Free Republic

David Cameron will this week demand the return of powers from Brussels amid new evidence of the massive cost of EU regulation to Britain. A report published today by the Open Europe think-tank claims that the top 100 EU regulations are costing the UK more than £27 billion a year, outweighing benefits in a quarter of cases. … Annual figures for the five costliest EU regulations are capital rules for banks at £4.5 billion; the Working Time Directive, £4.1 billion; the EU Climate and Energy Package, £3.4 billion; the Temporary Agency Workers Directive, £2 billion; and the Energy Performance of...

As more key powers are transferred to Brussels, it poses an existential question for central governments. … “In my opinion, national central governments will become less important and will lose more power. They will become more and more impotent,” says Franz Schausberger, founder of the Austria-based Institute of the Regions of Europe.To compensate, he notes, “regions have to become stronger, so that the citizens can strengthen their identity and participate in regional and local democracy.” …

Brilliant observation by WND’s David Kupelian – The ‘gay rights’ movement is a trojan horse for totalitarianism. He explores this in the October issue of Whistleblower available here. A “Trojan Horse” is “any trick or stratagem that causes a target to invite a foe into a securely protected bastion or space.” (Wiki) WND Story here. David Kupelian says, “this particular issue – this revolutionary sexual anarchy movement, which more than any other ideology, including Marxism, Islam or atheism, has the potential of permanently corrupting our nation’s core ‘operating system’ called the family – is the one issue that almost everybody...

"Technocracy is nothing new. It hasn’t just come up in the last two decades. It has been around for the last 400 years. Technocracy is a very strange animal, it has many different facets. It has a very colorful history. It’s very difficult to actually define it, however, the main idea behind Technocracy is that it is a political as well as an economic system. As a political system, it is a pure dictatorship, it is a pure totalitarian system. Those who rule in a technocracy are not democratically elected politicians, they are appointed in some way, or they appoint...

Pat Vaillancourt went on a trip last week that was intended to showcase some of America’s greatest treasures. Instead, the Salisbury resident said she and others on her tour bus witnessed an ugly spectacle that made her embarrassed, angry and heartbroken for her country... The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, she said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest.

David Cameron wants to remove the commitment to “ever closer union” from the EU treaty, as part of plans to reform Britain’s membership of the bloc. Speaking in a BBC interview Sunday (29 September), on the eve of his Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester, the UK prime minister said that the phrase was “not what the British people want and it’s not what I want.” Cameron also repeated his threat to withdraw Britain from the European Convention of Human Rights unless his government is allowed to quickly deport foreign nationals deemed to be a security threat. …

On Saturday 1 October 1949, the inauguration of the People's Republic, known in Chinese as Kaiguo dadian (开国大典), was proclaimed by Mao Zedong atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen Gate, not to be confused with the eponymous Square). For some reason, in most if not all Western reconstructions and recountings of the event, Mao is credited to have uttered at this occasion the words that "the Chinese people have stood up" - and in the various commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the PRC in 2009, this was any different.

The decay of a free society doesn’t happen overnight, but we’re getting there. "This is the United States of America,” declared President Obama to the burghers of Liberty, Mo., on Friday. “We’re not some banana republic.” He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, which glorious American tradition seems to come round earlier every year. “This is not a deadbeat nation,” President Obama continued. “We don’t run out on our tab.” True. But we don’t pay it off either. We just keep running it up, ever higher. And every time the bartender says, “Mebbe you’ve had enough,...

The EU’s internal market commissioner Michel Barnier, a convinced European and known federalist, has come out in favor of limits being imposed on the European project, telling EurActiv.fr in an exclusive interview that he understood concerns expressed by the far-right and other euroskeptics. But he said Europe should also dare to venture into new areas such as defense and industrial policy. … “What less can we do here in Brussels? Subsidiarity is very important. Many citizens are concerned about a European project that has no limits or boundaries. Some should probably be established. But we are not alone,” Barnier warned...

For the progressive left, all roads lead to the French Revolution (1789-99) which was the first totalitarian revolution, the genesis of modern totalitarianism, and the spiritual foundation for the Russian Communist, Italian Fascist and German Nazi revolutions. A nationalist-populist rebellion, it was established and controlled by a small intellectual braintrust hellbent on killing God, Christianity, capitalism and objective truth thus devolving Western civilization into a savage society based on a political religion that deified "the people," anointed the revolutionary elites as their priests, and destroyed the rights of individuals. As Robespierre put it, "The people is [sic] always worth more...

I love it when liberal progressives actually speak their true beliefs for us all to hear. However, you have to probe deeply and get them riled up enough to blow their cool in order to hear their unvarnished agenda. Liberals know that sane people do not agree with their policies or their goals, so they must always cloak them in a shadowy cloud of lies. It's always, "it's about the children!" or "where's your compassion?" with them in order to mask their true goals. Once you get under their skin, you can expose their lies and twisted words as they'll...

Police have detained a Chinese journalist on suspicion of causing trouble after he openly alleged that a senior government official was negligent with his public duties, lawyers said Saturday. Si Weijiang, a lawyer for Liu Hu, said the journalist was detained by Beijing police Friday at his home in the southern city of Chongqing and taken to Beijing. … In postings on his personal microblogs, Liu had urged authorities to investigate Ma Zhengqi, deputy director of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, saying Ma was derelict while working in Chongqing. He also shared information that raised questions over possible...

The European Union will review relations with Zimbabwe given its “serious concerns” about the conduct of the southern African state’s election, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said on Thursday. The EU’s verdict on the fairness of the elections will be crucial to a decision on whether it continues to ease sanctions against Zimbabwe. Ashton did not broach the issue of such sanctions in her statement. President Robert Mugabe is to be sworn back into office soon after winning the July 31 election, extending—at age 89—his 33-year rule dating back to independence from Britain. The United States said earlier this...

The U.S. government on Tuesday filed two civil lawsuits against Bank of America for what the Justice Department and securities regulators said was a fraud on investors involving $850 million of residential mortgage-backed securities. The Justice Department and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed the parallel suits in U.S. District Court in Charlotte, according to the court filings. The securities date to about January 2008, the government said, putting them just at the beginning of the global financial crisis.

The U.S. government’s growing surveillance of Americans has transformed the nation into an “electronic concentration camp,” top civil-liberties attorney John W. Whitehead says. “It’s moving so rapidly you have to feel creepy because you're being watched. Everybody has a file if you do anything electronically,” Whitehead, author the new book “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,” told Newsmax TV. … Whitehead—who founded the Rutherford Institute in Virginia, which helps promote civil liberties and human rights—has been researching the growth of the National Security Agency since the 1980s. The agency has been under fire for its collection of...

Barack Obama, to hear his advisers tell it, has finally found The One he has been looking for: John McCain. “We have been looking literally for years for someone we can cut deals with, and finally someone has stepped up,” a White House official said. West Wing aides say they now talk with McCain roughly every other day. McCain, to hear fellow Republicans tell it, has finally found The Two he has needed to make such conversations worth the bother: Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat who can actually get things done in the Senate, and Denis McDonough, a White House...

On one occasion, so it was narrated, Stalin called for a live chicken and proceeded to use it to make an unforgettable point before some of his henchmen. Forcefully clutching the chicken in one hand, with the other he began to systematically pluck out its feathers. As the chicken struggled in vain to escape, he continued with the painful denuding until the bird was completely stripped. “Now you watch,” Stalin said as he placed the chicken on the floor and walked away with some bread crumbs in his hand. Incredibly, the fear-crazed chicken hobbled toward him and clung to the...

Would you trust thousands of low-level Federal bureaucrats and contractors with one-touch access to your private financial and medial information? Under Obamacare you won’t have any choice. As the Obamacare train-wreck begins to gather steam, there is increasing concern in Congress over something called the Federal Data Services Hub. The Data Hub is a comprehensive database of personal information being established by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to implement the federally facilitated health insurance exchanges. The purpose of the Data Hub, according to a June 2013 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, is to provide “electronic, near real-time...

The UK wants to repatriate 35 EU-wide police and justice laws out of some 130 in its wider efforts to claw back power from the EU. “We believe the UK should opt out of the measures in question for reasons of principle, policy, and pragmatism,” UK home secretary Theresa May told ministers in London on Tuesday (9 July). Tory right-wingers want to repatriate all 133 laws, but May said the UK should retain its cooperation with the EU police agency Europol and the EU’s joint judicial authority Eurojust. … The European Arrest Warrant will also figure into UK’s provisional opt-in...

Did you actually believe that they were not going to use the precedent that they set in Cyprus? On Thursday, EU finance ministers agreed to a shocking new plan that will make every bank account in Europe vulnerable to Cyprus-style bail-ins. In other words, the wealth confiscation that we just witnessed in Cyprus will now be used as a template for future bank failures all over Europe. That means that if you have a bank account in Europe, you could wake up some morning and every penny in that account over 100,000 euros could be gone. That is exactly what...