Free Republic

The controversy over a Nevada rancher’s decades-long use of public land without paying federal grazing fees has quickly become a national issue — one that Glenn Beck on Monday urged Americans to fully understand before taking a side on. “We did some research online with PsyID today, and found that there’s about 10 or 15 percent of the people who are talking about this online that are truly frightening,” Beck said on his television program. “They don’t care what the facts are. They just want a fight.” Beck said there are many “decent, small-government proponents from groups like the Tea...

It is the most important question being asked of dozens of New Yorkers lined up as potential jurors for the trial of Cecily McMillan, an Occupy Wall Street activist accused of assaulting a police officer: what do you think of her protest movement? Unfortunately for those keen on the swift procession of justice, a series of Manhattan residents who presented themselves at the criminal courthouse this week declared that they strongly disagreed with it – and could not promise to be impartial about one of its members. “I’m involved in Wall Street things. I’m on the Wall Street side, not...

Springtime is here. The birds are singing, temperatures are on the rise and the Occupy movement is emerging from winter hibernation, calling for a worldwide “wave of action” Friday to re-launch anti-capitalism protests. Occupiers have been instructed by the movement’s official Twitter feed to congregate at Zuccotti Plaza in New York City Friday morning. The plan is to march to nearby Federal Plaza. Zuccotti was the stronghold of Occupy Wall Street the last two years. An associated Facebook page announced a protest against the “regressive 1% agenda of Governor Andrew Cuomo and for a truly progressive one that includes the...

One of the co-founders of the Occupy Wall Street movement has called on Barack Obama to resign as president, and “appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America”.

Traditional American distrust of the centralized state is based on some lessons learned the hard way.Russia’s takeover of Crimea is already so complete that commercial flights to Kiev from the region’s main airport, located outside Simferopol, the regional capital 50 miles from Sevastopol, now leave from the international terminal instead of the domestic one as they did until last week. The shift suggests that Kiev and the rest of Ukraine are now classified as foreign territory. New York Times, March 6, 2014 There is no one who can be trusted with political power. Lord Acton’s famous epigram — “Power corrupts,...

Hey, makes about as much sense as anything else they've been doing since 2009.

(CNSNews.com) - Speaking with reporters from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last month, Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) said she was “so relieved when [Obama] won,” and would give Obama an ‘A’ in his second term if he would “just occupy the spot.” When asked by a reporter to give a progress report on Obama’s second term and to grade him, Moore declined to at first saying, “I'm not going to give Obama a grade. I’m glad he’s there. A Grade compared to what? Compared to Mitt Romney being there?” She then compared Obama’s second term to what would have happened...

On the looming battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.Just over two years after the inception of Occupy Wall Street, and one year after the corporate media wrote it off as dead, an unabashed progressive, Bill de Blasio, took the movement’s rhetoric and mobilized the 99 percent to give him a landslide victory over four decades of class war against poor and working New Yorkers. Mayor de Blasio’s progressive campaign rhetoric could have come from the Occupy movement’s “human microphone,” and no amount of Koch brothers funded attack ads could derail the zeitgeist that drove de Blasio and a...

Get specific. That’s the message conservative intellectuals and strategists have for the Republican Party as it faces an assault from President Obama and Democrats on issues resonant with struggling voters such as the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits. Obama’s income inequality push comes as the tide appears to be rising for the left on economic and social issues, something evident in everything from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s election to the legal selling of marijuana in Colorado. Some conservatives fear that the party has failed to make its case on how its policies can improve the lives...

Time to invite Occupy back to Wall Street. There is no question but that New York’s new mayor, Bill De Blasio, owes his landslide victory in the November election to the Occupy Movement. It was Occupy Wall Street’s minions, hemmed in by thug-like NYPD officers armed with sidearms, clubs and pepper spray cans, who in 2011 abruptly changed the national conversation about capitalism, introducing the concept of “We are the 99%,” and focusing attention on the enormous enrichment of the top 1% of Americans at the expense of the other 99% over the past several decades, as a direct result...

As more and more human rights of U.S. citizens are violated in the name of safety and security, the group Anonymous stands to fight at the side of Americans. Over the holiday weekend, they have even gone as far to announce a call to arms. The fact that many people are still unaware of the “hacker” group Anonymous is sign of censorship by today’s mainstream media. There is a clear need for groups such as Anonymous as the fact of this direct censorships shows just how clouded the media’s freedom of speech has become. anon5 (See also: Obama Secretly Signs...

Police estimated there were between 40 and 60 people still at the site before they moved in to evict them, with only around 20 actual protesters, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported — a figure disputed by Occupy organizers

Gov. Nikki Haley and state law enforcement agencies can be sued by Occupy Columbia protestors who were arrested in 2011 after living for a month on the S.C. State House grounds, a federal appeals court ruled Monday. Haley and the chiefs of the state Bureau of Public Safety and state Department of Public Safety had asked the court to protect them from civil legal penalties, saying they only were carrying out their duties. While Monday’s ruling centered on whether state officials were immune from the lawsuit, the Fourth Circuit of Appeals in Richmond, Va., said the Occupy protestors have “a...

I've long thought that part of why liberals succeed in villifying conservatives is because they're not afraid to use ridicule (whether deserved or not). In the interests of throwing that ridicule right back where it belongs, I offer this unabashed vanity: Photos of two of our cats in a slightly political pose. Please feel free to "steal" these and "occupy" any Internet space you care to with them!

For someone the Democrats have declared irrelevant, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin seems to be surprisingly relevant. According to the left, Palin hasn’t been a real factor since 2008. Yet every time she so much as makes a run to the grocery store, liberals scrutinize her behavior like disgraced Internal Revenue Service thug Lois Lerner reading Tea Party tax returns. While conservatives, many of whom genuinely like Palin, invite her to break bread with them at various functions, liberals whine about her near omnipresence — all while fawning like groupies in an effort to entice her as an interview subject....

Occupy Wall Street buys $15 million of Americans' medical debt Tue, Nov 12 2013By Elizabeth Dilts(Reuters) - An Occupy Wall Street spin-off group has bought up $14.7 million worth of Americans' personal medical debt and forgiven it over the last year as part of its Rolling Jubilee project, the group announced Monday.The Rolling Jubilee project, organized by Occupy Wall Street's Strike Debt group, has so far spent $400,000 to buy the debt, in the process relieving 2,693 people of the money they owed for medical services Occupy thinks should be free."Think of it as a bailout of the 99 percent...

Colorado - The Gilmore case attracted national attention because he supported demonstrations at an Occupy Wall Street encampment a block away from where the fire was started. Occupy activists were protesting against economic inequality and government policies favoring the wealthy. The early-morning fire caused an estimated $10 million damage to a four-story apartment complex under construction and the occupied Penny Flats condominium and retail building next door.

The House Oversight Committee wants to find out why the Park Service behaved so bizarrely. ... Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a former prosecutor, almost drove National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis into incoherence with his relentless questioning. Gowdy wanted to know why Jarvis had allowed “pot-smoking” Occupy Wall Street protesters to camp overnight illegally in Washington’s McPherson Square park for 100 days, yet put up barricades to keep veterans out of war memorials on the first day of the shutdown. By not issuing a single citation to the Occupy campers, Gowdy argued, the Park Service was treating them...

During a U.S. House hearing concerning the closure of national parks and monuments during the partial government shutdown, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) scolded the director of the National Park Service for treating “pot-smoking” demonstrators in the Occupy movement with more respect than the nation’s war veterans. Gowdy relentlessly challenged National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis to cite the federal regulation that prompted his department to put up barricades to keep veterans out of war memorials on the first day of the shutdown. He also pointed out that the Park Service failed to issue a single citation when Occupiers camped out...

To those people paying only casual attention, the Occupy movement has become nothing more than a footnote in history. Their ragtag encampments have been removed for the most part, and there is little to indicate they made much of an impact. In Madison, Wisconsin, however, the Occupy movement has suddenly resurfaced, but with a totally new mission: addressing the basic needs of people who are homeless. As issues around collective bargaining rights for public employees and other significant alterations to the social contract were initiated by Governor Walker and the Republican-dominated legislature, Madison became famous for very loud and angry...