Free Republic

LOS ANGELES (KTLA) -- A back-to-school campaign is drawing criticism for encouraging graffiti among school-aged children. The campaign, dubbed by the art-retailer Aaron Brothers as "Artrageous," is hosting free events and giving out free "graffiti starter kits" to participants. But city council members are calling the move outrageous by promoting an act of vandalism as art. Councilman Dennis Zine introduced a resolution this week trying to stop the company from hosting the event, claiming kids may be tempted use the tools for illegal reasons. Zine is seeking a seek and desist order to legally prevent the store from holding the...

Though the group is barely formed, two things seem patently obvious. First, since elite liberals have failed in branding themselves as “liberal” and then “progressives” in a country that is center-right, No Labels seems to be another center-left attempt at re-branding the movement. Taken in this light, the group’s deciding not to have a label says a lot about how poorly any group or policy that has an overt center-left tag performs in the center-right political marketplace. Second, No Labels, which purportedly seeks consensus on a range of issues, accomplished its primary goal of bringing together the left, right, and...

Bill Gates: Capitalism Has 'Systemic' Problems Government Should Address Bill Gates says that the federal government’s job is to address the “systemic” problems of capitalism. Wednesday, November 10, 2010 By Nicholas Ballasy (CNSNews.com) - The CEO and Chairman of Microsoft Bill Gates said that capitalism’s “systemic" problems are not doing enough for research and “the needs of the poorest.” “In general, the world under funds research because the person who takes the risk of doing the research doesn’t capture the full benefit of having done it and so you know, capitalism does amazing things but it has one systemic problem...

Although it received very little coverage in the mainstream media, Barack Obama made some comments about globalism during his speech in Mumbai, India that were very eye-opening. As he was discussing the new realities of world trade in 2010, Obama warned against "those who see globalization as a threat" and he spoke of the "integrated world" in which we all now live. But is merging the entire globe into a one world economy, a one world financial system and a one world labor market really the best thing for the American people? For the past two decades, all U.S. presidents...

The Southern Poverty Law Center has produced a video, “’Sovereign Citizens’ and Law Enforcement: Understanding the Threat,” warning police that traffic stops involving “right wing” citizens could end up as deadly encounters. I’ve embedded it in the sidebar video player. Go ahead and watch it before reading on. There’s no question the officers were murdered. The question is, do we blame an ideology or the individuals who committed the act? And if the former is a factor, what responsible actions have the finger-pointers taken to limit the blame to a narrow spectrum of violence initiation advocates—as opposed to conflating their...

“Spread the Recovery” Labor Sec: Keeping People on Unemployment for Almost Two Years is Gov Moral Obligation http://www.theblaze.com/stories/%e2%80%9cspread-the-recovery%e2%80%9d-labor-sec-keeping-people-on-unemployment-for-almost-two-years-is-gov-moral-obligation/

Per copyright restrictions and FR posting guidelines, can't display the article. So, here's a link: http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2010/12/graydon-201012

US women's groups Thursday were bracing for a fight over abortion rights and gender equality with the new conservative majority in Congress. "We now face an anti-choice majority and a new speaker of the House who will threaten to roll back hard-fought progress for women," said Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest women's group in the United States. Republicans by Wednesday had picked up 60 seats in the 435-seat House of Representatives, well more than the 39 they needed for a majority. At least 49 of the newcomers to the House are opposed to...

When comics Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert announced their rallies on the national mall scheduled for this Saturday, they may not have expected—or wanted—an endorsement from Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. But Ayers told the Ford Motor Company-sponsored Green Festival in Washington, D.C. last Saturday that the event will be a needed respite from the “Alice in Wonderland” world of military domination of the planet and wars waged by the U.S. “empire.” The October 30 Stewart/Colbert rallies, dubbed “Restore Sanity” and “Keep Fear Alive,” are “worth attending,” Ayers said. Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn, once labeled a “violent maniac” by a...

I have heard Savage and some others calling for the return of the House Un-American Activities Committee. While that may sound like a good idea on the surface, in fact it would be a terrible mistake. I found several threads on Dunderground discussing how a revived HUAC could be used to investigate talk radio, the Tea Party, this site, Fox News, etc. I'd like to hear people's thoughts on this.

By funding numerous rightwing organisations, the mega-rich Koch brothers have duped millions into supporting big business The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related. An Astroturf campaign is a fake grassroots movement: it purports to be a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens, but in reality it is founded and funded by elite interests. Some Astroturf campaigns have no grassroots component at all. Others catalyse and direct real mobilisations. The Tea Party belongs...

The director general of the BBC admitted Thursday that his organisation had been guilty of a "massive bias to the left" but said "a completely different generation" of journalists now works at the broadcaster. "In the BBC I joined 30 years ago, there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of people's personal politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the left," Thompson said. "The organisation did struggle then with impartiality. And journalistically, staff were quite mystified by the early years of Thatcher."Now it is a completely different generation. There is much less overt tribalism among the...

If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would. But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio, that isn’t what you’d do at all. In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed...

MELBOURNE (AFP) – The Australian Sex Party on Tuesday promised to spice up campaigning for next month's elections with a manifesto "unlike Australia had ever seen before". Party chief Fiona Patten launched a risque national campaign at a Melbourne bar, saying her policies "would make (opposition Leader) Tony Abbott's hair stand on end and would turn (Prime Minister) Julia Gillard's hair grey". prospective "We've always been forward and we actually enjoy real action," Patten said, mocking Gillard and Abbott's "Moving Australia Forward" and "Stand Up For Real Action" slogans. The party's policies include legalising euthanasia, decriminalising all drugs for personal...

The idea that President Obama is anti-business broke into the mainstream this week. It has long been a widely held view on the right that Obama’s rhetorical nods to the free market and American business were little more than that. But as Washington slowly staggered back to work this week following a long July 4 weekend, discussions of Obama’s troubled relationship with the private sector popped up with surprising frequency. Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria wrote Monday that after speaking with numerous corporate executives, most of whom voted for Obama, he found that “all think he is, at his core, anti-business.” Tuesday,...

As the rest of us in America lose jobs by the millions, Obama wants to spend another $23 billion more of your taxes on public employees in a teacher bailout plan proposed by Senator Tom Harkin (D, Iowa). Harkin wants this new public employees bailout in order to prevent teachers layoffs, a concern echoed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. "We are gravely concerned," said Duncan in a letter to Congress, "that ongoing state and local budget challenges are threatening hundreds of thousands of teacher jobs for the upcoming school year." Oh, Duncan had all sorts of recommendations for Congress...

NEW YORK (AFP) – The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday. "If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York. A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected...

technician in the NYPD's forensics lab has been suspended for allegedly falsifying drug-test results, throwing into question "maybe thousands" of criminal cases -- and prompting a panicked meeting yesterday between cops and the city district attorneys. A Bronx drug trial was even abruptly halted last week because the longtime lab technician, Mariem Megalla, was supposed to testify in that case, sources told The Post. The NYPD last week sent out an emergency e-mail to the city's five DAs warning them about the evidence disaster and telling them to examine pending felony case files for evidence tested by her. In all...

Is the Obama Administration preparing the ground for a Ministry of Truthiness? The President's latest wide-ranging speech at Hampton University made a halt at a very strange outpost, before moving on to education. Obama, it seems, is vexed by the idea of conspiracy theories. Apparently people aren't thinking the right thoughts. Obama's internet Yoda, Professor Cass Sunstein*, is also besotted with the idea. Two years ago, Sunstein proposed what you might call an 'active government solution' to conspiracies. The best way to counter conspiracy theories, Sunstein and co-author Adrian Vermeule argued, is with the "cognitive infiltration of extremist groups". This...

You know, this has to be one of the strangest stories of the weekend. The New York Times, ever a champion of Obamacare during the recent debates, is reporting (from an April 30 article) on some rather compelling advice for the nation of Greece, which is currently teetering on the precipice of collapse. It’s part of a plan negotiated between officials of the European Union, the I.M.F. and the European Central Bank. What might help them? Don’t have nationalized health care… or any other industry for that matter.