Free Republic

"Giving leaders enough power to create ‘social justice' is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity." Thomas Sowell "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana "The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse." Edmund Burke) "If you by any means forget the Lord your God and follow other gods... you shall surely perish." Deuteronomy 8:19 History shows us that as free nations become complacent, they become vulnerable to manipulation. Most dictatorships rise gradually -- a step at a time. Smooth talking politicians make each incremental step...

There is a new piece, however, that doesn’t get discussed much at all. Forced home inspections. Thanks to a South Carolina state bill that passed the house but failed in the Senate we learn of something very, very ugly coming packaged with Obamacare. As Ben Swann reports: “Clearly, any family may be visited by federally paid agents for almost any reason.” According to an Obamacare provision millions of Americans will be targeted. The Health and Human Services’ website states that your family will be targeted if you fall under the “high-risk” categories below: Families where mom is not yet 21....

Marc Morano, a global warming skeptic and publisher of the website ClimateDepot.com, applauds the administration's strategy, if not its purpose. "The Obama administration is being strategically brilliant by doing this behind the scenes," he says. "They're going to achieve everything that cap and trade, and UN treaties and even a carbon tax would achieve through the invisibility of federal regulations. " A day after Lamberth's ruling, two lawmakers, Rep. Daryl Issa (R-Ca.) and Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) wrote Jackson, demanding all of her personal emails over the last four years that relate to her official duties. They are concerned the...

This Fall, Harvard University Press will release The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, by the 35-year-old historian Ben Urwand. Alexander Kafka previewed the book in The Chronicle Review. “Urwand found that Nazi officials considered some American films ideologically useful—among them Gabriel Over the White House (1933), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Our Daily Bread (1934), and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)—and that the studios expressly marketed certain titles in that vein,” Kafka writes. “ For instance, Gabriel Over the White House, an American fascist fantasia about a fed-up, divinely inspired president dissolving a chaotic Congress and whipping the...

Excerpt (source - email) OBITUARY? In 1887 Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior: A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy...

Customers have been calling on Time Warner Cable and CBS Corp. to resolve their ongoing carriage dispute that has resulted in channels going dark in several markets including Los Angeles and New York. Now politicians are demanding an end to the blackout. Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who recently won John F. Kerry's Senate seat, on Tuesday asked the Federal Communications Commission to step in and restart negotiations.

President Obama celebrates his 52nd birthday today! To honor the momentous day, the President signed an executive order granting all of his supporters free ice-cream!

Please don't complain later that you didn't see it coming. As always, Mr. Obama states publicly what his intentions are. He is doing that now. Toward the end of his speech last week in Jacksonville, Fla., he said: "So where I can act on my own, I'm going to act on my own. I won't wait for Congress." (Applause.) The July 24 speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., has at least four references to his intent to act on his own authority, as he interprets it: "That means whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I'll...

With only 69 days until the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges open for enrollment, Obama administration officials face major logistical and structural challenges. This two-part blog series details some of the major issues with ACA implementation. This post, Part I of the series, highlights various logistical problems, while Part II will focus more specifically on fraud and consumer privacy-related concerns. Delayed Enforcement of the Employer Mandate The Obama Administration acknowledged July 3rd the necessity to delay a major component of the ACA, the “employer mandate,” until 2015. The provision requires employers with more than 50 workers to provide their employees...

Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports that after President Obama won re-election, he tried to find out ways of pushing his second term agenda without the Republican-led Congress. “Guys, I don’t want politics to be a limit of what you recommend to me,” Obama told senior aides David Plouffe, Lew, Dan Pfeiffer and Pete Rouse a couple of weeks after his reelection, according to a White House aide with direct knowledge of the meeting. “Let’s come up with an agenda, then let’s figure it out from there as best we can,” he said, prodding them to adopt a more muscular approach to...

Reid continues to say that the nuclear option in the Senate is on the table: I'm speaking @CAPAction to discuss why changing Senate rules is good for the institution. #EndGridlock Watch here: http://t.co/aVwisuCrjy— Senator Harry Reid (@SenatorReid) July 15, 2013 End the gridlock eh? I seem to recall a time when the Democrats were in the minority during Bush's tenure and during that time Reid and pals made gridlock a household name. Senate Democrats mounted an unprecedented filibuster campaign against Bush’s judicial nominees. According to The Heritage Foundation’s Todd Gaziano, the average number of days a Court of Appeals nominee...

Carney on Obama’s erstwhile opposition to Senate filibuster changes: Yeah, but that was different posted at 6:01 pm on July 12, 2013 by Erika Johnsen In the Green Room this afternoon, Guy highlighted now-President Obama’s adamant opposition to the “nuclear option” of altering Senate procedures to limit minority rights back in 2005, and his bizarre reversal from said position in the present day and age. Invoking the nuclear option, said 2005-era Sen. Obama, would have marked the “end of democratic debate”; indeed, the “fighting and the gridlock would only get worse,” his former self pronounced with conviction. So… what...

On Monday the IRS provided the 'smoking gun' pointed at its own head, in reports and information showing that the government agency made decisions based upon the views of pro-Israel groups which disagreed with the administration about the 'Disputed Territories.'Ever since the beginning of the scandal concerning the United States Internal Revenue Service and the claims that it had a policy of treating differently – as in worse – organizations seeking tax exemptions if those organizations held positions in conflict with this US administration, there have been doubters. And, of course, the way the story has been spun fans the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is planning a major push using executive powers to tackle the pollution blamed for global warming in an effort to make good on promises he made at the start of his second term. "We know we have to do more — and we will do more," Obama said Wednesday in Berlin. Obama's senior energy and climate adviser, Heather Zichal, said the plan would boost energy efficiency of appliances and buildings, expand renewable energy and use the Environmental Protection Agency's authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate heat-trapping pollution from coal-fired power plants. Zichal,...

5. Dictatorship of Relativism In his futuristic novel Brave New World, the British author Aldous Huxley had predicted in 1932 that falsification would be the decisive element of modernity. In a false reality with its false truth – or the absence of truth altogether – nothing, in the final analysis, is important any more.There is no truth, there is no standpoint. Today, in fact, truth is regarded as far too subjective a concept for us to find therein a universally valid standard. The distinction between genuine and fake seems to have been abolished. Everything is to some extent negotiable. Is...

The White House signaled Monday that President Obama will delay signing a controversial arms trade treaty until after Congress leaves for summer recess. White House spokesman Jay Carney said the president aims to sign the pact “before the end of August.” Obama could have signed it as early as Monday. The National Rifle Association (NRA) opposes the treaty, and the delay would allow Obama to sign the pact during the August doldrums, with Congress out of town. That time frame appears to validate the concerns of treaty advocates who had worried the administration would wait until the cover of darkness...

PELL CITY, Alabama -- St. Clair and Bibb county authorities are confirming there were roadblocks at several locations in their counties Friday and Saturday asking for blood and DNA samples. However, the samples were voluntary and motorists were paid for them as part of a study, they said. According to Lt. Freddie Turrentine of the St. Clair County Sheriff's Department, it isn't the first time such roadblocks have occurred in the area. "They were here in 2007," said Turrentine, the supervisor in charge of the roadblocks, which took place in several locations in St. Clair County Friday night, early Saturday...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - The National Security Agency has been collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top secret court order, according to a report in Britain's Guardian newspaper.</p> <p>The order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19, the newspaper reported Wednesday. The order requires Verizon, one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies, on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.</p>

When fascism comes to America, what will it look (and feel) like? Very much like what we have now, because a version of fascism is already here. I am not the first to worry about the prospect of fascism in America. In 1935, for example, Sinclair Lewis published It Can't Happen Here, which is a fictional account of a fascist take-over of the country. In 2008, Joe Conason published It Can Happen Here. The book's subtitle, Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, tells all we need to know.