Free Republic

Checking out Rembrandts and checking in with European allies, President Obama seems blind to the rubble around him. The U.S. leadership vacuum has left NATO as ravaged as a post-World War II battlefield. In May 1945, a sizable force of Allied bombers flew photographers over European cities to document the destruction of what was then, and remains, the worst war in history. Their images of urban craters and flattened buildings are permanent reminders of the evils of totalitarianism. One can't help wondering, if Barack Obama had been on board, whether he would have looked down and remarked on the day's...

....Diving into the thorny issue of climate change, Hillary Clinton said young people understand the significant threat of global warming and that she hoped there would be a mass movement that demands political change. She said the generation of college students and young people are much more committed to doing something to address climate change and it wasn't "just some ancillary issue" but will determine the quality of life for countries around the globe.

Appointments: America is a country of 320 million people, most of them holding to traditional values. Yet President Obama keeps mining the fringes for his hires. Does he have any friends who aren't crackpots? Seriously. The president keeps saying he champions the middle class and its values. But his choices of people to help him run the country are the most extreme in U.S. history, and his second-term nominations are more radical than the first.

**SNIP** Reed's message to liberals--especially those who invest their hopes in the Democratic Party--is stark. Since the 1980s, he writes, liberals, activists and social movement organizations (the combination of which Reed labels "the left") have been on the defensive. Instead of determining how to advance a broadly popular and egalitarian vision, this left has narrowed its "social vision" and its time horizon, keying actions to the next election cycle. "Each election now becomes a moment of life-or-death urgency that precludes dissent or even reflection," Reed writes. "For liberals, there is only one option in an election year, and that is...

Most Americans who are dissatisfied with President Barack Obama's leadership are thinking about the poor economy and the misbegotten health care law. That disillusionment is justified -- if not tardy. But the foreign policy failures of this administration are likely to be far more consequential, lasting and possibly catastrophic. What we are seeing is the collapse of American influence in the world. Permitting people like Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Hagel and John Kerry to deal with the brutal realities of world politics is like putting Richard Simmons into the ring with Muhammad Ali.

Unite Here, which represents more than 300,000 workers in the hotel, food service, laundry, warehouse and gaming industries, was the nation’s very first labor union to back Barack Obama’s quest for the White House. It also was one of the foremost supporters of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the signature achievement — if it can be described as such — of Mr. Obama’s presidency. So a new report by Unite Here, “The Irony of Obamacare: Making Inequality Worse,” cannot be dismissed by the White House, by Democrats on Capitol Hill, or by the left-leaning punditocracy, as a politically...

A local official in Virginia has subpoenaed the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the SPLC Task Force on Hate in the Public Sphere for the criteria it uses to designate other organizations as “hate groups.” The subpoenas were filed February 28th in Loudoun County Circuit Court. They request "all written criteria, guidelines, bylaws or rules used by Southern Poverty Law Center to designate organizations or groups as 'hate groups' from the inception of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the present date."

As we have seen for the last six to seven years, the liberal media have wholly bought in to being propagandists for the Obama administration. Not only have they given glowing support of Obama whenever they can, they conveniently leave out, when they can get away with it, any news items that would put Obama in a negative light or contradict the false image of him that the media has helped create. President Obama is the first president ever put in power by the media. In 2008, while many of us were warning of the consequences of an Obama presidency,...

Don’t know whether Malia and Sasha Obama are learning at their private school, but through their parents, are they learning that life is one never-ending holiday with the bill footed by the public purse? In today’s high tech society, the phone keeps the business of the day running for many. For Barack Obama, it’s key to his Artful Dodger, never-take-accountability-for-anything, I-didn’t-know until I saw-it-on-the-news-like-you-did, style. Don’t let he tragedies of life on earth interfere with the never-ending lavish holidays of America’s so-called ‘First Family’. Daddy O, who’s got a pen and a phone will undoubtedly pass along appropriate words of...

ThinkProgress writer Igor Volsky seems genuinely excited that fewer than 15 out of 92 federal anti-poverty programs are somewhat effective. The results came out of a report commissioned by Representative Paul Ryan to evaluate the effectiveness of government programs put in place to combat the problem. The War on Poverty, 50 Years Later evaluates the at least 92 federal programs the government has created and finds that, “Despite trillions of dollars in spending, poverty is widespread.”

Progressive movement’s century of steady destruction of the U.S. dollar, income taxation, massive liberal intrusion into the lives of all Americans from birth to death

This is a link to a posting that appeared on my Facebook Page this morning from a Republican Affiliated / Libertarian affiliated group that was organized to support the Gateway Pacific Coal terminal. I don't know how to post a picture, but it is the GIF on the page that is of interest. It is a picture of the socialist fist over a housing development. The group, Save Whatcom uses variations of a green fist, rather than the red fist, but it is still a fist. http://whatcomteaparty.org/attention-local-land-owners-and-well-owners-part-two/

<p>People line up to buy food at a supermarket in San Cristobal, about 410 miles (660 km) southwest of Caracas, Feb. 27, 2014. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Pope Francis called Wednesday for an end to violence in Venezuela that has killed at least 13 people and urged politicians to take the lead in calming the nation's worst unrest in a decade.</p>

This feels like old times. Across the pond at the Telegraph, Tim Stanley and Daniel Hannan are having a friendly disagreement on the question of whether the Nazis were in fact socialists. I don’t usually wade into these arguments anymore, but I’ve been writing a lot on related themes over the last few weeks and I couldn’t resist. Not surprisingly, I come down on Hannan’s side. I could write a whole book about why I agree with Dan, except I already did. So I’ll be more succinct. Fair warning, though, I wrote this on a plane trip back from...

Last week the First Lady in an attempt to be humorous made the statement that America’s young people are “knuckleheads” showing how the administration views millennials. Young people are fully capable of making their own decisions for their own lives despite what the First Lady thinks. Being young is all about trial and error, lessons and mistakes, taking away a young person’s ability to decide what’s best for themselves doesn’t help them—it hinders them from becoming an independent adult in today’s world.

I don’t recall when I first wrote about Obama telling lies, but it surely must have been early in his first term, if not even earlier in the 2008 campaign. So much of the information about his life was subject to question that it raised my concern. The way ObamaCare was reamed through a Congress that hadn’t even read the bill put me on full alert. No Republican voted for it.

A vast country estate, marble-lined mansions, a private golf course and zoo: the unimaginable luxury of the private residence of departed Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych flung open for all to see. As parliament voted to oust Yanukovych Saturday and he fled to a pro-Russian bastion in east Ukraine after months of bloody protest again his rule, thousands of Ukrainians wondered awestruck around the breathtaking luxury of his abandoned property some 110 miles from Kiev after it was taken by demonstrators. "I am in shock," said retired military servicewoman Natalia Rudented, as she looked out over the manicured lawns studded with...

Europe’s socialists are set to top the polls in May’s European elections, according to the first pan-EU election forecast. The projections, released by Pollwatch Europe on Tuesday (19 February), give the parliament’s center-left group 221 out of 751 seats on 29 percent of the vote, up from the 194 seats it currently holds. For their part, the center-right EPP would drop to 202 seats from the 274 it currently holds on 27 percent of the vote across the bloc. If correct, it would be the first victory for the Socialists since 1994. …

With Obamacare and Common Core education, Americans are not the only ones worried about a socialist upsurge. Prince Bertrand of Orleans-Braganza, whose great-grandmother abolished slavery in Brazil, is also concerned. The Imperial Prince of Brazil, a loyal Catholic, sent a respectful yet eye-opening 12-page letter to Pope Francis on February 8, after a team of radical socialist agitators from Brazil were invited by the Vatican for a seminar. Here is the complete document: Quo vadis, Domine? Reverent and Filial Message to His Holiness Pope Francis from Prince Bertrand of Orleans-Braganza The well-documented letter explains what the Marxist activists welcomed by...

Lately I see a lot of Marxist propaganda in our country, particularly in the MSM and in education. I know all the slogans because I lived the lies of the communist propaganda for 20 years. I will start with equal pay, social justice, and equality across the board by government fiat. The commie social justice was equality of misery, hunger, poor, cold, and cramped living conditions, scarcity of food, basic needs, electricity, water, and everything else spoiled brats in America take for granted that is produced by a free market model. The Sochi hotel accommodations are a case in point....