Free Republic

I remember when 1984 rolled around, with the Cold War still going in high gear (in fact higher than ever after Reagan correctly called the Soviet Union “an evil empire”), and it was natural that the literary world would mark the occasion with a callback to George Orwell’s 1984. The anti-anti-Communist left at the time labored mightily to downplay or distract from Orwell’s anti-Communist message, offering convoluted takes about how 1984 was “really about us” in the democratic West. These were snortworthy takes, to be sure, but right now it is appearing that Orwell’s description of the tyrannical drive to...

Anyone remember the Obama Administration’s lugubrious “Life of Julia” slide show video, promoting their cradle-to-grave socialist vision for a single American woman? It seems to have been scrubbed from the internet, but my favorite part was the segment where Julia “decided to have a child,” with no mention then or after of a thing called a “father.” It seemed to be spontaneous procreation! Well now the Biden Administration has come out with the “Life of Linda,” showing us how great Linda’s life will be if we pass the Build Back Better plan. You have to see it, not to believe...

Diahann Carroll, the captivating singer and actress who came from the Bronx to win a Tony Award, receive an Oscar nomination and make television history with her turns on Julia and Dynasty, has died Friday. She was 84. Carroll was known as a Las Vegas and nightclub performer and for her performances on Broadway and in the Hollywood musicals Carmen Jones and Porgy & Bess when she was approached by an NBC executive to star as Julia Baker, a widowed nurse raising a young son, on the comedy Julia. As the sultry fashionista Dominique Deveraux ... Carroll played a much...

Secret Service Director Julia Pierson will face questions about how an armed intruder jumped the White House fence and made it as far as the East Room when she testifies before a House committee on Tuesday. Sources confirmed to Fox News on Monday that 42-year-old Omar Gonzalez overpowered a Secret Service officer in the Sept. 19 incident -- this led to a struggle and "wrestling" inside the executive mansion as he darted through. Gonzalez was eventually tackled by a counter-assault agent in the East Room after he reached the doorway to the Green Room, a parlor overlooking the South Lawn....

A Millennial Love Story began the day Pajama Boy (P.J.) met Julia in a rope line outside an elite venue for an Obama fundraiser. They chatted excitedly as they awaited his coming. Talking while texting friends, they soon realized that they both attended the same Obama for President campaign event back in 2007 while in college, although Julia had fainted and missed part of Barack’s awesome, inspirational speech. They hardly minded when it was announced that the President had entered through a back door and was already inside the hotel – a place where their presence was prohibited by the...

Nearly 100,000 Russian forces have massed on Ukraine's border, a top Ukrainian defense official told an American audience Thursday, giving a number far higher than US military estimates. "Almost 100,000 soldiers are stationed on the borders of Ukraine and in the direction ... of Kharkiv, Donetsk," Andriy Parubiy, chairman of Ukraine's national security council, said via a webcast from Kiev. "Russian troops are not in Crimea only, they are along all Ukrainian borders. They're in the south, they're in the east and in the north," Parubiy said.

"...........Her version of her story has an ideological charge. So much of her allure for her feminist political base is her status as a go-it-alone single mom. That she benefited from the stability and resources of marriage can’t be allowed to muddy the picture.The Today Show interview mentioned her second marriage, but slightingly: “[Wendy] Davis married again for a time.” For a time? She was married to Jeff Davis for 18 years!One of the best things that happened to her, obviously, is that she got married to someone in a position to help her. But Davis and her hagiographers in...

“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.” – P.J. O’Rourke Okay, that used to be funny. Before it was hijacked by the Teahadists and used to hold hostages and make ransom demands. Butt now I see that sticker shock is starting to stun people all across America, even journalists: Obamacare is not just creating havoc in state exchanges, it is roiling the larger private health insurance market. Costs are skyrocketing thanks to the expensive mandates, regulations and taxes buried in the Affordable Car Act. Call it the Unaffordable...

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard surprised voters on Wednesday by announcing that national elections will be held September 14, in a country where governments have traditionally given the opposition little more than a month’s notice to keep a strategic advantage. September 14, 2013, falls on Yom Kippur, leading former opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull to post on Twitter that he was “deeply disappointed that Julia Gillard chose to hold the election on Yom Kippur — the most solemn and sacred day of the Jewish year.”

The name of the program now escapes me. Several months ago, while flipping channels with the remote, I stopped on an MTV show about a working mom whose whole life was upended when her partner announced that he was splitting. It caught my attention because this mother lived in a nice apartment that looked like one in my suburban New Jersey town, and she was applying for food stamps. This wasn't your caricature "taker"—the woman had a real job. With her partner leaving, however, she could no longer afford the rent, and she would have trouble providing for her two...

First it was Julia, now National Review has an excellent piece on the latest female exploited by the Obama Campaign. Read it here.

The U.S. welfare system sure creates some crazy disincentives to working your way up the ladder. Benefits stacked upon benefits can mean it is financially better, at least in the short term, to stay at a lower-paying jobs rather than taking a higher paying job and losing those benefits. This is called the “welfare cliff.” Let’s take the example of a single mom with two kids, 1 and 4. She has a $29,000 a year job, putting the kids in daycare during the day while she works. As the above chart – via Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s secretary of Public Welfare...

Julia Child (née McWilliams; August 15, 1912 – August 13, 2004) click for youtube vid Would have been 100 tomorrow.

Remember Julia, the fictional woman created by the Obama campaign to illustrate the benefits of big government? Now there is hard evidence that Julia should probably stay home and pick up her government check rather than getting a good job. A new chart put together by Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State, shows that Julia, as a single mom with two kids in daycare, would be better off remaining in her $29,000 per year job than she would be in a $69,000 per year job because of the benefits she would obtain from the government. In the lower paying job,...

When Gloria Steinem popularized the saying “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” I wasn't old enough to wear a bra, never mind burn it. However, thanks to that feminist credo and its infiltration of 1970s popular culture, women of my generation grew up believing we could make it on our own, like Mary Tyler Moore. While her theme song cautioned, “This world is awfully big, girl,” our confidence rose with Mary's cap, tossed triumphantly to “You're going to make it after all.” Indeed, we did make it, though presidential campaign operatives peddling the “War on...

When President Obama's re-election campaign put up its "Life of Julia" feature, the mockery from the right came thick and fast, focusing on Julia's creepy faceless anonymity—literally, the way she is drawn, she has no face—and on the apparent absence in her life of family, friends, a mentor, a spouse, or anyone or anything to compete with the beneficence of the federal government. Beyond the mockery, though, there is a sense that "Julia" reveals some very important things about the worldview of the left. Here's one point I haven't seen made elsewhere: the fact that Julia is apparently in the...

"The Life of Julia," the Obama campaign's new interactive Web ad, follows a cartoon everywoman, Julia, through the milestones of a middle-class American life: education, work, motherhood, retirement. One milestone is pointedly missing: marriage. But, then again, why should Julia get married? She doesn't need to. Like a growing number of single women with children, Julia is married to the state. As a character drawn and focus-grouped by political consultants, Julia is designed to remind voters of the government programs President Obama champions and likely GOP nominee Mitt Romney is ostensibly intent on taking away. Julia goes to school (with...

For months, President Obama has been focused on courting the American woman. This week the latest CBS News/New York Times poll shows that she is not returning the love. In fact, it appears that she is seriously thinking about breaking up with him. In the last month, Romney has managed to close the gap with women voters and according to the CBS/New York Times poll now leads President Obama among women voters 46-44%. While poll numbers will fluctuate through November, and the actual significance of the ballot question will start to be clearer after Labor Day, Romney’s growing strength with...

If “Julia” taught us anything, it’s that the Democrats' agenda — a set of cradle-to-grave policies designed to “protect” women and keep them under the auspices of government control — is doomed to fail come November. Yesterday’s CBS/New York Times poll that found that women support Romney over Obama 46-44, revealing that playing gender politics actually doesn’t win you women’s — or men’s — votes. The fact is this “gender split” really just mimics the general vote split, suggesting that these ideas are widely unpopular. As I’ve written before, the “War on Women” narrative is risky business, as women are...

Somewhere in the recent past (say, about the time "Dreams From My Father" was published), liberals decided reality wasn't really their thing. It was too dull. It didn't give closure. Sometimes the endings weren't right. So it turns out that Obama's main squeeze in his young days was a "composite," digitally enhanced for your reading experience. Then, it turned out that even the blond, blue-eyed, whey-faced Elizabeth Warren, running against Scott Brown in Massachusetts for his seat in the Senate, was hired by Harvard as an American Indian, though the proportion of Cherokee in her bloodline was just 1 in...