Free Republic

“А у вас негров линчуют” is a bitter Soviet-era punch line meaning, roughly, “But in your country they lynch Negroes.” There were a million Cold War variations on the joke: The Soviet farm minister meets his U.S. counterpart, who inquires about whether the heroic Soviet farmers are meeting their five-year plans. Asked about each crop in turn, the Soviet minister is forced to sheepishly admit that they are woefully behind on every goal, and then demands: “But what about the blacks in the South?” A U.S. car salesman asks a Soviet counterpart how many months the typical Soviet citizen must...

Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” was published on March 10, 2014, the day after the first episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” aired on Fox and its sister networks. The fact that both men have captured the public imagination at the same time is at least partly due to that simple fact. There’s also the matter of professional ripeness, behind the appearance of fresh fame: Piketty had been around for some time, publishing papers and collaborating on constructing the Top Incomes database along with Emmanuel Saez, but he’d never published anything remotely as sweeping as...

The United Nations (UN) has delivered its latest verdict on the measures necessary to save the world from global warming and the news is as grim as it is predictable and wearisomely familiar: More regulation from "experts", technocrats and bureaucrats at supranational organisations, such as the one whose initials begin with U and end with N.More taxpayer subsidies for expensive, inefficient renewable energy.More nuclear power (with shale gas used as a transitional fuel to replace coal). The abandonment of fossil fuels. Less meat consumption.A single, globally-regulated price for carbon dioxide. More local-government-enforced walking, cycling and public transportation. More back-door wealth...

In an apparent reversal of his past campaign statements, President Barack Obama told Fox News's Bill O'Reilly in a Sunday interview that he does not believe in fundamentally transforming America. O'Reilly read Obama a question from a viewer who asked, "Mr. President, why do you feel it is necessary to fundamentally transform the nation that has afforded you so much opportunity and success?" "I don't think we need to fundamentally transform the nation," said Obama. "But those are your words," explained O'Reilly. "I think what we have to do is make sure that here in America, if you work hard,...

.....More may be revealed this week as the Democrats meet in Charlotte, N.C., when the president will be formally nominated as their candidate. Some of the possible second-term goals are ones he set aside in the first when they were too difficult or politically costly. They include a rewrite of immigration laws, efforts to combat global warming and a sweeping change in the tax code beyond the year-to-year extensions of Bush-era tax cuts.... The government faces a “fiscal cliff” of scheduled tax increases and spending cuts at the end of this year. If he and Congress can’t reach a permanent...

A curious specter will be hovering over the Democratic convention this week. It is the ghost of Frank Marshall Davis, Communist Party USA member 47544 and mentor to a young Barack Obama. .....Frank Marshall Davis's politics were so radical, and so pro-Soviet, that the Democrats who ran the Senate in 1956 summoned him to Washington to testify on his pro-Soviet activities. Even more remarkable, the FBI placed him on the federal government's Security Index, meaning that if a war broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union, Obama's mentor could have been placed under immediate arrest. I've noted...

N.H. Sen. Judd Gregg tells CNBC's Larry Kudlow leaders are 'trying to run the government into the ditch' to institute European social welfare model. We’ve heard from various elements that President Barack Obama was a socialist trying to “fundamentally change” the United States of America in a covert manner, but maybe it isn’t as covert as it seems. A recent CNS News analysis of government data shows that in the first 19 months of the Obama administration, the federal debt held by the public increased by $2.5260 trillion - more than the cumulative total of the national debt held by...