Free Republic

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, CNN’s Chris Cuomo, and MSNBC’s Ed Schultz will soon be in the dock (below, figuratively speaking), but first, let’s make this clear: The battle over various Religious Freedom Restoration Acts has nothing to do with a dislike of, or desire to discriminate against, homosexuals. Let this also be clear: The organized Left and its media mouthpieces have won this week’s skirmishes, largely because the Right’s would-be champions proved to be invertebrate; but advocates of religious freedom have not lost the war, and cannot, must not, and will not retreat — and we have every chance of ultimately...

IÂ’ve written many times about the shortcomings of government schools at the K-12 level. We spend more on our kids than any other nation, yet our test scores are comparatively dismal. And one of my points, based on this very sobering chart from one of my Cato colleagues, is that AmericaÂ’s educational performance took a turn in the wrong direction when the federal government became more involved starting about 40-50 years ago. Well, the same unhappy story exists in the higher-education sector. Simply stated, thereÂ’s been an explosion of spending, much of it from Washington, yet the rate of return...

Earlier this week, Drew M wrote another chapter in his long running “Let It Burn” saga, Can The GOP Be Reformed? Some Say No, Others Are Wrong. It's a good essay, I encourage anyone who missed it to take a moment to read it, because I'm about to take issue with it. The issue I have with Drew's thread has nothing to do with it's content. I happen to think that his observations are spot on, and I agree with them. The GOP isn't a conservative party. It isn't going to ever be as conservative as he, and I, and I suspect...

Checks and balances. If you’re frustrated by the refusal of Congress to stop its fiscal insanity – and how could you not be? – it’s time to start realizing that the Constitution gives states and the people more power over Congress than most realize. And right now there is an effort called the Article V Initiative that would wield and deploy that power. Most people don’t know, because they have never been taught, that Article V of the Constitution empowers the people through their state legislatures to propose amendments. Specifically, Article V proscribes a process in which two-thirds of state...

Repair and realignment of our federal government The size of the federal government has exploded over the last century. The legislative and judicial branches of government have grown to serve the increased number of states and its growing population. The size and scope of the executive branch has grown to reflect an expanded role of the federal government over the last 100 years. Apparently the staffing of fourteen separate Cabinet Departments were not enough to manage the current executive branch, so Barack Obama felt the need to appoint a number of “czars” to focus on special emphasis areas. Recent studies...

Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and president of Khalilzad Associates, an international business consulting firm based in Washington, DC. He was the United States Ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush. He has been involved with U.S. policy makers at the White House, State Department and Pentagon since the mid-1980s, and was the highest-ranking Muslim American in the Administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. Khalilzad's previous assignments in the Administration include U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. President Bush in 2002 appointed Khalilzad...

By Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyJerusalem, Israel — March 25, 2015 … Part of the following was communicated by the President’s Office of Israel to the Israel News Agency. President of Israel Reuven Rivlin this evening, appointed outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu MK, with the task of forming the 34th Government of Israel, at a ceremony at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem. The President signed the official letter of appointment in his office with Prime Minister Netanyahu, before going on to make public statements. “In democracy, majority rules, and the majority has made its voice heard clearly in this election,”...

American foreign policy is controlled by fools. What else can one conclude from the bipartisan demand that the U.S. intervene everywhere all the time, irrespective of consequences? No matter how disastrous the outcome, the War Lobby insists that the idea was sound.

So Governor Mark Dayton of Minnesota wants another new tax--this time adding a 6.5% gas tax at the wholesale level, along with license fee increases and a new metro-wide sales tax for, you guessed it, mass transit. A lack of government revenue isn't what plagues our roads. About 25% of the current federal gas tax of 18.4 (not including diesel) cents per gallon is siphoned off for non-highway uses, primarily via the Mass Transit Account. As a result, the HTF must now rely on general fund bailouts to survive. Recent history here in Minnesota also proves a similar point. In...

Four of the seven Arkansas Christian homeschool children who were removed from their parents home in January will finally be returned to live full time on a 60-day trial basis after the family reached a mediated agreement with the Arkansas Department of Human Services on Tuesday. The children's mother, Michelle Stanley, told The Christian Post on Wednesday that the agreement will also allow for the three older children to return home on the weekends and to stay at home during their spring break, which is next week. Stanley explained that the mediation hearing, which was only supposed to last three...

Federal agencies made $125 billion in improper payments last year, including tax credits to people who didn't qualify, Medicare payments for treatments that might not be necessary and unemployment benefits for people who were actually working, said a government report released Monday.

It’s one of the central contradictions of American politics: that there’s no such thing as the “Catholic vote,” yet the Catholics vote still matters. There’s no “Catholic vote” in terms of Catholics representing an electoral bloc that votes according to what their bishops tell them, or in lockstep with the tenets of their religion. Yet winning Catholic voters has been essential to almost every presidential victory in modern times. And the defection of Catholics voters has played a role in some of the most consequential congressional turnovers in recent history — from 1994 to 2014 — making Catholics the ultimate...

3. “The social contract” A valid contract must be presented honestly and agreed to voluntarily, without duress or fraud. The social contract does not meet this standard because the state will initiate the use of force against anyone who does not voluntarily enter into the social contract. The state is also not automatically dissolved when it fails to uphold its obligations under the social contract, so the presentation is dishonest if it even occurs at all. Therefore, the social contract cannot be considered a legitimate contract.

WASHINGTON — She has been the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, a senior adviser to a Republican presidential nominee and a candidate for the United States Senate. But Carly Fiorina recently took on her boldest role yet: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s loudest critic. Over the past few weeks, Ms. Fiorina has mocked Mrs. Clinton’s globe-trotting as secretary of state, assailed Mrs. Clinton’s use of only a private email account to do official business, and even accused Mrs. Clinton of stealing intellectual property. From her. Twice. Ms. Fiorina insists she has no problem with Mrs. Clinton personally — only with her liberal philosophy...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Americans' confidence in all three branches of government is at or near record lows, according to a major survey that has measured attitudes on the subject for 40 years. The 2014 General Social Survey finds only 23 percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the Supreme Court, 11 percent in the executive branch and 5 percent in Congress. By contrast, half have a great deal of confidence in the military. The survey is conducted by the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. Because of its long-running and comprehensive set of questions...

Interenet Tax

Hillary’s press conference showed We the People there will never be a safe way for Hillary to become President. She said she had a private server in her private home thinking she had some degree of privacy by doing so. But Hillary there’s one thing you didn’t think of. Doing government business on a separate private server in your home was a national security risk. Didn’t you understand that? We can comfortably conclude that, at a bare minimum, the Chinese and Russians have everything that was; repeat was, on your private server. I know you, in the middle of an...

There may be precedence of using private email accounts in government, but I don't know of anyone having their own hardware system at their private residence. Using accounts at google still allows subpoenas to be issued to the ISP such that data can be retrieved from archives, even if the user has deleted them. Quite frankly, I'm not concerned about Hillary's email to other .gov addresses. I'm sure they're benign. I'm also sure she knows when something is classified. As a Secretary of State, if you wanted to hand off something classified, what better way to do it than in...

If you think you haven’t heard of “reformicons” or “reform conservatives,” don’t sell yourself short. You are already familiar with this latest movement within the Republican Party, albeit under different branding. This piece, entitled “The Good Right” (as compared with … ?), sums up the Reformicon agenda this way: Yuval Levin, one of reform conservatism’s brightest thinkers, told Sam Tanenhaus that “a shrinking or scaling-back of government” was not his aim. He sought “an entire reimagining of it.” He argues that “a true Burkean conservatism would recast the federal government as the facilitator and supporter of local institutions who are...

Will the government ever publish graphs, charts, info on where the money they get for Obammy Care is going?