audience of more than 1,000,000 people, Heritage now reaches conservatives in a brand-new way--rallying them together to call on Congress and the White House to cut government spending, stop the liberal assault on our values, and protect our Constitution. I’m calling on you as a fellow conservative to help us raise the funds needed to cover...

If conservatives believe that reducing the burden of government creates economic growth, lefties at the Daily Kos have to believe the opposite: cutting government is an economic disaster. Take the Thursday blog post by Vyan titled "Cutting our way toward 3rd World status." The target is the Heritage Foundation, which apparently wants America to be a "third world nation with no middle class," like Somalia, because of the "(Koch Funded) Heritage Idea that the U.S. should change it's constitution to require it to only spend a maximum of 18% of it's GDP and require a Super-Majority Vote to increase

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley isn't retreating from her decision to keep the Confederate flag atop the north end of the Statehouse in Columbia despite complaints from the NAACP, whose president this week said the ethnic minority governor is a "contradiction" for allowing the flag to fly. Speaking to a crowd at an NAACP national conference in Los Angeles on Monday, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous attempted to shame Haley into removing the flag by comparing African American slavery to oppression Haley's ancestors in India faced under British rule. "Perhaps one of the most perplexing examples of the contradictions of this...

Next time you're about to slam somebody for carrying on like a Neanderthal, think twice: You might be hitting close to home. A new study published in the Molecular Biology and Evolution reports that people of non-African heritage carry a chromosome which originates from Neanderthals, offering evidence that the two populations interbred at a certain point in history.

Oakland A’s ready for their first Jewish heritage gameby andy altman-ohr Thursday, May 12, 2011 Once known for their outrageous promotional stunts — such as Hot Pants Day, Mustache Day and Dinger Night — the Oakland A’s have decided to host an event that’s much more commonplace, at least these days: Jewish Heritage Night. Already a standby on the schedules of many teams across the country, Jewish Heritage Night with the A’s will make its debut Tuesday, May 17 in a game against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. First pitch at the newly renamed Overstock.com Coliseum in Oakland is...

On March 23rd we went to the Atlas Shrugged movie premiere at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. Afterward we were able to catch up with producer Harmon Kaslow and several people who attended the premiere. Here is what they had to say about the movie.

Back in the Jurassic Era when I was young, we learned “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in school, and I often heard it on the radio on national holidays. We learned two verses, the first and the fifth. The words of the fifth verse made a deep impression on me: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. It implanted in my youthful mind the idea that fighting for freedom sometimes requires actually FIGHTING for freedom, which includes the possibility of dying for freedom. But now, I rarely hear this inspiring hymn on...

Last week, House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) outlined $58 billion in non-security domestic spending cuts. Within hours, Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) attacked the proposal calling it “unworkable” and “even more draconian than we originally anticipated.” But these outcries were hardly unexpected considering Washington’s spending addiction. As National Review’s Rich Lowry commented in his column this morning, “There is a complicated mathematical symbol practically unknown to the House Appropriations Committee. It’s called the minus sign.” In response to these outcries, Matthias Shapiro, the creator of Obama Budget Cuts Visualization and The National Debt Road Trip videos, has created another new video which...

From Bartleby's:    Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations.  1989.     NUMBER: 71 AUTHOR: Dean Alfange (1900–  ) QUOTATION: I do not choose to be a common man. It is my right to be uncommon—if I can. I seek opportunity—not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me. I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed. I refuse to barter incentive for a dole. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence; the thrill of fulfillment to the...

Economic freedom is the fundamental right of every human to control his or her own labor and property. In an economically free society, individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please, with that freedom both protected by the state and unconstrained by the state. Index of Economic Freedom World Rankings World Rank Country Index Year Overall Score Change from Previous Business Freedom Trade Freedom Fiscal Freedom Government Size Monetary Freedom Investment Freedom Financial Freedom Property Rights Freedom From Corruption Labor Freedom 1 Hong Kong 2011 89.7 0 98.7 90 93.3 89.6 87.1 90...

WASHINGTON – Two more big guns of the conservative movement confirmed today they are not participating in the Conservative Political Action Conference next month because of the continued participation of the homosexual activist organization GOProud. The Heritage Foundation, the largest think tank in Washington and not known as part of the religious right, confirmed that it is not taking part in what has been the largest annual gathering of conservatives in the country. Heritage has been an active participant in CPAC every year for the last 10. "We have withdrawn," said Mike Gonzalez, vice president of communications for the Heritage...

I enjoy making up politically correct versions of Christmas carols. But today many young people are unfamiliar with the carols we knew so well. This year I listened to radio and watched TV in the weeks before Christmas. Unless I tuned to a religious station, carols were few and far between. Even mall music included fewer carols than in the past. My favorite carol is “Good King Wenceslas.” It expresses the essence of religion: not dogma but treating our fellow humans with kindness. But I haven’t heard it on TV or radio for years. Kids used to grow up hearing...

PARIS (Reuters) – Peking Opera, Spanish Flamenco and the art of French gastronomy won places Tuesday on UNESCO's list of intangible world heritages to preserve. The U.N. culture and education agency deemed the traditions and 43 others from a total of 11 countries worthy of recognition on the list at a meeting in Nairobi. Among the more obscure traditions, Luxembourg won recognition for a centuries-old annual hopping procession in the eastern border village of Echternach. The blade-twirling of a scissor-dancing ritual in Peru's Chanka region, which has roots going back to the 16th century, was also nominated as was Turkey's...

Ah yes, Michael Bennet’s senate campaign is banking, politically, on the fact that most Coloradans don’t know their own history. Bennet pounced on a separation-of-church-and-state speech given in 2009 by Ken Buck...Buck, like Delaware campaign cutie and senate hopeful, Christine O’Donnell, knows that the phrase “separation of church and state” appears nowhere in any of our founding documents. They both note that the “separation” ruse has been used, to our detriment, to expunge religious ethics from American culture.

First there was the Contract With America. Then came the Pledge to America. The Heritage Foundation plans to issue its Solutions for America blueprint on Monday–just after Republicans issued their Pledge to America, which outlined what they’ll do if they win back power in the November elections. “Now is the time to be bold, and to act as befits our character,” foundation President Edwin J. Feulner writes in a letter addressed to “My fellow conservatives.” “That is what our parents and grandparents would expect of us, what future generations demand – and what The Heritage Foundation offers to America.” Feulner...

Clint Howard, long-time character actor and brother of the more liberal director Ron Howard, is displaying his conservative stripes in a new advertisement for Heritage Action for American, the new grassroots advocacy arm of The Heritage Foundation. The video calls attention to the propensity of politicians with unpopular voting records to avoid townhall meetings. The video, titled “August Recess Excuses,” aims to raise awareness about the disconnect between the issues that concern congressional leaders and those that concern their constituents. “The ‘August Recess Excuses’ video highlights the lengths our so-called representatives will go to avoid their constituents,” Heritage Action’s CEO...

Kristin Theresa Jaroma, Ever since the oil spill disaster occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, the issue at hand has been the long-term and near-term effects of this on local residents, local businesses, and the South’s economic hit, Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation said at the Bloggers Briefing there on August 10, 2010. As a result, pressure has been placed on the Obama Administration to end the moratorium. The oil spill liability cap issue, and the secondary costs that BP must pay as a result of the economic disaster, have been contentions issues for Democrats and Republicans alike. The...