Free Republic

According to former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, the Democrats have a linguistics “Jedi” named George Lakoff (rhymes with back off), a Professor of Linguistics at U.C. Berkeley. He advises Democrats on how to win in the political arena by controlling the language. Lakoff's theory -- according to his Little Blue Book -- is that people use metaphors or narratives make decisions about politics. The way liberals frame issues in narratives undermines conservative’s positions in a subtle way that lets Democrats easily defend their disastrous policies.Here are ten examples: 10) ObamaCare – At one point, the president embraced the word...

NEW YORK (AP) - Mix blatant bigotry with poor spelling. Add a dash of ALL CAPS. Top it off with a violent threat. And there you have it: A recipe for the worst of online comments, scourge of the Internet. Blame anonymity, blame politicians, blame human nature. But a growing number of websites are reining in the Wild West of online commentary. Companies including Google and the Huffington Post are trying everything from deploying moderators to forcing people to use their real names in order to restore civil discourse. Some sites, such as Popular Science, are banning comments altogether.

They are among our most personal daily decisions: what to eat or drink. Maybe what to inhale. Now that the governmentºs banning trans fat, does that mean it’s revving up to take away our choice to consume all sorts of other unhealthy stuff? … In the tug-of-war between public health and personal freedom, the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to ban trans fats barely rates a ripple. Hardly anyone defends the icky-sounding artificial ingredient anymore, two decades after health activists began warning Americans that it was clogging their arteries and causing heart attacks. …

What Now? Developments, encouraging and otherwise by Michael Kelly  .....   HE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA HAS GONE MAD," announced a headline in The Times of London on January 15. This was at first glance worrisome, but at second less so, because the article turned out to be not a news report but an opinion column. It was the opinion, specifically, of John le Carré that "America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more...

Where’s Your Case? By Michael Patlan The mainstream press, led by the New York Times (the paper of distorted record), is in the throes of waging a campaign to prevent military action against Saddam Hussein. They have incorrectly labeled such action an “Attack on Iraq;” it is actually the liberation of innocent people from an evil dictator. The press is as giddy as a schoolgirl meeting a teen heartthrob over the fact that Republicans disagree on this issue. The pro-Saddam crowd has consistently raised a few points, which I will now address. “We don’t know how much this war will...