Free Republic

With as many times as outgoing Majority Leader Harry Reid mentioned the Koch brothers in Senate floor speeches this year, you'd think that they were the ones who spent the most money during the 2014 midterm elections. Think again. Out of all the billionaires who donated money to causes or campaigns for the midterms, the top two were Democrats and they outspent everyone else on the list, combined. David Koch isn't even near the top. More from POLITICO: Billionaire Tom Steyer's pet issue is global warming. With the amount of money Steyer spent, a whopping $74.3 million, and the results...

Years of trashing U.S. culture haven’t bought American filmmakers immunity North Korea supposedly hacked Sony and exposed hundreds of embarrassing behind-the-scenes e-mails, humiliating the company into giving in to blackmail by delaying for a time the release of its new film Interview. Perhaps the murderous North Korean thugocracy thought that, by revealing the innermost illiberal thoughts of the global corporate elite, it might win adulation commensurate with that accorded the liberal crusader Julian Assange — the heartthrob hacker who exposed U.S. government secrets and the private musings of the ruling American hierarchy. Kim Jong-un’s hackers were supposedly displeased by the...

He was the liberal-media darling of the Ferguson protests; now he’s an alleged arsonist. Joshua Williams is everywhere: protesting in Ferguson, Mo., Washington, D.C., and Cleveland, Ohio. He has perfected the skill of catching the attention of journalists and using them to elevate his claims of police brutality to national attention. Quoted or photographed in countless articles in publications including the New York Times and USA Today, Williams claims police in Ferguson, Mo., targeted him because he is black. The truth, caught on tape by National Review Online, is much different. The charismatic teenager is one of Ferguson’s most recognizable...

Video at link ... Soldiers Silent NightAs the war in Afghanistan winds down, our troops remain in harm’s way in that war-torn country, and Iraq as well. This Christmas, please pause to remember them, their families and the many sacrifices they make so that we may continue to live free. Merry Christmas to our brave men and women in uniform. May you all safely return to your loved ones.

In his “fourth quarter,” he feels free to ignore popular opinion, the rule of law, and Congress. Until now there were two types of peaceful American change. One was a president, like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, working with Congress to alter American life from the top down by passing a new agenda. The other was popular-reform pressure, as happened in the 1890s or 1960s, to change public opinion and force government to make new laws or change existing ones. Barack Obama has introduced a quite different, third sort of revolution. He seeks to enact change that both the...

By now you know President Obama announced yesterday he will unilaterally normalize the relationship between Cuba and the United States. Back in 2008, Obama said he would talk and negotiate with Iran and now, sources tell the Los Angeles Times that the president attempted to start talks with North Korea and failed last year. A White House official made two secret visits to North Korea last year in an unsuccessful effort to improve relations after new ruler Kim Jong Un assumed power, according to former U.S. officials familiar with the trips. The former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of...

A perfect storm brought into power Barack Obama, a previously little-known Illinois community organizer. He had at best a mediocre record as a state legislator and rookie senator. Yet he quickly dazzled the liberal establishment. Joe Biden and Harry Reid were wowed by his sounding and behaving like a white liberal, while retaining the ability to turn on his supposedly authentic black persona when needed. That he had no record of achievement was seen as an advantageous clean slate. Teleprompted glibness was preferred to ad hoc repartee, as if an entire presidency could be scripted and Photoshopped with backdrops of...

Updated 2:30 p.m. | Unsure whether they have the votes to pass a trillion-dollar federal spending package, House GOP leaders on Thursday afternoon delayed a final vote on the “cromnibus.” They did so with mere hours to go until the government is set to run out of funding, and just before the House was scheduled to vote. GOP leaders called a recess to floor proceedings, with a GOP leadership aide confirming “no conference meeting [is] planned at this time.” The aide said “leadership teams are still talking to their respective members,” and noted, “We still plan to vote this afternoon.”...

Politics has a million problems. Too much debate isn’t one of them. If you want to dodge Ted Cruz or Rand Paul, just say so. Although the specifics are still hazy, The New York Times reports that a group of deep-pocketed Republican donors and bundlers have hatched a plan to clear the GOP field of all insurgents to make room for a favored “establishment” candidate—preferably Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, or Mitt Romney. But there can only be one. This strikes me as a dubious strategy for a number of reasons. But the main point of the Times piece is to...

Well aside from “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,” or blanket amnesty that is and is not lawful for a president to grant, there is a special category of progressive mythology. Or rather a particular cast of “truth tellers,” victims, supposed whistle blowers, and popular liberal icons who spin tales for a supposedly higher good, on the premise that untruth for a cause makes it sort of true. From the details of Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir, to Tawana Brawley’s supposed rape, to the O. J. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” myth, to the open-and-shut case...

It’s crystal clear that Hillary Clinton has a glass jaw and is poised to be knocked out in 2016. With Barack Obama and his legacy of failure weighing her down, Hillary must cobble together a coalition by recovering the normal Americans who used to help Democrats win while at the same time satisfying the freak show that is the Democrat base. But she'll still be the face of the party of idiots who block you on the freeways, of morons who burn stores, of faceless Obamacare bureaucrats raising premiums, and of Goldman Sachs. Yeah, Wall Street crony capitalists pay hundreds...

At the time of this writing, six “Gruber videos” have been released and “gone viral,” as they say in YouTube land. These are the videos of course, in which “Obamacare architect” Jonathan Gruber lets the cat out of the bag on the process of enacting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, aka The Greatest Consumer Fraud Perpetrated on the American People, Ever. Of the many Gruber quotes burning up the internet, I was especially struck by this one, to which Charles Krauthammer refers in a recent article: Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget...

The Council on American Islamic Relations, better known as CAIR, has been designated by the United Arab Emirates as a terror group comparable to ISIS and Al Qaeda. More from Fox News: The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was one of 82 groups around the world designated terrorist organizations by the United Arab Emirates, placing it in the company of Al Qaeda, Islamic State and others. While CAIR has previously been linked to Hamas, it has held hundreds of meetings with White House officials on a wide range of community issues and has sought to present itself as a mainstream...

Obama’s legacy: government-induced chaos at home, moral equivalence abroad. The last but long gasp of the Obama administration is characterized not so much by deceit and incompetence as by growing chaos. Everything appears to be coming apart. The chariot of state now veers up and down with a terrified Phaethon clueless at the reins. Whether it is ISIS, Ebola, Putin, or Obamacare, the common strain is not simple incompetence, but a maladroitness born of intolerant ideological fundamentalism. Have our government agencies ever seemed more corrupt or useless or both, staffed by political cronies and leftist zealots? What ever happened to...

Within 24 hours of the 2014 midterm election results pouring in, handing the Senate over to Republicans, outgoing Majority Leader Harry Reid unleashed his chief-of-staff to the Washington Post where he slammed the Obama White House for the Democrat bloodbath. Now, after comments from Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber surfaced showing the administration lied to "stupid" Americans in order to get the legislation passed, former Democrat Presidential candidate and DNC Chairman Howard Dean is calling the architects of the law "elitist" who don't "fundamentally understand Americans." "The problem is not that he said it. The problem is that he thinks it....

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday slammed Democrats who sought to use race against Republicans in the midterm elections, saying they were offensive and out of touch. “The idea that you would play such a card and try fearmongering among minorities just because you disagree with Republicans, that they are somehow all racists, I find it appalling. I find it insulting,” she said on Fox News. Rice and the show’s co-host, Brian Kilmeade, specifically mentioned the Georgia Democratic Party’s flyers that asked voters to prevent another shooting similar to that in Ferguson, Mo. “We are not race blind....

<p>Facts now pale in comparison with the higher truths of progressivism.</p> <p>Do bothersome facts matter anymore?</p> <p>Not really. This is an age when Americans were assured that the Affordable Care Act lowered our premiums. It cut deductibles. Obamacare allowed us to keep our doctors and health plans, and lowered the deficit. Those fantasies were both demonstrably untrue and did not matter, given the supposedly noble aims of health care reform.</p>

What’s with rich liberals who blast other people for being rich? In early October, Barack Obama went to a $32,000-a-head fundraiser at the 20-acre estate of the aptly named billionaire Richie Richman. The day before he charmed his paying audience of liberal 1 percenters, Obama had sent out an e-mail alleging that Republicans were “in the pocket of billionaires.” Does that mean that Republicans who accept cash from billionaire supporters are always in their pockets, but that when the president does likewise, he never is? And if so, on what grounds is he exempt from his own accusations? In mid-October,...

Fifty years ago today America faced a choice very much similar to the choice we face today. On October 27, 1964, a clarion call was heard across the nation. America faced a choice, a speaker told us: We could either “abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves,” or we could reaffirm our belief “in our capacity for self-government.” That man was Ronald Reagan and then, as now, it was a time to choose. Today, the threats are every bit...

The recent unfortunate shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and its violent aftermath seem to have had everything and nothing to do with race. Brown was black and unarmed and the officer white; but it is equally true that the 292-pound Brown likely committed a number of crimes in the minutes before his death. He was high on drugs; he robbed a store and strong-armed the clerk; he was walking down the middle of a road; and he started a physical altercation with policeman Darren Wilson (who tried to question him), inflicting injuries on the officer before being fatally...