Free Republic

August 27, 2014By Terence P. Jeffrey The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Department of Transportation, published last week an "advanced notice of proposed rulemaking" on "vehicle-to-vehicle communications." What NHTSA is proposing could begin a transformation in the American transportation system that makes our lives better and freer — or gives government more power over where we go and when. In announcing its proposed rulemaking, NHTSA is stressing its intention to protect the "privacy" of American drivers. "This document initiates rulemaking that would propose to create a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard, FMVSS No. 150, to require...

War, like politics makes for strange bedfellows. Consider for a moment that the U.S. is now on the same page as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad when it comes to battling ISIS, the Medieval Islamist terrorist group that has sent a chill down the spine of every civilized human being. It seems like only yesterday that President Barack Obama called for the ouster of Assad, ominously warning that "his days are numbered."

This is a real headshaker that should send chills down your spine.Washington Free Beacon: The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter. The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online. The “Truthy” database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution.” The university has received $919,917 so far for the project....

SunTrust Bank is cutting ties with three types of legal businesses in the latest evidence of the Obama administration’s secretive crusade against “objectionable” enterprises. SunTrust, which counts more than 400,000 small business clients, cited “compliance requirements” as its reason for closing accounts with “payday lenders, pawn shops and dedicated check-cashers.” “It is consistent with long-standing industry practice to review relationships to ensure they satisfy a range of business and risk considerations,” the bank said in a little-noticed press release dated Aug. 8. In the same blanket notice, however, SunTrust underlined its support for maintaining bank relationships with licensed gun sellers....

Government dependency is on the rise, with more than half of all Americans relying on the government for survival. While the Obama administration is broadening eligibility, US citizens increasingly also say they prefer it this way. Americans’ self-reliability has been decreasing as eligibility for Medicaid, food stamps, earned income tax credit, work pay tax credit and unemployment benefits have broadened since 2009 to allow more US citizens to enjoy them. More than half of the US population – 165 million of 308 million Americans – is now dependent on the state in some form. Of these, 107 million Americans rely...

<p>The French government was dissolved Monday amid turmoil among top ministers.</p> <p>President Francois Hollande asked Prime Minister Manuel Valls to form a new government, which will be announced Tuesday...</p> <p>"The crisis in the heart of the government is clear, and it promises to be bloody," reported Le Figaro, a right-leaning national newspaper.</p>

Complete Headline: Feeling rested? Smiling president returns to the White House after relaxing in Martha's Vineyard amid ISIS and Ferguson crises President Barack Obama's summer vacation off the Massachusetts coast has come to an end. The president returned to the White House late Sunday after spending two weeks with his family on the island of Martha's Vineyard. What a break it turned out to be. His attempt at rest and relaxation was largely overtaken by events involving Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, including the videotaped execution of an American journalist they had been holding hostage, and the unrest...

August 24, 2014 By: Money_Morning Shah Gilani writes: This is a warning. I’m not kidding.I heard something yesterday that blew me away. My friends know I like to target shoot. I don’t hunt, because I can’t kill anything living, but I like guns. Maybe it has something to do with wanting to be James Bond when I was a kid… OK, I still want to be 007. As other target shooters know, it’s gotten harder and harder to get ammunition. Fo a few years now, all kinds of stuff have been going around on the Internet about why ammunition is...

School children in Elyria, Ohio are mourning the demise of a 40-year tradition – the loss of their beloved pink cookie. The fabled cookie, long served in local school cafeterias, was done in by a pound of butter, six cups of powdered sugar and the Obama administration’s food police. […] The USDA “Smart Snacks in School” standards mandate that all snacks must contain less than 200 calories. It’s not exactly clear how many calories are in the pink cookie, but the recipe for the frosting calls for a pound of butter. The cookie was banished to comply with the federal...

President Obama doesn't have the authority to simply stop the companies he calls “corporate deserters” from taking up legal residency in low-tax countries. The Obama administration began examining its ability to take executive action to address corporate inversions without Congress because it lacks the support of Republicans. "Unless the U.S. corporate tax rate is reduced to 10 percent or less," Harvey told the Examiner, "it will still be beneficial for U.S. [multinational corporations] to invert."

December 3, 1934, Time Magazine, Plot Without Plotters, From Straight Dope One frosty dawn in November 1935, 500,000 War veterans rolled out of their blankets in the pine barrens around the CCC camp at Elkridge, Md. The brassy bugle notes of "Assembly" hurried them to the camp's parade ground, where, mounted on a white horse and surrounded by his staff, they found their leader, Major General Smedley Darlington ("Old Gimlet Eye") Butler, U. S. M. C., retired. "Men," cried General Butler, "Washington is but 30 miles away! Will you follow me?" The answer was a mighty shout: "We will!" Squad...

Screening older patients for cancer provided minimal benefit at considerable cost and increased use of invasive procedures, reported investigators in two separate studies. "It is particularly important to question screening strategies for older persons," Gross continued. "Patients with a shorter life expectancy have less time to develop clinically significant cancers after a screening test and are more likely to die from noncancer health problems after a cancer diagnosis."

To paraphrase the old Tennessee Ernie Ford song — you take a ton of government cash to get job retraining, and what do you get? Several years older and deeper in debt, according to the New York Times, which casts a critical eye on the Workforce Investment Act. The program first came into existence in 1998 and was expanded in the 2009 stimulus bill passed by Democrats, but does it actually help people find work and restore their economic independence? Not really, and the costs more often make situations worse instead of better: Instead, an extensive analysis of the...

Pharoah, let my people go: How did ancient Egypt become a land of slaves building fantastic monuments to dictatorial leaders? The land of Egypt was rich and fertile, a seeming paradise for egalitarian living. Stephanie Pappas writes in Live Science about how despots “evolved” in ancient societies, but that’s a misleading use of the term; it actually was a series of bad choices by free people. She writes how Simon Powers at the University of Lausanne came up with a mathematical model to explain the shift from egalitarianism to despotism. Whether it actually explains them could be disputed, but he...

People living in countries with governments that spend more on social services report being more contented, according to a Baylor University study. "The effect of state intervention into the economy equals or exceeds marriage or employment status -- two traditional predictors of happiness -- when it comes to satisfaction," said Patrick Flavin, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences. The study -- "Assessing the Impact of the Size and Scope of Government on Human Well-Being" -- is published in the journal Social Forces. The researchers analyzed data from 21 advanced industrialized countries in the...

Courts in Arizona and California have delivered rulings in two separate divorce cases, legally recognizing transgender marriages, including that of the world's "first pregnant man." The Arizona Court of Appeals has allowed "Pregnant Man" Thomas Beatie, who was born female, to dissolve his Hawaiian marriage with another woman, while the California Superior Court has ruled that the marriage of Jake Miller, also known as Buck Angel, with Elayne Angel is valid. A lower court had refused to dissolve the marriage of Beatie, who later got his birth certificate amended under Hawaiian law, with Nancy J. Beatie due to Arizona's ban...

FedEx Corp faces a new charge of conspiring to launder money in a U.S. criminal case over the company's drug deliveries for rogue online pharmacies despite warnings from law enforcement. The latest indictment, filed in court on Friday, said FedEx accepted payment from several pharmacies when it knew the revenue was the product of invalid prescriptions. If convicted, FedEx could face fines of up to roughly $1.6 billion.

This week, the Heartland Institute offered up a modest proposal: Eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency's 15,000-person staff, move the headquarters from Washington to Topeka, Kan., and reload it with 300 state delegates. The policy brief from the libertarian think tank that promotes climate skepticism—written by Heartland science director Jay Lehr—is something of a dream scenario for tea partiers and other conservatives, who would like a smaller government and a chance to wipe clean EPA's federal regulations. Lehr writes that "incremental reform of EPA is simply not an option," hence his proposal for a "Committee of the Whole" made up of...

According to two new studies published Wednesday by the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), U.S. physicians and hospitals are rapidly increasing the use of electronic health records (EHRs). The two studies found that in 2013: •Nearly 78 percent of office-based physicians acknowledged they had implemented some form of EHR system. •About half of all physicians had an EHR system with advanced functionalities, nearly double the rate of four years before. •About 59 percent of hospitals had an EHR system with advanced functionalities, nearly quadruple the rate of two years before. The HHS claims that...

SANTOS, Brazil, Aug 13 (Reuters) - Brazilian presidential candidate Eduardo Campos was killed in a plane crash on Wednesday, throwing the October election into disarray and causing big swings in local financial markets. Campos' private jet crashed in bad weather as it prepared to land in the coastal city of Santos, just south of Sao Paulo, killing all seven people on board, the Sao Paulo state fire department said. Television images showed smoke billowing from the crash site in a residential area. Campos, 49, was in third place in recent polls with the support of about 10 percent of voters....