Free Republic

In this era of hoaxes, euphemisms, obfuscation, and lies, I once again offer the following as a public service. Here are more (mostly new!) selections from…The Democrat-to-English Dictionary*Ableism: the unfounded and bigoted belief that people who are capable of doing a certain job should be hired over those who are not.*Baby: non-viable tissue mass.*California: a Golden State and Land of Milk and Honey with almost perfectly progressive government … that thousands of people flee every year.*Christian: a radical religionist characterized by intolerance and a fanciful belief in a “Sky Daddy.”*Democracy: any political system, no matter how authoritarian, that allows Democrats...

As inflation continues to eat away at household budgets and fears of a major economic downturn continue to mount, the Biden administration is attempting to redefine the term "recession" in an apparent public relations push to mitigate backlash for the current state of the economy. This effort to obscure what has long been a simple, specific, and uncontroversial definition is part of an ongoing pattern of President Biden and his team redefining and weaponizing specific terms to further their political agenda and stigmatize forms of dissent they deem threatening. Here are six terms the administration has sought to redefine: 1....

Several weeks ago we offered our first installment of Power Line’s Lexicon of Leftist Terms, and it is time for an update that includes several worthy suggestions from readers. Taking it from the top: Populism: When the wrong person or cause wins a free election, like Brexit or Trump. Racism: Any kind of resistance, conscious or unconscious, to the political program of the left. Democracy: Any institutional design or voting system that enables the left to get what it wants. Updated version: “Our” democracy—the version of “democracy as the left defines it.” “Threat to democracy”: When Republicans win an election....

President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure legislation has the political class seemingly locked in a debate about what “infrastructure” means. Biden and Democratic leaders—backed by a majority of the U.S. population—believe that “infrastructure” is more than just roads and bridges and encompasses all the structures that help modern society function. Their new bill reflects that understanding, including improvements to water pipes and the electrical grid, universal broadband access, charging stations for electric vehicles, physical upgrades to schools and universities, and—perhaps most innovatively—home care for the elderly and disabled, support for families with children, and expanded access to health care. Republican elected...

For open discussion, definitions of these two terms and comparative discussion are invited, particularly in the classical and in the modern context.

Dictionary.com caught some some flack on Twitter Tuesday, after some users noticed it had changed the definition of the term “court packing.” One Twitter user went to the “Wayback Machine” on the Internet Archive and compared the old and new definitions for the term which has become debated in political circles following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in September. […] In the old case of “court packing,” Roosevelt’s example appeared as the sole definition. But now, the definition reads, “Court packing can tip the balance of the Supreme Court toward the right or left.” …

Rush recorded a conversation with black activists yesterday and is going to play the recording today at 2:00 Eastern Time.

The Left and their media allies are pushing a new narrative regarding mass shootings. The Washington Post and Boston Globe had massive headlines yesterday claiming there have been 355 mass shootings in 336 days this year, while Vox included it as part of their “fancy stats” on gun violence. It’s enough to make people squeamish about ever owning a gun, let alone hanging out with a gun owner. The problem is the definition of “mass shooting.” All three websites are using the data supplied by crowd-sourcing website shootingtracker.com, which has a really broad definition of what a “mass shooting” actually...

One way of reinventing reality is to warp the meaning of words. No president in memory has waged such a war on the English language as has Barack Obama — changing the meaning of vocabulary to hide what he fears might otherwise be unpopular.

Today I read an article where the author suggests that we come up with another word for “marriage” because the one we’re using has been redefined by the courts and the liberals away from what is originally meant. While we’re at it, let’s come up with another word for “coffee table” since we don’t use them for coffee, and frequently they become footrests.  Or a new word for “money” because our government seems to talk about it like they have it, but they don’t.  There’s always a whole bunch of new words for “automobile”, like “SUV” and “crossover” and...

RETARD is the word for most of today. It comes from somewhere, probably from a school teaccher that tried to teach the local mouthbreathers their sums and cyphering. Anyway the sharpest minds if not the most sober have come up with this from the Redneck Dictionary. RETARD - Verb. To stop working. Usage: "My granpaw retard at age 65.." Milo's grandpa near was retard, he never worked to start with and spent his time in abatement. For the young whelps and mouth breathers, abatement is that room under the house that usually has a foot of water when it rains.

Would anyone work to support themselves or their families — and then turn over a chunk of that hard-earned money to somebody else, just because of the words used by that somebody else? A few people may be taken in by the words of con men, here and there, but the larger tragedy is that millions more are taken in by the words of politicians, the top-of-the-line con men. How do politicians con people out of their money? One example can be found in a recent article titled "The Autism-Welfare Nexus" by Paul Sperry in "Investor's Business Daily." Genuine...

Make no mistake: Obama, Pelosi, Reid, et al. believe in nothing but power. They are not "socialists." There are no socialists in the world except those in mental institutions or very young children who have never seen modern political debate in action. The façade of socialism has always been the same -- a phony banner for the acquisition of power. Every brutal thug, every Hitler or Stalin wannabe, first champions the masses against the despised few who exploit them. It is almost impossible, in a free society, for anyone to exploit anyone else for very long. But the lust for...

I have closely researched the constitution and bylaws of the Republican State Committee, and nowhere do I find a provision for designating registered Republicans as RINOs (Republicans in name only). So who is it that has the authority to make such a designation? The RINO designation is being bandied about by certain self-appointed Reagan Republicans as though they have the sole claim to be real Republicans. Was it not Ronald Reagan who popularized the phrase "the big tent," under which all Republicans to the left or right were welcome? Now we have this shrinking minority of so-called Reagan Republicans claiming...

Espionage (pron: es-pE-oh-naj) Etymology- from the French [Where else?] espionnage and espion “spy”. The practice of spying or using spies to obtain information about the plans and activities- especially of a foreign government. The crime of spying on the Federal Government and/or transferring State secrets on behalf of a foreign country or power. (The other country need not be an “enemy”, so espionage may not be treason, which involves aiding the “enemy”. Treason (pron: tree-zun) Treason against the United States, in the legal definition, shall consist of: “.. only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies,...

This thread is intended to be a workshop, where we can thrash out the definitions on which all the science-literate freepers can agree. When we are agreed on one final list, we can then link to it in future threads, in the hope of bringing some order to the linguistic chaos that too often prevails in the science threads. In discussions about science and philosophy, we must be careful about our terminology, so that we're all using words in the same way. Dictionaries provide multiple definitions, but not all are appropriate in a specific context. It only generates confusion to...

Perhaps Desiree Nall, the president of the Brevard, Florida, chapter of the National Organization Of Women thought she was being helpful by reporting that she was raped in a campus bathrum when she really wasn't. (Or maybe she was just looking for attention.) Wendy McElroy writes: Instead of publicizing sexual violence against women, Nall has spotlighted the problem of false accusations against men. Her case also raises the question of whether NOW-style feminists encourage false accusations when they flatly insist that women must be believed. In the '60s, feminists fought to have rape taken seriously. But taking an accusation seriously...

The underlying red-blue issue involves the current state of bioethics. Many of the founders of this relatively new field were religiously motivated. Daniel Callahan, a former colleague of mine at the Catholic magazine Commonweal, cofounded the Hastings Center. Sargent Shriver and the Kennedy family launched the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. But the bioethics world turned rigorously secular and veered sharply to the blue section of the color spectrum. A key factor in the rise of bioethics, Callahan wrote, was the "emergence ideologically of a form of bioethics that dovetailed nicely with the reigning political liberalism of the...

Teachers Hear Racist Agenda By Alan Bulluck The Guilford County Schools invited the public to attend an anti-racism workshop held for teachers, parents and community leaders last week, but refused to allow a reporter to stay in the room once he was identified as such. In fact, Crossroads Ministry, who held the seminar, has such clout that the second day, a reporter was thrown out after Guilford County School Superintendent Terry Grier had given permission for him to attend. Considering what they were teaching at this seminar, which teachers from Southwest, Andrews and High Point Central high schools were required...

In the weeks leading up to the Scott Peterson death sentence, I revisited my debate with liberals about the fundamentally controversial topic of capital punishment. There are a handful of issues in the American culture war that I believe can act as an instrument in portraying a person’s logical outlook on life; this is one of those issues and some people just don’t get it. Across the nation from Scott Peterson’s California trial, a 911 call came from the night club Alrosa Villa in Columbus, Ohio. On December 8, 2004, twenty-five-year-old Nathan Gale had walked on stage where the band...