Free Republic

"America, in this sense, is a country of victorious minorities. The situation began with the protection of rights, but has developed into a dictatorship . . .""we can say that dozens of such families are ready to move to Russia . . . If you analyze the situation in the United States, it has to do with the nation's process of actively accepting LGBT values, same-sex marriages, and so on. As this process intensified, people began to think about moving to other countries, including Russia . . .RT's "Not Alone" project received a request from Orthodox families from the United...

In perfect tabloid fashion one can expect this time in a contentious election cycle (remember Herman Cain), supermarket tabloid The National Enquirer decided to fabricate a sex scandal about Ted Cruz that could be the plot for a sequel to Eyes Wide Shut if it weren't so unbelievable.

Barbara Boxer, the senator from California, leaned over her press secretary, Peter True, as he sat at an HP desktop computer and tried to find an old campaign ad from 2010. Boxer wanted me to see the ad because it featured interviews with former employees of HP who had been laid off by the storied technology company’s one-time CEO, Carly Fiorina, who in 2010 challenged Boxer for her seat and now, five years later, seeks the Republican nomination for a somewhat higher office: president of the United States. -snip- Fiorina was, in Boxer’s telling, a monstrously greedy businesswoman who would...

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina may not be a liberal, but she certainly appears to be a fan of the liberal arts. The 2016 contender said Monday that her college degree in medieval history made her uniquely qualified to combat ISIS and other terrorist groups. “My degree in medieval history and philosophy has come in handy,” Fiorina said at a town hall in Windham, N.H., “because what ISIS wants to do is drive us back to the Middle Ages, literally.”

Carly Fiorina received a BA from Stanford in medieval history and philosophy almost 40 years ago, but she’s always ready to revisit her undergraduate glory days. Last Sunday, the Republican presidential candidate tried to burnish her national security credentials by claiming that her bachelor’s degree prepared her to fight Isis. She said: “Finally my degree in medieval history and philosophy has come in handy, because what Isis wants to do is drive us back to the Middle Ages, literally”. I’d like to state unequivocally that my years of training to become a professor of medieval history in no way make...

In the week since Wednesday’s contentious GOP debate, Carly Fiorina has walked away the winner—both on social media and in the polls. She peaked in Google searches when mentioning her daughter—who passed away from an overdose—in response to a question about drug reform, earned the biggest applause of the night by cooly but deftly responding to Donald Trump’s criticisms of her appearance, and painted herself as a Washington outsider in a race where non-politicians like neurosurgeon Ben Carson and real estate mogul Trump are leading the pack. -snip- Much like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns during the 2008 subprime mortgage...

That Carly Fiorina was a one-woman wrecking crew during her tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard was never in doubt. But what follows is a tale that is now being picked up and distributed as the Republican Party seeks a nominee who combines business savvy and executive know-how. Sadly, the former executive who most closely fits this particular bill also has exhibited the kind of corporate arrogance and blind certitude that came close to sinking what had been considered among the world’s best technology companies: Hewlett-Packard. At HP beginning in the mid-1990s, Fiorina was responsible for the ill-fated merger with Compaq,...

For those of us that live in California, there’s a palpable deja vu in Carly Fiorina’s declaration to run for president on the Republican ticket. Smatterings of those late night TV advertisements are still sloshing around our brains. Her campaign positions her as the outsider, the embodiment of the American dream. As her website informs us, “Only in the United States of America can a young woman start as a secretary and work to become Chief Executive of one of the largest technology companies in the world.” Implicit in that leap is the kind of power that is a companion...

As Carly Fiorina gains increased media attention and ramps up her presidential campaign after her strong performance in the second Republican debate last week, she may still be struggling to overcome the obstacles that led to her defeat the only previous time she sought elected office. While Fiorina has billed herself as an "outsider" candidate, she does have political experience -- she just wasn’t successful. Her 2010 campaign to unseat U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer in California saw fierce campaigning (she’s often remembered for the “demon sheep” ad) and pressure on Fiorina to defend her business record before the former Hewlett-Packard...

The surging candidate’s remarks on Planned Parenthood drew Steinem’s ire. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem blasted Carly Fiorina in a post on her Facebook page, saying the presidential hopeful’s commentary on Planned Parenthood at the Republican debate last week “was a 100 percent lie.” “I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes,” Fiorina railed during the debate. “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” Fiorina was referring to a series of “sting” videos produced by the Center for Medical...

Carly Fiorina made several false, misleading and unsubstantiated claims in responding to questions about Hewlett-Packard’s involvement with a foreign subsidiary that sold products in Iran. The former HP CEO claimed that a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation “proved that neither I nor anyone else in management knew about” a Hewlett-Packard subsidiary doing business in Iran. We have found no such ruling from the SEC, nor could Fiorina’s campaign provide one. She also claimed that the company that actually sold HP products in Iran was “not honest” with HP about its dealings. But that company said in a 2003 press release...

Carly Fiorina’s campaign is defending her record as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard. In a post published on Medium, Fiorina’s Deputy Campaign Manager Sarah Isgur Flores took on criticism about the candidate, pushing back on recent reports characterizing the retired tech executive's tenure as a failure. “There’s a lot of armchair CEO’ing going on around here. And some folks seem to have taken the ‘Invent’ motto to mean they get to invent their own facts,” Isgur Flores writes, referring to the HP motto during Fiorina’s tenure. Fiorina was fired in 2005. Isgur Flores then goes on to list 10 things she...

As a professor, hearing my name once, let alone twice, before 25 million TV viewers in an historic U.S. presidential debate is a surreal experience. “The head of the Yale business school, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, wrote a paper recently,” Donald Trump proclaimed in his attack on Carly Fiorina’s business record, “one of the worst tenures for a CEO that he has ever seen.” Immediately, the phones started ringing, text messages dinging, emails beeping—notes from thrilled old students, proud colleagues, teasing friends, pleased former teachers, curious clients, and my own immediate family in shared, flushed, utter shock. So used to being identified...

As Fiorina admits, I have been critical of her for over a decade—long before she announced her political aspirations. I have studied her business record, challenged her leadership abilities and have come to agree with the assessment that she was one of the worst technology CEOs in history. I stand by that evaluation. Fiorina can attack me all she wants, as she did when she called me “a well-known Clintonite” (an absurd allegation I’ll get to later) who “had it out for me from the moment that I arrived at Hewlett Packard.” But no amount of one-liners to Trump, weekend...

<p>"It's not like people who are Muslim who do wacky things have a monopoly on it," Levy claimed. "We have hypocrites across faiths, Jewish, Christian who say they're out for God and end up doing not so nice things."</p> <p>Maher, true to form, called his guest out and said his premise was "liberal [BS]."...</p>

Austrian School economist Bob Murphy responds to Robert Reich's video, "The Truth About the Economy."

Sticks and stone may break your bones - but words can destroy. Think about the Swift Boat campaign and what it did to John Kerry in 2004 and what rumors of a secret love child did to John McCain's bid for the White House in 2000. ~~snip~~ The Internet is making it easy to set these little fires and fan them into a blaze of untruths, and this election has become so intense that groups wanting to undermine the other guy have sunk to a new level. Unregulated attack groups like the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, called 527s...

There is the story about a motorist evacuating New Orleans at the onset of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The motorist ran out of fuel on a crowded expressway. When later asked why he did not turn off the motor to conserve fuel, he replied, "Why would I do that? I needed the air conditioning." The story illustrates a fundamental obstacle in our country's critical need to conserve energy and use it wisely. "Even when you are running for your life, with no fuel supply in sight, people do not make the connection with the fact that their fuel tank contains...

Dear Readers, I've received so many messages about my review of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" that, frankly, I don't see how the Answer Man can process them. I could print a dozen or a hundred, but that would lead us into an endless loop. Many are supportive. More are opposed to the movie and just about everything in it, and are written by people who have not seen the movie and will not see it for a variety of reasons, including the theory that it is "liberal propaganda." What I fail to understand is why global warming should be...

ST. PETERSBURG - A six-hour period of black on white violence 19 months ago has earned St. Petersburg an unflattering distinction in a new state report: the city with the most hate crimes in 2004. Police Chief Chuck Harmon cut short his holiday vacation to hold a news conference about the numbers, contained in an annual report by Attorney General Charlie Crist. The figures were an aberration, Harmon said, largely the result of one evening of civil unrest on May 12, in which a group of about 125 people, mostly black, threw bricks and bottles at drivers, mostly white. One...