Free Republic

Our interview with former U.S. senator, under secretary of state during the Reagan administration, and federal judge James Buckley (brother of William F.).

Scotland Yard officers have said they believe allegations that a ring of prominent politicians and members of the establishment abused and terrorised children as young as seven more than 30 years ago and went on to kill three young boys. Detectives appealed for victims and witnesses to come forward and identified a flat in Dolphin Square, London, near the Houses of Parliament, as a scene of some of the alleged abuse, as well as military premises and other locations across London and the home counties. So far one victim, known by the pseudonym Nick, has come forward to tell of...

Redstate catches an unguarded moment with Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper at a lunch earlier this week where he speaks extemporaneously and gives us a peek into what he believes the proper role of government to be. You might be surprised at just how little responsibility he feels you should take for yourself. Government should do what people individually canÂ’t do, or canÂ’t do well themselves. You know, educating our young people, [emphasis added] making sure our roads are designed and built properly, making sure our communities are safeÂ…that our economic system is robust, but at the same time fairÂ…that every...

The National Children’s Study has been cancelled despite almost 10 years of work and $1.3 billion of funding after a National Institutes of Health working group concluded that the project was flawed and too expensive to continue. The ambitious study, commissioned through the passage of the Children’s Health Act in 2000, set out to follow 100,000 children from birth to age 21 and track the effects of a broad range of environmental and biological factors on their health. However, concerns about the study’s design, research methodology and management that led to increased cost projections and triggered questions about whether the...

For over a decade, people all over the world have used Tor (formerly known as the Onion Router) to protect their privacy. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory developed the system using open source technology, to protect U.S. government communications. It is used by people living under restrictive regimes who want to access forbidden information or data on the Internet, whistle-blowers and dissidents who want to communicate with journalists, and anyone who wants to use the Internet without being tracked or to publish information on the Net without compromising their privacy.How Tor Works Tor works by sending traffic from its source...

Six years after candidate Barack Obama vowed to make working for government “cool again,” federal hiring of young people is instead tailing off and many millennials are heading for the door. The share of the federal workforce under the age of 30 dropped to 7 percent this year, the lowest figure in nearly a decade, government figures show. With agencies starved for digital expertise and thousands of federal jobs coming open because of a wave of baby-boomer retirements, top government officials, including at the White House, are growing increasingly distressed about the dwindling role played by young workers. “Millennials are

Senator Rand Paul introduced the Preventing Executive Overreach on Immigration Act on December 12. The bill (which has not yet been assigned a bill number, but has been placed on the Senate’s legislative calendar) is a companion legislation to Rep. Ted Yoho’s bill of the same name (H.R. 5759) that passed the House of Representatives on December 4, 2014 on a 219-197 vote. In a release place on his Senate webpage, Paul explained: This legislation would end President Obama’s executive action on immigration and restore the Congress’ constitutional role as the body to craft legislation. Article I of the Constitution...

Of course, back home in the Blue America’s capital, New York City, President De Blasio was less charitable. “We are no longer held back by the reactionary, racist policies of the past,” he thundered. “Together, we will build a new dawn of progress that places people before profits and promotes peace instead of perpetual war!” Blue America – New England and the mid-Atlantic seaboard, back through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, the West Coast and Hawaii, immediately set to drafting a new constitution. It featured 216 new affirmative rights, including “the right to a living wage,” “the right to abortion upon...

Sub-Headlines: CPI no longer measures the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living. CPI no longer measures full inflation for out-of-pocket expenditures. With the misused cover of academic theory, politicians forced significant underreporting of official inflation, so as to cut annual cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security, etc. Politicians look to expand further the concept of artificially-suppressed cost-of-living adjustments in current budget-deficit negotiations [in 2013], through the use of the Chained-CPI (see Special C-CPI Supplement at end of this document). Use of the CPI to adjust retirement benefits, private income or to set investment goals impairs the ability of retirees,...

More frightening than anything else: In the nightmare world progressives are designing for civil society, little tots are no longer your little tots. They are government-sought human resources to be raised as tomorrow’s anarchists. “On Wednesday, the White House Summit on Early Education will unveil nearly $1 billion in new “investments” to “expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America” from “birth and continuing to age 5.” It’s a retread of President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union school-spending plan, which was a repackaging of his 2011 Race to the Top — Early Learning Challenge program.”...

Editor’s note: This column was originally published Dec.. 5. On Dec. 12, the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act. Page 1,163 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) states: “The land conveyed under this subsection shall be used only as a motocross, bicycle, off-highway vehicle, or stock car racing area, or for any other public purpose consistent with uses allowed under the Act of June 14, 1926 (commonly known as the ‘Recreation and Public Purposes Act’)…” You may ask yourself: What in the world does this have to do with defending America against the numerous threats we face? The...

Published on Dec 10, 2014Las Cruces City Attorney Harry S. Connelly lays out the incentives and tactics that drive the practice of policing for profit, better know as civil asset forfeiture. He explains how nuisance ordinances are lucrative grounds for police departments to mine.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Thursday held a conference call with government agencies and departments to prepare them for a possible shutdown, as the House struggles to pass a funding bill. "Congress is taking a series of actions today on legislation that would prevent a lapse in appropriations and allow for continued Government operations. We continue to believe that time remains for Congress to pass full-year appropriations for FY 2015, and prevent a government shutdown," an OMB official said in a statement. "However, out of an abundance of caution, we are working with agencies and taking steps...

Senator Elizabeth Warren is bat guano crazy. She is calling on Democrats in the House to oppose the bi-partisan budget bill negotiated by the House and Senate because an obscure rule dealing with derivatives contained in the Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform bill has been removed.If House Democrats follow her lead, the budget bill will fail and the government will be forced to shut down at 12:01 AM on Friday. At present, Speaker Boehner does not have enough votes for Republicans to pass the measure themselves. That’s because some conservatives in the House are also bat guano crazy and insist...

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) argued that the "abomination" omnibus bill was "a chance to see if electing Republicans made a difference" on Tuesday's "Laura Ingraham Show." "I'll vote no to any kind of 2,000 page bill that I'm given at the last minute that we don't have time to read, it's an abomination, nobody should support a Congress that stuffs all the spending into one bill, nobody reads it, there are no reforms, no amendments, and it really is probably why Congress has about a 10% approval rate because this is not doing our job" he declared. Paul added that...

In an attempt to promote transparency in military activities between the two countries, Russia will conduct an observation flight over the United States as part of the Treaty on Open Skies between Dec. 8 and Dec. 13, Sergei Ryzhkov, head of Russia’s National Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, said Monday. The flight will be launched from Travis Air Force Base in California and cover a maximum range of 2,640 miles. A group of U.S. specialists will also board the Russian aircraft to monitor the flight and to ensure that norms of the treaty are not violated. According to the U.S. Department...

The IRS scandal is not much in the news these days, but it is not going away. The more Obama’s minions stonewall this scandal, the more congressional Democrats discount the scandal, the more the leftist establishment media ignores this scandal, the more toxic it will be for the left. In late November we learned that 30,000 of Lois Lerner’s lost e-mails have been found, but these e-mails have not yet been converted into readable form. The utter contempt the Obama administration shows toward the oversight powers of Congress, toward the millions of information technology-savvy Americans who grasp the lying and...

The left-of-center government of Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has been forced to call new elections less than three months after taking office.  Unable to pass a budget through the Rikstag (parliament), Lofven faced a choice of either resigning or calling snap elections, slated for March 22, 2015.  Although the budget was the trigger, most observers believe that immigration policy is at the root of the fall.  David Crouch of the U.K. Guardian explains: Sweden’s far right plunged the country into unprecedented political upheaval on Wednesday by forcing the government to gamble on fresh elections in the spring after the...

Imagine that Eric Garner had been white. Imagine that he’d been living in Idaho. Imagine that the law-enforcement officers who killed him had been federal agents. His death would be a Tea Party crusade. Think about it. The police hassled Garner because he had a history of selling untaxed cigarettes. It’s the kind of big-government intrusion that drives Tea Partiers nuts. One of the events that helped launch the Tea Party, in fact, came in January 2009, when activists from Young Americans for Liberty donned American Indian garb to protest the soda taxes proposed by then-New York Governor David Patterson....

Federal officials are hiring 1,000 permanent employees to open a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Virginia that will help implement President Obama’s recent executive orders on immigration. “USCIS is taking steps to open a new operational center in Crystal City, a neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, to accommodate about 1,000 full-time, permanent federal and contract employees in a variety of positions and grade levels,” the agency announced Monday in a bulletin flagged by Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.). “The initial workload will include cases filed as a result of the executive actions on immigration announced on Nov. 20, 2014.”...