Free Republic

Big Journalism has learned that the Occupy Washington DC movement is working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement. Someone has made the emails from the Occupy D.C. email distro public and searchable. The names in the list are a veritable who’s who in media. Journolist 2.0 includes well known names such as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi who both are actively participating; involvement from other listers such as Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald plus well-known radicals like Noam Chomsky, remains unclear.

Some folks involved with the annual Burning Man festival plan on staging a counter-standoff to the one currently taken up by Bundy in his ongoing challenge to the feds over grazing rights. The video below posted by progressive activist Sean Shealy details the plan for a month-long shindig to be held after the official Burning Man proceedings that will take place directly across from Bundy Ranch. The "anything goes" action promises hundreds of bands, as many as 50,000 revelers, "total freedom," and of course full nudity. "You're free to let it all hang out right there, just like Bundy's cattle,"...

The rich are not the problem, the greedy are not the problem, the crooked are not the problem - the problem is the system that brings them about. If the system is ours, the system means by the people, of the people, for the people, then now it is time to take it back. Now it is time to demand that it would be changed.

We're better than those damned Russians and their Putin; we have democracy! Well, maybe not. Quote: Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. Lots of big words in that paragraph. Let's distill it down -- the argument presented is that America is really no different than...

FROM THE 'DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND': A new low for the far left: a post titled, "Why I Hope the Bloodshed Continues in Iraq." I kid you not.  DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND DECIDES TO EDIT: Hmmm. After I linked to a truly hideous posting celebrating bloodshed in Iraq, they take the page down. I should have copied the page. First CBS. Now DU. Shine a light on them and they scram. - 11:42:12 AM  THE POST: Here's what Democratic Underground didn't want you to see: I Hope the Bloodshed Continues in IraqWell, that should bring the bats out of the attic with fangs dripping....

For Immediate Release: Contact: Rosanna Pulido April 14, 2014 Rick Biesada tel. 773-771-3927 Chicago, IL – The head of the Illinois Minuteman Project and former Republican candidate for Congress, Rosanna Pulido, announced that her group, along with The Chicago MInutemen Project group and grassroots organizations, is holding a “SAVE THE AMERICAN WORKER RALLY” at 1:00 pm Tuesday, April 22, at the corner of Michigan and Van Buren Streets in downtown Chicago. Pulido said the rally is being held to protest a gathering of well-heeled Republican politicians, lobbyists, and corporate CEOs pushing amnesty for illegal aliens at the nearby Chicago Club...

Guess who's all of a sudden standing up for law and order? Why, it's radical environmentalists, who despite their general disdain for lawful behavior have felt compelled to speak out in support of the Bureau of Land Management's attempts to round up Cliven Bundy's cattle and ultimately force the Nevada rancher to abandon his family's century-old business. Martin Griffith at the Associated Press relayed the comments of one such group in a Sunday report in the aftermath of the BLM's abandonment of its roundup efforts, in Griffith's words, "after hundreds of states' rights protesters, some of them armed militia members,...

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the current bull market on Wall Street, making it one of the longest and strongest in history. Yet U.S. stock ownership is at a record low and less than half of Americans trust banks and financial services. And in the last two weeks, the New York attorney general and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission in Washington have both launched investigations into high-frequency computerized stock trading that now controls more than half the market. The probes were announced just ahead of a much anticipated book on the subject by best-selling author Michael Lewis called...

Two newcomers, Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, are the hottest figures in the dominant conservative wing of the Republican Party. In markedly different ways, they both claim to be the heirs to the party’s contemporary patron saint, Ronald Reagan. In a short time, these first-term lawmakers have electrified elements of the party’s base and rattled the Senate establishment. The top two Republican leaders in the chamber, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Cornyn of Texas, have had to defer to the political popularity of their junior colleagues. Both are outside the party mainstream, rock stars...

Five years ago almost no one knew the term – Fracking. Today it is one of the hottest topics in America and has become one of our hottest political footballs. The question is whether the fracking process harms underground water. It depends on who you ask. Josh Fox received money from HBO to make a movie called Gasland. The documentary reached great heights as it was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary based on a small theatrical release. Josh Fox, a little known theater director, became a darling of the anti-fracking movement. The highlight of his film was...

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...

Yesterday, the House Homeland Security Committee published a video on their Youtube page highlighting a portion of the committee questioning Roberta Stempfley, acting assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cyber-security and Communications, who confirmed at least 16 attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s portal Healthcare.gov website in 2013. Roberta Stempfley highlighted one successful attack that is designed to deny access to the website called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is designed to make a network unavailable to intended users, generally through a concerted effort to disrupt service such as repeatedly accessing...

"The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny — and I'm happy with people using it, it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way," British graphic novel artist David Lloyd, the man who created the original image of the mask for a comic strip written by Alan Moore, told BBC. At the top of Reddit today is somewhat ironic image of this icon of rebellion being mass-produced in a factory in Sao Goncalo near Rio de Janeiro. Reuters notes that the masks are...

Media in general do not report things that are not happening; perhaps an artifact of human nature, but important non-events simply are not news. The fact that nobody in the US starves to death for lack of food is a non-event, as is the decreasing rate of cancer or the absence of polio infections. These non-events are actually bigger news than the latest warehouse fire or shark attack, but such is the news business. Another non-event worthy of reporting is the complete death of Occupy Wall Street. Once billed as the future of political discourse, and heralded by many left-wing...

MARSHALL, MI – A man protesting the Enbridge Inc. pipeline, the source of the 2010 oil spill, has lodged himself into the open pipeline and is refusing to come out, according to reports. WWMT is reporting that the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Department and rescue crews are on the the scene and are worried about the man’s oxygen intake. Channel 3 is reporting a woman on the scene, who said she is with MI CATS, the Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands, identified the man in the pipe as Chris Wahmhoff, an organizer for Occupy Kalamazoo. The group, which demands Enbridge remove...

Optimista wrote: I don't like the reference to the 2% tax hike. That reduction was nothing but an Obama gimmick to spike spending. Knowing full well that it wood be taken away soon. It was being stolen from the SS budget which is strained as it is. I wish the conservatives would state it truthfully. It hurts credibility and confuses people not to mention the fodder it gives the liberal morons to argue with. - Occupy and Redistribute D.C Dear Comrade Optimista, And I don’t like your reference to Social Security as anything other than theft. In fact, the more...

Occupy Wall Street activist Carne Ross and his consulting firm, Independent Diplomat, have a new job. Rather than champion for members of the world’s 99 percent, Ross and co. will now be lobbying for the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, which TheBlaze revealed this week may have ties to al-Qaeda. Russia Today reports that legal registration papers provided by the U.S. Department of Justice this week confirm Independent Diplomat’s role advising the Syrian rebel forces opposing the Bashar al Assad regime. According to lobbying papers filed on April 8, 2013, Independent Diplomat “will provide information on and...

The White House closed to the public is open to wealthy 1% Clebes. May each one be called to task for being traitors to the people.

Wall-Street Craziness Is Back Wolf Richter, Testosterone PitMarch 29, 2013 The craziness on Wall Street, the reckless for-the-moment-only behavior that led to the Financial Crisis, is back. This time it’s Citigroup that is once again concocting “synthetic” securities, like those that had wreaked havoc five years ago. And once again, it’s using them to shuffle off risks through the filters of Wall Street to people who might never know. What bubbled to the surface is that Citigroup is selling synthetic securities that yield 13% to 15% annually—synthetic because they’re based on credit derivatives. Apparently, Citi has a bunch of shipping...

Hacktivist group Anonymous took control of the U.S. Sentencing Commission website Friday, January 25 in a new campaign called "Operation Last Resort." The first attack on the website was early Friday morning. The second - successful - attack came around 9pm PST that evening. anonymous By 3am PST ussc.gov was down (it has since been dropped from the DNS), yet as of this writing the IP address (66.153.19.162) still returns the defaced site's contents. It appears that via the U.S. government website, Anonymous had distributed encrypted government files and left a statement on the website that de-encryption keys would be...