Free Republic

In Louisville, Kentucky today, Freedomworks hosted #FreePAC, a gathering of right and center right grassroots activists. The keynote speaker was Glenn Beck, who had strong words for Mitch McConnell and other republican party leaders. [video at link] "I told you at the very beginning what this administration tries to do you and what the progressives on the right, let me tell you something, Mitch McConnell is as big of a danger to this country as Barack Obama is. The progressive disease is in both parties. Big government is a philosophy in both parties, period. It is antithetical to the American...

Fox News Channel anchor Shepard Smith spoke with Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace on Friday about the ongoing investigation into the shooting at Ft. Hood when he expressed his revulsion over the debate over access to guns that follows a mass shooting. He said it was “nauseating” how both sides of the gun issue come out “screaming” largely before the victims have even been buried. “If somebody wanted to bring a gun up here, you could bring a gun up here,” Smith observed. “You can’t stop every criminal in advance.”

Shannon Watts, the public relations executive that founded and runs Moms Demand Action as a campaign of Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG), has long been known as a fact-deprived gun prohibitionist. Sadly, the tragic shootings at Fort Hood this week, committed by a soldier angry that he was told to come back the next day for paperwork to go on leave, shows that she is viciously deceptive hater of military veterans as well.

But now they’re baaaack. According to organizer David Swanson, “Awareness has grown, education has spread, and ideas have sunk in. People now know that we can’t lift up the poor without pulling down the plutocrats. It’s understood that we can have democracy or billionaires, not both. The notion of shifting priorities is even making headway; behind the screaming of ‘no cuts!’ and ‘less spending!’ there’s a steady, rising voice – ebbing and flowing like the ocean – insisting that we can move the money from the military and the oil corporations and the bankers to green energy and schools and...

One of the best ways to survive the grotesque and empty power pageantry of Washington's annual State of the Union extravaganza is by visiting the University of California, Santa Barbara's online archive of past addresses and looking up the speeches that corresponded to where the current POTUS sits in his term. Barack Obama took the podium during a midterm election year in his second term, corresponding to the addresses of George W. Bush in 2006, Bill Clinton in 1998 all the way back to George Washington in 1794.

WASHINGTON (AP) — New Army regulations meant to help standardize and professionalize soldiers' appearance are now coming under criticism by some black military women, who say changes in the hair requirement are racially biased. The Army earlier this week issued new appearance standards, which included bans on most twists, dreadlocks and large cornrows, all styles used predominantly by African-American women with natural hairstyles. More than 11,000 people have signed a White House petition asking President Barack Obama, the commander in chief, to have the military review the regulations to allow for "neat and maintained natural hairstyles." Some black military women,...

Folks like Moms Demand Action, a campaign run and funded by Michael Bloomberg, keep trying to make the association between cigarettes and guns. It’s a smart move, since the “progressive” movement was very successful in branding those who argued in favor of cigarettes as being in the pocket of “big tobacco” and kept ramming through more restrictions on when and where people can enjoy their favorite tobacco products. In their minds, guns are no different — a scourge on the country with no benefit whatsoever. They even say as much in the copy accompanying this Facebook post . . .

Thomas Jefferson was a smart dude. And in one of his letters to John Adams, dated June 27, 1813, Jefferson made an observation about the nature of politics that science is only now, two centuries later, beginning to confirm. "The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time," wrote Jefferson. "The terms of Whig and Tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history," he later added. "They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals." [...] It all adds up, according to Hibbing, to what he calls a "negativity...

The stakes are higher than most conservatives realize. When the fraud of man-made global warming finally dies, folks will start thinking: What else were we lied to about? How could the high priests of modern knowledge have confidently insisted something that was never remotely plausible? A key element of progressivism is having wise philosopher-kings who make benevolent decisions for the masses. It is a core element of conservatism that you can make decisions for yourself. But for progressives, it is essential to convince the public that the designated authorities know better than you do, including what to eat, how to...

No doubt, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg passionately believes in gun control. To his credit, he puts his own money — tens of millions of dollars, and possibly much more — into pushing the issue politically. But Bloomberg's push hasn't been just political advertising, lobbying and media appearances. He also funds studies that have gone overboard in backing up his anti-gun beliefs. To put it plainly, they have not only exaggerated their conclusions but have fabricated numbers. And these incorrect numbers have then been used to push for more regulations.

The newly elected CEO and co-founder of Mozilla - the maker of the Firefox web browser - was forced into resignation today after activists pressured the company over his donation to a political campaign that opposed same-sex marriage. Brendan Eich was forced into resigning from the company he co-founded just one month into his new role as CEO. In 2008 Eich donated $1000 to the campaign for California Proposition 8 and was widely chastised by the left press and social media. After his recent appointment as CEO his vilification was reawakened and he came under pressure from employees, press, social...

On Thursday, Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich resigned thanks to pressure by both the company infrastructure and the left over a $1,000 donation he made to Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative that would have enshrined traditional marriage as the standard for state marriage in California.

At the University of North Carolina Wilmington, Dr. Mike Adams teaches crime — but he never dreamed he’d be the victim of one. Unfortunately for the assistant professor, that all changed when his ideology did. When he was hired as a criminology expert 21 years ago, Adams was an avowed and outspoken atheist — a worldview that was shaken to the core when Mike went to visit a prisoner on death row in 2000. The convict, a mentally handicapped man, had read the entire Bible — something Adams had never done. He resolved then and there to change that —...

The White Privilege Conference claims everyone is racist, even those involved in helping the black community even if they are not African American themselves. But now a taxpayer-funded event is attempting to teach people that white people can never help but be racist and claims they should be treated like alcoholics. In a related report by The Inquisitr, Bill O’Reilly believes President Obama believes in the white privilege concept, which was denounced by students when a Wisconsin school began teaching it: “They’re dividing the students. They’re saying to non-whites, ‘You have been oppressed and you’re still being oppressed. This is...

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..