Free Republic

Unless you’ve been sticking your head in the sand, or had a busy summer of spending American tax dollars with Obama on the golf course, you’re probably aware of all the race baiting going down in Ferguson, Missouri. Several weeks ago, a black man named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer, in the economically depressed community outside of St. Louis, creating a perfect recipe for race riots, looting, and liberal race baiting geared toward keeping Americans divided. America’s favorite race hustler, the Rev. Al Sharpton shot over to Ferguson before Brown’s body went cold, sensing...

Over the weekend, a headline from the Daily Caller caught my eye: “Conservatives Are Greatest Threat To Nation, Obama Suggests.” It was a look at some comments Barack Obama (or whatever his name is) made in an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. So, I pulled up the Times column, “Obama on the World,” and braced myself for the usual outrage that accompanies reading most anything that comes out of Obama’s mouth. I wasn’t disappointed. Most of the column was Obama’s deflecting, blaming and making excuses for his disastrous foreign policy and declaring that Israel should learn to...

As the sorry ramifications of situational morality play out on virtually a daily basis, many of us wonder where this all came from. With no hard edges on ANY concept these days, let alone good and evil, we observe the seeming paradox that with endless shades of gray comes not compromise, but more division! Of course, there is one thing on which we can all agree: money and debt. If I owed you $1000, you would consider yourself cheated unless I paid back every penny. There is a clear standard here. It’s the economy, stupid! Now throw into the mix...

Every now and then I come across a story so unbelievable, it’s simply laughable beyond all comprehension. Here’s the latest. Progressive socialists have revealed themselves to America for who they are and regardless of the media manipulation, lies, deceit, and coercion their agenda is failing — as it has worldwide. So what’s their next step? Well, according to a piece in the Washington Post by E J Dionne, “Its time for Progressives to reclaim the Constitution.” Really?? Dionne advocates for progressives to enshrine themselves in the fundamental document of our Republic, the U.S. Constitution. Excuse my vernacular, but I just...

"One of the most appalling things about NRA was the sudden multiplication of new rules with which businesses must comply, rules not resting on settled law but on arbitrary decisions of administrative bodies, subject to change almost without notice.The business community was suddenly called upon to rush to Washington to participate in the making of codes, codes which represented bargains among different elements of the industries, bargains with labor, and bargains with an extraordinarily incapable set of Government officials and employees, many of whom were extremely radical, and few of whom knew anything about business"

At the behest of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Cale Keable, D-Burrillville, the Rhode Island House has finally voted to ratify the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reqired direct election of U.S. Senators. Before the amendment took effect in 1913, senators were elected by state legislators. That system was widely criticized for breeding corruption as senate aspirants bribed lawmakers to secure the votes needed to win senate seats. The ceremonial resolution approved by the House doesn’t change anything, Keable acknowledged, but he said it does send a message ``that Rhode Island values democracy.’’ Rhode Island never ratified the 17th...

Remember that the little guy in America is rich by world standards. If you made a global division of wealth, the guy at the bottom in America would be in the top quintile, the top fifth of affluent people in the world. So if you’re a global redistributionist, you recognize, or you believe that even the poor guy in America has got to pay because if we’re going to have global redistribution, wealth has to be transferred even away from the American poor toward even poorer people in other countries. And so I think what we’re going to see under...

In the great dispute over utilization of our Federal lands in the West, the attempt is frequently made to end run the arguments over how best to manage those lands by asserting the Federal government has no capacity to own the lands. The argument goes that since the Constitution is a delegation of enumerated powers, if there is no provision therein for ownership of land, the Federal government must lack standing to be a legitimate owner. This is not an idle question. It is said to have given Jefferson great pause prior to deciding to make the Louisiana Purchase. However,...

Red Alert at the White House? When the VA scandal leads even such as Sam Stein to question liberalism . . . The VA scandal is getting so grievous for the Obama admin and for the liberal project at large that it has led even liberals to question their most cherished ideological beliefs. On today's Morning Joe, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post wondered "is liberalism, is progressivism, in this instance the right thing" given that the additional money the Obama admin spent on the VA has not yielded results? View the video here.

Have you noticed that the cries of the cultural and political “left” in the U.S. are becoming more venomous and shrill? As President Barack Obama flails on the international stage and approval for his domestic agenda and his party in Congress slips away, so-called “progressive” Americans are also watching something else slip away: the chances of politicians and government bureaucrats getting a strangle-hold on the petroleum energy industry. The stated goal of progressive energy policy is to stave-off “global warming” (or “climate change” or “climate disruption” or whichever term progressives choose at any given moment), and the means to that...

Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy is still a cause célèbre for the right-wing, drawing praise from Tea Party activists, Republican politicians, and conservative media outlets. Kevin Williamson of National Review called him a “dissident” like Mohandas Gandhi or Henry David Thoreau, Nevada Sen. Dean Heller hailed him as a “patriot,” and Sean Hannity has praised him as somebody that’s “willing to fight.” This was bad enough as an instance of conservative recklessness when Bundy was just a lawless rancher backed by armed militamen. It’s even worse now that we know that Bundy is full of racist bones. Here he is, as...

If you’ve ever engaged in a debate with a progressive, you know first-hand the definition of futility. After a few minutes, they run out of whatever talking points they just read in Mother Jones or Salon, and out come the names. It used to take longer – there were even reported cases of debates reaching double-digits in minutes before the expletives and personal attacks began. Cries of racism/sexism/homophobia used to be where Democrats ended up in a debate. Now, it’s where they start. What once was simply the last arrow in their quiver has turned into their favorite. Now, the...

A preferred ploy of left-wing change agents is to ridicule critics when they point out the undeniable parallels between the goals of today’s “progressive” movement, to include the Democratic Party in general, and the goals of the early, and very much still alive, communist movement.If, for instance, one mentions the historical fact that nearly every adult who, at any time, was in any position of influence over a young, soon-to-be-radicalized Barry Soetoro was an avowed communist, to include his own parents, then one is immediately mocked and dismissed as a neo-McCarthyite hack pining for the bygone days of the Red...

This short book rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. It shows that what we think of liberalism today – the top and bottom coalition we associate with President Obama - began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of the post-WWI disillusionment with American society. In the twenties, the first writers and thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and the right. The aim of liberalism’s foundational writers and thinkers such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis...

Author’s Note: This is a column I wrote back a few years ago but never published. Instead, it appeared in abbreviated form in my latest book, Letters to a Young Progressive. Given recent political trends, I thought it would be good to publish it in its original extended form. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the books of Ayn Rand. After escaping from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Rand became a famous American playwright, philosopher, and novelist. She has written many books – three of which I would urge everyone to read. The first,...

The roots of American liberalism are not compassion, but snobbery. That's the thesis of Fred Siegel's revealing new book, "The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class." The standard account from liberal historians over the years, and more recently in bestsellers by Glenn Beck, is a linear story: Government expansion starts with the Progressives of a hundred years ago, accelerates through the New Deal and the Great Society, and is followed up by the Obama stimulus and Obamacare. Siegel says it's more complicated than that. And he argues that literary figures contributed as much to the...

George Zimmerman on Monday accused President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder of making a “scapegoat” of him but that he does not know why they would do so. In an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Zimmerman said he believes that in his trial for the killing of Florida teen Trayvon Martin he faced a “miscarriage of justice,” and he described himself as a “scapegoat.” “A scapegoat for [what]?” Cuomo asked. “The government, the president, the attorney general,” responded Zimmerman, who was acquitted in the trial. “I don’t know what they’re thinking or why they’re thinking it, all I...

If you study John Dewey on the surface, much of his history has been brushed away. But if you really go digging, you will find out about two of Dewey's early radical colleagues, those being Corydon and Franklin Ford. (Moreso Franklin than Corydon) In his book "The Child of Democracy: Being the Adventures of the Embryo State", Corydon La Ford recounts some of the relationship between the Fords and John Dewey. What's written on page 174 is just odd: Professor Dewey, of Philosophy, sawed with me on the schools and welcomed the proposition of a new economy in the State...

That's why it's pretty chilling to hear Vladimir Putin hurling accusations at the West and pointing out that what's going on is identical to what went on when communism was established and religion was completely expunged from the Soviet Union. Between 1917 and 1937, almost a quarter of a million Christians were executed, and churches that survived destruction were converted into things like museums of atheism. Russian President Putin, who hasn't been shy about expressing his disapproval of homosexuality and has banned what he defined as "homosexual propaganda," had this to say: Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their...

While the Oscars routinely go political and the VMAs pull out all the shock stops, the annual Grammys telecast eschews overtly dividing moments. Assuming you don't mind musical genre mashups worth rubbernecking over. Tonight, LL Cool J emceed another Grammys telecast aimed at the widest audience possible until rappers Macklemore and Ryan Lewis sang Same Love while 33 couples--both straight and gay--got married. "This song is a love song not for some of us, but for all of us," said Queen Latifah who officiated the live wedding in front of a church-like setting complete a gospel choir. "Strip away the...