Free Republic

When John Quincy Adams entered office in March, 1825, he had lofty ideas both domestically and on the global front. The younger Adams had one of the most impressive resumes of a new president. He was widely regarded as one of the most successful secretaries of state in our history, and presided over the tranquil years of the Monroe presidency. Yet, the Jacksonian Democrats who dominated Congress, buoyed by the voting bloc of the southern states, absolutely decimated Quincy’s agenda and rendered his entire presidency an utter failure. There is no reason the same dynamic cannot occur during a potential...

Netflix has acquired worldwide rights to Barry, a film about a formative year in the life of a young Barack Obama, following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this month. According to Deadline, the streaming service beat out several other distributors to land the rights to the critically-acclaimed film from director Vikram Gandhi, which premiered September 10 in Toronto. Netflix was said to have spent $4.5 million to acquire the film, though the final number was not confirmed. Barry tells the story of one year in the life of the future president, as he attends Columbia University in...

Barack Obama has come out swinging against his Republican rival, sponsoring television advertisements that ask, "What is Mitt Romney hiding?" The allusion is to such relatively minor matters as Romney's prior tax returns, the date he stopped working for Bain Capital, and the non-public records from his service heading the Salt Lake City Olympics and as governor of Massachusetts. Obama defended his demands that Romney release more information about himself, declaring in Aug. 2012 that "The American people have assumed that if you want to be president of the United States that your life's an open book when it comes...

Have you ever heard of a group called UNO of Chicago? No, not the deep dish pizza chain; the Left-wing community organizing outfit. How about the Midwest Academy? Does the name James Cone ring a bell? If you’re like most Americans – including many who consider themselves fairly well informed about President Obama’s background and associations – you’re probably drawing a blank on all three questions. That’s why Stanley Kurtz’s new book, Radical-In-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, is so important. The key word in the title is “untold.” Kurtz, a respected investigative journalist and public...

A loose accusation of his being a socialist has trailed Obama for years.... But the evidence exists, if not in plain sight then in the archives — for example, the archived files of the Democratic Socialists of America.... That, along with some misleading admissions in [] Dreams from My Father, makes it clear that Obama attended the 1983 and 1984 Socialist Scholars conferences.... A detailed account of these conferences (along with many other events from Obama’s radical past) and the evidence for Obama’s attendance at them can be found in my new book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story...

In late October 2008, when I wrote here at National Review Online that Obama had been a member of the New Party, his campaign sharply denied it, calling my claim a “crackpot smear.” Fight the Smears, an official Obama-campaign website, staunchly maintained that “Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party.” I rebutted this, but the debate was never taken up by the mainstream press. Recently obtained evidence from the updated records of Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society now definitively establishes that Obama was a member of the New Party. He also signed...

It began with Richard Nixon. He showed Republicans how to win elections and lose their soul, how to capitulate to statism and call it a “new kind of freedom.” Consequently the GOP is now a carbon copy of the Democrat Party. Throughout the seventies and eighties, neoconservative intellectuals eagerly fostered this “new kind of freedom” which gave Republicans an excuse to blank out on the reality of what they were doing. Led by the late Irving Kristol and big government luminaries like Harvard sociologist Patrick Moynihan and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, these influential former socialists infiltrated the Republican Party like...

Today’s New York Times features an in-depth look at the radical background of Bill de Blasio, the man poised to become the next mayor of New York. De Blasio is a longtime admirer and supporter of Nicaragua’s Marxist Sandinistas. He helped raise funds for the Sandinistas in the 1980s, subscribed to the party’s newspaper, Barricadda (Barricade), and unlike many others, remained supportive even after the Sandinistas lost power. To this day de Blasio speaks admiringly of the Sandinistas (while offering some token criticism of their handling of dissent), and remains interested in the Latin American left. De Blasio honeymooned in...

For the first time since the mid 1800s we hear today liberty voices rising from elected state officials including governors. But they're not in D.C.; instead they're in Kansas, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri and dozens of other states, making their own decisions on abortion, guns, constitutional law, ObamaCare, and practically everything. But no leader yet emerges, and no center. It is, like Pirandello’s play, with actors in search of a theater and a leader. Actually a leader is emerging: Sarah Palin. But new ideas need new forms to start again the conversation and bring in a new generation. For a fresh...

"Weatherman domestic terrorist finally spills the beans"Weatherman domestic terrorist Bill Ayers is now confirming what the White House has previously denied – that he held a fundraiser in his living room for Barack Obama. That 1995 meeting was said to have launched Obama’s political career. In an October 2008 interview on MSNBC host Chris Matthews’ show, Robert Gibbs, a spokesman for Obama’s presidential campaign, categorically denied the fundraiser was ever held. Matthews asked Gibbs: “Did [Ayers] have a fundraiser for [Obama], or not?” Gibbs, who would become the White House spokesman, replied: “No, he did not have a fundraiser for...

(CNSNews.com) - Conservative leaders don't like what they're hearing from House Speaker John Boehner, the man in the middle of fiscal cliff negotiations. One day after Boehner mentioned an $800-billion tax hike -- half the amount President Obama is seeking -- conservative activist L. Brent Bozell III said the Republican Party is no longer the party of limited government, limited spending and limited taxes: "It is now officially exactly right behind the Democrats -- on everything," Bozell said. "It is time for conservatives to start looking for a new home. There's precious little left for us here." Bozell said it's...

Former Kadima chair Tzipi Livni held a news conference at 12:00 noon to announce that she is running for the 19th Knesset at the helm of an independent party, "The Movement – Headed by Tzipi Livni." Livni met Monday with another former Kadima chair, Ehud Olmert, and informed him of her decision. According to a Maagar Mochot poll published Thursday, a list headed by Livni would garner nine Knesset seats and "steal" seats from Labor, which would get only 19, and Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid (Future) party, which would get 4 seats. Lapid has offered Livni the Number Two position...

We the OppositionPart I can be found here. It provides some of my thinking behind this, Part II. Jim Gourdi at Conservatives on fire wrote yesterday, Obama won and we lost. There are lessons WE must take away from this election. One lesson is that the Republican party is not what in many parts of the world is called the OPPOSITION. They are not the opposition. We are. The virtuous conservative and libertarian Americans are the opposition. We have no party that represents us. Yes, there are some small third parties; but, it would take years for a viable third...

Should we put it on life support and hope that it survives or attempt to displace it gradually with something better?Yesterday, I received a gracious e-mail from the Obama-Biden campaign thanking me personally for all that I had done: Friend -- I hope you saw Jim's note with the video of President Obama thanking supporters and staff. I wanted to single you out especially because you've gone above and beyond in your support of the President. (Emphasis added.) I only wish I could have done even more to support his defeat; after all that he had done, it was past...

Minutes of the meeting on January 11, 1996, of the New Party’s Chicago chapter read as follows: Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He signed the New Party “Candidate Contract” and requested an endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party. Consistent with this, a roster of the Chicago chapter of the New Party from early 1997 lists Obama as a member, with January 11, 1996, indicated as the date he joined.

RUSH: Hey, hey, folks, quick question here. Would it matter to you if you found out that Mitt Romney was a member of a socialist third party back in the 1990s, who wanted to basically make America like a Western European Social Democracy? Would that matter to you? It would? Would it matter to you if Romney were a member of the Nazi party back in the nineties? So you think it would disqualify Romney? If you found out that Romney was a member of a left-wing socialist third party and did everything he could to cover it up and...

President Barack Obama has been challenged before about his alleged ties to the “New Party,” a far-left political group that once served as a third party option in the American political schema. Last month, The Blaze highlighted some images that seemed to corroborate the president’s alleged past ties to groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and, alas, the New Party, despite his campaign’s 2008 denial that he was a member of the movement. As noted, a picture of Obama was published on the cover of the New Party News pamphlet back in 1996, serving as a small sliver of...

On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, which was precisely the New Party’s In late October 2008, when I...

Barack Obama was, in fact, a member of the socialist New Party in the 1990s and sought its endorsement for the Illinois senate--contrary to the misrepresentations of Obama's presidential campaign in 2008, and in spite of the efforts of Politico's Ben Smith to quash the story. Stanley Kurtz, author of Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (2010), has released new "smoking gun" evidence at National Review Online. It is evidence that the mainstream media can no longer ignore--and Obama can no longer deny. When the story of Obama's association with the New Party first broke in...

New documents shed new light on his ties to a leftist party in the 1990s. On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward...