Free Republic

President Barack Obama is calling attention to his economic proposals and efforts to expand the middle class. In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama says the U.S. should focus on attracting good jobs, educating workers and ensuring workers get paid a decent living.

The European Union is to ban olive oil jugs and dipping bowls from restaurant tables in a move described by one of Britain’s top cooks as authoritarian and damaging to artisan food makers. The small glass jugs filled with green- or gold-colored extra virgin olive oil are familiar and traditional for restaurant goers across Europe, but they will be banned from 1 January 2014 after a decision taken in an obscure Brussels committee earlier this week. From next year, olive oil “presented at a restaurant table” must be in prepackaged factory bottles with a tamper-proof dispensing nozzle and labeling in...

The beauty of UN Agenda 21 is that Big Government collects lots more taxes that they can spend on their Big Business friends. That is why it is so instructive to watch Monsanto, the agricultural chemical behemoth that has long been a great partner with rural farmers, turn on its base and join the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Monsanto is now aligned with 200 major banks, oil companies, and other powerful corporate players committed to implementing the United Nations Marxist scheme to expropriate rural land and eliminate the suburbs by moving these unwashed masses to the cities where...

The European Union (EU) is pouring millions of pounds into organizations that advocate state control of the press. For many, the funding—uncovered recently by Telegraph journalist Andrew Gilligan—is yet further evidence of the EU’s increasingly Orwellian, authoritarian nature. The Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has for years referred to the organization as the EUSSR. … This is not the first time the EU has sought to control freedom of expression. In 2001, the European Court of Justice ruled that the EU was allowed to suppress political criticism of its institutions and of leading figures. The court ruled that the EU was...

Figures from Eurobarometer, the EU’s own polling organization, suggest that anti-Brussels feeling has spread far beyond Britain and is rising in both poor and better-off EU nations. It follows the continuing eurozone economic crisis, which has sent unemployment soaring and led to a string of multi-billion-pound taxpayer-funded bailouts. Results showed 66 percent of voters in Britain say they “tended not to trust the EU as an institution”. A majority shared that view in Italy (53 percent), France (56 percent) and Germany (59 percent), while in crisis-hit Spain, the figure has soared to 72 percent. The findings are understood to have...

Swedish defense minister Karin Enstrom has said her country is not in NATO partly because the EU treaty contains its own security guarantee. Speaking to EUobserver at the GLOBSEC conference in Bratislava on Saturday (20 April), she said: “If you really read it, the Lisbon Treaty says you must support your EU neighbors with all the necessary means.” Referring to Lisbon’s article 42.7, she noted: “Since the EU is not a military alliance, it’s not like article five [NATO’s collective security clause], but there is this line which says all EU member states must support any other member state if...

In The Republic, Plato argued that philosophers must be made kings for the ideal city-state to be born. In the pages of The New Republic, Cass Sunstein argues for the benevolent paternalism of the nanny state and its philosopher-kings. It’s an old Sunstein theme and the one that brought him to the attention of politicians who dearly love to imagine themselves in the roles of those philosopher-kings. One of those politicians, Barack Obama, even made Sunstein his Regulatory Czar. Sunstein debuted as the philosopher-king of the technocrats with his book Nudge. Now having left his D.C. Czardom, Sunstein is back...

Do not annoy Jay-Z. The rapper has recorded a song that appears to take on those who criticized his recent trip to Cuba with wife Beyoncé.

Among all the media coverage of Margaret Thatcher's recent death, what has impressed me most are the scenes of communists, trade unionists, "occupyers", miners and assorted leftists "celebrating" collectively in the street (like in the video that can be seen clicking on the link just below the post title) or privately at home with a bottle of sparkling wine or a cigar. Where did you see analogous scenes? Among Muslims, of course, after 9/11 or some genocidal attack on Israel or other similar niceties. You never see Christians celebrating the death of anyone, or real conservatives doing that. All these...

Two boys allegedly kidnapped in Florida by their father turned up with their parents in Cuba Monday, officials said... ...the boys were taken by their parents, Joshua Hakken, 35, and his wife, Sharyn Hakken, 34, who had lost custody of the children after Joshua's drug-possession arrest in Louisiana.

Despite a long-standing ban on tourist trips to Cuba, Jay-Z and Beyonce were recently spotted on the island, sparking outrage for many Cuban-Americans and prompting a letter from two Florida Republican Congressmen to the Obama administration. NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell reports....

Baroness Ashton will be entitled to £400,000 at the taxpayer’s expense over three years for doing nothing after finishing her five year term as the European Union’s foreign minister at the end of 2014. Research by The Daily Telegraph has established that the Labour peer, who finishes her job as High Representative of foreign affairs in October next year, will be paid £133,500 ($204,735.60) a year, 55 percent of her basic salary, until the end of 2017. The “transitional allowance” does not require her to do any work at all, and she will be paid under reduced rates of EU...

These are trying times. Never in the history of this country have we been so weakened and polarized by what many view as deliberate government policy. Now anti-gunners in the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration, and legislatures across the country are seeking to exploit the Newtown tragedy to promote their “gun control” agenda that envisions federal, universal background checks on gun purchases, and that could lead to gun registration and confiscation. At the same time, the increasing militarization of law enforcement, most visibly demonstrated by the growing use of massive, SWAT-type raids on businesses and individuals, sometimes with federal

UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s attempt to get other member states to participate in a general review of EU laws has suffered an embarrassing rebuff from Paris and Berlin. France and Germany have refused to take part in Cameron’s much-publicized examination of whether some EU powers should be returned to member states, reports the Financial Times. The paper notes that Paris and Berlin consulted with one another on the issue before concluding that the exercise—known as the “balance of competences”—was more to serve Britain’s domestic political interests. … The review is the cornerstone of London’s EU policy, as Cameron attempts...

Agenda21Radio is hosted by Paul Preston and Chriss Street. The show airs Monday thru Friday from 9 to 10 PM Pacific Time on 1410AM Marysville, CA and is simulcast on YouTube at Agenda 21 RadioE-mail Paul Preston at paul@edtalkradio.com E-mail Chriss Street at Chriss@chrissstreetandcompany.com

Obama’s actions throughout his “presidency,” and the active support of Democrats, have made it crystal clear that he and the party hate free Americans. Everything they have colluded on has been aimed at harming We, the People, as free citizens of a capitalist, constitutional republic. From the daily attempts to shred the Constitution, to the total fraud of ObamaCare and the use of it to attack Christians, to the looting of the treasury and redistribution of our money to Big Banks and Big Unions, to the raising of already out-of-control taxes, to the destruction of our energy industries and much,...

Trying to cool down the resurgent property market, two of China’s biggest cities announced over the weekend that they would put in place a series of restrictions and penalties on housing sales. … The announcements came a few weeks after China’s State Council, or cabinet, said the government would take stronger action to ensure that property prices do not continue to soar, fueling what many analysts believe is a real estate bubble that could seriously damage the economy and exacerbate social tensions between the rich and the poor. …

Markets were generally steady Tuesday as European officials attempted to douse concerns that the main thrust of Cyprus’ bailout—a raid on deposits—could be used again in the future. On Monday, markets were roiled by a suggestion from Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who chairs the meetings of the finance ministers of the 17 European Union countries that use the euro, that the Cyprus bailout was a template for future rescue plans. … Other European officials, such as Greek finance minister Yannis Stournaras and European Central Bank policymaker Benoit Coeure, sought Tuesday to ease fears that the Cyprus bailout strategy will be repeated, but...

Ireland's expected exit from a European bailout program later this year should be a morale boost to other euro zone countries in crisis, its European affairs minister said on Saturday.

The EU has taken a step closer to establishing a full banking union with the European Parliament agreeing on a bill to see the appointment of an overarching bank supervisor. Lawmakers demanded several amendments. … Under the plan, the European Central Bank would have oversight of Europe's biggest and most interconnected banks, while national authorities would supervise the rest. …

Rising unemployment, bleak economic prospects and continued austerity is making people question the benefits of the EU, Europe’s top trade unionist has said. Speaking ahead of Thursday’s (14 March) EU summit, Bernadette Segol, head of the European Trade Union Confederation, said the current policies “have failed.” “We are in a double dip recession. Unemployment is up, up and up. When is growth going to come?” Segol, who met top EU politicians for a “social dialogue”, said she tried to convey a sense of “urgency” to leaders about member states where “doubts about the benefits of the European Union is showing...

The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters...

Former Eurogroup chief Jean-Claude Juncker has warned of “sleeping war demons” in Europe and compared the current situation to the year before the outbreak of the first world war, when everybody took peace for granted. “For my generation, the common currency always meant politics of peace. Today, I am to some extent saddened to see that too many in Europe are again lost in petty national thought processes,” the Luxembourg Prime Minister said in an interview with Der Spiegel published on Monday (11 March). … “Those who think that the question of war can never be raised in Europe any...

Brussels is awash with stories about the unhealthy influence of lobbyists on lawmakers, but as big a scandal, say some experts, is the increasing amount of legislation made with little scrutiny at all. The lack of oversight—despite the EU capital’s 754 MEPs and thousands of lobbyists—is down to the rising use of so-called secondary legislation coupled with a greater tendency to fast-track primary laws. The twin effect has been to make much of EU law-making “untransparent” and “unpredictable,” says Daniel Gueguen, himself a lobbyist and long-time expert on so-called comitology. … The second layer system is complicated and, says Gueguen,...

A man from Long Island, New York, is facing up to 30 days in jail and a $500 fine after a neighbor complained to police he was laughing too loudly. Police issued Robert Schiavelli, 41, two tickets for disturbing the peace for laughing out the window of his home in Rockville Centre on Long Island at about 6 pm on Feb. 12 and Feb. 13, his lawyer said. …

Nazism and Communism They Endured the Communist Terror by Horst Schüler    Place of horror. A Soviet prison camp in the Vorkuta region. Our author Horst student had there for four years, forced to work - PHOTO:. PICTURE-ALLIANCE / AKG-IMAGES / A contribution to the controversy over the memory of the victims of Nazism and Stalinism: Horst Schüler responds to the historian Wolfgang Benz. The former director of the Berlin Center for Research on Antisemitism Wolfgang Benz has recently published in Tagesspiegel about the dispute over the right of interpretation of the crimes of the Nazi dictatorship and communist regimes....

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has urged New York State to adopt his ban on large sugary drinks. The city has jurisdiction over restaurants, movie theaters, fast food restaurants and street carts, but not supermarkets or convenience stores that do not serve prepared foods. “The state should do exactly the same thing in stores,” Bloomberg told reporters including WCBS 880’s Rich Lamb. …

Britain is set to pull out of the discredited European Convention on Human Rights that has allowed dangerous criminals and hate preachers to remain in the UK. It marks a triumph for The Mail on Sunday’s campaign against the ludicrous abuses of justice carried out in the name of human rights. The historic move, to be announced soon by Home Secretary Theresa May, would mean foreign courts could no longer meddle in British justice. The European Convention has led to such hugely controversial decisions as banning the deportation of radical cleric Abu Qatada and giving British prisoners the right to...

The voters rejected the tutelage of Mario Monti and Angela Merkel, sabotaging the Chancellor's strategy of postponing the euro crisis until after Germany's September elections. To avoid a complete disintegration of the European consensus, the integration process must get back on track now. Angela Merkel has done everything she could to clear away the danger of new outbreaks of instability in Europe in the lead-up to the German elections in September. In Italy, she played the Monti card to the full – without going beyond declarations of esteem – anxious as she is to avoid the boomerang effect that caught...

The Daily Telegraph has seen confidential spending proposals and internal documents planning an unprecedented propaganda blitz ahead of and during European elections in June 2014. Key to a new strategy will be “public opinion monitoring tools” to “identify at an early stage whether debates of political nature among followers in social media and blogs have the potential to attract media and citizens’ interest”. Spending on “qualitative media analysis” is to be increased by £1.7 million ($2.7 million), and while most of the money is to be found in existing budgets, an additional £787,000 ($1.24 million) will be need to be...

“A decade of war is now ending,” U.S. President Barack Obama declared Monday. Maybe that’s true in America, but it isn’t true anywhere else. Extremists are still plotting acts of terror. Authoritarian and autocratic regimes are still using violence to preserve their power. The United States can step back from international conflicts, but that won’t make them disappear. Fortunately, there is another power that shares America’s economic and political values, that possesses sophisticated military technology and is also very interested in stopping the progress of fanatical movements, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. That power is Europe. …...

In his 1980 graduate thesis at the University of Texas at Austin, John Brennan denied the existence of “absolute human rights” and argued in favor of censorship on the part of the Egyptian dictatorship. “Since the press can play such an influential role in determining the perceptions of the masses, I am in favor of some degree of government censorship,” Brennan wrote. “Inflamatory [sic] articles can provoke mass opposition and possible violence, especially in developing political systems.” Brennan serves as President Barack Obama’s national security advisor. Obama has nominated him to lead the Central Intelligence Agency.

Agenda21Radio is hosted by Paul Preston and Chriss Street. The show airs Monday thru Friday from 9 to 10 PM Pacific Time on 1410AM Marysville, CA and is simulcast on MySYTV.comCall in questions and comments at 1-877-211-4525 or locally for Northern Californians in the Marysville, Yuba City, Chico area at 530-742-5555. Or e-mail Paul Preston at paul@edtalkradio.com http://www.mysytv.net/kmyclive.html

If someone were to ask you for an example of a “totalitarian society”, how would you respond?  Most Americans would probably think of horribly repressive regimes such as the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Communist China, East Germany or North Korea, but the truth is that there is one society that has far more rules and regulations than any of those societies ever dreamed of having. In the United States today, our lives are governed by literally millions of laws, rules and regulations that govern even the smallest details of our lives, and more laws, rules and regulations are constantly being...

RIGA, Latvia — When a credit-fueled economic boom turned to bust in this tiny Baltic nation in 2008, Didzis Krumins, who ran a small architectural company, fired his staff one by one and then shut down the business. He watched in dismay as Latvia’s misery deepened under a harsh austerity drive that scythed wages, jobs and state financing for schools and hospitals. --------------------snip--------------------------- Hardship has long been common here — and still is. But in just four years, the country has gone from the European Union’s worst economic disaster zone to a model of what the International Monetary Fund hails...

There is a 50/50 chance that Britain will slide into a devastating triple-dip recession this year, leading economists warn today. Output “probably” fell in the final three months of 2012 and could do so again in the first three months of 2013, said the Center for Economics and Business Research. Another two quarters of decline in a row would mean the third recession in five years and set the scene for another bleak year. The think-tank singled out the crisis in the eurozone as “a major challenge for the UK economy”, given it is Britain’s biggest trading partner. …

Britain should cease to be a full member of the European Union under a new deal that would focus on trade, according to senior Brussels politicians. An umbrella group of 20 organizations campaigning for a federal Europe suggested Britain should be offered “associate membership” of the EU to prevent the country leaving altogether.David Cameron is seen as the “continual impediment” to a closer integration of eurozone states, according to the Union of European Federalists. The plan would see the UK lose all its MEPs, its commissioner in Brussels and its right to veto decisions in the European Council, but remain...

An attempt by Britain to rewrite the EU rulebook to reflect domestic interests could make the European Union fall apart, its top official has warned. EU council president Herman Van Rompuy told the Guardian newspaper that London’s quest to repatriate powers from Brussels could spark other member states to do the same. “If every member state were able to cherry-pick those parts of existing policies that they most like, and opt out of those that they least like, the union in general, and the single market in particular, would soon unravel.” … Meanwhile, the future-of-Europe debate is taking place in...

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said only the federal government should have “high-capacity” gun magazines and that the “state ought to have a monopoly on legitimate violence.” At a Capitol Hill press conference on Wednesday, Nadler gathered with other House Democrats to push for stricter gun control in the wake of last week’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which left 26 dead, including 20 children. The lawmaker told CNSNews.com that he not only supports prohibiting the future sale of 10-round gun magazines, but he would like to confiscate high-capacity clips already legally possessed by American citizens. …...

Barack Obama has warned Britain against leaving the European Union, it emerged today. The US President used a call to David Cameron to urge him to resist calls to abandon Brussels, ahead of the PM delivering a major speech on Europe in the New Year. But President Obama is understood to be backing Mr. Cameron’s approach in his fight for a “better deal for Britain”. …

At a press conference this afternoon, President Obama called for an assault weapons ban (AWB), limits on ammunition magazine capacity and background checks for all private firearms sales. He urged Congress to “hold votes on these measures next year.” “I believe that the Second Amendment guarantees a right to an individual right to bear arms,” the President assured Americans. But, he insisted, the majority of law-abiding gun owners agree that it’s a good idea to remove the public’s access to “weapons of war.” The President assured Americans that the new, VP-led task force’s “concrete proposals” won’t be long in coming...

Agenda21Radio is hosted by Paul Preston and Chriss Street. The show airs Monday thru Friday from 9 to 10 PM Pacific Time on 1410AM Marysville, CA and is simulcast on MySYTV.comCall in questions and comments at 1-877-211-4525 or locally for Northern Californians in the Marysville, Yuba City, Chico area at 530-742-5555. Or e-mail Paul Preston at paul@edtalkradio.com http://www.mysytv.net/kmyclive.html

Agenda21Radio is hosted by Paul Preston and Chriss Street and airs Monday thru Friday from 9 to 10 PM Pacific Time on 1410AM Marysville, CA and is simulcast on MySYTV.comCall in questions and comments at 1-877-211-4525 or locally for Northern Californians in the Marysville, Yuba City, Chico area at 530-742-5555. Or e-mail Paul Preston at paul@edtalkradio.com

European parliamentarians next week are to debate a controversial draft law that would create massive national police databases of flight passengers entering or leaving the 27-nation European Union, including everything from addresses to meal preferences. The proposal for a “passenger name record” (PNR) would require airlines and booking agencies to hand over passenger data to national authorities, which would then routinely search for anything conspicuous. The data would be saved for five years and would include names, seat assignments, travel destinations, phone numbers, hired travel agencies and potential re-bookings, among other details. …

Agenda21Radio is hosted by Paul Preston and Chriss Street and airs Monday thru Friday from 9 to 10 PM Pacific Time on 1410AM Marysville, CA and is simulcast on http://www.mysytv.com

A new ideas paper on progress towards further EU integration highlights the shifting power sands for national parliaments, as the European Parliament is set to become the principal democratic guardian of a future EU. The paper—put together by EU council president Herman Van Rompuy and published Thursday (6 December)—lays out a loose time framework for achieving “genuine economic and monetary union.” In a section entitled democratic legitimacy and accountability—the section itself is an acknowledgement of the how the issue has moved up the political agenda—the paper notes that the one of “guiding principles” is that democratic control should happen at...

Directly electing the European Commission President at the 2014 EU elections would “organize the disappointment in advance”, said European Council President Herman Van Rompuy. Directly electing his own successor would be “even more absurd”, he added in comments that are likely to irritate proponents of increased democracy in the European institutions. Van Rompuy’s statement, made at a public conference in Brussels on Wednesday (28 November), runs in direct opposition with the EU’s major political families, who in their majority, would like to “give faces” to the next European elections in May 2014. But Van Rompuy warned that the “huge legitimacy”...

Cellphones seem to be increasingly attractive to the Department of Justice, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union show. Agencies affiliated with the department used more than 37,600 court orders in 2011 to gather cellphone data, a sharp increase from previous years. They were almost equally divided between “pen register” data, which captures outgoing phone numbers, and “trap and trace” orders, which refer to incoming phone numbers, which means one phone could have two separate orders associated with it. The total number has roughly doubled since 2007, when cellphone communications were more limited. By law, the data can be...

I still feel optimistic about a Romney victory. But if Obama wins next week, whether by cheating or by the stupidity of the electorate, things are going to get much worse in this country. It's quite possible that election rules will be changed and freedom of speech suppressed so much that the forces of conservatism could not win an election again, as Bill Whittle reminds us. So what are your plans in that case? Are you going Galt? How will you change your behavior and your life in the event of an Obama win?