Free Republic

The Republican field is crowded, which implies that primary voters have little information about where some of the candidates stand. That is particularly the case this season, with a few relatively unknown contenders who lack legislative experience or a long history of campaign contributions that would allow researchers to precisely identify where they stand on the liberal-to-conservative political dimension.However, one characteristic all candidates share is that they have active and popular Twitter accounts. And as I showed in an article published earlier this year in the journal Political Analysis — now freely available online as an Editors’ Choice article —...

Here is a live map of different war zones. You can zoom in or out just like on Google Maps. Hover over different icons and more. Check out how close ISIS is to Baghdad. Yikes!

How do you jog, take an evening walk, or go to the movies in one of the world's most dangerous cities?   The answer is that you do it and take the risk, as we see in this NY Times article about Caracas: Twice a week, Mariela Virguez ventures out for an evening ride with a cycling group that scales the hills of El Hatillo, a colonial-era district in the south that has seen a rash of kidnappings. "I refuse to give this up just because of the situation in this country," said the 50-year-old computer engineer. "We don't have food,...

Caracas – One of the many byproducts of Venezuela’s acute political and financial crisis is food truck looting, a pattern that is plaguing the country’s highways with chaos and fear. Just last week, some 200 looters swarmed into an overturned tractor-trailer carrying canned juice — men, women and children were seen taking as many boxes of juice as they could, either by foot or on motorcycles.Drivers and even emergency personnel just stood by, unaffected. "The two Venezuelas" (Las dos Venezuelas), a catchphrase so commonly used here these days to describe the rift between the poor and the middle or upper...

According to an inside source, the military collaborations between Iran's Revolutionary Guards and the Gaddafi government date back to 2006.In an interview today on the Al Arabyia news network, an informed source within the Revolutionary Guards Corps revealed that Iran has several military bases in Libya. The source, who requested anonymity due to his sensitive position within the Guards, elaborated further that the Iranian military bases are located mostly along Libya’s borders with the African countries of Chad and Niger. From there, he said, the Guards actively smuggle arms and supply logistical assistance to rebellious groups in the African countries.According...

Documents made available to Pajamas Media prove that the Venezuelan strongman has been selling reformate to Iran Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez has again frustrated the worldÂ’s attempt to derail IranÂ’s nuclear weapons program. Evidence now clearly shows that heÂ’s been sending gasoline to Iran in defiance of U.S. sanctions that sought to deprive the regime of that commodity and bring them back to the negotiation table.On July 1, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA). The act was a consequence of IranÂ’s continued defiance in the face of international pressure to...

From the BBC: 1545: Libyan TV says in an "urgent" screen caption the state news agency is under "piracy" attack, and gives a new web address: "Website of [state] al-Jamahiriyah News Agency (JANA) subjected to suspicious piracy operation." 1528: And AFP has just reported that there are violent clashes between demonstrators and government forces taking place in central Tunis. 1525: In Tunisia, where it all started, hundreds of journalists and technicians from the state-run TV broadcaster have gone on strike over what they say is continued government censorship of their dispatches, Reuters reports. State TV news bulletins have stopped. One...

The U.S. constitution has remained in place with occasional substantive amendments over more than 220 years. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in a foreword to the book Dollarocracy wrote that, “we cannot govern our own affairs when our national, state, and local debates are bought and sold by billionaires, who use thirty-second commercials to shout down anyone who disagrees…The money and media election complex, producing a slurry of negative ads, spin, and obstruction, is not what the founders intended.” [1] Sanders was right to suggest that the United States’ revered “founding fathers” would be scandalized by the plutocratic madness of the...

THE TRAIL OF BLOOD AND SUFFERING LEFT BY THE CASTRO BROTHERS TERROR NETWORKThe Castro brothers, mass murderer tyrants who terrorized a whole Island for over 56 years who killed, imprisoned, and tortured more Cubans per capita than Stalin during his reign of terror and founded and headed the most lethal international terror network is honored, embrace and rewarded by comrades Obama and Pope Francis.The trail of blood and suffering left by Castro’s exploits, especially throughout Africa and Latin America, has had no bearing on the Pope and on the American sycophants support for the longest lasting and most brutal regime...

Today President Obama further opened the financial floodgates from the U.S. to the world’s most notorious deadbeat nation—who is also a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” Quotation marks are now required around the term “State-Sponsor of Terrorism” when referring to Cuba because just this morning, as the 45 day notification period to Congress expired, President Obama officially removed Cuba from the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, where President Reagan had placed it in 1982. “Laughing all the way to the bank,” hardly does justice to what the multi-billionaire Castro family must be doing this week. The $7 billion...

Socialist genius Bernie Sanders has figured out what’s really ailing America. Our store shelves have too many different brands of deodorant and sneakers. Just look at all those horrible, fully stocked aisles at Target and Walgreens and Walmart and Payless and DSW and Dick’s Sporting Goods. It’s a national nightmare! If only consumers had fewer choices in the free market, fewer entrepreneurs offering a wide variety of products, and fewer workers manufacturing goods that people wanted, Sanders believes, we could end childhood hunger. Nobody parodies the far Left better than far-leftists themselves. In an interview with financial journalist John Harwood...

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- It's still possible to buy a gleaming Ford truck in Venezuela, rent a chic apartment in Caracas, and snag an American Airlines flight to Miami. Just not in the country's official currency. As the South American nation spirals into economic chaos, an increasing number of products are not only figuratively out of the reach of average consumers, but literally cannot be purchased in Venezuelan bolivars, which fell into a tailspin on the black market last week. Businesses and individuals are turning to dollars even as the anti-American rhetoric of the socialist administration grows more strident. It's...

​Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has announced new plans to create a subsidized food program for school teachers and other workers in the education sector. Maduro explained that the new program would benefit as many as 700,000 families of education workers, including the children of teachers and professors. The president added that his government is committed to ensuring all teachers are provided with a living wage. Earlier this week, Maduro approved a 50 percent increase in teacher salaries.

Venezuela is afflicted with the world’s highest inflation, its second highest murder rate and crippling shortages of food, medicine and basic consumer goods. Its authoritarian government is holding some 70 political prisoners, including the mayor of Caracas and senior opposition leader Leopoldo López, and stands accused by human rights groups of illegal detentions, torture and repression of independent media. All of that is now pretty well known, and it is finally beginning to gain some attention from Latin American leaders who for years did their best to appease or ignore Hugo Chávez and his “Bolivarian Revolution.” What’s less understood is...

WHY THEY QUIT BEING LEFTISTS By Carlos Alberto Montaner The Independent Institute November 17, 2008 What led these people (along with Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa, Ernesto Sábato, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, and so many other valuable intellectuals) to abandon communism and begin to defend the values of liberty? In the first place, the painful realization that the communist governments, without exception, built societies that were very poor and brutal, from which people invariably tried to flee in desperation. All the communist experiments failed, regardless of the substrata on which they tried to erect their systems. The Germans, the Slavs, the Latin...

From the first sudden, and quite dramatic, appearance of the fanatical Islamic group known as ISIS which was largely unheard of until a year ago, on the world's stage and which promptly replaced the worn out and tired al Qaeda as the world's terrorist bogeyman, we suggested that the "straight to beheading YouTube clip" purpose behind the Saudi Arabia-funded Islamic State was a simple one: use the Jihadists as the vehicle of choice to achieve a political goal: depose of Syria's president Assad, who for years has stood in the way of a critical Qatari natural gas pipeline, one which...

They say the Cold War is over, but Russia and the U.S. remain the leading supplier of weapons to countries around the world and are the two biggest military powers. Lately, tensions have been pretty high, too. The U.S. supplies much of NATO and Middle Eastern allies like Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. Russia supplies many BRIC nations, as well as Iran, much of Southeast Asia, and North Africa.

The Muslims of the Americas (MOA), a Pakistan-linked Islamist group that runs 22 “villages” across the U.S., is waging a litigation jihad against Martin Mawyer, President of the Christian Action Network. His offense, for which MOA demands $30 million, is exposing the group’s extremism in a new book with the help of inside information from a former MOA leader. Readers of Twilight in America get an inside look at MOA, a cultish Sufi Islamist group that follows Pakistani cleric Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani as a representative of Allah. Gilani also leads Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a Pakistani “Islamic sect that seeks to...

A U.S. Spanish-language news network that lobbied Hillary Clinton’s State Department on U.S. policies toward Mexico reported on those policies without disclosing its lobbying expenditures and is covering the U.S. presidential election without informing views of its company’s donations to the Clinton Foundation. The network, Azteca America, has employed two Clinton confidantes since late 2008 to lobby the State Department on various initiatives affecting U.S. relations with Mexico, where its parent company is based, during and after Clinton’s tenure at the head of the agency. Mexican parent TV Azteca, a foundation associated with the company, and that foundation’s U.S. counterpart...

China Retakes Top Spot as the Biggest Foreign Owner of U.S. Debt By IAN TALLEY It was a short-lived domination. After just a month of being the top holder of U.S. Treasury debt, Japan has once again been pushed into the No.2 slot as China bulked up on Uncle Sam’s bonds and notes. As we noted last month – and several times before that – Treasury’s data is a rough guesstimate. That makes it hard for analysts sifting through the obscure sheaves of digital data to glean anything but rough trends. It also makes it difficult to draw precise conclusions....