Free Republic

Now is the time to talk about replacing the statue of Robert E. Lee, as iconic as it is controversial, from its perch at the center of Lee Circle, Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced Wednesday (June 24) during a gathering held to highlight his racial reconciliation initiative. "Symbols really do matter," he said. "Symbols should reflect who we really are as a people. "We have never been a culture, in essence, that revered war rather than peace, division rather than unity." The slaying last week of nine black people in a historic Charleston, S.C., church at the hands of Dylann Roof,...

BERLIN (Reuters) - The U.S. military estimates around 12,000 Russian soldiers are supporting pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine, U.S. Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges said on Tuesday. The Russian forces are made up of military advisers, weapons operators and combat troops, Hodges said in a speech in Berlin, adding that a further 29,000 soldiers were stationed in the Crimea peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine last year. In addition, 50,000 troops are positioned on the Russian side of the border with Ukraine in case the separatists suffer a severe setback and the Ukrainian army gains the upper hand, Hodges said.

Suspected dissidents disappear after midnight visits to their homes; chilling screams can again be heard from Idi Amin's infamous torture chambers, reopened after a quarter of a century of disuse. From the few that escape come tales of punishment beatings and even mass executions. Welcome to President Yoweri Museveni's Uganda. One of Britain's favourite African states in recent years has, almost unnoticed in the West, become a sinister land where a corrupt regime uses its secret police to rule through fear. The reasons for this transition are not hard to fathom. Mr Museveni has ruled Uganda since 1986, when his...

My twelve-year-old recently finished George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. When I asked her whether she had taken any lessons from the book, she airily replied, “The individual is powerless, so there’s really no point in trying.” Alarmed, I tried to explain that the world was an altogether cheerier place than Orwell, writing in 1948, could have imagined. Unrepentant socialist as he was, he never overcame his belief that the free market was doomed. He would have been stunned by the way that seventy years of exchange and specialization have served not only to make us wealthier, but to make us more...

Duncan faces 25-years-to-life on gang conspiracy charges brought against him this week, according to the Los Angeles Times. Prosecutors will reportedly look to prove that the album art "willfully promotes, furthers, or assists in any felonious criminal conduct by members of that gang." "That gang" refers to the San Diego Lincoln Park gang, of which Duncan is a member, according to San Diego police. According to the Times, at least 15 Lincoln Park gang members have been charged in a recent string of shootings in the city. Yet Duncan's attorney, Brian Watkins, told the paper that his client is innocent and the evidence against...

Advancements in technology have fueled this White House's obsession with controlling the message. Jay Carney is free. But not loose – at least so far. After resigning as the press secretary for President Obama on June 20, Carney gave insight into the Obama administration’s handling of classified documents, and responded to criticism that this administration has been the most Orwellian in recent history. “I know — because I covered them — that this was said of Clinton and Bush, and it will probably be said of the next White House,” said Carney in a recent New York Times Magazine interview....

In the U.S., the politics of the left versus the right rolls on with the predictability of traffic jams at the George Washington Bridge. It's a lot of honking. Until now. All of a sudden, the left has hit ramming speed across a broad swath of American life—in the universities, in politics and in government. People fingered as out of line with the far left's increasingly bizarre claims are being hit and hit hard. Commencement-speaker bans are obligatory. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice withdrew as Rutgers's speaker after two months of protests over Iraq, the left's long-sought replacement for...

Republican legislators, stop this Fed takeover of the newsrooms in it's tracks! They already control around 95% of Big Media. We are hedging toward 100% Pravda reporting! STOP BEING WIMPS!!

The nightmare societies portrayed in the George Orwell novels "1984" and "Animal Farm" gave us the word "Orwellian." That adjective reflects a vast government's efforts not just to deceive and control the people, but also to do so by reinventing the meaning of ordinary words while rewriting the past itself. America, of all places, is becoming Orwellian. The president repeatedly reminds the American people that under his leadership, the U.S. has produced a record level of new oil and natural gas. But didn't Obama radically curtail leases for just such new energy production on federal lands? Have the edicts on...

Red-light cameras are getting the heave-ho in this seaside city. Saying he was following through on a campaign promise, Commissioner William Julian made a motion Wednesday to get rid of the cameras as soon as legally possible.

The conservative behind "2016: Obama's America" is under indictment for campaign finance violations but his next doc will open on schedule on July 4, filmmakers say. The filmmakers behind Dinesh D'Souza's upcoming doc have vowed to press on while their star defends himself after his indictment on federal charges that he violated campaign finance laws in 2012. On Sunday, they released a trailer for the movie, America, that is set for release on July 4. OUR EDITOR RECOMMENDS '2016: Obama's America' Filmmaker Claims 'Libel' Over Accusations of Marital Infidelity Oscar-Winning Producer of 'The Godfather Part II' Joins Dinesh D'Souza's Next...

Two events last week — one an announcement by the Marine Corps, the other speeches at the inauguration of New York City's new mayor — illustrated vividly how President Obama and his media cohort have so narrowed the boundaries of political speech that we no longer believe we can challenge outright lies.. [snip] ..What Obama said about America in that speech was a lie, what Rev. Lucas and Harry Belafonte said in the de Blasio inauguration were lies, and what the Marines did in renewing their diminution of physical standards for combat arms was the renewal of a broken promise....

On the Obamacare health insurance exchanges, being married can cost you a lot. Get divorced (or avoid getting married, if you live together), and you save $7,230 per year if you are a fairly typical 40-year-old couple with kids (example: the husband working full-time, and the wife working part time, with the husband making $70,000, and the wife making $23,000). If you are a 60-year-old couple with equal incomes and no kids, and you make $62,041 a year, you save $11,028 a year by getting divorced or remaining unmarried. These are the amounts of money you will lose if you...

I'm speechless at the stupidity of these morons.

A video published to YouTube shows a good number of “average” Americans eager and willing to sign a [satirical] petition that advocates a Nazi-style “Orwellian” system of government to supposedly keep the American people safe. Political prankster Mark Dice asks random San Diego beach-goers to sign a petition to dramatically increase Nazi-style “measures to keep the community safe”. Dice makes the satirical case that the government shutdown not only cut back on funding for national parks, but has also cut back on funding for the police state. Signature after signature, Americans willingly sign their name to a petition to implement...

The Commerce Department has made changes to how it calculates gross domestic product, designed to have the data better reflect the so-called knowledge economy. The U.S. government adjusted data all the way back to 1929, and other countries have or are about to make similar changes to their data.

In a single weekend, Edward Snowden became one of the most famous -- and wanted -- men in the world. This is because last week Snowden, a former contractor technician for the National Security Agency, blew the lid off of a domestic spying program straight from George Orwell’s worst nightmare. America may never be the same again. As explained by Glenn Greenwald, the reporter with The Guardianwho worked with Snowden to expose the massive NSA eavesdropping programs, “There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only...

President Obama has said the outrage over the federal government’s decision to monitor citizens’ phone activity is all “hype.” He might want to share his opinion with the Air Force, which is ordering members of the service not to look at news stories about it. WND has received an unclassified NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) that warns airmen not to look at news stories related to the data-mining scandal. The notice applies to users of the Air Force NIPRNET (Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network), which is the only way that many troops stationed overseas and on bases in the U.S. are...

Michael Steinbach, former head of the FBI’s counterterrorism division and now special agent in charge of Miami, told over 30 congressional staffers in March of 2012 that, contrary to the White House's classification, the bureau does not refer to the Fort Hood shooting as "workplace violence." As head of the FBI counterterrorism division, Steinbach oversaw the investigation into the mass murder at Texas Army base. Steinbach made this claim during an unclassified counterterrorism briefing on Capitol Hill.

Capita list: North Korea approves 28 model socialist hairstyles It's not just nuclear weapons proliferating on the Korean peninsula these days. In a move that for once is not considered a threat to regional and global security, the North Korean government has recommended a relatively generous range of 28 hairstyles for its citizens, claiming that they are "the most comfortable" styles and capable of warding off the corrupting effects of capitalism, according to ifeng.com, a news website run by Hong Kong's Phoenix TV network. Pictures can be seen on the walls of hair salons around the country showing the approved...