Free Republic

MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace said Wednesday on her show “Deadline” that in the 2024 election, Democrats need to say the Republican Party was “the largest anti-democratic force on the planet.” Wallace said, “I want to say it carefully because I’m not trying to throw an elbow at people that have done good, but even Liz Cheney, who did heroic work on the select committee, is not out front in protecting democracy from fellow Republicans. Neither are the other Republicans, people in the primary like Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie saying that Trump is clearly criminally compromised, if you will.”

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell decried the upper chamber of Congress as "anti-democratic" during his appearance Thursday on "The ReidOut." Host Joy Reid led to the topic of the Senate by discussing whether the United States is "governable" as a country based on "a system designed by European men who certainly never envisioned racial and gender equality or the kind of diversity that we have today or that anyone not like them would share power in this country."

<p>The aftershocks of Thursday's referendum on British membership in the European Union continued to reverberate Saturday, as more than 2 million people signed an online petition calling for a second vote and one lawmaker said Parliament should overturn the result.</p>

A British opposition lawmaker says Parliament should stop the “madness” Iand overturn the result of a referendum calling for Britain to leave the European Union. Labour legislator David Lammy says Thursday’s national vote was non-binding and “our sovereign Parliament needs to now vote on whether we should quit the EU.” David Lammy ‏@DavidLammy 21h21 hours ago Wake up. We do not have to do this. We can stop this madness through a vote in Parliament. My statement below 16,725 retweets 15,684 likes              

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is blasting the way the country chooses presidential party nominees as “corrupt” and “crooked” as he grapples with the potential of a brokered convention that he risks losing. Speaking to thousands packed in a frigid airport hangar in western New York on Sunday, Trump ripped the byzantine fight over delegates at the heart of his party’s nominating process. He argued anew that the person who wins the most votes in the primary process should automatically be the GOP nominee. “What they’re trying to do is subvert the movement with crooked shenanigans,” said Trump, comparing his...

Donald Trump used his first campaign rally in western New York to attack Sen. Ted Cruz for something the Texan happily boasts about: mastering party rules to elect his delegate slates to the Republican National Convention. “They’re trying to subvert the movement,” Trump said to thousands of voters crammed into a frigid airplane hangar Sunday. “They can’t do it with bodies, so they’re trying to subvert the movement with crooked shenanigans.” The Rochester rally was only Trump’s second in the 14-day New York campaign, and his first since Cruz swept Colorado’s 34 available delegates in a series of conventions. Trump’s...

**SNIP** The first of four Democratic debates before voting begins will not take place until mid-October - and three of them are on weekends. If the Democratic Party were trying to keep the audience to a minimum, it could hardly have drawn up a better plan. Equally troubling, candidates who participate in any debate not sanctioned by the DNC forfeit their right to join the official debates. Why would a party want to muzzle its candidates this way? It doesn't take a cynic to believe that the DNC has the Clinton's campaign's best interests in mind. Front-runners almost always prefer...

Although [Jonathan] Gruber has sought to play down his remarks, the danger to the law from the unclear language is still very real: The section in question mentions exchanges "established by the state," but not the federal government. One former staffer involved in drafting the legislation attributes the vague wording to a rushed process in the Senate: "When there'’s a rapid process, sometimes things aren't worded as precisely as you might like when you have more time. … I see it more as, you didn't find all your cross-references." That explanation, however, makes Michael Carvin laugh out loud. "That’s another...

With the 'Arab Spring' blowing up in her face all around her, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (pictured here with Mutassim Gadhafi) is 'concerned' about an 'anti-Democratic' wave that might limit funding to her good friends at Peace Now. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced concerns over a wave of anti-democratic legislation in Israel noting a proposal to limit donations to aid foundations. Speaking at the Saban Forum in Washington, Clinton also criticized the exclusion of women from Israel's public life. EXCLUSION of women? Why? Because we won't make Tzipi Livni Prime Minister? In a cable exposed by...

Some scholars squabble about the particulars, but there is no question that democracy's roots go back at least 2,500 years to practices developed in the Greek city-state of Athens. But the adoption of a key pillar of democracy — the secret ballot — came far more recently. In England in the 1830s, disenfranchised working-class men and sympathetic members of Parliament launched the Chartist movement. The most crucial of its six objectives was universal suffrage for all men over 21, but not far behind was the secret-ballot provision. It took decades, but eventually the secret ballot became the democratic norm —...

Modern American liberalism, as it emerged in the 1920s, was animated by a revolt against the masses. Liberal thinkers accused the great unwashed of smothering creative individuals in a blanket of materialist, spiritually empty cultural conformity. The liberal project was, so to speak, to refound America by replacing its business civilization—a “dictatorship of the middle class,” as Vernon Parrington put it—with a new, more highly evolved leadership. But along with the ideal of the spontaneous, creative individual, liberals also embraced government economic planning, which depended on making people more predictable. The tension between the two aspirations was resolved, rhetorically at...

And now for a world government By Gideon Rachman Published: December 8 2008 19:13 | Last updated: December 8 2008 19:13 I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the US. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible. A “world government” would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already...

-- snip --The elected delegates, though virtually unknown, are at least selected by the voters and pledged to the candidate those voters chose. Most of the super delegates aren't chosen by the general populace, and they are not bound by the votes in their respective states. If they end up making the difference in the nomination -- especially if the winner came into the convention in second place -- there is a strong possibility of disenchanting a good portion of the party's base, potentially costing the party the election...

Belinda's lesson By LINK BYFIELD -- Calgary Sun Pardon me while I gag. It was announced from Ottawa last week that our new Minister of Democratic Renewal will spend $1 million crossing the country to find out why fewer Canadians -- especially young people -- are voting in national elections. Why is there such growing apathy, disengagement and even cynicism about politics? She's determined to find out. The minister is Belinda Stronach, who was elected a year ago as a Conservative MP by the voters of New Market-Aurora in Ontario. On May 17, the Liberals bribed her with a cabinet...

Over the past several decades, we have gotten used to judges being above the law, so it was perhaps inevitable that we would now be asked to get used to the idea that judges are above criticism. In the wake of the Terri Schiavo case, where a Florida judge ignored Florida law and Congressional subpoenas, and where federal judges ignored Congressional legislation duly signed by the President, some people dared to suggest that judges had overstepped the bounds. Immediately there has been a firestorm of reaction by those who think it is just fine to have judges make social policy,...

The phrase, “Level Playing Field,” was coined in the 1980s, according to The Phrase Finder, to mean fair competition with no advantage to either side. Today, I hear this phrase used more often in politics—from both the Left and the Right. Somehow, I think this phrase has become contaminated, depending on one’s viewpoint or naiveté. Coming from the Right, this probably means “idealism.” Coming, though, from the Left, I suspect that it means that they want welfare from the USA, or they prefer to blame the USA for its capitalism and imperialism and look to either Socialism or Communism as...

"In a new century, the alliance of America and Europe is the main pillar of our security," - President George W. Bush, Brussels, February 21, 2005 Seeing our graceful new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dancing her diplomatic minuet in Paris reminds me of a Woody Allen story about Sigmund Freud’s most neurotic patient. After years of wrestling with this man’s demented soul, Freud finally decided to call an end to the therapy. So he declared his patient to be cured and sane. Except for one little thing --- Freud would never turn his back to him. Europe is like...

The EU is proposing legislation which could bar Eurosceptic parties from the European Parliament reports Daniel Hannan What would it take to convince you that the EU is anti-democratic? It has brushed aside "no" votes in Denmark and Ireland. It has refused to accept the result of an Austrian general election. Now it is proposing legislation which could bar Eurosceptic parties from the European Parliament. For several weeks, I and my fellow members of the constitutional affairs committee have been chewing over a draft "Statute of European Political Parties". The establishment of state-funded pan-European parties is something that federalists desperately...