Free Republic

Mike Olien has been planning his first trip to the Eastern Sports and Outdoor Show for a year. His Texas-based company, MN Outdoors, planned the roll out for its new clip-on beverage holder when the show opens Feb. 2. MN specializes in duck decoys and hunting camera mounts. Its beverage holder isn't specifically designed for hunters. The company does not sell guns or gun accessories. But the Harrisburg show's new firearm policy has put Olien -- a "lifetime member of anything you can be a lifetime member of," an AR-15 owner and a strong gun control opponent -- in a...

Yesterday during his second Inaugural Address Barack Obama promised to blow billions of taxpayer dollars on more global warming junk science projects. After all, his donors have to get paid. Eighty percent of Obama’s green energy “investments” his first term went to committed donors. Much of the money was lost. During his first term over 19 of Obama’s green ventures went belly-up after receiving billions of dollars. But that won’t stop him from committing more of your cash to this failed cause. Yesterday, James Delingpole at The Telegraph tossed cold water on Obama’s reckless statements on climate change.

BOSTON — Among the many changes that Christopher M. Mayer wanted to make when he became publisher of The Boston Globe in 2010 was to transform a particularly unattractive section of the newsroom. Mr. Mayer wanted to fill in what he called “the center of the doughnut” on the second floor — acres of abandoned desks once occupied by more than 100 workers in the payroll, classified and advertising departments. Those jobs have largely disappeared in recent years from The Globe, which is owned by The New York Times Company, and Mr. Mayer faces a situation familiar to many publishers...

Exhibitors have been dropping out in what they say is a show of support for the Second Amendment. Now the celebrities are following. Several television personalities and expert hunters who were supposed to be on hand at the upcoming Eastern Sports and Outdoor Show to speak to attendees and sign autographs announced over the weekend they will join the growing boycott of the show slated for Feb. 2-10 at the State Farm Show Complex in Harrisburg. Lee and Tiffany Lakosky, hosts of the television show "The Crush With Lee & Tiffany," lead the list of celebrities boycotting the show as...

Spanish banks have already shed 30,000 jobs in ins banking crisis. Another 20,000 cuts are due in 2013, along with pay cuts and reduced pension contribution. In response Spain's Banking Unions Announce Strikes. Workers at three of Spain's bailed-out banks will stage strikes in coming weeks as they fight mass layoffs, unions said on Monday, spreading industrial unrest to a sector where walkouts have so far been rare. While the banks, crippled by a property bubble that burst five years ago, have hogged headlines, employees have so far mostly kept a low profile even as protests become a way of...

BREAKING: Governor approves new oil pipeline route....... LINCOLN — Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman has approved the rerouted Keystone XL oil pipeline path through Nebraska, putting the final decision squarely in the lap of President Obama’s administration. snip

Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill... I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together... -Meditations Marcus Aurelius I find speaking to people all the time, from all walks of life, that people are wearier of other people, which really means, they are weary of...

Roe v. Wade, the SCOTUS decision that legalized abortion in the United States, marks a dubious 40th anniversary on Tuesday, January 22, 2013.  According to published data by the Guttmacher Institute more than 55 million abortions have been performed during the last four decades.  Abortion -- and those children who were never born – exist in a place that is primarily out-of-sight and out-of-mind.  Although legally protected, abortion is among the few unspeakables in American society.  Thus, comprehending the impact on American society is even more difficult.  In a sense, it is hard to understand that which you never see. ...

Republicans blame Barack Obama for the national-debt explosion, and for good reason; about a third of the existing national debt has accrued in his four years in office. Democrats blame George W. Bush for it, as deficits returned during his eight years after a momentary respite under Bill Clinton and a (briefly) fiscal-conservative Republican Congress. A few Democrats still blame Ronald Reagan, whose defense spending supposedly first delivered big deficit spending.However, a new study from the St. Louis Fed argues that the problem began farther back — in 1970, when the federal government began to implement benefit programs that decoupled...

Legislation to provide financial aid and other assistance to college-bound illegal immigrants is gaining political support in New York a year after the idea withered in Albany and Washington.

Angelo Codevilla has spent more than his share of time as a sojourner among America’s ruling class. He was a key part of the Reagan transition and point-man in the Gipper’s efforts to transform both the foreign and the intelligence services. Then later he served as a professor of International Relations at prestigious Boston University. From this vantage point, Codevilla was able to get a close look not only at the international relations elite, but at the entire American ruling class, from which the former are overwhelmingly drawn. I had the honor of sitting across a Skype line with Angelo...

Texas is in much better shape than California. Taxes are lower, in part because Texas has no state income tax. No wonder the Lone Star State is growing faster and creating more jobs.And the gap will soon get even wider since California voters recently decided to drive away more productive people by raising top tax rates.But a key challenge for all governments is controlling the size and cost of bureaucracies.Government employees are probably overpaid in both states, but the situation is worse in California, as I discuss in a recent interview with John Stossel.But being better than California is not exactly a...

<p>The city’s population of mentally deranged street people may explode because of new regulations signed by Gov. Cuomo last week that forbid privately run adult homes from accepting new residents, advocates warned.</p> <p>“Hospitals can’t discharge to us,” said Jeffrey Edelman, who runs adult homes in Queens and The Bronx. “Within a week, the hospitals will be starting to get backed up, and they are going to have big problems.”</p>

"Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt." --William Cobbett What is it with this administration -- a general envy and resentment of success ("You didn't build that!") or just a general incompetence at anything to do with basic economics? Like the old and bitter truth that the surest way to make something scarcer is to tax it. The administration's latest victim is the American medical-device industry -- the people who make everything from body-scanning machines to catheters to glucose meters, anything regulated by...

In a stunning blow to the Internal Revenue Service’s efforts to regulate the tax preparation profession, a federal judge struck down the IRS’s licensing requirements for tax preparers on Friday, including testing and continuing education. U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg ruled against the IRS and in favor of the tax preparers in enjoining the agency against enforcing its Registered Tax Return Preparer requirements. “Today’s ruling is a victory for hundreds of thousands of tax preparers across the country and the tens of millions of taxpayers who rely on them to prepare their taxes,” said lead attorney Dan Alban....

The Germans and most of the world no longer trust us. Rather the Germans no longer trust the Federal Reserve, our political or economic elite and leaders — why should they? The United States has held the world’s reserve currency status since 1971 when Nixon took us the gold standard after Charles DeGaulle demanded that any transfer payments between the US and France be in gold. After that, the world accepted us as reserve currency, the dollar became the gold standard. Along with London and the Swiss the United States became a financial empire as well as a military and...

"You don't have to be a deficit hawk to be disturbed by the growing gap between revenues and expenses," said Sen. Barack Obama during a Nov. 3, 2005, debate on the Senate floor. At the time, Obama had been a senator for less than a year and the federal budget deficit was in fact shrinking, from $248 billion in fiscal 2006 to $160 billion in fiscal 2007. Still, Obama seemed deeply concerned about the deficit, and he appeared to believe it when he said the only way to close the shortfalls was to force Congress to pay for what it...

A new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reminds Americans that, contrary to the narrative that huge deficits and debt are merely a recent product of the Great Recession, the problem began over forty years ago. Daniel Thornton, the St. Louis Fed's Vice President and economic adviser, finds what conservatives have been saying all along is true: it's steadily increasing government spending, not a lack of tax revenues, that's causing all of this. [A]fter 1970, both revenues and expenditures increased on average relative to the previous two decades; however, revenue increased marginally while expenditures increased significantly... on...

Moral Imperative: I speak often in these pages about things fiscal, financial and economic. Given that I am a CPA and sit on three committees in Congress that deal with money (Budget, Financial Services and Joint Economic), this is to be expected. But, I am not all about money. And, the nation's problems are not all about money. As big a problem as our debts and deficits are, they are emblematic of deeper and actually more significant moral and cultural issues. For some time now, we have heard of those who Tom Brokaw dubbed "the greatest generation", those who sacrificed...

(Reuters) - While delivering mail on Chicago's North Side, Lakesha Dortch-Hardy spoke about how much she loves her job at the U.S. Postal Service, and how much it would hurt if jobs such as hers were to disappear. "These jobs are the middle class ..." said Dortch-Hardy, a tall, energetic 38-year-old, who took long strides as she wheeled her cart along a row of two- and three-story brick apartment houses. "Without this job, I don't know where I'd be right now." The cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service has eliminated 168,000 jobs since 2006, and more cuts could result as it struggles...