Free Republic

Bad move by Trump. Ryan and the globalist big government GOPe RINOs are the problem not the Freedom Caucus. Trump is supposed to be draining the swamp by now, not swimming in it. Put the interest of American citizens first! Freedom not socialism and tyranny!! Good grief! Dump Obamacare already! Should have been done on day one and we’d be way on down the road to draining the swamp by now! We the people have been demanding a full repeal for seven long years and that's the position Trump took with his original health care goal at the beginning of...

A lawsuit in Seattle pits some fundamental rights against each other — it’s civil rights that ban discrimination, and property rights that allow owners to decide what to do with their homes and land. The issue is with a new law that requires landlords to rent to tenants on a “first come, first served” basis. The goal is to make sure all renters are treated equally. But the landlords who are suing say the program is a bureaucratic nightmare and unconstitutional. Critics say it’s all about the survival of the fastest, but supporters say it levels the playing field for...

Social Security... The SSI program. Liberals hail it as the toast of socialism. Liberals promulgate SSI as proof that government cares. The social secuirty program cares, the program is there to help those who cannot help themselves and that welfare state is superior to Christian charity. According to New York Times columnist and leftist Charles Blow, "Social security is the gift of Washington to the American people. It is what makes America a higher standard in freedom and prosperity." Just like everything printed by the Bolshevik News media including the Times and its left wing mouth pieces, nothing could be...

Electric vehicle owners in Minnesota would have to pay a $75 to $85 annual "surcharge" under proposed legislation since they do not pay the state's gasoline tax. State governments across the country are increasingly seeking to slap such fees on electric vehicles, some exceeding $150 per year. The Minnesota fee would cover vehicles that are all-electric and plug-in hybrids based on electric motors, but exclude gasoline-electric hybrids. The fee is aimed at making electric vehicle drivers pay their fair share of road maintenance costs, which are partly funded by gasoline taxes, said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, the author of the...

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he’ll fight a proposal to eliminate a 52-year-old federal agency that seeks to create jobs. McConnell told WYMT-TV Saturday that he’s opposed to the proposal to do away with the Appalachian Regional Commission, which is contained in President Donald Trump’s budget for Fiscal 2018. In fact, McConnell said, “We are not going to allow any cuts” to the commission. …

Several key Republican lawmakers are expressing support for the programs, which, since their near-death experiences during the culture wars of a generation ago, have taken pains to counter accusations of coastal elitism by making sure to distribute their grants widely across all 50 states. -snip Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican who is the chairwoman of a crucial Senate appropriations panel that oversees the endowments, said in a statement, “I believe we can find a way to commit to fiscal responsibility while continuing to support the important benefits that N.E.A. and N.E.H. provide.” Her backing, like that of some other...

Kentucky Republican congressman Hal Rogers, who has spent more than three decades on the House Appropriations Committee, including six years as the chairman, rejected President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2018 budget as Congress begins consideration of the president’s rearrangement of priorities. “While we have a responsibility to reduce our federal deficit, I am disappointed that many of the reductions and eliminations proposed in the President’s skinny budget are draconian, careless and counterproductive,” said Rogers, one of the so-called “cardinals,” the nickname for the lawmakers controlling how federal money is spent. Rogers said he was concerned about cuts to programs in...

(He) stated his position when he said that the history of government, the history of liberty, was the history of the limitation of governmental power. This is true as an academic statement of history in the past. It is not true as a statement affecting the present. It is true of the history of medieval Europe. It is not true of the history of twentieth-century America. In the days when all governmental power existed exclusively in the king or in the baronage and when the people had no shred of that power in their own hands, then it undoubtedly was...

Although the details are scarce, President Donald Trump’s proposed budget, America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again, paints a dramatic picture for the American science and medical communities that is facing huge potential budget cuts. If it’s been a while since you’ve had a civics class, the Constitution states that it’s Congress that gets to decide how to spend the government’s money and how to tax its citizens, so this proposal is not the final word on what goes and what stays. But a President essentially starts the conversation, and for many scientists, it’s not a happy...

President Donald Trump's administration on Thursday proposed a 31 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, as the White House seeks to eliminate climate change programs and trim initiatives to protect air and water quality. The White House's proposed 2018 EPA budget, with the biggest proposed cut for any federal agency, comes as Trump seeks to clear away regulations he claims are hobbling U.S. oil drillers, coal miners and farmers. The proposed cuts are a starting point in negotiations with Congress, and could be tempered. The proposal would eliminate 3,200 EPA employees, or 19 percent of the current workforce....

Americans who live outside of the nation’s capital should understand the District of Columbia is “sacred ground,” according to a Virginia congressman who represents a district that is among the wealthiest in the country thanks largely to its heavy concentration of highly paid federal workers. Rep. Gerry Connolly told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (HOGR) Wednesday that Congress may need to “educate” people on why federal departments and agencies should be centralized on the “sacred ground” of D.C. Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, made the comments as the committee debated a House resolution encouraging federal agencies to relocate...

As hard as it will be to pass health insurance reform, tax reform, and infrastructure legislation, President Trump's toughest challenge will come in trying to cut the numbers of federal workers. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but budget and government experts are calling the planned reductions in the federal workforce a "historic contraction" not seen since the drawdown after World War II.  Cabinet secretaries will have some leeway in how they reduce their departments' workforces.  Some may rely on the normal attrition that occurs in any workforce with retirements and vacancies created by promotions being responsible for...

Worst Humanitarian Crisis since 1945 Twenty million people at risk of starvation in Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen, NE Nigeria. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-n-says-world-faces-largest-humanitarian-crisis-since-1945-1489223549 My Congressman, McClintock CA 4th, represents rice farmers. All these countries eat rice. We pay farmers billions not to grow food. No starvation is natural. All starvation is man-made geo-political manipulation, slow motion murder for political power gain. Please ask the President to declare an international crisis. A new Marshall Plan for Africa. Bomb them with food. What a positive PR blizzard for the Trump Administration.

<p>Slap them back twice as hard. You have the force of God and the people with you. You have been raised up by God to smite the evil America-hating, Christian-hating, Jew-hating, freedom-hating SOBs.</p> <p>You were elected by we the people (per the constitution) to drain the swamp and make America great again. One nation under God!</p>

Man alive. How often do you see poll results like this anymore?That’s from Quinnipiac. CNN asked the same question and got a slightly less enthusiastic response — but note the partisan numbers: Republicans are now more gung ho to spend on infrastructure than Democrats are, huh? Gotta be “the Trump effect” at work, with the right rushing to embrace Trump’s priorities as the left inches away from them. Here’s a famous bit from an interview Steve Bannon gave last November, 10 days after Trump’s victory: “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The...

Big Government: This week, IBM showed that it could cram data into a single atom, part of the private sector's never-ending quest to make things smaller and more efficient. If only government would follow this model. IBM Research announced on Wednesday that it was able to put a holmium atom — a rare earth element — on top of a magnesium oxide surface, and with "a pulse of electric current from the magnetized tip of scanning tunneling microscope ... flip the orientation of the atom's field between a 0 or 1," according to the journal Nature, which published the findings....

So, since 1960, federal spending, adjusted for inflation, has quintupled and federal undertakings have multiplied like dandelions, but the federal civilian workforce has expanded only negligibly, to approximately what it was when Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952. Does this mean that “big government” is not really big? And that by doing much more with not many more employees it has accomplished prodigies of per-worker productivity? John J. Dilulio Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania and the Brookings Institution, says: Hardly. Since 1960, the number of state and local government employees has tripled to more than 18 million, a growth...

Most other developed nations already have a VAT -- a system in which taxes are paid by each business in the different stages of production of a good or service, and, ultimately, directly or indirectly, by the consumer. VAT is considered a consumption tax, since it taxes what people consume, rather than how much they earn or their profits from investment. That's also a reason why some consider it unfair for lower-income households. And critics say it could let government take a bigger slice of the overall economic pie, enabling higher spending. Its supporters, meanwhile, say VAT is better for...

Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. is out with his new book, On the Brink, where he details his version of events that occurred on Wall Street and Washington D.C.during the financial crisis while he was Treasury Secretary. All that you really need to know about this fairy tale can be found in the front of the book in what is labeled as "Author's Notes". In this preface, Paulson tells us that he doesn't take notes and doesn't use email and his staff was frustrated because he didn't send out memos, but fortunately, he tells us, he has a very...

Those who follow the messaging from within the unofficial news agency of the U.S. State Department, CNN or CNNi, might have noticed a report delivered by Wolf Blitzer yesterday claiming the Russians were set to influence another nationalist election victory, this time in France.