Free Republic

Individuals applying for concealed carry permits in Wisconsin will no longer face minimum training requirements, a change welcomed with open arms by Second Amendment groups and other gun rights supporters. But the sudden switch has thrown a wrench into the plans of Blackhawk Technical College, which hosted its first four-hour training course last Friday and had planned to offer additional classes in the near future, said Mark Brown, the Dean of Public Safety there. "It will impact our plans," Brown said in an email Tuesday. "We plan to meet this week to discuss this issue and come up with a...

Idaho Board Approves First Ever Online Class RequirementPublished November 04, 2011 | Associated Press Boise, ID – Education officials on Thursday gave final approval to a plan that makes Idaho the first state in the nation to require high school students to take at least two credits online to graduate, despite heavy criticism of the plan at public hearings this summer. The measure is part of a sweeping education overhaul that introduces teacher merit pay and phases in laptops for every high school teacher and student. **SNIP** "There is still a live teacher. It may be at a distance, but...

Congress caused the mortgage crisis, not the banks. Permit denied for Occupy Madison due to public masturbation. Cops: School worker asked student to pose nude for picture.

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Senator John Thune today criticized the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) admission at a U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing that the Obama Administration has spent "just under $5 million" on the implementation of Obamacare's failed Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act. The CLASS implementation figure cited today is more than twice the $2.2 million figure HHS claimed had been spent in a letter to Thune in August, just three months ago. "After ignoring repeated warnings from budget experts and Congressional Republicans, HHS still spent nearly $5 million of taxpayers' hard-earned money to implement...

The Obama administration will not implement a controversial piece of the healthcare reform law, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Friday. Sebelius said the department will not continue trying to implement the CLASS program, which was intended to provide insurance for long-term care. Republicans charged that the program’s financial structure was unsustainable, and Sebelius conceded as much Friday. “We have not identified a way to make CLASS work at this time,” she wrote on the Huffington Post's website. Sebelius said HHS will “suspend” implementation of the program. The department recently reassigned the people it had placed in the...

"Now the Republicans, you know when I, I talked about this earlier in the week. They said 'well, this is class warfare.' You know what? If asking a billionaire to pay their fair of taxes. To pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher is class warfare, then you know what? I, I, I, I, I'm, I'm a warrior for the middle class. I'm happy to fight for the middle class," President Obama said at the Brent Spence Bridge in Cincinnati, OH.

Last week, a report from a Republican working group revealed that administration officials, in the rush to pass Obamacare, ignored internal warnings from government experts about the fiscal sustainability of a long-term care insurance entitlement program included in the health reform law. Throughout the health care debate, officials within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as well as the Health and Human Services Department, repeatedly warned that the CLASS Act would be a fiscal disaster. Yet, the final version of Obamacare not only included the CLASS Act; it even counted CLASS as a cost-saving measure. Now, the Republicans behind...

In his increasingly desperate attempts to pander to a population that has by now entirely given up on the hope, and barely has any change left, Obama is going for broke (or technically the reverse) by setting the class warfare bar just that little bit higher. This time around, his targets are millionaires, who according to the NYT are about to see their taxes soar. Or not: nobody really knows if the proposed "Buffett Rule", affectionately known for crony communist #1, will impact just millionaires income tax, which incidentally is the same as what everyone else is paying, or, far...

Ian McKeachie is a freckled 15-year-old who "drifted along" in elementary school. Not because he didn't love to learn or because it wasn't a good school, but because he mastered new concepts so quickly that the classroom work presented no challenge. "My teachers would usually use me as a tutor for the other kids," he says, "so I was engaged in school, just not in a way that had me learning."

(And you wonder why Britain is in trouble ....) After just one day of classes at her summer school of choice, Emily Birkenshaw had already learned a crucial lesson: how to "go floppy" when facing arrest. "You're heavier then, so you can't be carried," she said, with the genuine delight of a new recruit. The 24-year-old been practising by linking arms with her classmates and singing loudly at a pretend policeman. "It just felt really empowering," she said. "If that happened [in real life] – and I hope it wouldn't – I'd know how to do it without getting hurt."...

Questions are also being raised questions over whether London could be trusted to stage a safe Olympic Games. After months during which China has bridled over western lectures about its fierce crackdown on dissent in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, the country's official media reported on the shaming scenes in Britain with a mixture of shock and schadenfreude. "The West have been talking about supporting internet freedom, and oppose other countries' government to control this kind of websites, now we can say they are tasting the bitter fruit [of their complacency] and they can't complain about it," wrote...

There is one aspect of the final debt deal from DC that took me by surprise. I was convinced the 2% reduction in payroll taxes would be extended through 2012. On July 12th I wrote about this and got it completely wrong. Not only did I think there would be a one year extension of the existing holiday; I forecast that the subsidy would actually be increased.

Do you notice how the Democrats are cranking up the class warfare rhetoric? The ObamaMedia, of course, is loving it, and they’ve shown their eagerness to promote the message right into the election. Just know this … the media – with exceptions of course – is dedicated to the reelection of The Community Organizer. The only real tactical question is just how obvious they are going to be about it. The dumb masses must be reeled in --- so let’s not make it too obvious. Actually … it looks like the dumb masses have already been reeled in. I cited...

In its most recent report, Blue Chip Economic Indicators predicted that the nation's unemployment rate would fall to 8% by the end of 2012. That might seem like good news, considering the fact that unemployment now stands at 9.1%. But it is not good news for the President. Barring some cataclysmic event ("wag the dog") that would rally the country behind him, Obama's reelection rests on the health of the economy and especially on employment. The problem for this President is that unemployment rates during the second and third quarters of 2012, when undecided voters will make up their minds,...

America's Ruling Class-And the perils of a Revolution Angelo Codevilla As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not...

There has rarely been a starker juxtaposition of evil and innocence than the moment President George W. Bush received the news about 9/11 while reading The Pet Goat with second-graders in Sarasota, Fla. Seven-year-olds can't understand what Islamic terrorism is all about. But they know when an adult's face is telling them something is wrong - and none of the students sitting in Sandra Kay Daniels' class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School that morning can forget the devastating change in Bush's expression when White House chief of staff Andrew Card whispered the terrible news of the al-Qaeda attack. Lazaro...

A glimpse of tonight's speech by Obama: President Barack Obama will call tomorrow for a combination of reductions in entitlement spending and tax increases on higher-income Americans to address long-term fiscal debt while drawing a sharp contrast with the Republican alternative proposed by Representative Paul Ryan, according to a person familiar with the plan. This speech is just more evidence of the Marxist nature of our President. He will bandy about words such as "shared sacrifice" and "fairness" but in Obama's world shared sacrifice means you turn over more and more of YOUR labor and wealth to the government...

The size of government threatens the American way of life as we know it. The solution is straightforward -- cut government. A vibrant grassroots movement insists that it happen, and Washington is lousy with rival plans for how to go about it. The social threat to the American way of life is as dire, if not more so. But it is more insidious, and more complicated. No grassroots movement has mobilized against it, and no high-profile bipartisan commission is suggesting remedies. Yet it proceeds apace, all but ignored except in the lives of Americans. Among those trying to sound the...

Life not fair. Nor for that matter is it unfair. It simply is. It’s not fair or unfair that the lion feasts on the slowest zebra or that the penguin who leaps into the ocean at just the wrong moment becomes dinner for an Orca. Life is life… fair doesn’t come into play. Fair is a fundamentally human concept that is defined by a lack of preference or favoritism and or injustice. Despite its subjective nature, fairness is a word that the left loves to bring to what should be an objective realm, politics. It’s not fair that CEOs...

Lawdy.