Free Republic

At the July 20 Chicago “Justice for Trayvon” rally, which garnered somewhere between 5-10 thousand people (predominantly African-American), mainstream public figures like Jesse Jackson and celebrities like MC Lyte demonstrated alongside radical groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (REVCOM), Occupy Chicago, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). The event was one of hundreds sponsored by the National Action Network (NAN), run by Al Sharpton. At this particular rally, as was undoubtedly the case at most of the other Justice for Trayvon rallies across the country, the message was clear: the United States...

Updated: January 15, 2013 2:17AM When President Barack Obama is sworn in for his second term, his hand will rest not only on President Abraham Lincoln’s Bible, but on Dr. Martin Luther King’s, too. As the ceremony falls on the federal holiday celebrating Dr. King’s birth, the civil rights leader would no doubt be proud as an African-American president is sworn in on the steps of a Capitol built by slave labor, about 170 miles from Jamestown where slave ships landed. We have come a long way. But Dr. King would not be satisfied. He marched to his own drummer,...

Civil-rights activist the Rev. Jesse Jackson took the microphone shortly before noon today at the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Eatonville and pronounced slain teen-ager Trayvon Martin to be a martyr. "Martyrs have power," Jackson said near the end of his hour-long sermon. "He represents all of us." Dressed in a dark gray suit and blue tie, Jackson began his address with a chant: "Stop the violence. Save the Children. Keep hope alive!" "How do we go from a moment to a movement that creates fundamental change," Jackson asked the capacity crowd, estimated at 1,600 people. "If it's a moment,...

Southern Baptists top public-policy spokesman said on his radio program March 31 that black leaders are exploiting outrage over the shooting death of a Florida teenager to help President Obama get re-elected. Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, described activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as “racial ambulance chasers” who are fomenting a “mob mentality” over the recent shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch captain in Sanford, Fla. Land said President Obama turned it into a national issue when he said if he had a son, he would...

Republican Gov. Jan Brewer insults the president with a finger-wagging tarmac rant in Arizona. As a result, sales of her book soar. American presidents have always been fair game for public criticism. But isn’t it past time that we challenge the campaign of insult, racial slur and utter disrespect that has been unleashed on Barack Obama? Consider just the Republican presidential contenders. The campaign started with Donald Trump’s ugly nonsense about Obama’s birth certificate, suggesting that he was un-American. Newt Gingrich devoted a book, To Save America, to denouncing Obama’s “secular socialist machine that represents as great a threat to...

'In 2008, we changed the guard," says the Rev. Joseph Lowery in a radio ad for the Democratic National Committee. "This year we must guard the change." There's no question that if mobilized, the base of the Democratic Party -- blacks, Latinos, single women, the young who constituted more than half of the electorate in 2010 -- could help save many Democratic seats and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. While the media have been fixated on the Tea Party, a case can be made that African Americans hold the keys to the 2010 elections. A determined black vote...

In Washington this Saturday, I will join tens of thousands of Americans to march for jobs, justice and education. The march is called together under the banner of One Nation: Working Together, a large coalition of more than 400 organizations. Why do we march? We march for hope. We've seen the politics of fear. Fear that America is in permanent decline. Fear that America is being changed for the worse. Fear that the president is not a citizen. One Nation calls us back to positive purpose. This nation can't go return to the ideas that drove us off the cliff....

When the news came out that Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. was under federal investigation, I found myself hoping in an odd Chicago-style sort of way that he was indeed guilty. I would hate to see the system punish an innocent man. But, guilty or not, he already is being punished in the court of public opinion without being formally charged with anything. His latest headache came Tuesday when the Chicago Sun-Times dropped a bombshell: Fundraiser Raghuveer Nayak of Oak Brook told federal authorities that Jackson personally directed him to offer then- Gov. Rod Blagojevich millions in campaign cash in return...

Voters are angry, and for good reason. Jobs are gone; poverty is up; one in four homes, the leading source of savings for Americans, is underwater, worth less than the mortgage. Many who voted for Obama are discouraged; some argue there isn't a whit of difference between the parties. An increasing percentage say they will vote against the incumbents simply to protest what is going on. But there is a great difference between the two parties. It's personified by the contrast between the positions of President Obama and House Minority Leader John Boehner. On taking office, faced with an economy...

American politics isn't beanbag. It is rough, bare-knuckled and often dirty. In today's 24/7 media environment, attack ads are remembered, and the truth has a hard time catching up with a lie. We now have entire TV networks that are essentially ideological propaganda outlets. With Republicans consolidated as the party of white sanctuary, anchored in the South, and Democrats championing diversity and inclusion, the politics of race is accentuated. But given all that, have we ever witnessed anything like the unrelenting assault on Barack Obama? "Birther" nonsense is believed by some 40 percent of Republicans. Staggering numbers think he's a...

The dysfunction of the Senate has now reached cruel depths. First we watched as Republicans systematically chose to filibuster every major vote, effectively ending majority rule by requiring 60 votes to get anything out of the Senate. Now, one Republican senator, Kentucky's Jim Bunning, who is not running for re-election, employed this power of obstruction to block a 30-day extension of unemployment benefits, aid for COBRA health insurance payments and a range of other key programs. Even while his Republican colleagues admitted that eventually -- perhaps soon -- they will renew the program, one senator ended unemployment insurance extensions for...

President Obama calls on Congress to pass a jobs program immediately, estimating its cost at $100 billion. This nestles the president's program nicely between the program passed by the House in December, totaling about $150 billion, and that being discussed by the Senate, said to be $80 billion and getting smaller by the day. Obama's plan -- in a clear concession to Republicans -- focuses on tax cuts and loans for small business. He endorses the "jobs tax credit," that would give small businesses a tax credit for new hires. He calls for eliminating capital gains taxes for some small...

The state of America's union is stark. The economic collapse triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble continues to take its toll. We know the statistics. Nearly one in five American workers is unemployed or underemployed. That means wages are losing ground. One in three homes with a mortgage is under water. Millions of Americans are headed to losing their homes. That will leave families adrift, children displaced. The desperate effort to keep the financial system from failing has succeeded. It has saved the big banks -- leaving them more concentrated than ever -- but not succeeded in removing...

'There is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there's the United States of America." With these words at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama electrified a divided country, launching a victorious Senate campaign, and four years later, a triumphant presidential campaign. He took office amid the worst conditions facing any incoming president since Franklin D. Roosevelt -- a great recession, two wars, financial free-fall. In his first year he staved off depression,...

Christmas approaches. Families gather. For some, there is a whirl of presents to wrap, cards to address, meals to cook. For many on this Christmas, times are hard, and it's worth recalling what the real story is about. The real story is not about Santa Claus, it's about Jesus the Christ. His birth is the real reason for the season. The real story is about two parents, ethnic minorities in the Roman Empire, fleeing for their lives, later to become immigrants in Egypt, traveling to make the census count or be punished. They had no place to stay. The innkeeper...

Unemployment has soared above 10 percent, but that figure doesn't count those forced to work part-time, those who have given up in despair, young people who were never able to get hired. There are now 25 million people unemployed. For African Americans, it is worse. African Americans are experiencing a silent depression. Unemployment is more than 18 percent; underemployment even higher. And among black teens, unemployment is more than 40 percent. This is combined with a staggering loss of wealth among what was the emerging African-American middle class -- a group devastated by the collapse of the housing bubble. African-Americans...

When I think back on the Rev. Martin Luther King on his birthday, I know he would have been both pleased and troubled by our current state. He would surely have been pleased at a picture of the Democratic debate in New Hampshire -- an African American, a woman, a white male populist and a Hispanic competing for the Democratic nomination to be president. When King had his dream, he knew a day like this might come. He surely would have been troubled by the state of our country. Poverty is up; hunger spreading. Millions of children go without adequate...

This nation faces a clear choice this September. President Bush will insist that Congress continue the war in Iraq and demand another $50 billion for the occupation. That is on top of the $147 billion already pending for Iraq and Afghanistan this year, and that's on top of the $460 billion annual military budget. The United States will spend about as much as the rest of the world combined on its military this year. At the same time, the president vows to veto any spending on domestic programs that exceed his budget. He has threatened to veto any increases for...

Fred Thompson calls the Bush economy ''the greatest story never told,'' lauding four years of growth, low unemployment, low inflation, high profits and rising productivity. All the Republican presidential candidates pledge to follow in the president's course. Think about this for a second. Americans are being terrorized by inadequate levees in New Orleans, by collapsing bridges in Minneapolis, by an aged water valve in Manhattan. Schools are aged and overcrowded, roads are gridlocked, airports overwhelmed, mass transit outmoded. Our parks are in decline for lack of upkeep. Millions of children go without health care or preschool. The costs of college...

A 40-year-old bridge collapses into the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Levees give way in New Orleans at the foot of the Mississippi. An 83-year-old steam pipe produces an eruption that terrorizes Manhattan. As our infrastructure literally crumbles beneath our feet, America is building the largest embassy compound in the world in Iraq -- an area larger than the Pentagon -- to manage a war now estimated to cost $1 trillion. What happened at both ends of the Mississippi and is happening in cities across the country are tragedies, but they aren't random accidents. They are the direct price of the...