Free Republic

Folks, this according to the Thomas More Law Center: ANN ARBOR, MI – Tomorrow, December 16, 2009, at 10 AM PST, a panel of eleven judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sitting in San Francisco will hear oral arguments concerning the constitutionality of San Francisco Board of Supervisor’s virulent resolution attacking the Catholic Church for its teachings against homosexual adoptions. The en banc panel will review the earlier opinion of a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit that upheld the resolution. Thomas More Law Center attorney Robert Muise will argue the case on behalf of the plaintiffs in...

The phrase “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” sounds innocent enough. Who could be against such an agreement? But in fact it appears to be a pretext for a massive invasion of privacy, motivated in part by the entertainment industry seeking to maintain copyrights. But once unleashed, such an assault on freedom will know no bounds. What if Big Brother finds on your laptop that you think ID supports certain traditional moral views, and what if any articulation of such views comes to be regarded as a hate crime? (Click excerpt link for MUST SEE VIDEO!)

The first year of the Obama administration is almost in the books, and pundits across the political spectrum are assessing its accomplishments. Any assessment must be placed in context of the overall political and class balance of forces, in Congress and within the multi-class, socially diverse coalition that carried Obama to the White House. The success, breadth and extent of President Obama’s new policy direction depend in particular on the strength and unity of the people’s forces and their ability to gain allies and mobilize at the grassroots and influence Congress. The Obama administration must work with and unite a...

The lawyer who handled the years-long battle by Pastor Stephen Boissoin over "hate speech" charges for a letter he wrote to the editor of a local newspaper that cited the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality is forecasting a nationwide "witch hunt" in the U.S. prompted by an expanded "hate crimes" law signed by President Obama. Gerald Chipeur,  who supervises law offices across Canada, worked from his Calgary headquarters on the defense of Boissoin, who was accused by a university professor of instigating hate against homosexuals with his letter to the editor. As WND reported, an appellate court in Canada recently reversed...

Washington – The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) civil rights organization, today responded to the “Manhattan Declaration” produced and released by 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders indicating that they will not cooperate with laws that conflict with their beliefs, including those recognizing same-sex couples. The document also references the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) as a threat to religious liberty. Yet ENDA – which prohibits workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity – broadly exempts religious organizations. The declaration also argues that religious groups that receive public funds...

Alongside the internationally better known National-Democratic Party of Germany or “NPD,” the German People’s Union (DVU) is one of the two main German political parties of the so-called “extreme Right.” As discussed in my earlier PJM report here, in German usage this expression is, in effect, just a euphemism for neo-Nazi currents and organizations. Both the NPD and the DVU are officially classified as “right-wing extremist” organizations by Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the so-called Office for the Protection of the Constitution or “Verfassungsschutz.” A statement published by the DVU on Wednesday, however, makes clear just how misleading it is to...

President Barack Obama cannot possibly intend to resemble an aspiring dictator. Somehow, he keeps doing so. Now he's going ahead with plans to address America's schoolchildren, having dropped the part about encouraging those children to then "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president." This administration's run is rapidly transforming into an episode of "The Twilight Zone." How could Obama be so foolish? He and his advisers must be oblivious to the connections between the American far left and fascism. They must be immune to the revulsion that so many ordinary citizens feel when they...

''Watch what we do, not what we say'' -- Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell to reporters as Nixon Administration began. "Had enough?" -- Republican slogan in the 1946 congressional elections Had enough? Van Jones was not a vetting problem, he was a "getting caught red-handed" problem. As discussed on Friday in this space, Jones would never, ever have been allowed in the door of the White House with his nutty record -- much less be hired to work there -- unless people at the top thought of him in, an ideological sense, as one of their own. This episode has...

I hope you didn't think that everything about the healthcare bill was covered in Shock: Inside the Healthcare Bill. If you did, you were wrong. That just covered the first 500 pages. There's another 500 pages. Peter Fleckstien (aka Fleckman) has also read the second 500 pages. As I write this, there are some 159 comments at the original Shock: Inside the Healthcare Bill. Some comments are left by people truly in shock by what the Obama Administration is trying to pull off. Others charge that his interpretations of the bill are incorrect and hint that he is purposely being...

Your right to eat healthy food and use supplements of your choice is rapidly vanishing, but every effort has been made to keep you in the dark about the coming nutricide. Codex Alimentarius is scheduled for full global implementation on December 31, 2009, and not a word has been spoken in main stream media about this threat to humanity. Yet, according to the projections based on figures from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a minimum of 3 billion people will die from the Codex mandated vitamin and mineral guideline alone. Former Nazi is...

As the Most Powerful Community Organizer in the world pushes through his vision for your future healthcare, his minions are hard at work. Myriad press outlets are blaming fat folks for the rise in healthcare costs. In Obamaland, fat is the new smoking! How and what you eat is the next evil behavior to be controlled by law .

DC forum member El Goodo has done some excellent detective work on Obama’s so-called economic czars, wading through dirty pools that other so-called muckrakers refuse to tread. The first person he’s looked into is “green jobs� czar Van Jones. In typical Wikipedia fashion, the checkered past and political extremism of a politically liberal public figure is almost completely discarded and that which is left is played down. As noted by El Goodo, Jones is a former communist who was radicalized by the 1992 Los Angeles riots and has continued to associate himself with groups on the far left, including the...

14-year jail for SMS joke on Pakistani president IANS 19 July 2009, 08:52pm IST ISLAMABAD: It would seem that in Pakistan, there is nothing you need to watch out for more than making a joke about President Asif Ali Zardari by SMS (Short Messaging Service). If you mistakenly, or just for fun, share with a friend one of the hundreds of derisory jokes about the leader floating around electronically, you could get a 14-year prison sentence. Pakistan's interior minister Rehman Malik announced last week that the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has been tasked to trace SMS (or text messages) and...

The furore around the Chinese government’s Green Dam software has raised the issue of the way modern technology is used to monitor our daily lives. Here, we list seven of the technologies that can be used to keep track of your movements. CCTV Closed-circuit television cameras were first used in Germany in 1942 to remotely monitor the launch of V2 rockets. Since then, CCTVs have become one of the most contentious pieces of technology in public use. The government and law enforcement agencies claim the use of video monitoring technology can help reduce crime and improve public safety; critics argue...

On a one-man and multi-Czar mission to turn the USA into--at least--a third world country, Obama is in the process of taking over all major US industries--thus far, he’s commandeered the auto industry and banking. He is now going after the creme de la creme--healthcare and the attendant Insurance companies. ObamaControl of this industry will give him ultimate power over all of us. During a recent speech to the American Medical Association (AMA), he said: ‚"What accounts for the bulk of our costs is the nature of the healthcare delivery system.” Translation: ‚"I don’t like this entire US system and...

GERALD WALPIN All I know is that what was done was wrong, and it was done, I think, to send a chilling message to all inspectors general that they should not touch any hot topics. LOU DOBBS: Not to touch any hot topics, by which- WALPIN: I mean topics that may be close to somebody who is at the pinnacle of power.

A new food safety bill is on the fast track in Congress-HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009. The bill needs to be stopped. HR 2749 gives FDA tremendous power while significantly diminishing existing judicial restraints on actions taken by the agency. The bill would impose a one-size-fits-all regulatory scheme on small farms and local artisanal producers; and it would disproportionately impact their operations for the worse. HR 2749 does not address underlying causes of food safety problems such as industrial agriculture practices and the consolidation of our food supply. The industrial food system and food imports are...

Officers are targeting children as young as 10 with the aim of placing their DNA profiles on the national database to improve their chances of solving crimes, it is claimed. The alleged practice is also described as part of a "long-term crime prevention strategy" to dissuade youths from committing offences in the future. The claim comes amid widespread criticism of government proposals to store DNA profiles of innocent people, including some children, on the database for up to 12 years. Civil liberty campaigners have condemned the tactic of as "diabolical" and said it showed contempt for children's freedom. A Metropolitan...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently met with Beijing officials to secure international agreement about tighter restrictions on economic activity in order to deal with perceived global warming. Happily, China’s regime over the past three decades has been moving away from its Maoist cult and totalitarian communism and towards more freedom, most notably in its economy. Thus Beijing officials are reluctant to strangle economic freedom and, as a result, slow economic growth with such restrictions. Sadly, it looks like Pelosi has picked up the totalitarian sword and is bringing it back with her to wield against Americans in the name of...

Sonia Sotomayor's America is a land in which the rule of law would be turned into the rule of empathy, where quotas would triumph over merit, rogue bureaucrats could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, free thinkers could be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is and is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy. President Obama is still our president, but he shouldn't be able to reach out from...

WASHINGTON — President Obama told human rights advocates at the White House on Wednesday that he was mulling the need for a “preventive detention” system that would establish a legal basis for the United States to incarcerate terrorism suspects who are deemed a threat to national security but cannot be tried, two participants in the private session said. The discussion, in a 90-minute meeting in the Cabinet Room that included Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and other top administration officials, came on the eve of a much-anticipated speech Mr. Obama is to give Thursday on a number of thorny...

A deliberate campaign to enforcce “diversity” and political correctness by “unelected or quasi-governmental bodies” is turning Britain into the “the first modern soft totalitarian state”, an Australian political science expert and author says. Hal Gibson Pateshall Colebatch, an Australian historian, author, poet, lecturer, journalist, editor, and lawyer, has warned in an editorial in the Australian that while there may as yet be no concentration camps or gulags in Britain, “there are thought police with unprecedented powers to dictate ways of thinking and sniff out heresy, and there can be harsh punishments for dissent.” He points to the dozens of cases...

Liberals and other assorted Obama butt-kissers will want to shield their eyes. This is not going to be pretty. As you may have heard, and as we discussed in last week's podcast, Obama is trying to strongarm Chrysler's secured creditors into giving up their claims, "for the best interest of the State." From Financial Times. An Obama administration official said: “It is neither in the interest of Chrysler’s senior lenders nor the country for them to advance a proposal that would yield them an unjustified return ... Since it is very much in the creditors' interest to get exactly what...

Socialism, like a tick or leech, grows fat on the blood of its host until the host dies. The greatest socialist experiments of modern times had an outward and initial appearance of success. That initial success seduced many people into ignoring the later realities that proved socialism is the brutal playground for amoral leaders and intellectuals. Europe’s current love affair with socialism is beginning to reveal the sinister intentions of the ruling elite and the ugly consequences of making poor decisions. The host is dying and the elite know it. The initial success of Nationalist Socialism in Germany, Fascism in...

I have often thought the term 'facist' is used a little too freely, more often than not by liberals and leftists who have called me a fascist on many occaisions. I have even seen BHO referred to as a fascist by conservatives, some here on this website. I think fascism is all too often confused with socialism. Although they have much in common, fascism and socialism are not twins, but they are cousins. Both ideologies originated in Europe and both ideologies advocate a strong, powerful central government which controls the economy and many other facets of the state as well....

The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill Tuesday to strengthen national service by increasing funding for thousands of volunteers. The House approved 275-149 the Senate-passed Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which now goes to President Barack Obama for his signature. "Just one month ago, in his address to Congress, President Obama called upon Congress to pass legislation 'to encourage a renewed spirit of national service for this and future generations,'" House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. "Today, the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act is on its way to his desk to become law." Obama...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Tens of thousands of Americans, from teenagers to baby boomers, soon will get a fresh chance to lend a helping hand in a time of need after Congress voted Tuesday to expand ways for people to serve the country and each other. The House voted 275-149 for a $5.7 billion bill that takes ambitious steps on public service, including tripling the number of positions in the Clinton-era AmeriCorps program, its largest expansion since the agency's creation in 1993, and establishing a fund to help nonprofit organizations recruit and manage more volunteers. Congress was sending the bill to...

President Obama didn’t want any advice from Congress on the decision to ask GM CEO Rick Wagoner to resign, according to Carl Levin (D), Michigan’s senior senator. “He didn’t ask us about it, he informed us,” Levin told reporters in a conference call Monday afternoon. “The president said he’d already decided.” Levin said he and three other lawmakers were informed of the decision in a phone call Obama made from the Oval Office. Obama told the members of Congress that Wagoner needed to resign so that the administration could show the public it was making an effort at a fresh...

Surprise and even shock were among the reactions to my recent column about how elite members of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, were considering a proposal for a new global television network to usher in a state of "global governance." It sounded authoritarian, even totalitarian, to some. Here are more of the troubling details. The media proposal, which was included in "The Global Agenda 2009" report, is to create "a new global network" with "the capacity to connect the world, bridging cultures and peoples, and telling us who we are and what we mean to each...

By Matthew Vadum Saturday, February 7, 2009 With all of Washington and most of the media mesmerized by debate on the porkulus bill, little attention has been paid to what appears to be an unconstitutional power grab by President Obama. The Obama administration reportedly wants the U.S. Census to be run directly out of the White House, as opposed to by a politically insulated official within the Department of Commerce. This would apparently be unprecedented and unlawful because federal law provides that the Census must be administered by the Commerce Department. Former Census director Bruce Chapman warns that no good...

Europe, or a significant segment of Europe, unfailingly discloses its frequent willingness to appease totalitarian foes of freedom. In modern times Europe gladly has served as a cradle of fascism on the right, communism on the left and in between all sorts of variations of the two, joined at the hip with a common blood-soaked bigotry directed at Jews. Since 9/11, and despite Muslim terrorists striking on European soil, that segment of Europe ready to appease any totalitarian assault on freedom has contorted itself to accommodate the Islamist agenda. The latest evidence of this is the Amsterdam Court of Appeal's...

Even in the United States, the Utopian economic and political system known as socialism remains attractive to those who are not familiar with its track record of broken promises.  "The free market for all intents and purposes is dead in America," said Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.). "The action proposed today by the Treasury Department will take away the free market and institute socialism in America." Senator Bunning's comments, made in the wake of the bank bailout, and followed by the election of a president who has openly advocated redistribution of wealth, should make Americans pause, for the formerly unthinkable is...

AugustReview.com [Editor's note: members of the Trilateral Commission and companies with Commission representation appear in bold type.] Since 1973, this writer has made inquiry as to the location and ownership of the vast stores of monetary gold (400 oz., .999 pure bars) in the world. There has not been a formal audit on Fort Knox, for instance, since the Eisenhower administration. Official statistics on gold holdings are often contradictory. Getting plain answers from any Central Bank in the world, including the Fed, is virtually impossible. This paper points out a pattern of manipulation that has been clearly observed by many...

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of "liberalism," they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." – Norman Thomas, U.S. Socialist Party presidential candidate 1940, 1944, and 1948 Nine years into the twenty-first century, Mr. Thomas’ prediction has come to fruition; the presidential elections of 2008 have validated his faith in “liberalism” and its Trojan horse delivery of Socialism. After decades of slow yet persistent desensitization in our schools, in our media, and in government policy, Americans have become...

The co-chair of Barack Obama's Transition Team, Valerie Jarrett, appeared on Meet the Press this weekend. She told Tom Brokaw that Obama will be ready to "rule" on day one. It's a word that reflects the worst fears that people have for Obama the "arrogant," the "messiah," that imagines he's here to "rule" instead of govern. Jarret told Brokaw that "given the daunting challenges that we face, it's important that president elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one."

Holy Crap!!! Obama is a Marxist totalitarian neocommie! Even for someone who considers them self to be a thinking person I am shocked. I know that he has marxist policies, and is so far left as to practically be a communist, but Holy Communists Batman!

"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."-Barack Obama, July 2008 “I don’t believe people should be able to own guns.”-Barack Obama, Comment made to John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime The more people learn about Barack Obama the scarier he seems. Pete DuPont, writing in the Wall Street Journal, identified seven sure results of an Obama presidency with a Pelosi/Reid congress... 1. The U.S. military will withdraw from...

ABC News' Imtiyaz Delawala reports: At two rallies in Iowa today, Gov. Sarah Palin charged that a Barack Obama administration would usher in an era of “government as part of your family, taking care of us, making decisions for us,” while for the first time warning that Democrats would have "unchecked power" if they take control of both the White House and Congress. “That philosophy of government taking more, which is a misuse of the power to tax -- it leads to government moving into the role of taking care of you and government and politicians, and kind of...

The secret to selling bad ideas is to make sure they are the only ones available. This is how totalitarian regimes take power. Whether it was Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany or Vladimir Lenin in Communist Russia, the pattern is largely the same – totalitarian dictators come to power by enshrining themselves as cults of personality and then creating political monopolies through often less than delicate campaigns of indoctrination and censorship – especially censorship enshrouded in the intimidating aura of state power.Ironically, these cloven-tongued leaders often rise to dominance by preaching power to those they will dominate, provision to those...

By see-dubya  •  August 8, 2008 01:54 AM Get a load of these guys: Nearly 10,000 of the biggest donors to Republican candidates and causes across the country will probably receive a foreboding “warning” letter in the mail next week. … Led by Tom Matzzie, a liberal political operative who has been involved with some prominent left-wing efforts in recent years, the newly formed nonprofit group, Accountable America, is planning to confront donors to conservative groups, hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions.“We want to stop the Swift Boating before it gets off the ground,” said Mr....

The U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to debate two bills that could give the federal government unprecedented control over the way parents raise their children – even providing funds for state workers to come into homes and screen babies for emotional and developmental problems. The Pre-K Act (HR 3289) and the Education Begins at Home Act (HR 2343) are two bills geared toward military and families who fall below state poverty lines. The measures are said to be a way to prevent child abuse, close the achievement gap in education between poor and minority infants versus middle-class children and...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: World War II, I read today, those of you from the greatest generation, you World War II vets still alive, apparently Monday night PBS is going to run a documentary on World War II in which the whole notion that we were the good guys is going to be turned upside down, that we used totalitarian dictatorship tactics to win World War II, that all we did was bomb the innocent in Dresden and Hamburg and, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that we were not the valiant and valorous victors that we were made out to be,...

Where does all this stuff that you�ve heard about this morning � the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it � where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic. We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been...

Demonised in the West as goons guarding the Olympic torch along its chaotic world tour, these pictures show how China's paramilitary police learn their unwavering discipline. Officers of the People Paramilitary Police preparing for the Olympics are drilled on the parade ground with pins in their collars and crosses on their backs to ensure perfect posture. But instead of the blue tracksuits members wore while escorting the flame, they are kitted out in full dress uniform during the exercise at their base in Shenyang, Liaoning province.

Return to the Article April 27, 2008Another Obama MarxistBy Lance Fairchok Barack Obama has a thing for Marxists. He befriends them, listens to their counsel, and he even hires them to work in his campaign.  And they seem to feel the warmth.  President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, who led a revolution there in 1979,  says Barack Obama's presidential bid is a "revolutionary" phenomenon, and Americans are "laying the foundations for a revolutionary change." A captured computer revealed that an unknown person chatted with Marxist FARC guerillas on Obama's behalf (they believed), stating he would be the next President and US policy...

PARIS (Reuters) - French former film star Brigitte Bardot went on trial on Tuesday for insulting Muslims, the fifth time she has faced the charge of "inciting racial hatred" over her controversial remarks about Islam and its followers. Prosecutors asked that the Paris court hand the 73-year-old former sex symbol a two-month suspended prison sentence and fine her 15,000 euros ($23,760) for saying the Muslim community was "destroying our country and imposing its acts." Since retiring from the film industry in the 1970s, Bardot has become a prominent animal rights activist but she has also courted controversy by denouncing Muslim...

BEIJING (AFP) - China bluntly told the world Olympics chief Thursday to keep out of politics, in a tart exchange on human rights following days of protests that have shadowed the Olympic torch around the world. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said the Games were in "crisis" following the demonstrations, and urged China to respect its pledge to improve its rights record before the event begins in August. China fired back that Rogge should keep politics out of the Olympics, which Beijing hoped would showcase its much-touted "peaceful rise" to power -- but which have instead become a public...

"I am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries." "I am also afraid that the same people, imprisoned in the Malthusian tenets and in their own megalomaniacal ambitions, want to regulate and constrain demographic development, which is something only the totalitarian regimes have until now dared to experiment with."

Globalization relates to social change and the connectivity of societies around the world. The goal of globalization is to create one global village that has mutual understanding and friendship between all citizens of the world community. The signs of globalization are many. Some major ones are: 1. “Increase in international trade at a faster rate than the growth in the world economy 2. Greater international cultural exchange 3. Greater international travel and tourism 4. Greater immigration, including illegal immigration 5. Development of global telecommunications infrastructure 6. Development of global financial systems 7. Increase in the share of the world economy...

Police in San Mateo County, California apparently first spent months investigating the small-stakes poker game. From this firsthand account, it looks like a couple of the officers were playing regularly for several weeks before sending in the SWAT team, guns drawn, last week. If California is like most states (and I believe it is), a poker game is only illegal if the house is taking a rake off the top. In this case, it looks like that "rake" was the $5 the extra the hosts asked from each buy-in to pay for pizza and beer. Police also took a 13-year-old...