Free Republic

It is one year since the Ukrainian city of Mariupol was largely destroyed by Russian forces and captured. It is now being transformed and presented as a showcase for rule from Moscow - and some Russians are even hoping to buy homes there. Russia claimed to have annexed Mariupol, along with all other occupied areas, following a series of referendums that have been widely condemned as sham exercises. About 90% of the city's buildings were damaged or destroyed by Russian shelling during a gruelling two-month siege. Thousands of civilians were killed and about 350,000 people left, out of the pre-war...

Potemkin villages” refer to the magnificent facades that Crimean governor Grigory Potemkin supposedly built in front of decrepit villages to impress Catherine the Great on her grand tour of the region. Today, there’s no better term than “Potemkin schools” to describe how educrats run public education in New York City. ... teachers at William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens complained that administrators forced them to pass failing students. Last year, a long-stalled investigation revealed that Maspeth High School in Queens repeatedly faked passing grades. In 2020, at Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill High School where more than 70% of the students...

Biden’s handlers, as hyper-partisan and self-serving as ever,have been reluctant to admit it up to now, but the Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday that “the Trump administration’s Iran envoy is facing ‘serious and credible’ threats to his safety, according to a non-public assessment produced this month by the State Department.” This news “was delivered to Congress amid a campaign of public death threats by Iran aimed at former president Donald Trump and top administration officials.” Why is all this happening? Because of the weakness of Joe Biden and his Potemkin presidency. The State Department noted that a “specific threat...

When Catherine the Great of Russia traveled in the late 18th-century, her former lover, Grigory Potemkin, would travel ahead of her and build hasty facades along the main thoroughfares in impoverished, bedraggled villages to create the impression of a prosperous nation. Thus, a Potemkin village is a fake that artificially puffs up a leader’s competence and popularity. Two recent videos, one of Biden’s fans turning out to greet him in Michigan and another of Trump’s fans turning out for him in Florida, show that Biden is a Potemkin president. It’s all fake.The first video shows Biden traveling through Antrim County,...

Video shows a second streering wheel in the vehicle that Joe Biden was “driving”Below is a still image from the video.Click on this link to see a bigger version of the image: https://danfromsquirrelhill.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/c-span.pnAnd here’s the video:https://www.bitchute.com/video/OBaxyPUP59K6/

College campuses still appear superficially to be quiet, well-landscaped refuges from the bustle of real life. But increasingly, their spires, quads and ivy-covered walls are facades. They are now no more about free inquiry and unfettered learning than were the proverbial Potemkin fake buildings put up to convince the traveling Russian czarina Catherine II that her impoverished provinces were prosperous. The university faces crises almost everywhere of student debt, university finances, free expression, and the very quality and value of a university education. Take free speech. Without freedom of expression, there can be no university. But if the recent examples...

In 1787, Russian Empress Catherine Romanov the Great visited Crimea. Her tour guide was her lover Prince Grigory Potemkin. The Prince's estates in Crimea were shoddy and run down. To give her majesty the impression that all was well and that Crimea was pristine and beautiful, he erected portable settlements and facades along the river that her boat would be travelling. The deception worked, The middle aged aristocrat impressed the Middle aged Empress and Prince Grigory curried favor with the empress. In reality, behind the facade, Grigory's subjects lived in abject poverty and misery. An Austrian delegation toured Potemkin's...

The U.S. labor market has recovered faster than expected, though that strength is tempered by economic challenges both at home and abroad, according to an annual assessment from the president's Council of Economic Advisers. The 430-page "Economic Report of the President" released today summarizes recent developments in the economy and highlights areas where the administration sees room for policy improvements. This year's report notes that the unemployment rate has fallen more quickly than most analysts predicted, dropping to 4.9 percent in January. That tightening job market is finally showing up in larger paychecks. Wage growth over the past 12 months...

I suppose that headline is a bit optimistic -- the media is very good about suppressing stories that expose them as frauds; see the Gosnell coverage. But we're coming to a point where the media's continue refusal to acknowledge the obvious is going to become very embarrassing to them. IBD states the obvious. (I can't quote it because it's short, but it dispels so much of the previous myth-making here; do read it.) Suggesting, to me, that we're about to hit the moment of Peak Media Embarrassment is the fact that the tech community is now openly referring to this...

This morning on the White House lawn, Pope Francis introduced himself as the child of an immigrant – a position many young children in America can relate to. Later on during the papal parade, a young girl – Sophie Cruz – bypassed police blockades and just as she was being escorted back to her family, the Pope allowed her to come to the vehicle. His security detail lifted the 5-year-old to the Pope, where she received a hug and left the Pope with a gift – a letter pleading with Pope Francis to do something about immigration reform in the...

President Obama is speaking at George Mason University today (traffic is insane!). He has a long awaited jobs one-liner: the U3 unemployment rate fell to 7.8%. He probably won’t mention that U6 unemployment, the more indicative measure of true unemployment, remained at 14.7%. This is due to a large increase in the number of workers working part time for economic reasons. Change in nonfarm payrolls rose by 114,000. Hardly comforting given the 12,088,000 unemployed. And remember that the survey of households uncovered an additional 800,000 jobs this month, 187,000 of which government workers. [This reminds me of the miraculous appearance...

There's apparently less than meets the eye at an OWS occupation in London -- vacant tents masquerading as demonstration participants. The UK Daily Mail headlines: The thermal images that prove 90% of tents in the Occupy camp in London are left EMPTY overnight Here is one of their images:

In the 1700s, the courtesans of Queen Catherine of Russia gave her tours along the Volga river where she witnessed a happy and thriving bourgeoisie living in clean and prosperous villages. But this was all a show to cover disease, poverty, and misery that lay just behind the facade that had been erected for her benefit. This is the origin of the phrase Potemkin Village, a place where a politically generated appearance covers a less impressive underside. Europe is today filled with Potemkin Villages, none as successful as Denmark. Denmark is often cited as an exemplary country within the EU,...

This is so evil ..... and the corrupt media is in lock step, goose step. I watched that poor piece of theater and I knew it ........ well, at least we know the few in the military who are anti-American. Obama’s Potemkin Military Reception Flopping Aces (hat tip Dave) “Cheered wildly by U.S. troops,” begins Jennifer Democratic Operative Loven’s AP report on Obama’s surprise visit to Iraq on Tuesday. Quite a contrast to the silent treatment Marines gave Obama at his Camp LeJeune speech in late February. Just how did Obama manage to fix that little problem? According to a...

This is an obituary for the Oxford Union, which claims to be one of the most famous and distinguished debating societies in the world. The reality is that it is no longer a debating society at all; it has become a propaganda platform for extremist views, primarily of the hard-left. It has now stopped even pretending to present both sides of controversial issues. To be sure, it puts forward a façade of balance, by presenting speakers who purport to represent both sides of an issue. But the Oxford Union has become a Potemkin village where a façade of fairness serves...

As photojournalists gather around, an anti-WTO protester throws rocks over a fence towards police guarding the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun Thursday, Sept. 11, 2003.(AP Photo/Victor Ruiz)