Free Republic

Some Of My Friends Think That Being A Socialist Is About Being NiceDo you have a friend who claims to be a socialist? In the 20th century there have been numerous political systems, but in the latter half of the century there were only two survivors, Socialism and Capitalism. So we have at this time in the Western world, which for all practical purposes controls the world, two opposing political systems. (I have already previously stated that there is no basic difference between socialists and communists. There are, however, some very important factors relating to socialism of which you should...

A bipartisan group of senators has asked NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to pull the league's 2017 All-Star game from North Carolina because of a law in that state that many say discriminates against gay and transgender people. . . . Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Pat Leahy, D-Vt., Cory Booker, D-N.J., Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., all signed onto the letter sent Tuesday. Kirk is the only Republican signed onto the letter and is running for reelection this year.

Congratulations portable air conditioner buyers and sellers. This product now qualifies for… government regulation! The Department of Energy (DOE) recently determined that portable air conditioners meet the criteria set under the Energy Policy Conservation Act (as amended) for efficiency mandates. Like all other efficiency regulations, mandated appliance standards removes choices from individuals and empowers Washington to override personal preferences. DOE concluded that the average household use of electricity for portable air conditioners exceeds the limit to trigger consideration for regulation. The energy-use threshold for DOE bureaucrats to begin inspecting and testing an appliance is low.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass) brushed off fears that a runaway national debt could pose a threat to America. "Look, a debt of whatever amount merely records resources that have already been acquired by the government," Markey argued. "The government has already gotten and spent that money for the benefit of America. Whether it ever pays this money back is basically irrelevant." "Let's imagine that, 'horror of horrors,' the government defaults on this debt," Markey continued. "Who's hurt? The people who lent the money to the government by buying bonds can obviously afford to lose this money. People who need their...

Some of the most disturbing aspects of the times in which we are living include the utter corruption of the mass print and broadcast media and the lack of awareness of this fact by a large portion of the public. It seems that most Americans operate on the assumption that the media is making a good-faith, if imperfect, effort at objectively informing its audience. That so few are genuinely aware of the outrageous manipulation of public opinion now taking place is the single greatest threat to the republic, to the extent that we can even say that our republic still...

Kamala Harris, the Attorney General of California, is an example of the new jackbooted fascists pretending to be responsible public officials. Democrat politicians like Harris and Jerry Brown demonstrate their disgust with the Constitution by placing their own political beliefs above the will of the people, when Brown refused to defend Californians votes for Prop 8, and free speech, when Harris tries to criminalize speech she doesn’t like. While some will reject such strong language, there is really no other way to describe an attorney general who uses the full power of her office to attack a reporter who is...

the U.S. Supreme Court .. issued an injunction blocking the EPA from implementing its Clean Power Plan, which would end America’s use of coal, its cheapest and most abundant source of electricity. ... Western Colorado’s economy is so dependent on coal. It employs more than 2,000 people and generates $58 million in federal and state royalties, $28 million in private landowner royalties, $4.5 million in reclamation funds, and pays $28 million in property, severance, and sales taxes — all of it on the Western Slope. EPA has never tried anything so unpopular in its 45-year history, and that is saying...

The U.S. Department of Housing has just determined that refusing to rent to a convicted felon may be a violation of the Fair Housing Act, and National Public Radio seems to approve. Felons are not a protected class (yet) under the Fair Housing Act, but since the American justice system disproportionately affects persons of color, it's racist to deny felons housing. Note that HUD says may violate the act. That means, all you have to do as a landlord is ignore HUD and then battle it out in court. Feeling lucky? Roll the dice: 40% of the federal judiciary has...

Calling the road to revolution “long and arduous,” the state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper advised readers to “brace for famine.” The “bracing” is expected to entail the people “chewing the roots of plants once again.” In addition, the country is requiring all residents to deliver about 2 lb. of rice to state warehouses each month. The rice levy is needed to ensure that the country’s 300 lb. leader—Kim Jong-un—is able to “maintain his strength in the battle against capitalist imperialism. We cannot allow hunger to undermine his ability to continue to make progress toward the socialist future we are all striving...

The Climate Science Truth & Accountability Act, a bill introduced by California state Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) would expand state and local government’s attorneys’ power to crack down on global warming critics. Under the bill, the statute of limitations would be extended to 30 years so that the California attorney general, 58 county district attorneys and the city attorneys of every city with more than 750,000 people would have a bigger window of opportunity to launch investigations, lawsuits, and prosecutions against climate change critics. “We cannot allow the biggest criminals against humanity to escape punishment just because of the...

Treating climate change as an absolute, unassailable fact, instead of what it is— an unproven, controversial scientific theory [1], a group of state attorneys general have announced that they will be targeting any companies that challenge the catastrophic climate change religion. Speaking at a press conference on March 29, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said [2] “The bottom line is simple: Climate change is real.” He went on to say that if companies are committing fraud by “lying” about the dangers of climate change, they will “pursue them to the fullest extent of the law.” The coalition [3] of...

"Our commitment to that principle, that people shouldn't be discriminated against just because who they love, is one worth fighting for, and this president will continue to speak out in support of those equal rights," he said. "That's part and parcel of what it means [to live] in the greatest country in the world." Earnest didn't elaborate on exactly what steps executive government agencies are considering in response to the state law, and urged reporters to contact individual departments instead.

New Top Cop's Fiancee Under Investigation For Alleged Police Exam Cheating By Mark Konkol and Heather Cherone Updated April 5, 2016 THE LOOP — Mayor Rahm Emanuel's newly appointed top cop Eddie Johnson's fiancee is a Chicago Police lieutenant named in an ongoing investigation into alleged cheating on the department's lieutenant's exam, DNAinfo Chicago has learned. It's the same cheating probe that sources said helped derail Deputy Chief Eugene Williams' chances of being promoted to police superintendent. Now the allegations are part of a separate probe, this one by Chicago Inspector General Joe Ferguson, sources said. Williams, one of the...

For the federal government to demand more, and seize more, such as we are seeing regarding BLM land, is nothing less than tyranny. According to Article I, Section 8, aside from adding territory as spoils from war, the only way the federal government can own property is if they “purchase” it with the “consent” of the State legislature for the purpose of “needful buildings.” Much of the land west of the Mississippi River owned by the federal government was not obtained in either manner. As a result, the Bureau of Land Management unconstitutionally regulates/manages (or should I say “mismanages”) a...

It’s been a rough stretch for Climate Armageddon religionists and totalitarians.Real World science, climate and weather events just don’t support their manmade cataclysm narrative. The horrid consequences of anti-fossil fuel energy policies are increasingly in the news. And despite campaigns by the $1.5-trillion-per-year government-industry-activist-scientific Climate Crisis Consortium, Americans consistently rank global warming at the very bottom of their serious concerns. But instead of debating their critics, or marshaling a more persuasive, evidence-based case that we really do face a manmade climate catastrophe, alarmists have ramped up their shrill rhetoric, imposed more anti-hydrocarbon edicts by executive fiat and unratified treaty –...

The road trip from the Colorado statehouse to the Capitol building in Montana is about 800 miles, but the psychological distance from a Denver meth-house to the office of Helena’s Commissioner of Political Practices has to be greater than that. And that’s only the beginning of this bizarre story, and just the latest example of partisan public officials using government power to crush their political opponents. In Washington, D.C., Lois Lerner, head of the tax-exempt organizations division of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), allegedly slowed or killed the nonprofit applications of conservative and libertarian organizations. In Wisconsin, Kevin Kennedy, director...

I have read about the paradoxical alliance between Islam and the left for years. I have even written about it -- at some length, in fact, in my newest book Scarlet Letters. But it was only a few weeks go that I got to see up close the mechanisms that allow people who celebrate homosexuals to find common cause with those who, when the law allows, happily sever their heads.

Marquette University has moved to suspend and then fire Professor John McAdams for backing a student who tried to defend man-woman marriage when a leftist teaching assistant shut the student down. In the fall of 2014, junior faculty member Cheryl Abbate told a student, who secretly recorded the exchange, that his defense of man-woman marriage was an unacceptable topic in her ethics class and compared his views to racism. She said, "You can have whatever opinions you want but I can tell you right now, in this class homophobic comments, racist comments, and sexist comments will not be tolerated." And...

The blood after last week's terror attack in Brussels, Belgium, was not even dry yet when globalists and anti-sovereignty extremists, in typical fashion, began demanding more assaults on liberty and more power for themselves under the guise of “protecting” people from terrorism. At the top of the agenda: exploiting the crisis to impose a “Security Union” on Europeans that would consolidate the emerging continental police state. The self-styled “president” of the European Union, for example, joined other radical politicians and bureaucrats in arguing that it was time for the EU super-state to have its own “intelligence” agency. Other European leaders...

This feature appears in the April ’16 issue of NRA America’s 1st Freedom, one of the official journals of the National Rifle Association. In an attack that is unprecedented in our lifetimes, the destruction of the Second Amendment-protected rights of all Americans has emerged as the centerpiece of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. If elected, she vows to make the Obama administration’s illegal, all-out war on our values and liberty look like amateur night. Embracing the kind of mass confiscations that disarmed Australians in the 1990s, Hillary intends to take down the NRA, calling us her number one “enemy.” Politico summed...