Free Republic

The soon-to-be White House chief strategist laid out a global vision in a rare 2014 talk, one where he said racism in the far right gets “washed out” and called Vladimir Putin a kleptocrat. BuzzFeed News publishes the complete transcript for the first time.

Kleptocracy: A form of government in which corrupt rulers (kleptocrats) use their power to exploit the people and natural resources of their own territory in order to extend their personal wealth and political power. - Wikipedia. Until now, the present generation of ultra-rich ruthlessly exploit the media disninformation technicians, the Winston Smiths, to bring billions under the sway of mass delusion. But is there potential for the media to take advantage of their present idea hegemony, to stage a coup, to overthrow their masters? In past centuries, the was the concern with the Military. (You likely never heard that...

Did you see that Sen. Bernie Sanders released his income taxes?....well, his 2014 income taxes, anyway. He did it around 7 p.m. on a Friday night, on the same day that the Democratic presidential hopeful was making international headlines by speaking at the Vatican and meeting Pope Francis, for at least a handshake. In journalism, releasing information at that off hour is what we call "a Friday news dump" -- usually an attempt to bury bad news. That's weird, because if I were handling PR for the Bernie Sanders campaign, I'd be shouting the news from the Green Mountain-tops. They...

A top presenter on Russian state TV has come out firmly in favour of Donald Trump in his bid to become US president, hailing him as an "anti-establishment" candidate who is ready to co-operate with Moscow. Russian state TV has regularly shown sympathy towards Mr Trump, especially after his apparently complimentary remarks about President Vladimir Putin. But it is only in the last week or so that it has started to unequivocally praise him. Fronting his two-and-half hour news review on official channel Rossiya 1 on 13 March, Dmitri Kiselyov hit out strongly at what he saw as a conspiracy...

A new Russian poll questions the validity of Russian polling results. When Russians were asked about how comfortable they feel expressing their views on current events, more than a quarter said they were fearful, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported Friday. "The problem of socially acceptable responses in surveys is nothing new," said Konstantin Kalachev, a political consultant who spoke with Kommersant. "This is called a social spiral of silence. People follow the majority. They are afraid to stand out, superstitiously prefer not to stir the pot, and they answer with pre-readied, upbeat mantras."

Data for 2014—the latest year available—indicates that burglars absconded with $3.9 billion worth of victims’ property. At the same time, “civil forfeiture” made off with $4.5 billion worth. The civil forfeiture statute was initially sold as a tool for coping with organized crime. It has morphed into crime wave in which police seize cash from individuals on the slimmest of pretexts and dare the owner to try to get it back through cumbersome and costly procedures. A favored tactic is to assert that any cash that a person may be carrying was obtained via criminal activity. As proof, police cite...

Senate Republicans are coalescing around a plan to extend Obamacare subsidies for up to two years if the Supreme Court strikes them this month. The court is due to rule within days on whether the president’s health care law allows people using HealthCare.gov to get insurance subsidies. If the court rules against the White House and strikes the subsidies, Republicans say they want to be ready to protect the more than 6 million people who could lose their subsidies. In a closed-door meeting Wednesday, Republicans crafted the outline of a plan that would extend the subsidies for a period of...

(54:10) FRONTLINE investigates the accusations surrounding Vladimir Putin's reign in Russia.

Fidel Castro seized power in January 1959 after waging a guerilla war against then-dictator Fulgencio Batista. The charismatic bearded revolucionario dressed in a dark olive uniform promised to restore order and hold elections. People on the streets of Havana cheered and celebrated the return of fighters from the Sierra Maestra. Batista had fled and Castro was their hero. But the dream of a new dawn was short lived—at least a democratic one. Soon enough, Castro turned his back on those ideals, embracing Soviet style communism. Cuban exiles fled. Others were ousted. In 1961, the United States broke off relations with...

The Federal Reserve may be about to turn more aggressive in its regulation of the financial system. Fed Chair Janet Yellen suggested Tuesday that current regulatory rules might not be enough to prevent the kind of risk-taking that triggered the 2008 financial crisis and nearly toppled the entire banking system. She said the largest U.S. banks may need to hold additional capital to withstand periods of financial stress. Non-banks with deep reaches into the financial system might also need to meet tougher rules, she said. Such firms range from money market mutual funds to private equity and hedge funds. …

Attorney General Eric Holder exploded at Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert during a House hearing Tuesday. In the midst of questions about the Justice Department’s failure to divulge documents about the Holy Land Foundation terror funding trial, Gohmert made a side comment about how the House of Representatives found Holder in contempt in 2012 for refusing to turn over documents related to the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal. “I realize that contempt is not a big deal to our attorney general, but it is important that we have proper oversight,” Gohmert said. “You don’t want to go there, buddy! You...

In other words, stop thinking of the Democratic Party as merely a political party, because it’s much more than that. We’re not just the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition. Not just the party of Aaron Burr, Boss Tweed, Richard J. Croker, Bull Connor, Chris Dodd, Richard Daley, Bill Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II. Not just the party of Kendall “Agent 202” Myers, the State Department official recruited as a Cuban spy along with his wife during the Carter administration. Rather, think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal...

Glenn Reynolds not only runs the indispensable Instapundit website, he is also a distinguished law professor at the University of Tennessee and writes a regular column for USA Today. Today’s column is an important one, “Our Criminal Justice System Has Become a Crime.”

The resolution of the bank crisis in Cyprus by seizing depositors money and forcibly converting it into equity shares in the banks was hailed as “an innovative way out of a plethora of bad investments by bank officials” by Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch chairman of the Eurozone. “Under the old rules, losses incurred by bad investments would fall upon the stockholders and officers of the bank,” Dijsselbloem said. “Stockholders would typically lose their money and officers their jobs—all because of an imbalance between deposits and assets. By mandating the conversion of a portion of deposits into new shares the stockholders...

Communist China is this month celebrating its tenth anniversary of joining the World Trade Organization. The subtitle ought to be China's tenth anniversary of cheating the United States. The globalists talked us into supporting this cozy trade relationship with China by getting U.S. manufacturers and farmers to salivate at the prospect of gaining access to the world's biggest market. China, on the other hand, joined the WTO to implement its plan to grow into an economic superpower the same way the United States became powerful in our pre-New Deal century, i.e., by protecting local industries and financing our government with...

I’ve written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of “wealth redistribution” that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles—producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance. Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many...

With Americans burdened with high taxes, one would hope that the government they pay for would at least be used efficiently and wisely. These Top 10 Examples of Government Stupidity from around the country would suggest otherwise: 1. Sensitivity training: The Omaha, Neb., public school district spent $130,000 in federal stimulus money to buy manuals to instruct teachers and school administrators on how to be culturally sensitive. Green car bust: The city of Salinas, Calif., invested more than $500,000 in Green Vehicles, an electric car venture that failed to produce a single car.

The news of Hungary effectively seizing private pension fund assets to pay for the debt obligations of the state last week should come as yet another reminder of the urgent need to get tax-sheltered retirement savings away from the clutches of the state before it's too late. Hungary is just the latest country to decide that it's citizens retirement savings are the property of the state. The last major country to use similar tactics was Argentina who confiscated about $3.2 billion of pension savings in 2001 before the country stopped servicing its debt and then nationalized the $24 billion industry...

In a classic case of misdirection, while the media are preoccupied with the fate of the Bush tax cuts, President Obama is preparing to attend a United Nations summit next week to endorse “innovative finance mechanisms”—global taxes—to drain even more wealth out of the U.S. economy. A draft “outcome document” produced in advance of the September 20-22 U.N. Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) commits the nations of the world to supporting “innovative financing mechanisms” to supplement foreign aid spending. The term “innovative financing mechanisms” is a U.N. euphemism for global taxes. But the document actually goes further, praising...

Socialism's greatest lie is that it promises the people something for nothing, services and programs of all kind that will either be "free" or more affordable than the free market variety. But just like the ads promising you a free iPod or a chance to make millions from home while you yawn, socialism is not something for nothing, instead more often it's nothing for something. The idea that the government will take care of you is appealing, entire nanny states have been built on that proposition. But the government can't take care of you, it can't even pay its own...