Free Republic

Soviet Sweden? Model Nation Sliding to Third World By Dale Hurd CBN News Sr. Reporter Wednesday, April 02, 2014 STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- When President Barack Obama visited Sweden last year, he expressed his deep admiration for the Swedish model. But that should make Americans a little nervous. One U.N. report says Sweden will be a third-world nation in about 15 years, below Libya and Bulgaria. Sweden is a society that believes it is racing into the future, but critics warn that it is racing to the bottom. It has been a laboratory for all kinds of social experiments: Swedish leaders...

Ten years ago this week, John Kerry barely held off John Edwards in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary, prolonging for another few weeks his plodding, uninspiring march to the party’s presidential nomination. Kerry went on to lose an eminently winnable election, after which most Democrats in Washington expected him to disappear, like Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis. Kerry went the Ed Muskie route, instead. He persevered, and now, exactly a year into his tenure as secretary of state, he is enjoying the most widespread admiration of his long political life. In September, even before he managed to restart peace negotiations in the...

In 2000 I was standing in for my boss at the time, then-representative John Shadegg (R., Ariz.), as I spoke to an AP Government class in Phoenix. It was the first time I had visited a high-school class on his behalf, but I had my spiel ready. I knew exactly how to kick it off: Raise your hand if you think ours is the greatest country in the world. From there, I had planned to launch into a speech explaining that our democratic values, federalism, and respect for individual freedom made us great. Slight hiccup: Only half the class raised...

We hear a lot about the racial disparity in death penalty sentencing, namely, that black Americans are dramatically overrepresented on death row. Less remarked on is the disparity in death penalty support, as revealed in a new Pew Research Center survey. Overall, 55 percent of Americans support capital punishment, and 37 percent are opposed. Among whites, however, support for the death penalty jumps to 63 percent, compared to 40 percent for Hispanics and 36 percent for blacks. Religion — or at least, Protestantism — seems to increase the divide. At 67 percent in favor, white evangelical Protestants are more likely...

If only people had to live in the world that they dreamed of for others. Endangered species everywhere are supposed to be at risk — except birds of prey shredded by wind turbine farms, or reptilian habitats harmed by massive solar farms. High-speed rail is great for utopian visionaries — except don’t dare start it in the Bay Area, when there are yokels aplenty down in Hanford to experiment on. Let’s raise power bills to the highest levels in the country with all sorts of green mandates — given that we live in 70-degree year-round temperatures, while “they” who are...

TV journalist Lisa Bloom has just written a book about the Trayvon Martin case. Curious to find out more, I watched her interview with Cenk Uygur of “The Young Turks.” She started out by explaining that she wrote the book to demonstrate Zimmerman’s guilt, and show that the jury got it wrong. Instead of presenting new evidence, or a more compelling interpretation, she ignored exculpatory evidence, mangled the facts, made bogus inferences, and omitted much..

    TRENTON, N. J., Oct. 3.--Before an audience which filled the Taylor Opera House, Dr. Woodrow Wilson, Democratic candidate for Governor of New Jersey, defined to-night where he stood on public issues. He was received with immense enthusiasm. His wife, sitting in a box, joined heartily in the applause.     Unmindful of the fact that "Old Nassau" is only sung or played when Princeton men are in danger of defeat, the band played the air when Dr. Wilson was introduced by Chairman Erwin E. Marshall of the Democratic City Committee, but the audience did not know university ethics, and yelled for five...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8Fk5Ga6wCM

17-year-old Gregory Vied was suspended for flying a confederate flag atop his pickup truck, "which was parked in the student lot at Steinert High School in Hamilton Township." According to News 12 New Jersey, Vied said he was suspended on March 25th after being repeatedly told he could not fly the flag.

On March 29th Breitbart News sat down with KnifeRights.org founder Doug Ritter. We discussed the growing efforts to stop and/or repeal knife control and ways in which knife control and gun control intersect. We asked Ritter, "So how do laws banning or controlling certain types of knives about?"

One of the best ways to keep tabs on what’s happening with air issues inside the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is through a newsletter called the Clean Air Report of the aptly titled online news service InsideEPA.com. The Clean Air Report is a (rather pricey) bi-weekly publication produced by Inside Washington Publishers, which, according to their website, “for over 25 years has provided exclusive, relevant news about the federal policymaking process to professionals who have a need to know about the process.”

This sort of thing parodies itself, for obvious reasons. The toxicity of Adam Weinstein's rant against people who disagree with him on climate change lies in his total disregard for the First Amendment and his belief that a court in Italy that found some scientists guilty for misleading the public about the severity of an earthquake sets a "precedent" for American justice.

Director Darren Aronofsky's "Noah" is on pace to outperform this weekend with a $40 -$45 million haul at the box office, but moviegoers are giving Russell Crowe's epic a deadly CinemaScore rating of C. Deadline Hollywood called that "very bad news for word of mouth and next weekend’s drop." For some perspective, studios get nervous when a film only scores a B. Critics overall gave "Noah" a 76% Fresh Rating over at Rotten Tomatoes but the Tomatoes' audience score is a withering 57%. Next weekend "Noah" will not only have to deal with deadly word-of-mouth but also the Captain America...

Catherine Stefani has an article up over at the SacBee talking about how she became the head of the Kaliforniastan chapter of Moms Demand Action… Its not much more than a shameless plug and link bait for the civilian disarmament cult, but I thought it was pretty interesting for a couple of reasons… one, I had never heard of Catherine Stefani before this and two, I thought it was incredibly interesting how she talks about how she became involved in MDA:

Leland Yee, a Democratic state senator and candidate for secretary of state in California, has been a longtime champion of gun control. This week he was arrested on numerous charges, including conspiracy to deal firearms without a license and conspiracy to illegally transport firearms. Yee, a prominent foe of assault weapons, allegedly took bribes to set up a meeting between an undercover agent and an international arms dealer to broker the sale of automatic weapons and shoulder-fired missiles. A lengthy FBI affidavit also describes Yee’s ties to a Chinese triad and his desire to help out Islamist militants.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. (Matthew 6:24 – ERV)   But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
 You’re gonna have to serve somebody
 Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
 But you’re gonna have to serve somebody --Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody” (1979)   Reading the transcript of Tuesday’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga cases, I...

The small farmers in Virginia rejoiced when Senate Bill 51 and House Bill 268, dubbed the “Boneta Bill,” passed both houses and the Democrat Governor Terry McAuliffe signed it. The bill gave farmers legal protection from overreaching and overzealous county bureaucrats who impose unreasonable requirements and unnecessary fees on small farmers. The bills, sponsored by state Senator Richard Stuart (R-Montross) and state Delegate Bobby Orrock (R-Thornburg), protect “agricultural operations from local regulation” and limit the government’s ability to require “special-use permits” for farm activities. Among many things, “Martha’s bill prevents counties from imposing a $100 fee to grow tomatoes.” Martha...

Saving The Planet: It used to be said that socialism was the opium of the liberal intelligentsia. But now the drug of choice for the elite is environmentalism. The dirty little secret of the modern green movement is that it's become a luxury good for the uber-rich who espouse policies — from carbon taxes to renewable energy standards to closing down coal plants — that impose high costs on poor people who can least afford to pay the green tab.

One of the strategically interesting things about Vladimir Putin is that he has been careful not to set himself against religious belief but attempted to align himself with it. He has taken domestic actions that he believes reflect the assumptions of religious conservatives. He has positioned himself so that he can make a claim on a part of the Russian soul, as they used to say, that his forbears could not: He is not anti-God, he is pro-God, pro the old church of the older, great Russia. ... At the top, religious references. Crimea is "where Prince Vladimir was baptized....