Free Republic

"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." - Obama, July 2, 2008 What objectives? Who set them? This may begin to answer those questions, raise other questions, and perhaps point toward things needing further research. Organization of Islamic Cooperation - Criminalization of "Islamophobia" In 1990 the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) issued their “Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam” (http://www.oic-oci.org/english/article/human.htm). It’s Article 22 states: “Everyone shall...

AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing), President Obama’s most radical regulation, continues to go virtually unmentioned in the campaign. You might think a policy that allows big cities to swallow up and control surrounding suburbs would be widely debated and discussed, especially in an election where the suburbs hold the balance of power. Instead, both presidential candidates make a point of avoiding the issue. Meanwhile, it’s become increasingly clear that AFFH is about a great deal more than housing. In truth, this sweepingly transformative regulation creates levers by which the feds can reach into almost every aspect of local government. In...

Dear Colleagues: As the Secretaries of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Department of Transportation... Today, our agencies are calling on local education, transportation, and housing leaders to work together on issues at the intersection of our respective missions in helping to guarantee full access of opportunity across the country.

On June 16, 2009, EPA joined with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U. S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to help improve access to affordable housing, more transportation options, and lower transportation costs while protecting the environment in communities nationwide. Through a set of guiding livability principles and a partnership agreement that will guide the agencies' efforts, this partnership will coordinate federal housing, transportation, and other infrastructure investments to protect the environment, promote equitable development, and help to address the challenges of climate change.

Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them. Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. One of Obama’s original trainers, Mike Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building One America In July of 2011, Kruglik’s Building One America held a conference at the White House. The ultimate goal [] is quite literally to abolish the suburbs. One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts...

Farmers in the U.S. are pouring out tens of millions of gallons of excess milk, amid a massive glut that has slashed prices and has filled warehouses with cheese. More than 43 million gallons’ worth of milk were dumped in fields, manure lagoons or animal feed, or have been lost on truck routes or discarded at plants in the first eight months of 2016, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That is enough milk to fill 66 Olympic swimming pools, and the most wasted in at least 16 years of data requested by The Wall Street Journal....

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has promised to nationalize food distribution in the South American nation beset with record shortages of basic goods, runaway inflation and an escalating economic crisis. [Snip] Various estimates suggest the government already controls about half of the country's food distribution, but that hasn't stopped record shortages in shops and markets. Venezuela is struggling with a recession, 68.5-percent annual inflation and severe shortages of the basic goods that it relies on oil money to import. On any given day, people in Venezuela can wait hours to get some subsidized milk, cooking oil, milk or flour -- if...

Most of life happens without a central planner. Yet people think we need one. Suppose you'd never seen a skating rink, and I told you that I want to lay down some ice and charge people money to strap sharp blades on their feet. They will zip around on the ice -- young and old, skilled and unskilled. My only rule: Go counter-clockwise. Hillary Clinton would say the rink needs regulation. She calls herself "a government junkie." Government junkies like government plans. Hillary'd probably demand that my rink have an official who tells skaters when to zoom left or right,...

President Obama repeatedly assures us that this will be his “year of action.” (snip).... Yet not a word has been heard of late about a truly transformative Obama executive action, his rule on “affirmatively furthering fair housing” (AFFH). That rule will push Americans into living how and where the federal government wants. It promises to gut the ability of suburbs to set their own zoning codes. It will press future population growth into tiny, densely-packed high-rise zones around public transportation, urbanizing suburbs and Manhattanizing cities. You won’t see a more ambitious Obama administration initiative than this. Yet Obama never discusses...

Having traveled to well over 100 countries, I have seen some pretty shocking signs of poverty around the world.In parts of Asia, it’s not uncommon for parents in poor villages to sell their children for bags of rice… or for children to be stolen outright and sold as orphans to unsuspecting foreigners.In Africa, I’ve seen people who are so destitute they intentionally mangle and gash their own bodies just to give themselves good cause to shock foreign tourists into donations.But I’d have to rank poverty in Cuba as the most extreme.Going to Cuba is like going back in time....

The just-published NIPCC reports may lead to a paradigm shift about what or who causes current climate changes. All the evidence suggests that Nature rules the climate – not Man. Watch for it: We may be on the threshold of a tipping point in climate history. No, I’m not talking about a tipping point in the sense that the Earth will be covered with ice or become hellishly hot. I’m talking about a tipping point in our views of what controls the climate -- whether it’s mainly humans or whether it’s mainly natural. It makes an enormous difference in climate...

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855-1857) CHAPTER 10. Containing the whole Science of Government Mr Arthur Clennam, scion of a merchant family, seeks to intervene with the Government to assist William Dorrit, held in Marshalsea prison for debt for more than twenty-five years.   Mr Meagles is a successful banker, retired, with whose family Mr Clennam shared confinement in quarantine for some weeks at Marseilles.   Daniel Doyce is a successful inventor but unsuccessful as a patent applicant for more than twelve years. The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public...

Last Thursday, thanks largely to Senator Pam Roach (R-Auburn), the Washington State Senate provided an opportunity to discuss the Growth Management Act (GMA) in a public work session. Last year, I wrote about a less formal work session held by Representative Dean Takko (D-Longview). However, the recent Senate work session demonstrated notable willingness to look at Washington State’s GMA in a comprehensive manner without constraining the comments of those who testified.

The central government is set to ease the design requirements for tobacco stores as a response to the recent wave of robberies targeted at the units, commercial broadcaster RTL Klub has reported.

... The Federal Reserve is the most important economic planning agency in the world. It's charged with promoting full employment, stabilizing prices, and overseeing the financial sector. So the new chair's theoretical views, management style, and personality quirks could affect trillions of dollars of economic activity. Is it wise to hand such extraordinary power to an elite cadre of economists and bureaucrats? The pretenses of top-down planning have been debunked by history. Throughout the last century, every nation that adopted central planning had its economy flounder. Even at the microeconomic level, the limits of top-down planning are increasingly obvious.

Generally speaking, government always grows -- it never shrinks -- whether times are good or bad. In each area it purports to "assist", government attempts to replace individual decision-making with central planning. In order to implement its grand central plans and solidify its power, government must take from one citizen to give to another; this is, in effect, lawful theft. No matter how many times central planning fails, the self-appointed masterminds in government assert that "this time is different" and that with only a few tweaks and more money, their delusional plans will succeed. Because it uses funds confiscated...

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) -- Former President Jimmy Carter said Monday that the income gap in the United States has increased to the point where members of the middle class resemble the Americans who lived in poverty when he occupied the White House. Carter offered his assessment of the nation's economic challenges Monday at a Habitat for Humanity construction site in Oakland - the first of five cities he and wife Rosalynn plan to visit this week to commemorate their three-decade alliance with the international nonprofit that promotes and builds affordable housing. The recent economic downturn revealed that families living in...

We are not a violent society. We are a society sheltered from violence. No one in Rwanda spends time wondering what kind of man would murder people. They probably live next door to him. If your neighborhood is diverse enough, you might be unfortunate enough to live next door to war criminals all the way from Eastern Europe to Africa. Guns are how we misspell evil. Guns are how we avoid talking about the ugly realities of human nature while building sandcastles on the shores of utopia. It's not about the fear of what one motivated maniac can do in...

Last weekend, Denver hosted a Comic Con convention – a gathering of fantasy enthusiasts and an excuse to wear Halloween costumes in the summer (also Captain Kirk was there). 48,000 people attended the convention, and 6,000 had to be turned away because the Colorado Convention Center could not hold them. The convention may have been the most successful two day event in CCC history. Still, the success has nothing to do with the CCC and is actually an indictment of Denver's culture of central planning. Built in 2005, the CCC promised to bring major league conventions to Denver. The old...

The presidential limo is a perfect metaphor for the economy. The people who claim authority have no idea what it runs on. President Obama was due in Israel. So the advance team wheels his non-sequestered limo out of the cargo plane and over to the gas pumps to make sure he has a full tank when he arrives. Apparently there is some concern he might have to make a hasty retreat and won’t have time to fill it up later. Whoever was filling it up didn’t know that it ran on diesel and filled it up with regular. Apparently, they...