Free Republic

By Marsha Shuler| mshuler@theadvocate.com Nov. 26, 2015; 6:25 p.m. On the campaign trial, Gov.-elect John Bel Edwards promised time and again that he would expand the rolls of Medicaid on his first day in office. His promise to reverse repeated rejections of expanded Medicaid by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal and open the government health insurance program to more low-income workers was a cornerstone of the Democrat’s campaign. But legal realities have caused Edwards to back off, at least for the time being, while his incoming administration works through a legal glitch raised by the Legislature’s fiscal advisers. Edwards told reporters...

Three months after Breitbart News and others outed Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) 's backdoor effort to freeze development on over one million acres of California dessert by having President Obama declare the area subject to the Antiquities Act of 1906, her efforts are going down in flames as Congressional Republicans are moving to ban the Antiquities designation. Feinstein's seven-year quest to convince "ongress to sequester over 1560 square miles of the Mojave Desert into three new national monuments under her proposed 'Desert Conservation and Recreation Act" has gone nowhere. Feinstein has argued that the area she wants designated as 'Mojave...

The Obama administration has warned states to comply with federal efforts to resettle Syrian refugees in communities around the U.S. or else find their states subject to enforcement action. In a letter this week, the Office of Refugee Resettlement threatens states concerned about resettling Syrians with punitive responses if they refuse to accept the refugees. ORR explains that states may not refuse ORR-funded benefits for refugees on the basis of religion and national origin.“Accordingly, states may not categorically deny ORR-funded benefits and services to Syrian refugees,” ORR Director Robert Carey wrote in the letter. “Any state with such a policy...

There are many of us, perhaps millions, who believe that the Republican party as a governing force has been the lesser of two evils. We fear what the Democrats are doing to destroy the country but we’re angry about what the Republicans aren’t doing to repair the damage. This is why Donald Trump and Ben Carson have been so popular. It’s why so many people are willing to tell pollsters that they support either of the anti-establishment candidates.Thankfully, there’s a third candidate who would stand in stark contrast to the ineffective Republican Establishment that has been harming the party and...

See: Can Governors Legally Block Refugees from Coming to Their States? "In response to the influx of migrants "from the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq," Congress in 2005 gave President George W. Bush unlimited authority to admit people for humanitarian purposes, noted Judge Napolitano. And that has since been passed over to President Obama, he added. "Here, he has the absolute lawful authority – may not like the way he’s exercising it, but he has it," said the judge. "To admit people for political asylum and humanitarian purposes." What Judge Napolitano and Foxnews ignore is, Congress cannot assume powers...

President Barack Obama heads to a terror-scarred Paris Sunday night to tackle one of the most important priorities of his second term — climate change. Obama has been laying the groundwork for years ahead of the United Nation’s two-week conference on countering climate change, where nearly 200 countries will be hammering out a pact to cut global emissions of heat-trapping gases. Using executive power, the president has moved the U.S. toward lowering carbon emissions, a key step in building credibility for his efforts to coax China, Brazil and other developing nations to do the same. The Paris conference may help...

Surveillance video shows 51-year-old Robert Barnes being pummeled by teens with a hammer, a piece of wood and punches, after police say a 10-year-old boy told his mother he got into an argument with Barnes.

Former and serving diplomats and intelligence officials tell the Telegraph that President Obama's hopes of defeating Islamic State are based on "smoke and mirrors" But in a series of candid interviews with the Telegraph, Western diplomats and intelligence officials - current and former - have angrily dismissed the approach as a “smoke and mirrors” public relations exercise founded on little substantive or effective action. “It’s smoke and mirrors and that is the dirty little secret,” said Derek Harvey, one of Mr Obama’s senior former intelligence officials, a Middle East specialist, who said he resigned from his job in frustration at...

WASHINGTON — Justice Department watchdogs ran into an unexpected roadblock last year when they began examining the role of federal drug agents in the fatal shootings of unarmed civilians during raids in Honduras. From Our Advertisers The Drug Enforcement Administration balked at turning over emails from senior officials tied to the raids, according to the department’s inspector general. It took nearly a year of wrangling before the D.E.A. was willing to turn over all its records in a case that the inspector general said raised “serious questions” about agents’ use of deadly force. The continuing Honduran inquiry is one of...

In April 2014, I suddenly realized that when you buy gasoline, the receipt does not list all the different taxes you have to pay.  So I emailed the Illinois Policy Institute (https://www.illinoispolicy.org) and asked them to make up a facsimile of a gas receipt.  Here's what they came up with, and they featured it in a story on their website.  Turns out a gallon of gas in Chicago has eight taxes on it.  In Park Ridge adds two cents more.  (I think today they are higher.)  I went to a neighborhood gas station – the owner was a nice...

The FBI is pulling out all the stops to try and keep track of 48 Islamic radicals who may carry out a terrorist attack. Elite surveillance teams consisting of up to a dozen agents, along with assistance from local law enforcement, are watching the radicals 24-7. But the problem is that these suvelliance operations are enormously expensive and take manpower away from other anti-terror operations. Fox News: "There is a very significant number of people that are on suspicious watch lists, under surveillance," Republican Sen. Dan Coats said. Coats, who sits on the Select Committee on Intelligence, would not comment...

Doctor Gun Banners A recent headline at The Hill read "Dems push to end ban on gun violence research".  The only problem is that there is no ban on "gun violence" research.  There is a ban on spending federal dollars, by the Department of Health and Human Services, on research that advocates for more gun control.  It is called the Dickey Amendment, and was put in place after the leaders of the CDC proclaimed what they expected from research results (advocating for more gun control) before the research was conducted.  The CDC had already funded severely flawed, advocacy  "research" to...

Hating Whitey on Campus Welcome to the totalitarian world of "student activism" at America's elite universities. November 27, 2015 Jack Kerwick Learn more about the Freedom Center's Stop the Jihad on Campus campaign. It isn't just Woodrow Wilson who's got to go. For the social justice warriors on America's college campuses these days, force and intimidation are paying off in spades. Following the occupation of the president's office courtesy of the "Black Justice League," Princeton University is the most recent "institution of higher learning" to relent to students' demand to reject "racism." President Christopher L. Eisgruber has "agreed"--more accurately,...

TIRANA -- There are no golf courses in Albania. But they will build one if he comes. "He'' is, of course, Barack Obama, the golfing president of the United States. Unfortunately for the Albanians and perhaps for Obama, he is not coming, and time is running out. Obama is not only on the back nine of his presidency, but he can see the clubhouse in the distance. All he has to do to get to the clubhouse is to avoid or negotiate a couple of bunkers on the 18th hole of this imaginary golf course that the Albanians would have...

Ranchers in the West are engaged in 21st-century range wars, but their adversaries are not the rustlers and cattle barons of lore. Federal land management agencies, overzealous officers, and self-righteous judges are the foes western ranchers fear the most. On October 7, father and son ranchers from Oregon, Dwight, 73, and Steven Hammond, 46, were labeled as terrorists and sentenced to five years in federal prison under anti-terrorism laws. In 2001, a fire set by the Hammonds to eliminate overgrown sagebrush on their own property inadvertently spread to adjacent BLM land. The two were convicted of arson when the Bureau...

Russia is preparing to sanction Turkey in response to its downing of a Russian warplane earlier this week, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced in a televised cabinet meeting on Thursday, according to the BBC. "The government has been ordered to work out a system of response measures to this act of aggression in the economic and humanitarian spheres," which may include "limits or bans" on "foodstuffs, labor, and services from Turkish companies," Medvedev said. The sanctions "could bite into more than $30 billion in trade ties between the two countries, as police here began seizing Turkish products and deporting Turkish...

Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that would bring about the most sweeping changes to the Federal Reserve since the 1930s. At the heart of the bill is a requirement that the Fed set interest rates according to a quantitative rule. Like advocates of the gold standard, proponents of the bill blame many of the economy’s ills on the Fed exercising too much discretion... [snip] Legislating a rule doesn’t do away with discretion, but makes it more likely discretion will be exercised only after the rule has failed, perhaps at great economic cost. [snip] In a dynamic...

Hillary Clinton is upping her anti-Wall Street rhetoric, amid reports that the Clinton Foundation is running a private-equity company down in Colombia.The same private-equity field dissed by 2008 Obama in hundreds of millions of dollars of negative ads against Mitt Romney b/c Romney earned his fortune w/ a PEF. The Bogota-based Fondo Acceso, started in 2010 by Bill Clinton, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and mining millionaire Frank Giustra....$20 million seed funding supposedly came from the Clinton Foundations Clinton-Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative and Carlos Slims the SLIM Foundation, the Washington Free Beacon reports. In an ominous sign, Fondo Acceso took down...

A month ago I predicted a Cruz-Rubio ticket. Now that Cruz has overtaken Carson to run neck-and-neck with Trump in the Iowa Quinnipiac University poll, Cruz is looking a lot like a winner. Here are my top 10 reasons to back him. 10. He really knows economics--not the ideologically driven pablum dished out at universities, but the real battlefield of entrenched monopolies against entrepreneurial upstarts. As Asheesh Agarwal and John Delacourt reported in this space, he did a brilliant job at the Federal Trade Commission: "Cruz promoted economic liberty and fought government efforts to rig the marketplace in favor of...

President Obama may be going through a minor mid-life crisis, as he's made numerous references to his graying hair over the last few weeks, even at major events with world leaders at the White House. But while Obama has spoken wistfully about the darker hair of his youth, he has also argued that his graying hair is a sign of the experience he's gained as the leader of the free world for the last seven years. Just two days ago, Obama, 54, met with French President Francois Hollande at the White House to discuss joint counterterrorism efforts after the attack...