Free Republic

This year, several Russian lawmakers called for an investigation against Mr. Gorbachev, charging him with having caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. To accuse someone of having brought about the end of a state responsible for the murder of millions, the imprisonment of tens of millions and the oppression of hundreds of millions is a bit like accusing someone of having brought down Nazism. But the people who run post-Soviet Russia don’t see it that way. Mr. Putin saw a regime – the regime he served – unwilling to maintain power by force. Unlike the Chinese communists, who in...

".......Gruber’s comments have been much-remarked-upon, particularly on the right, not only for confirming what Obamacare critics have said for five years but also for capturing at least in part the ethos of modern progressive liberalism: smarter-than-thou zealotry masquerading as for-the-greater-good pragmatism. (That he did it at sound-bite length is simply an added perk.) But for a movement that touts its stratospheric intelligence, the response to Gruber’s comments from his longtime supporters, both on Capitol Hill and in the media, reminds observers of something else: that liberalism tends to handle its PR nightmares with an iron first. Consider what is happening...

The University of Pennsylvania which had originally posted this has now pulled down the video from their site. But this is an attempt on the part of Jonathan Gruber and company to pull their pants up after they got caught. I think it's comical that these people still believe they can say whatever they want in public, but then flip out if anyone quotes them. It also appears that the Snopes.com mafia has been called in to cast doubt upon the incident as conservatives have reported it. They call this claim a Mixture of true and false. Here's their lame...

In a new campaign to reportedly raise awareness of "privilege," the University of San Francisco is handing out fliers telling anyone who is white, straight, Christian, or "able-bodied" that they are privileged and need to "check their privilege." The campaign was put together by three professors at the college and Student Life. The fliers also claim that if you believe that your gender identity and biological gender are the same (that is, if you consider yourself a male and you are biologically male), you are privileged as well. No matter who you are, no matter what your situation in life,...

Facebook is mining its data of users' posts to find out how users feel about certain candidates or issues and sharing that data with ABC News and BuzzFeed for use in their 2016 reporting, the social-networking site will announce on Friday. The data will be gathered from the posts of Facebook users in the United States 18 and older, classifying sentiments about a politician or issue as positive, negative or neutral. The data can also be broken down into sentiments by gender and location, making it possible to see how Facebook users in the key primary states of Iowa or...

A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over claims it kills stories that put President Obama in a bad light says she was spied on by a “government-related entity” that planted classified documents on her computer. In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” at what the analysis revealed.

"You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like... yeah, he's sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn't work out." This has become a recurring theme in Musk's public comments, and each time he warns of the AI bogeyman it seems even more dire. In June, Musk raised the specter of the "Terminator" franchise, saying that he invests in companies working on artificial intelligence just to be able to keep an eye on the technology. In August, he reiterated his concerns in a tweet, writing that AI is...

Former Secretary of Labor Bob Reich, on behalf of MoveOn, warns Democrats what will happen if Republicans take control of the Senate: they may use a “tricky, little-known maneuver” to “ram through” their “right-wing policies” with only 51 votes, instead of the 60 votes “usually required” in the Senate. Here he is:Reconciliation

Together, Charles and David Koch control one of the world's largest fortunes, which they are using to buy up our political system. But what they don't want you to know is how they made all that money. The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and...

In a meandering speech before the Family Research Council’s Values Voters Summit on Friday, former Alaska Governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin hailed attendees as “the Americans that the media loves to hate.”

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the masterminds behind Obamacare, has now explained that he wishes to die at age 75. In an article in The Atlantic, Emanuel writes, “Seventy-five. That’s how long I want to live: 75 years.” He explains that his daughters disagree; so do his brothers and his friends. But, he says, “I am sure of my position…here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but

Saying that the defendant had offered no proof that he felt remorse for his crime, a New York prosecutor is asking a judge to send Dinesh D'Souza to jail for violating campaign finance laws.D'Souza pled guilty to making straw donations to the 2012 United States Senate campaign of Wendy E. Long. He asked two friends and their wives to donate  the maximum to Long's campaign - $20,000 in all - and then reimbursed them, thus exceeding the $5,000 limit on donations per election cycle. Considering all the chicanery conducted by the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012, where millions of...

MSNBC’S Andrea Mitchell claimed President Barack Obama’s new cabal of foreign policy advisers “looks like a review of our guest list” on the liberal cable news network, with the AP’s Julie Pace explaining that the White House is trying to bring the commentators “into the fold.” Mitchell spoke Tuesday with Pace about Obama’s Monday night dinner with the DC foreign policy intelligentsia, presumably designed to help craft a strategy to contain an aggressive Russia and defeat ISIS in the Middle East. But as the MSNBC host ticked off the guests — including former Clinton aide Sandy Berger, longtime Democratic adviser...

James Vanderbilt's Truth, the high-profile movie chronicling the scandal that derailed Dan Rather's career, has gotten the greenlight to begin shooting this fall. Brett Ratner's RatPac Entertainment and Echo Lake Entertainment will finance the movie, starring Robert Redford as the iconic news anchor and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, Rather's producer. At the same time, FilmNation has come aboard to represent international rights and will pre-sell the project to foreign buyers at the Toronto Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday night (based on the cast, it's sure to whet appetites). Mythology Entertainment is the driving force behind Truth, which was...

The EU’s justice commissioner has accused internet giant Google of leading a campaign to shoot down data protection reforms. Speaking in Lyon, France on Monday (18 August), the commissioner, Martine Reicherts, said: “Google and other affected companies who complain loudly” about a recent EU court verdict on personal data are “detractors … attempting to throw a new spanner in the works”. The Luxembourg-based EU court in May ruled that Google must remove links to any content that is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” or face a fine.The ruling was based on the bloc’s 1995 data protection law, which are...

Tuesday night the Houston Chronicle published a story about the grand jury that indicted Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Those grand jurors who spoke with the Chronicle broke the law to do so, and they knew that they were breaking the law. They claimed that they were speaking to the newspaper to counter Gov. Perry’s “spin” on the case. That’s not the job of a grand jury, by the way. One of them is a woman named Rho Chalmers. Chalmers tried to get around her lawbreaking by attempting to build this wall of implausible deniability. Rho Chalmers, who name matches that...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Mr. Snerdley walked in and said, "Boy, this thing with Rick Perry, can you believe what a farce?" It's not a farce, folks. Now, I'm not gonna be getting to Rick Perry right off the bat here, but I wanted to mention something about it to get it on the table. It's not a farce. It isn't a joke. Sadly, it's not even a laughing matter. This is dead serious. Not that he's done anything wrong. What's dead serious about this is the Democrat Party and their ongoing effort to criminalize political differences or opposition. All the...

A Texas judge opted Monday not to issue an arrest warrant against Gov. Rick Perry, but the Republican still faces the unflattering prospect of being booked, fingerprinted and having his mug shot taken — and has assembled a team of high-powered attorneys to fight the two felony counts of abuse of power against him. "This is nothing more than banana republic politics," Tony Buzbee a Houston-based defense attorney who will head a cadre of four lawyers from Texas and Washington defending Perry, said at a news conference. A grand jury in Austin, a liberal bastion in otherwise largely conservative Texas,...

The school teachers lounge is a respite from more than just bratty kids. It’s a safe zone from the long arm of Michelle Obama’s food police. Students are already revolting against the newly-implemented school snack regulations that affect what is sold in vending machines. They will probably be equally upset to learn the vending machine just across the hall – in the teachers lounge – is exempt from the regulations.

(snip) “What you’ve seen with our politics, partly because of gerrymandering, partly because of the Balkanization of media so people just watch what reinforces their deepest biases, partly because of big money in politics, is increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme, maximalist positions,” Obama told the liberal Times columnist. “Sooner or later, that catches up with you. You end up not being able to move forward on things we need to move forward on. We need to reform our immigration system. That would be good not just for our domestic economy but for our position in the...