Free Republic

Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday on the nationally syndicated radio show the Thom Hartmann Program that the United States is now an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” has created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, “look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.” Carter was responding to a question from Hartmann about recent Supreme Court decisions on campaign financing like Citizens United. …

GREENVILLE, S.C. (AP) — The United States must acknowledge a "painful, complicated" history of racial discrimination that still affects many minorities, Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio said Monday between campaign speeches in South Carolina. Rubio told reporters that "decades and decades of discriminatory practices" have yielded a lack of economic opportunity for many minorities and sour relationships between law enforcement and minority communities, particularly African-Americans. "It's important for us to confront these issues because we can't fulfill our promise as a nation if we have a significant percentage of the population feeling as if the American dream is out of...

Surveillance cameras caught images of two white males laying Confederate battle flags on the ground near the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, but it wasn’t clear whether they had committed a crime. Atlanta police Chief George Turner said Thursday his officers were working with federal authorities and hadn’t determined what, if any, charges might be sought. Turner said they had not ruled out a hate crime, though Georgia has no state hate crimes law. An officer from the Atlanta FBI’s joint terrorism task force was on the scene “to better determine if any specific threats were received” and to...

The University of New Hampshire has removed from its website a “bias-free language guide” that warned against using the word “American” because it fails to recognize South America. The guide was developed in 2013 by several advocacy groups whose members are appointed by the university president. It was mentioned in an annual report submitted by at least one of those groups in 2014, but the university said administrators did not know about it until this week, when it was criticized in the media. […] It suggested replacements for common terms, such as “person of material wealth” instead of rich and...

“As we finish up the first seven months of this New American Congress, the statistics are in: This Congress is more accountable, more open, more productive and more effective,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told a news conference on Wednesday. He called it the “second most effective Republican-majority Congress in modern history,” and he used numbers to make his point. McCarthy said he judges accountability by the work that’s been done in committee: “The 30-year average is 7.4 percent of the bills get out of committee; this Congress is at 10.1,” he said. …

“On one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage. As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.” What a scoop, huh? Now it would be one thing if Ivana was making this allegation today. Instead, the first Mrs. Trump issued this statement to CNN yesterday: “The story is totally...

Apartment rents are up. So are prices for restaurant meals, haircuts, gym memberships and a cup of coffee. For American consumers who have become used to flat or even falling prices for several years, an unfamiliar sight has emerged in many corners of the economy: Inflation is ticking up. The price increases remain modest. And in many cases, they’re canceled out by price declines for other items that are keeping overall inflation historically low. Yet the stepped-up price tags for a range of consumer items are the largest since the Great Recession ended six years ago. They actually reflect a...

In part one we endeavored to introduce the subject matter of studying the national socialist left’s biggest Lies: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3311356/posts This part will be some of the national Socialist Left’s miscellaneous lies, part II will be gun grabber lies and part IV will be Lies that go directly to the heart of who and what of the national Socialist LEFT Now without any further ado we present the national Socialist left’s biggest lies 10 – 7: 10. You have a right to ______________ [healthcare, to be ‘safe’ from gun violence, etc.] 9. The Obama economy is up and the unemployment rate...

One hundred and twenty-five members of Congress asked Secretary of State John Kerry in a letter Monday to deny visas to diplomats’ spouses if the envoys come from a country that doesn’t recognize same-sex spouses of State Department personnel. House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) led the letter, which got one GOP signature — Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who has a transgender son. The lawmakers argued that countries not granting accreditation to same-sex spouses of American foreign service...

Want to eat genetically modified food? Expect a number of voices from the American left to tell you to avoid it. They claim it causes all sorts of maladies. To be sure, there are some voices on the right who say the same. But mostly it is socially engineering leftists who think it should be avoided. The left is OK denying Africans of corn bred to survive drought. Better the Africans die than eat corn bred to survive heat and lack of rain. For that matter, the left would also prefer Africans die of malaria than spray DDT. It is...

The term “sanctuary city” has become a rallying cry for conservative Republicans seeking stiffer immigration laws. They characterize such places as havens where those in the country illegally are protected from immigration authorities. The reality behind the phrase is that while some cities actively thumb their noses at federal immigration policies, many refuse to enforce them not because of any moral obligation to immigrants; they fear lawsuits. Since the fatal shooting of Kathryn Steinle on a San Francisco pier allegedly by an immigrant who was released from jail even though U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sought to deport him for...

Donald Trump’s planned tour of the Laredo Sector of the Texas -Mexico border has been canceled by the national AFL-CIO-controlled union that represents U.S. Border Patrol agents, the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC).

In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper that was broadcasted tonight Republican candidate for president Donald Trump berated the reporter for continuing to address polls that shed him in a negative light instead of polls showing his upper-tier status. "I am leading across the board," Trump said in the interview. "And then you hit me with this poll that I didn't see before, where oh, gee, it's not even that kind of a poll. All i know is I have a very big group of support. And I think one of the reasons." "Let me tell you. The people don't...

Liberals have won a string of victories on gay marriage and health care reform this year, but a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds a large majority of Americans are unhappy with where the nation is headed on social issues. Sixty-three percent of people say they are uncomfortable with the country’s overall direction on social issues these days; four in ten feel “strongly” uncomfortable about the nation’s changes. The downbeat results in the aftermath of a series of landmark Supreme Court rulings earlier this summer runs parallel to how people see the nation’s overall direction—65 percent say it’s on the...

NEW YORK (AP) — It’s getting more expensive to be an employer and small business owners say that’s making it harder for them to make money.The health care law, minimum wage increases and paid sick leave laws in some states and cities are increasing costs. Small companies also face the prospect of higher overtime expenses under a proposed federal regulation.“We’re going beyond the point where we can comfortably operate a functioning business and meet the requirements of these laws,” says Diana Lamon, who owns a Los Angeles restaurant, Poppy & Rose and a food truck, Peaches’ Smokehouse and Southern Kitchen,...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, late as usual, arrived in Rome Tuesday morning to pontificate at the Vatican about the dangers of climate change. Delayed by fog that forced his plane to land in Milan, de Blasio arrived 80 minutes after his allotted time to speak at the gathering of mayors invited by the Vatican. Once he was given time to speak, though, he waxed eloquent about “powerful corporate interests,” adding, “Is it not the definition of insanity to propagate corporate policies and consumer habits that hasten the destruction of the earth?”

The plan for a museum in the city that would focus on climate and climate change, with exhibits that could relate to health, social justice and rain-delayed baseball games, moved a step forward Monday, officials said. The state Board of Regents, meeting in Albany, approved a five-year provisional charter for the museum, Regents spokesman Tom Dunn said. The vote means “there is absolutely going to be a museum,” said Miranda Massie, executive director of the Climate Museum Launch Project. She said the museum is now “empowered to hold collections in trust for the public.” Supporters say it would be the...

Maybe complete and total inclusivity isn’t as easy as it sounds. The organizers of Free Pride Glasgow in Scotland have hit a snag in their mission to plan a totally inclusive event: Some activists think drag queens are offensive to transgender people, others think banning drag queens is offensive to transgender drag queens, and still others think allowing only transgender drag queens is offensive to cisgender drag queens. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421402/drag-queens-banned-scotland-pride

Over 28 years as head of the Anti-Defamation League, Abe Foxman emerged as a forceful torchbearer for American Jews. He counseled presidents and diplomats, CEOs and celebrities. He took on prominent figures over anti-Semitic remarks or representations—actor Mel Gibson among them—and accepted any ensuing apologies on behalf of an entire community. No other U.S. Jewish leader has wielded as much influence with policymakers, faith leaders and U.S. Jews. On Monday, Foxman retires as national director, a major moment of transition in American Jewish life that raises questions about the future of the organization known as the ADL. […] The ADL...

Facebook not only considers Jewish areas of Judea and Samaria (Shomron), but also parts of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, as outside of Israel, according to exposé published Sunday. The social network updated its advertising system recently allowing editors of popular pages the chance to gear their posts toward a specific geographical location. […] Channel 2 tested the new system to aim posts in eastern neighborhoods of Jerusalem, for example, and saw that the rest of the State of Israel became automatically “greyed out.” The same happened during any attempt to aim posts toward areas over 1949 Armistice lines or...