Free Republic

A new documentary makes the controversial case that a political cocktail of big corporate money and racially charged sentiments has helped fuel the rise of the tea party. And squarely behind that movement, the film argues, are the Koch brothers. Co-Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin sat down with “Top Line” to discuss their film, “Citizen Koch,” and why they say the GOP’s deep-pocketed donors, the Koch brothers, are such figures in American politics today. “Money – $100 billion now,” Deal said in explaining the Kochs’ influence. “When we started out making this film, their net worth was about $68...

The Taliban prisoner swap for Bowe Bergdahl might do some good, but fear and anger are getting in the way of a realistic appraisal.Richard Hofstadter opened his 1968 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," with this line: "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds." He continues, "Behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." One wonders...

‘Two, four, six, eight. Stop the violence. Stop the rape.” So chanted a group of Ohio University students calling themselves “f***rapeculture” at a protest a couple of years ago. Rape-culture activists have become a fixture on campuses throughout the country, and now, 55 colleges — including Harvard, Princeton, and Berkeley — are under federal investigation for mishandling sexual-assault complaints. Some of my conservative/libertarian sisters have pointed out that the statistics on sexual assault are wildly inflated. Christina Hoff Sommers notes that the “one in five women are victims of rape” statistic that the Centers for Disease Control popularized (and that...

Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said Sunday that white Americans so disregard the ongoing existence of racism that they’re more likely to believe in ghosts. “More whites believe in ghosts than believe in racism,” Abdul-Jabbar, a former center for the Los Angeles Lakers, told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. ”That’s why we have shows like Ghostbusters and don’t have shows like Racistbuster. You know, it’s something that’s still part of our culture and people hold on to some of these ideas and practices just out of habit and saying that, well, that’s the way it always was. But things have...

....The Ballad of the Civil Rights Movement has long been liberals’ favorite bed-time story. Martin Luther King Day may be the only day of the year when they feel completely, unambiguously proud to be Americans. It’s hard to exaggerate how important this is to liberal political thinking. They are perpetually looking for new ways to recapture that high. Conservatives tend to miss this because we see the Civil Rights story as settled history. We’re all pleased to have sloughed off the bigotry of our ancestors. Of course we want people to be judged “by the content of their character” and...

I stand by every word of it. And it’s even worse today. Of the thousands of Clinton presidential records released to the public last week, one among them has received of the bulk of attention: a 332-page memo from 1995. The memo, which offers an in-depth analysis of the right-wing media, describes how conservative conspiracy theories about the Clintons passed from the fringes to the mainstream. (...) Let’s go all the way back to the summer of 1995. At the time, my then colleague (and current business partner) Mark Fabiani and I were working at the White House as lawyers...

Without mentioning reports that the man accused of shooting up a Jewish Community Center over the weekend was apparently a fan of the left's Max Blumenthal, CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen exploited the murders to claim the American Right is more deadly than jihadists.

A new Facebook meme paints two leading Republicans as anti-science because of their alleged views of the age of the Earth. The Facebook group Being Liberal posted a picture March 10, 2014, featuring side-by-side images of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., looking somewhat sheepish. Bolded text under the images describes the senators’ views on the age of the Earth and the extinction of the dinosaurs. According to the meme, Rubio "believes Earth (is) 9,000 years old," and "humans hunted dinosaurs to extinction." Paul, the image proclaims, says the Earth is 10,000 years old and believes "God...

Barbara Boxer: Why no Viagra complaints? By: Tal Kopan March 25, 2014 11:28 AM EDT As the Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday about the Obamacare mandate on birth control coverage, Sen. Barbara Boxer questioned why those up in arms about the requirement have no problem with most insurance covering Viagra. “I have never heard Hobby Lobby or any other corporation, I could be wrong, or any other boss complain that Viagra is covered in many insurance plans, practically all of them, or other kinds of things, you know, for men, which I won’t go into,” Boxer said Tuesday on MSNBC’s...

Sarah Palin believes flight 370 flew directly to heaven... how is she a senator? — DIMV (@Freshselective) March 21, 2014 The Daily Currant strikes again. The website, which calls itself “The Global Satirical Newspaper of Record,” last week claimed that Sarah Palin told Sean Hannity she believes Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 “accidentally flew too high and got stuck in heaven.” The story was cross posted to other non-satire sites and managed to fool quite a few.

Val Vilott, president of the DC Abortion Fund, has responded to “ignorant” conservatives who have recently voiced outrage over the organization’s controversial coat hanger pendants. Before the passage of Roe v Wade (1973), some women seeking illegal abortions resorted to terminating their own pregnancies with coat hangers. While conservatives claim that reproductive rights advocates are insensitive and disgusting for making the horrors of illegal abortion a fashion statement, they apparently fail to realize that the policies they want to put in place may lead some women down that very path. Vilott writes: The coat hanger is a symbol of the...

RUSH: The Republican Party establishment... Let me set this up by going back to the 2012 presidential campaign. Remember when you learned that the Romney campaign, along with Republican establishment types, had put the word out that there was to be no criticism of Obama? In fact, I remember... I think I told you all this. A prospective Republican presidential candidate in 2010 or 2011 visited me. There was some confab here in Palm Beach, and this man called and wanted to come by and tell me what his plans were. So I said, "Sure, come on by Sunday morning."...

It’s a compelling story, isn’t it? A 7 year old’s birthday party invitation returned to the senders (two gay dads) with that note on it? The radio station posted that note on their Facebook page mid week this past week, and of course, readers went completely crazy over it, expressing their due outrage and offering their sympathy and support to the fathers. It spread like wildfire. The problem with the story, though, is that Steve Harper and Deanna (last name unknown) made up the entire thing, right down to the actual invitation, which they apparently hand-crafted. And they wrote this...

According to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, about 20 percent of the population is attracted to their own gender. That’s nearly double the usual estimates of about 10 percent. The authors explain that their methodology might have something to do with it: Participants were randomly assigned to either a “best practices method” that was computer-based and provides privacy and anonymity, or to a “veiled elicitation method” that further conceals individual responses. Answers in the veiled method preclude inference about any particular individual, but can be used to accurately estimate statistics about the population. Comparing the two...

This week, a report from the Congressional Budget Office acknowledged that ObamaCare would reduce full-time employment by 2.5 million over the next ten years. And that is on top of news that 92 million Americans who could be working are not. What a devastating assessment for the unemployed or underemployed, particular millenials seeking to transition from internships and part-time jobs to career-building full-time jobs. Yet the predictable spin from the White House and major media outlets is that this is good news, liberating workers from the chains of employment. To quote President Obama, from the 2008 campaign, "You can put...

The Washington Post recently published a quixotic editorial maintaining that the left has no deep-pocketed financiers like the right does in the much written about and thoroughly maligned Koch brothers. In its editorial, the paper laments that Democrat groups have no one like the Kochs. For the Post, Reid Wilson wrote that for "Democratic professionals who actually run campaigns, the thing that frustrates them most about the Koch brothers network is that there’s no real equivalent on their side."

John Kerry invoked his Vietnam War service to push back against an Israeli cabinet member who criticized his recent comments on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. During a security conference in Munich last weekend, Kerry suggested that if his Israeli-Palestinian peace effort fails, there could be serious consequences for Israel. “For Israel there is an increasing delegitimizing campaign that has been building up,” Kerry said, without condemning the effort. “People are very sensitive to it. There are talks of boycotts and other kinds of things.” In response, Israel’s economy minister Naftali Bennett harshly criticized Kerry’s failure to speak out against the...

The next time you hear someone dispute that human activity is destabilizing our climate, remember this pie chart. It represents geochemist James Lawrence Powell's review of 2,258 peer-reviewed scientific articles about climate change, written by 9,136 authors, published between Nov. 12, 2012 and December 31, 2013. Of all those hundreds of papers and thousands of researchers, Powell found one article, authored by a single scientist, that attributed climate change to something other than human actions: "The Role of Solar Activity in Global Warming," by S.V. Avakyan, appearing in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Science, Vol. 83, No. 3....

...And here’s the Democratic candidate, Jennifer Wexton. In court, she put rapists in prison, and in Richmond, she’ll fight Tea Partiers, who are basically the same thing: (video at link)

There isn't a majority that opposes the Affordable Care Act because it's too liberal, in fact, a good number of Americans don't think it's liberal enough. Today’s CNN poll (PDF) on the Affordable Care Act seems like a blow to supporters of the law. When asked if they “generally favor or generally oppose” the president’s health care overhaul, only 35 percent say they “favor.” The large majority—65 percent—say they “oppose.” For Republicans who have staked their entire message on opposition to Obamacare, this looks like vindication. Not only was the rollout a disaster, but now, the public has turned decisively...