Free Republic

The Progressive believes in precisely two things: his own magnificence and the constructive power of brute force. In combination, they lead him naturally from the role of pestiferous busybody to brutal dictator. Where the productive man dreams of the things he might create if only left alone by his fellows, the Progressive dreams of the world he could create if only the lives and property of his fellows were at his disposal. The roots of his pathology lie in that oldest and most destructive of all human vices, the desire for the power to rule over other men. As...

Obama will not complete his 2nd term as President. First, for Obama’s repeated lies, coverup and abandonment of two heroic Navy Seals, leaving both to die on the Benghazi battlefield on 9/11/2012, while the liberal media openly carried his YouTube video water for eight months. During last week’s House hearings, the mainstream media was shamed and embarrassed before the entire world, exposed as being lazy, partisan and incurious. The Obama-fawning media was highlighted as being unwilling to honestly report to their fellow citizens. Secondly, the 60-day electronic DOJ surveillance blanket thrown over the Associated Press, monitoring 100 reporter’s work and...

If the closest confidante and advisor to an extremely consequential American president had written a fantasy novel about a heroic social agitator with a plan to bring about a "benevolent" progressive dictatorship by instigating a brutal civil war, might one imagine that an honest press would take an interest? In fact this has happened, and America's actual press has tried to dismiss the book as a meaningless "bad novel". In 1912, Edward Mandell House, Woodrow Wilson's most intimate and influential advisor, wrote Philip Dru: Administrator. (Read it online here.) House is credited with having orchestrated Wilson's presidential nomination, and was...

Culture’s shifting sands on moral standards by Gilbert T. Sewell Sixty years ago juvenile delinquency and what to do about it suddenly drew a round of national soul searching. We no longer even use the term. We think in terms of juvenile monsters. Yesteryear’s hoods and troublemakers seem quaint and innocent beside today’s appalling school murders, gang rapes and teenage mayhem... ...Put together violent, porn-saturated electronic entertainment and armed, shame-free, unparented young men. Crazy things happen... ...Who is delinquent? A sociopath? A truant, an unwed mother, a rapist of drunken and unconscious girls, a meth addict or a mass murderer?...

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience� of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

For those of you who didn't catch the tail end of Mark Levin's show Tuesday night, here's what he discussed in the last 5 minutes.(mp3) At the Constitutional Convention, July 17th, 1787, delegate Gunning Bedford of Delaware made the following proposal: Mr. BEDFORD moved that the 2d. member of Resolution 6. be so altered as to read "and moreover to legislate in all cases for the general interests of the Union, and also in those to which the States are separately incompetent," or in which the harmony of the U. States may be interrupted by the exercise of individual Legislation."...

Why has the American society changed so drastically in the past few decades? How did the feminist movement get started? How did Obama get elected? Why are there so many single parent families? Where is God?

With deep condescension, my professors informed me that we live in a post-religious world. Religion, I was lectured, was the opiate of the people. I wondered, but never had the courage to suggest, that perhaps Marxism was the opiate of the elites.

Progressivism in America has always been a thuggish ideology. It rests on the notion that laws require no evidence to support their implementation, that intentions are all that matter and that those who oppose "change" of the sort progressives like are morally deficient. Progressivism requires Americans to separate off certain groups in American life as evil -- the rich ("greedy!"), gun owners ("hooligans!"), traditionally religious people ("sexists!"), Constitutional government advocates ("bigots!"). It requires that certain Americans be cast as good -- racial and ethnic minorities, low income earners and women ("victimized!"), irreligious people ("rationalists!") and big government advocates ("experts!"). Progressivism...

The generous mortgage-interest tax deduction that homeowners have long enjoyed could be diminished or eliminated as part of efforts to reduce the federal deficit, disproportionately hurting Massachusetts and other regions where real estate is especially costly. Proposals to change the deduction include limiting it to the 28 percent tax bracket and lower; converting the deduction to a less generous tax credit; reducing the maximum allowed mortgage balance from $1.1 million to $500,000; and eliminating the benefit for second homes and equity loans, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., nonpartisan think tank.

......[George] Washington spoke truly: a democratic form of government, republican or otherwise, is only as virtuous as the citizens who form it. Institutions of liberty, equality, and mutual respect cannot be sustained in, let alone re-imposed upon, a society that has generally forsaken every single virtue named in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and has in turn filled the soul's moral void with hatred, envy, gluttony, sloth, covetousness, lust, and collectivism's unique license to pillage, namely its presupposition that individual men -- that is, other men -- do not really exist. The entire moral and intellectual structure of the West has rotted...

With the political winds now blowing favorably for liberals, or “progressives” as they have more recently labeled themselves, another label (conservative) seems to have gained a negative connotation among some. Actually, there’s really nothing negative about conservatism, at least compared to all other alternatives. First, we should think about what conservatism actually is. The first definition in Webster’s Online Dictionary, by Wordnet, defines conservatism as “A political or theological orientation advocating the preservation of the best in society and opposing radical changes.” The second definition, by Webster, defines the term as “The disposition and tendency to preserve what is established;...

During my transcription process of the book Fabian Freeway, I would sometimes go through the footnotes and see what I could verify, when one thing in particular caught my eye. (Chapter 17) The fact that an old-line southern Democrat had been induced to sponsor the basic legislation so ardently desired by all spokesmen of gradual Socialism was an early and notable example of success for the Fabian technique known as permeation. This concept is actually used extensively throughout the book, but for whatever reason, it caught my eye in the current context. The Fabians turned "Permeation" into a policy because...

An academic lecture by Professsor Thomas West from Hillsdale College. An excellent lecture from their Consitution 201 series plus links to other Hillsdale College lectures. An educational series that I wish would be viewed in our private high schools. Excellent material for home schoolers. Pass it on.

President Obama’s first-term Supreme Court appointments make it seem unlikely to conservatives that the president will nominate judges over the next four years known for their judicial restraint. In fact, for progressives, judicial restraint takes on an entirely different description. At least, that’s the impression given by Ian Millhiser at a recent Center for American Progress event, in which he said that the “frivolous” lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, convinced him against judicial activism. “And one thing I will say that that taught me is that judicial restraint is really important and that I think...

The Progressives won on Tuesday. I don't mean the people who voted Democrat who call themselves "progressive." Though they won, too. I mean the Progressives who've been waging a century-long effort to transform our American-style government into a European-style state. The words "government" and "state" are often used interchangeably, but they are really different things. According to the founders' vision, the people are sovereign and the government belongs to us. Under the European notion of the state, the people are creatures of the state, significant only as parts of the whole. This European version of the state can be nice....

<> Though many of the state margins were narrow President Obama ran the table winning every swing or battleground state with the possible exception of Florida where votes are still being counted as of 5:30 this morning. President Obama also won the popular vote by 2 million votes. The President won 303 electoral votes to 206 for Romney. We knew about 11 pm that the President had won when Ohio was called for him. Democrats also held the Senate. Elizabeth Warren won with a good margin in Massachusetts. Claire McKaskill won in Missouri beating Akin-he of the legitimate rape...

In Madison, people dining at food carts don't have to eat their veggies, but in the future, they could get the choice. The city's Vending Oversight Committee, as part of its annual review of food carts, on Wednesday will discuss whether carts must offer vegetarian menu items.

.... Modern American liberalism has always had a streak of political messianism, a Great Man view of the presidency, and impatience with a government slowed by the checks and balances created by the Founders. The history of modern liberalism begins with Woodrow Wilson, the father of the movement to create a “living Constitution” in place of the written one. He sought to end what he called “blind worship” of the Constitution, taking pride in the fact that: We are the first Americans to hear our own countrymen ask whether the Constitution is still adapted to serve the purposes for which...

There was a time when the far left wing of the Democratic Party in San Francisco stood for something. Sure, they could be shrill, exasperating and self-righteous, but they took a stand. [snip] Because right now it looks as if their only commitment is to whatever is politically expedient. Ross Mirkarimi and District Five supervisor candidate Julian Davis have some serious defects. Each has been accused of mistreating women. But, hey, progressives say, they're our bad guys.

Progressive opinions on Barack Obama’s first term are as conflicted as his record. These differences are a sign of a diverse and spirited left, and we welcome continued debate in our pages about the president’s record and policies. But that discussion should not obscure what is at stake in this election. A victory for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in November would validate the reactionary extremists who have captured the Republican Party. It would represent the triumph of social Darwinism, the religious right, corporate power and the big money donors who thrive in a new Gilded Age of inequality. It...

..................Each party is pulled into this debate by what it sees as the deeply misguided views of the other. Democrats listen to Republicans and hear a simpleminded and selfish radical individualism​—​or, as President Obama has put it, “nothing but thinly veiled Social Darwinism.” They hear people who think that being successful and rich means you’re smarter than everyone else or work harder than everyone else, and who therefore have no regard for those in our society who are in no position to start a business or get a loan. They hear people who have benefited from the privileges of being...

HERE IS AN EYE-OPENING CHANGE --- Interesting website change we see at the NEW U.S. JUSTICE DEPT. http://www.justice.gov/ Little by little, the subtle changes come until one day we will wake up and be in the United Socialist States of America. The election is just around the corner, BECOME engaged as if our nation depended on it... because it does!!!!! Department of Justice ditches red, white, and blue stars and stripes. It seems the U.S. Department of Justice has changed its web site. Gone are the colorful red, white, and blue U.S. Flag decorations on the page! Replaced by...

Full title: Ground Reports from the “Depression that Shall Not Be Named” — things we notice that the corrupt media won’t report that show this is indeed a Depression On my desk, just under the computer monitor, I have a little box full of slips of scrap paper. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid because the nuns who taught me in Catholic School refused to ever waste paper. Anything that comes into my home that’s blank on one side and has outlived its usefulness is drawn and quartered and spends some time as scrap paper in that...

Try to define progressivism . In fact, ask progressives to try to define progressivism . All we really know is that they’re, well, progressing. They and their ideas and their politics are always changing, evolving. This means that what they believe and hold fast and dear today may not be what they believe and hold fast and dear tomorrow, or decades or a century from now. For instance, when progressive heroine Margaret Sanger started her American Birth Control League a century ago, she was seeking birth control for, among other purposes, what she and fellow progressives termed “race improvement.” She...

The transformation of Chick Fil A from a fast food place that most liberals had never even heard of into the "Enemy of the People" is a reminder of the speed at which progressivism travels forward and backward in time. A few months ago the CEO of Chick Fil A would have done nothing worse than echo a consensus so mainstream that it was adopted as a campaign position by the leftiest Democrat to sit in the White House. A few months later that same position is so outrageous that it leads to mass boycotts, threats of violence and mayors...

...The entire Democratic Party, from the top down, now looks like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. The hatred of America is open. The desire to undo American constitutionalism is explicit. And this exposure will only accelerate in the coming months and years, as the left realizes ever more acutely that its days as an accepted political faction are numbered, and it is forced to take increasingly drastic and sudden measures to achieve its brutal aims before the clock runs out....It has become patently clear that the present Republican Party establishment is not up for this fight. Constitutional conservatives must do...

It's long been known that Theodore Roosevelt was influenced by the book "The Promise of American Life", as well as Croly's other writings as he himself makes clear in the essay "Two Noteworthy Books on Democracy. What is questioned is to what degree, how it happened, and if the slogan "New Nationalism" itself is a direct lift. On page 169 is where Croly uses the phrase. In the New York Independent, the following is written: (Page 957, this was originally published in 1912) The New Democracy resembles in some points Croly's "Promise of American Life," from which Colonel Roosevelt got...

HYDE PARK, N. Y., May 31 (U.R) - President Roosevelt today began implementing his proclamation of an unlimited national emergency today by naming Secretary of Interior Harold. L. Ickes virtual dictator of the $10,000,000,000 American oil industry. Designating Ickes as petroleum coordinator for national defense, Mr. Roosevelt ordered him to formulate a program to insure "that the supply of petroleum and its products will be accommodated to the needs of the nation and the national defense program." The move followed Mr. Roosvelt's warnbig in a letter to Speak­er Sam Rayborn that oil rationing in the east is a "distinct possilbility"...

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said Wednesday she takes full responsibility for incorrectly claiming for eight months that 90 percent of the city's homicides and shootings took place on 100 blocks.Quan is continuing to stand by her crime plan. The city's news release said that although the statistic was incorrect, "the premise of the public safety strategy is sound and has merit."

French President François Hollande's popularity has fallen by two percentage points to 59 percent, a poll published on the Journal du Dimanche's website showed on Saturday. The survey by pollster Ipsos was conducted between June 14 and June 22, a few days before and after the second round on June 17 of France's parliamentary election, which gave a large victory to Hollande's Socialist Party. Hollande's prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault had an approval rating of 65 percent, unchanged on the previous. …

Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde told The Hill that Democratic Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin is a communist. "I fundamentally disagree with Tammy on almost everything," Hovde told the Hill, a congressional newspaper, "She has a more liberal voting record than almost anybody in Congress. Her philosophy has its roots in Marxism, communism, socialism, extreme liberalism — she calls it progressivism — versus mine, which is rooted in free-market conservatism." Baldwin's campaign took sharp issue with Hovde. Spokesman John Kraus told the Hill that Baldwin has worked with Republicans to protect manufacturing in tghe United States against unfair trade practices by...

Do you believe "progressive" is code language for "communist"? A lot of people here do. "Yes, I agree with that question". Some don't. "No, a progressive is not a communist". So then what say you about Mitt Romney, who has openly stated the very thing.(and his record shows the truth of his claim)

Trent Lott famously said "We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples," Lott said in an interview. "As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them." - and I know what I think. I want to know what you think. Has she(Coulter) surrendered to the progressives within the republican establishment?

You gotta click the link to see the video. If anybody can get at the direct link, please post it.

DID YOU KNOW SOUTH AFRICA HAS A CONSTITUTION THAT'S FAR SUPERIOR TO OUR OWN? THAT'S WHAT ONE U.S. SUPREME COURT JUSTICE, AS WELL AS SHADOWY ACTIVITIST GROUPS WORKING BEHIND THE SCENES TO EFFECT CHANGE, BELIEVE. “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the Constitution of South Africa … a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights …” -Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jan. 30, 2012. That stunning disavowal—by an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court—of the Constitution she has sworn...

There are times when you glance at the leftist Daily Kos blog and wonder if they're being sabotaged from the inside. Case in point: a blog titled "The fetus is a parasite." "Sasharusha" blogs "back to the whole fetus= parasite thing. That is how I see them. I don't see them as cute and cuddly. I see them as terrifying and scary. I see pregnancy the same way. Here are some examples on how pregnancy is a parasitic relationship: The Z/E/F sucks the nutrients from the mother. The "relationship" only benefits the fetus. The mother's organs and body parts become...

In The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb: Volume 3,(Introduction) the author makes the following observation about the Webbs' and Shaw's view of Russia: Shaw, visiting Russia before them, came to the same conclusion and reported that Lenin had established a Fabian state. This was being written as far back as 1932; in "Bernard Shaw, playboy and prophet":(Page 250) Shaw even claims the Russian Soviet Republic, founded on uncompromising Marxism but soon forced by hard facts to recognize Webb's "inevitability of gradualness," as a Fabian State. This is what I find so infuriating about copyright laws(which I do respect and...

Brown: Is Progressivism the new Communism? In politics, truth-telling can get you into trouble, even if you stumble upon it by accident. Just ask Rep. Allen West (R-FL). West is feeling the heat for a pregnant pause he took during a town hall meeting after he was asked "What percentage of the American legislature do you think are card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists?" "It's a good question," West responded, "I believe there's [sic] about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. (Long pause) "They don't actually hide. It's called the Congressional Progressive...

The ability to appreciate the merits of the other side of a question, John Stuart Mill asserted in his 1859 classic, “On Liberty,” is a hallmark of the liberal spirit. By this measure, Peter Beinart’s new book, “The Crisis of Zionism,” which has become a cause célèbre among progressives, marks another step in the parting of ways between progressives and that old-fashioned and indispensable liberalism that recognized that multiple perspectives were vital resources to a free society. Fittingly, the book was released late last month, during oral arguments before the Supreme Court over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act...

If one wanted to destroy America, all one would need to do is break the country into parts and chisel away at each segment, bit by bit. Tuesday‘s episode of The Glenn Beck Program laid out America’s core components and described how each one is being undermined and thus, destroyed. But who is doing the destroying? Glenn contends that those seeking to dismantle the American way are “no longer progressives.” Instead, the left has successfully morphed into what it had always intended to be: Full-fledged Communists. “Progressives can say mission accomplished. Now it’s phase two.”Invoking Stuart Chase’s “The Road We...

Not long ago I made an entry titled "Woodrow Wilson absolutely hated the principles of the Founding Fathers", well, I am no fan of any progressive. They are all dangerous to me. So Wilson attacks the founding and I'm going to call it as it is. The same is said for Roosevelt. Progressivism is America's cancer and it's not just in one party. I came across an article on The Heritage Foundation titled "Progressivism: Still Dangerous After All These Years, which is primarily about Roosevelt. In it, they highlight one of the things that came out of Roosevelt's pie hole:(Direct...

At the Occupy Strategy Session at New York University, all the usual suspects are once again targeting capitalism. This isn't surprising, anybody who digs into the roots of all this 'Occupy' stuff will quickly see that it's all based on progressivism and central planning - with a hint of socialism, a hint of communism, and they have even teamed up with Islamists. But this business about the incompatibility of capitalism and democracy. What makes that true? In 1887, Woodrow Wilson wrote an essay titled "Socialism and Democracy", and in my original entry I wrote an observation about mobs. We've all...

Royal Meeker, who was an advisor and long time ally(details, see chapter 4) to Woodrow Wilson, wrote the following: (page 544) In M. Colson's view the poor are poor through their own laziness, inability or thriftlessness; the rich are rich because of their own or their ancestors' virtues. The laws of property and of inheritance are almost above criticism. Any attempt to ameliorate the condition of those living at or below the minimum of subsistence must result in such an increase of the poorer classes that the result will inevitably be a larger number of miserable wretches living at or...

As has been reported by Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, there's an alliance of sorts between Mitt Romney (aka---Mitt Trotsky) and Ron Paul (aka---RuPaul, Jew hater Ron Paul, Dr. Demento, Crazy Uncle Ron, Iran Paul, and Dr. Newsletter). In other words, Mittiots like Ann Coulter and Matt Drudge are now marching under RuPaul's Swastika, while Paultards like Screwy Lewy Rockwell are now marching under Trotsky's Hammer and Sickle. (Poland is very, very nervous right now.) In the past 20 debates, RuPaul and Mitt Trotsky have never had one cross word for each other, while both attacked every Conservative that dared...

MADISON, Wis. (AP) -- Longtime Democratic Secretary of State Doug La Follette plans to file paperwork on Thursday that would allow him to run for governor if a recall election is ordered against Republican Gov. Scott Walker. La Follette said Wednesday he still hasn't decided whether he will actually get into the race. But he says he wants to create a campaign committee so he can better gauge interest in him running and better determine if he would be a strong candidate. Former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk and state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout have announced they are running. La Follette...

“We have to look at the root cause of why the economy is struggling as much as it is,” Santorum said. “Government intervention. Government regulation. Government taxation. Government is crushing and destroying the American spirit and the American free enterprise system.” Santorum said that government spending was impinging on personal freedoms and ultimately chipping away at what made the country great. “When the government gets as big as it’s gotten and starts to take over more of your life, then you get smaller as the individual, you get weaker, you lose control over your lives. You lose the rights that...

At the Maldives' National Museum, smashed Buddhist statues are testament to the rise of Islamic extremism and Taliban-style intolerance in a country famous as a laid-back holiday destination. On Tuesday, as protesters backed by mutinous police toppled president Mohamed Nasheed, a handful of men stormed the Chinese-built museum and destroyed its display of priceless artefacts from the nation's pre-Islamic era. "They have effectively erased all evidence of our Buddhist past," a senior museum official told AFP at the now shuttered building in the capital Male, asking not to be named out of fear for his own safety. "We lost all...

[This post begins a series on how the United States can move beyond our current political, economic and social impasse to create a new kind of society. The series continues Via Meadia's examination of the demise of the blue social model and its effects on American politics and culture.]The frustration and bitterness that fills American politics these days reflects the failure of our current social, political and economic institutions and practices to deliver the results that Americans want and expect. It’s comparable to the frustration and fear that swept through the country in the late 19th and early 20th century...

For the better part of a decade, companies like Google and IAC/InterActiveCorp have been pushing for the federal government to regulate the Internet in the name of net neutrality, and I’ve been fighting them every step of the way. We beat them in Congress. We beat them in the courts. We beat them in public opinion. But we lost to them on a 3-2 party line vote at the Federal Communications Commission, led by long-time IAC/InterActiveCorp general counsel turned FCC chairman Julius Genachowski. The FCC’s unlawful order gives that commission the self-appointed power to regulate how the broadband networks that...