Free Republic

(CBS SF / CNN) — It wasn’t a pledge or a promise, but Kamala Harris on Friday heartily embraced the idea of choosing a female vice president to create an all-woman ticket in her quest for the White House. “Wouldn’t that be fabulous?” the California Democratic senator told the Rev. Mark Thompson on SiriusXM’s Make It Plain with Mark Thompson. When asked whether America is ready for that, Harris demurred. “We’ll see if it happens,” she replied. **SNIP** It’s a particularly good talking point for Harris, whose advisers believe that her path to Democratic nomination hinges on her ability to...

Support is growing for a referendum on whether to ban large landlords from the German capital and turn their property into social housing stock ...The Social Democratic party (SPD), senior partner in Berlin’s current governing coalition and the main driver behind the privatisation of the capital’s housing stock in the late 90s and early 00s, has distanced itself from the campaign, although it has proposed freezing rents in the city for five years. The SPD’s youth branch, by contrast, has trumped the campaign’s demands and proposed expropriating any landlord with over 20 apartments... ...Taheri, now the campaign’s spokesperson, argues that...

Yesterday, the Washington Examiner did its best to confirm that South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg is officially a contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. As befits a bona fide challenger, the Examiner took a peek into his past and pulled out an interesting nugget. As it turns out, Buttigieg was raised by a Marxist. To wit: The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir...

“This president is the first president in the modern history of our country who is trying to divide our people up based on the color of their skin, the country they were born in, their sexual orientation, their gender, their religion. And that is an outrage.” That was Bernie Sanders, a Democrat candidate for president in 2020, at a CNN town hall event in late February. And as the Vermont Socialist explained, “our job is to bring our people together, not to divide them up.” This was not a new theme for Democrats. In September of 2018 at the University...

Academia has filled the heads of their students with pipe dreams of Marxism and communism, where everyone's problems will be solved by the benevolent government. Katie Hopkins warned Americans about the dangers of unrestricted Islamic immigration and described in frank detail how it has affected the U.K. and Europe, contributing to a social decline and an inimical atmosphere. Thanks to Barack Obama’s eight-year Islamophobic presidency, unrestricted immigration has spread to the United States. Michael Savage, the conservative talk show host, was banned from the U.K. for alleged hate speech which offended Islam. Few advocated on his behalf to protect his...

We all knew why Democrats support open borders. We all knew their goal was more imported dependent voters. Finally one Democrat pundit comes clean. The goal of the modern day Democrat Party is to replace Americans with foreigners and drive the GOP to extinction. Sadly, several Republicans in the Pretend Party (12 last week) support this plan. Liberal David Atkins posted a thread on the Democrat Party’s plan for domination — replace Americans and capture the vote forever. David is a contributor at the Washington Monthly and far left Rolling Stone.

The struggle between egalitarianism and wealth creation is being watched by the world with awe and apprehension -- the winner will proceed to prescribe America’s future. The Democratic Party carries a powerful ideological message of economic equality. It appeals to those who see themselves as unfortunate, underpaid, and exploited victims of capitalism, overwhelmed with envy that there are people of the extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness, and rich, and that they are not them. The Democrats have corralled the “victims” with promises of a better life, free health care, free education, more benefits, and laws to bill all this to...

Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continued to heap praise on fellow freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar early Sunday night — calling her “one of the most effective voices right now.” “Rep. Omar, a survivor of war, is one of the most effective voices right now at cutting through the authoritarian foreign policy tendencies of this administration,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez. She linked back to a post that the Minnesota lawmaker put up earlier in the evening, criticizing President Trump’s handling of the crisis in Venezuela. “Trump and Elliott Abrams cannot be trusted to tell the truth about what’s happening in Venezuela,” Omar tweeted, along with...

Amazon isn’t the only one fed up with New York’s ridiculous tax rates. Plenty of companies are packing their bags and looking for office space in states with more business-friendly policies. There’s just one problem: A lot of these top firms can’t stand the conservative laws that make their new homes so successful. AllianceBernstein, another firm fleeing the Empire State’s stifling economy, just announced that it’s relocating its $70 million headquarters to Nashville. But before it moves, the CEO is warning Tennessee: It’s not a fan of religious liberty. And AllianceBernstein is proving it by fighting the state’s faith-based adoption...

Leftist Democrats, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., introduced a revised government-funded Medicare for All Act on Wednesday as Republicans ready their opposition and Democratic presidential hopefuls face questions about what Medicare for All could mean and the role government should have in setting rates for private insurers. Jayapal’s bill largely mirrors a 2017 proposal by Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., but the heart of every “Medicare for all” proposal to date has been the same: government price controls for private health coverage. The price controls question could be one of the major policy issues of the 2020 Democratic primary and...

To see populism as the problem is to see the events upside-down. People wanting to take control of their own destinies is a good thing. The problem lies with the fragility or even nonexistence of lawful institutions — or sufficient forces to defend them — and with the oligarchic, incompetent, or authoritarian rule that provoked populist reactions in the first place. The criticism of "populism" and "nationalism" tends to become a criticism of "democracy" or even a corporatist protection of an institutionalised oligarchy. Thus, mainstream media's reporting that populism and nationalism are a threat is misdirecting the people from the...

CUCUTA, Colombia (AP) — Venezuelans frustrated over their nation's crippling food and medical shortages are expected to join opposition leaders Saturday in a potentially risky push to deliver international aid that Nicolas Maduro has refused to accept into the country. The opposition is calling on masses of Venezuelans to help trucks carrying the nearly 200 metric tons of humanitarian assistance delivered largely by the United States over the last two weeks across several border bridges in Colombia. (snip) "We think it's going to enter," opposition leader David Smolansky said in the lead up to the push. "There will be so...

Presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has never shied away from his embrace of a hard-left agenda, but the democratic socialist is facing renewed scrutiny over a catalog of comments he made in the 1980s praising the Soviet Union, offering advice to Nicaragua's socialist government -- and even saying breadlines in communist countries are a "good thing." “It’s funny sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing,” he said in one vintage video unearthed by conservative activists. “In other countries, people don’t line up for food, rich...

From the very first day of the 2020 presidential race, when Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts blamed “generations of discrimination” for black families earning far less than white households, Democratic hopefuls have broadly emphasized racial justice and closing the wealth gap in their policy platforms. But in recent weeks, some candidates have started embracing specific goals and overtly race-conscious legislation that even the most left-wing elected officials stayed away from in recent years. Last week, Senator Kamala Harris of California agreed with a radio host’s recent suggestion that government reparations for black Americans were necessary to address the legacies of...

The "fight for 15" -- a minimum wage of $15 an hour -- has been a rallying cry on the left for a while now, and they've succeeded in implementing it in various blue states. And look what's -- so utterly predictably -- happening: Its workers were the first to stage rallies demanding a minimum wage of $15 an hour. Then, they pressed for changes in the way national restaurant chains set their work schedules. Now, they are asking the City Council to shield them from being fired without a valid reason. That protection, the sort of job security...

It would be easy to dismiss the Green New Deal as an impossible progressive dream, but that would be a mistake. The Green New Deal is not the bucket list of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow travelers, but a blueprint to turn America into a socialist state. It is the culmination of a 90-year campaign, begun with FDR and the first New Deal. “The first obligation of government is the protection of the welfare and well-being, indeed the very existence, of its citizens,” presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt said at the 1932 Democratic National Convention. Roosevelt said that in...

When Democrats unveiled their “Green New Deal” to fight climate change, the Republican response was swift and strikingly uniform. “A socialist wish list,” said a spokesman for the national party. “The socialist Democrats are off to a great start!” exclaimed a spokesman for the GOP’s congressional campaign committee. “Socialism may begin with the best of intentions, but it always ends with the Gestapo,” chimed in Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, invoking Winston Churchill. The echo was no accident. Rather, it marked a purposeful shift in rhetoric and political strategy as President Trump and his party increasingly focus on his...

WASHINGTON — What is happening to the Democrats? Captivated by a handful of liberal superstars, they are venturing where the party has long feared to tread: Steep taxes on the rich. Abolishing an immigration enforcement agency. And proposing a sweeping Green New Deal that calls for an “economic transformation” to combat climate change. On Thursday, newly-elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led a chorus of cheers as Amazon announced it was abandoning plans to build a sought-after headquarters in New York City. Activists berated the online giant for a $3 billion package of tax breaks she said the city could better invest...

Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism. – Vladimir Lenin Religious, as indeed any other, ideas being born out of the soil of the material conditions of life and above all the soil of class contradictions, only gradually clear themselves away and then live on by the force of conservatism longer than the needs that gave birth to them and disappear completely only after the effects of serious social shocks and crises. – Leon Trotsky If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of...

I WAS TELLING MY FRENCH READERS ABOUT AOC’S CRAZY GREEN NEW DEAL ON A FRENCH-SPEAKING POLITICAL MEDIA. Even in Socialist France, where people suffer daily from “social justice”; where the government confiscates every month 50% of their pay check; where they pay 18% VAT and their tax return with what they have left; where 10% of the people, 25% of the youth is unemployed – and when they are lucky to find a job, it’s never in the field they studied for; where health care costs three times more than in the US – but they emphasize that it’s free...