Free Republic

American Sniper had a record-breaking debut. It’s the widest release ever for an R-rated movie, the biggest debut ever for a Best Picture Oscar nominee; it’s the highest grossing January movie in history and it’s already the second highest grossing war movie of all-time. The movie has already gone beyond “blockbuster” all the way up to “cultural phenomenon” in the space of a few weeks’ time. However, ironically, as the movie has become more popular with the public, liberals have gotten more and more upset about it. You’ve already seen the quotes from Michael Moore and Bill Maher, but...

While reading the Washington Post I ran across a column about a proposal by one of my home state’s (CA) legislators regarding people working on Thanksgiving and Christmas. The proposal so appealed to the Left that the proposal (not even a bill yet) was covered on the other side of the country by one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers. It commanded me to read on to find out what this was about. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez was bemoaning the fact that more and more stores were opening on Thanksgiving and Christmas. When it comes to shopping I agree with Ms....

The first step toward an in-depth understanding of adult behavior is to comprehend its origins in childhood. Whether adaptive or maladaptive, the enduring patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that define adult personality begin in the early years of life. In fact, our earliest experiences with caretakers and others, acting on inherited temperament factors, strongly determine our later personality traits, including those expressed in political values and beliefs. The dispositions of the liberal mind are no exception: his hopes and fears, beliefs and passions, values and morals are in great measure the legacy of his childhood from birth through...

Politics: The State of the Union speech supposedly was chock full of big, brassy new ideas to help the middle class. Truth is, the president offered little that hasn't already been tried and mostly failed. A "bold call to action" is how the New York Times saw the address. Other news outlets were struck by an "ambitious agenda" full of "major proposals" that exhibited "confident, assertive liberalism." Obama even managed to set the agenda for the 2016 elections, still others concluded. Really? When we looked at what Obama actually proposed, all we found was a musty laundry list of liberal...

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a...

In the American liberal compass, the needle is always pointing to places like Denmark. Everything they most fervently hope for here has already happened there. So: Why does no one seem particularly interested in visiting Denmark? (“Honey, on our European trip, I want to see Tuscany, Paris, Berlin and . . . Jutland!”) Visitors say Danes are joyless to be around. Denmark suffers from high rates of alcoholism. In its use of antidepressants it ranks fourth in the world. (Its fellow Nordics the Icelanders are in front by a wide margin.) Some 5% of Danish men have had sex with...

The site took another big hit Friday morning when it lost Maggie Haberman, who is going to the NYT and taking her unmatched Hillary Clinton coverage with her. NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet did warn in a recent memo that they’d carefully make a few outside hires after a recent spate of layoffs and buyouts. In recent months, Politico has made a lot of serious changes, including positioning Susan Glasser in the suburban Virginia bureau as editor. John Harris, meanwhile, is still editor-in-chief in title, but has fled to Brussels to start up Politico Europe — taking a page out...

I’m glad there’s a moderate Democrat finally running for president. I just wish he were running on the Democratic ticket. Jeb Bush, a likely Republican presidential candidate, called for “respect” of same-sex marriages on Monday as his home state of Florida began allowing gays to wed following a court ruling. Bush, a former governor of Florida, said in a statement that even those like him who oppose same-sex marriage must “respect the rule of law” now that the state’s ban on gay marriages has been ruled unconstitutional. Do you know what else is the law of the land? ObamaCare. So...

In the mid-term elections, the GOP’s not-so-secret weapon was fear. Fear of Ebola, fear of ISIS, and fear of immigrants all played a significant role in shaping the pre-election political climate, and Democrats for the most part, responded by hunkering down into a defensive crouch. Once again, as in 2010, they largely abandoned any pro-active agenda setting of their own, any talk of breaking new ground, exploring new possibilities—even despite the greater-than-hoped-for success of Obamacare—and they certainly lacked the patience, maturity and self-confidence to stand back and criticize the childish, self-defeating fearfulness at the heart of the GOP’s campaign strategy....

With as many times as outgoing Majority Leader Harry Reid mentioned the Koch brothers in Senate floor speeches this year, you'd think that they were the ones who spent the most money during the 2014 midterm elections. Think again. Out of all the billionaires who donated money to causes or campaigns for the midterms, the top two were Democrats and they outspent everyone else on the list, combined. David Koch isn't even near the top. More from POLITICO: Billionaire Tom Steyer's pet issue is global warming. With the amount of money Steyer spent, a whopping $74.3 million, and the results...

At our annual extended family Christmas gathering my nephew was given "Glock: The Rise of America's Gun", by Paul Barrett. His mother gave him the book having heard "all about it on NPR". Naturally my sister-in-law is all about hard left politics and gun control. My nephew, a high school senior, is in total lockstep. After he'd been reading it for a few hours I asked him if there was a coupon in the back for range time. I wondered aloud 'why just read about something you just as easily put in your hands and experience'. The look on this...

And I’m not so sure about the other 3 percent, either. It is amazing to behold how liberals will grab hold of the flimsiest statistic so long as it bolsters The Narrative, no matter how easily and convincingly the figure is debunked. These days, the favorite liberal numbers are 1 in 5, 97 percent, and 77 percent. If you keep up, you’ll recognize them immediately, of course: 1 in 5 women are raped in college; 97 percent of all scientists agree about human-caused climate doom, and women only earn 77 cents on the dollar compared to men’s earnings. John has...

Just about every year at this time, "A Christmas Carol' shows up somewhere on TV, as do headlines about how one Republican or another is the modern equivalent of the tale's greedy miser, Ebenezer Scrooge. "The GOP's sad Scrooge agenda." "GOP Protecting Ebenezer Scrooge." "Maher Likens Republicans to Ebenezer Scrooge." "Republicans play the role of the stingy Scrooge." You have to wonder if these folks have actually read "A Christmas Carol" or spent any time pondering what Scrooge actually says and does. Because if you do, you come to realize that Scrooge more closely resembles a modern liberal than a...

So, like, I’m a friendly person, wouldn’t hurt a fly, but when this jerk neighbor of mine said that global warming was a liberal fantasy I tried to reason with him. I told him the Arctic ice was melting, the polar bears were dying and the sea was rising but he kept spouting out stuff about records and trends and totally irrelevant things like water vapor, sunspots and volcanos. I’m well educated and I read the news. I never heard of any of the stuff he was throwing out. What B.S. How can you argue with a fool like that....

Howard Dean, who is thought to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, told reporters the other day that he supports our policy of using drones to kill people (and all those who happen to be near them) without warning. He also has no objection to the National Security Agency listening to his phone calls and monitoring his email.Donny Deutsch, the reliable voice of the left on "Morning Joe," told TV viewers that he supports the CIA’s torture activities – recently revealed in a Senate committee report.These views are very different from what one typically finds in the unsigned...

Cate Blanchett's Oscar-winning role in Blue Jasmine "nothing close to the degree of difficulty" of any of the male nominees, says "The Social Network" screenwriter Female leading Hollywood film roles are "nothing close to the degree of difficulty" of male roles, one of America's leading screenwriters has said, in the latest set of leaked emails published by the "Guardians of Peace" hacker group. Aaron Sorkin, writer of The Social Network and Moneyball, singled out Cate Blanchett's 2014 Best Actress Oscar-winning performance in Blue Jasmine as significantly easier than the performances by the five male nominees that same year. “Year in...

By most accounts, he was an incredibly arrogant ####, among other unflattering adjectives. When his former classmates at Princeton and Harvard were interviewed, certain words kept repeating. One was a nice thing -- that he's very smart. The others, not so much...

Of course, back home in the Blue America’s capital, New York City, President De Blasio was less charitable. “We are no longer held back by the reactionary, racist policies of the past,” he thundered. “Together, we will build a new dawn of progress that places people before profits and promotes peace instead of perpetual war!” Blue America – New England and the mid-Atlantic seaboard, back through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, the West Coast and Hawaii, immediately set to drafting a new constitution. It featured 216 new affirmative rights, including “the right to a living wage,” “the right to abortion upon...

The July 4, 2019, ceremony marking the final dissolution of the United States of America was quite amicable compared to the anger and bitterness of the preceding five years. The 2014 election results created a map clearly defining “Red America” and “Blue America,” and it sparked a debate, unlike any in the last 150 years, over whether the United States should remain united. For many in the leftist coastal states – their progressivism constrained by the overwhelming Congressional advantage of the conservative interior states – the answer was, “No.” As liberal thought leader Michael Tomasky wrote of the South, “Practically...

The liberal advocacy group Progress Michigan boasts on its website that it doesn’t take corporate money: “No corporate money. Just uncompromised progressive politics for Michigan.” Yet the non-profit group – which criticized Gov. Rick Snyder for so-called “dark money” contributions and has been an continuous critic of charter schools – itself collected $67,000 from the National Education Association teachers union in 2014. The NEA has an intense interest in charter schools because very few of them are unionized, and their growing popularity in states like Michigan threatens to erode the union's funds. When a Michigan parent chooses to send her...