Free Republic

Yesterday I started to delve into the Dennis Hastert case, paying particular attention to the specific crimes with which the former Speaker is being charged. But even after I finished writing about it and reading some of the comments here, I wasn’t very happy with my conclusions. There’s something very unsettling about the entire case (leaving out the obvious, horrible alleged child rape parts of it) but I felt that I wasn’t quite able to put my finger on it. Today I found someone who has done a better job of wrestling those questions to the ground and it...

Back during the 2012 presidential campaign, I criticized the view that America was divided between “makers” and “takers.”But not because I disagreed with the notion that people trapped in government dependency have an unfortunate self-interest in supporting politicians who want a bigger welfare state. Indeed, I’ve explicitly warned that some statist politicians explicitly want to create more dependency to advance their power.That being said, it’s important to understand the depth of the problem. It’s not accurate, as I’ve written, to assume that people who don’t pay tax are part of the moocher class. …those people are not necessarily looking...

The ssa.gov website is vulnerable in several ways, and when it comes to identity thief's no one is a better friend or more helpful with validating data or filling in the blanks or even stealing complete Social Security Account Numbers. Social Security Account Numbers are said to be the Holy Grail of identity theft. Stealing Social Security Numbers Hackers may easily steal Social Security Account Numbers from the Social Security Administration's website ssa.gov making Everyone who has ever been issued a Social Security Account Number vulnerable to identity theft should hackers choose to use this attack vector. This vulnerability is...

Your Social Security Number can be stolen in under an hour. And hundreds of website run by the government, universities and financial institutions among other companies are at fault. ... ... ... It works essentially in the following way. Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6789? No! Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6790? No! Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6788? Yes! ... ... ... Very commonly all the hacker needs is: A victim’s last name A victim's birth date A vulnerable website the victim uses. ... ... ... Are any big players exposing SSN’s? I have a list of hundreds of websites who are...

I appreciate it when leftists get off script, dispatch with the propagandist talking points and say what’s really on their minds. “Progressives” hate natural marriage. And they hate the natural family. But they do so love big government. In an article for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation titled, “Is having a loving family an unfair advantage?” Joe Gelonesi, host of “The Philosopher’s Zone” radio program, calls the natural mom-dad biological family a “weathered institution ever more in need of a rationale for existing.” While he admits that it may be premature to “abolish the family and put children into care of...

About a decade ago, a doctor friend was lamenting the increasingly frustrating conditions of clinical practice. “How did you know to get out of medicine in 1978?” he asked with a smile. “I didn’t,” I replied. “I had no idea what was coming. I just felt I’d chosen the wrong vocation.” I was reminded of this exchange upon receiving my med-school class’s 40th-reunion report and reading some of the entries. In general, my classmates felt fulfilled by family, friends, and the considerable achievements of their professional lives. But there was an undercurrent of deep disappointment, almost demoralization, with what medical...

Letter to my Congressional Representative Legislative Staffers, please ask staffers of appropriate governmental affairs committees to introduce legislation regularizing and streamlining the process for innocent, small-businesspeople to recover assets summarily seized by the Federal Government for technically running afoul of "Structuring Violations" laws about "suspicious deposits", a governmental shakedown operation in which innocent victims have no hope of recovering the $100 millions of honestly earned assets improperly confiscated by tyrannical, run-amok government officials.

The NSA’s Technotyranny: One Nation Under Surveillance The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control. – William Binney, NSA whistleblower We now have a fourth branch of government. As I document in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the...

Of those running for president, who will give this speech? “Ladies and Gentlemen, my administration will implement a series of economic policies to cause the economy to grow at an average rate of 4 percent or more a year. Growth of 4 percent-plus per year will create jobs at a faster rate than the growth in the labor force and provide hope for those who had despaired of finding a good job again. At a growth rate of a little over 4 percent per year, real incomes for all of our citizens will double in only 17 years. (At the...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview over Memorial Day weekend that he’s getting much closer to a decision on whether he’ll pursue a presidential campaign in 2016, a decision he expects will come in early July.

In an episode of Truth in Media, Ben Swann investigates the origins of the militant group referred to as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and lays blame for the terrorist organization on the United State government.CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO “The name ISIS is one that every American knows,” said Swann, an independent investigative journalist who earned two Emmy Awards and two Edward R. Murrow awards. “The biggest threat to our national security since Al-Qaeda, right? They are a brutal, savage group known for public beheadings and mass executions. They are the face of the new...

A brilliant young man has single-handedly solved the problem of college loan debt. It was a daringly simple maneuver! Tennessee high school senior Ronald Nelson, Jr., who is a National Merit Scholar, star athlete, sax player, SAT high scorer, and student body president, turned down acceptances from eight Ivy League colleges and will instead attend the University of Alabama this fall. Young Ronald seems to have absorbed at an early age a lesson that eludes many youths (and those who have long since left youth behind): avoid going head over heels in debt. This is not to denigrate an Ivy...

A 2010 Pentagon directive on military support to civilian authorities details what critics say is a troubling policy that envisions the Obama administration’s potential use of military force against Americans. The directive contains noncontroversial provisions on support to civilian fire and emergency services, special events and the domestic use of the Army Corps of Engineers. The troubling aspect of the directive outlines presidential authority ........

On Monday, FreedomWorks and the Center for American Progress (CAP) joined forces to invite bloggers, writers, and some think-tank analysts for a daylong conference on justice reform. One of the aspects I liked about the conference is that it shows on some issues the left and right can agree. It’s disconcerting that we’ve gradually lost the ability to have a conversation with one another–the Indiana RFRA fiasco is a result of this decay in public discourse. So, it didn’t end like the Red Wedding­; it didn’t even turn out like the end of Gangs of New York. In fact,...

Why Do Some People Accept Dependence? I had a thought I wanted to share regarding why some people accept dependence on government handouts as a way of life. My idea of success is for a person to go through life without becoming a burden on their fellow citizens. This is not always possible but once you do become a burden, your every sense should be to unburden your fellow citizens. Explaining the benefits to mind and body rooted in independence isn’t enough to cause some people to risk the comfort of a handout for the difficult path to independence. The...

Americans often go to great lengths to keep the government off their assets. But last month, as Peter and Joan Petrasek had wished in their wills, a cashier’s check for $847,215.57 was made out to the Department of Treasury. The Petraseks had left their total accumulated wealth, of cash in the bank and sale of their West Seattle home, “to the government of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” The Petraseks had no children. Why the unusual will? Why not a charity or some cause?

Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children I used the verb “stupefying” to describe a long process in our nation’s schools that has produced several generations of Americans, dumbed down and resulting in more than half who are functionally illiterate, nor can do math, and, as a recent headline reported “Student’s Results in Social Studies Stagnate.” “U.S. middle-school students’ performance on social studies didn’t improve much between 2010 and 2014, federal test scores released Wednesday (April 29) show, underscoring concerns about the uniformed citizenry and workforce.” When it comes to U.S. history, the...

Monday's edition of the Federal Register contains new rules for government-sponsored school meal programs, disclosing the compensation of senior executives at certain banks, and acquisitions regulations for government agencies. Here's what is happening: Global warming: The Obama administration is proposing new acquisitions regulations for the Department of Defense, General Services Administration and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. These federal agencies will try to procure materials that do not contain high global warming potential hydrofluorocarbons. "This will allow agencies to better meet the greenhouse gas emission reduction goals and reporting requirements," the agencies wrote. The public has 60 days to comment....

“The rights of private persons amongst democratic nations are commonly of small importance…the consequence is, that they are often sacrificed without regret, and almost always violated without remorse. But it happens that, at the same period and amongst the same nations in which men conceive a natural contempt for the rights of private persons, the rights of society at large are naturally extended and consolidated”, wrote Alexis De Tocqueville in Democracy In America. “In other words”, writes Tocqueville, “men become less attached to private rights just when it is most necessary to retain and defend what little remains of them.”...

THE FUTURE OF THE FAMILY What, then, has changed? Here’s one way of putting it. I wrote a book a few years ago about religion and science and I summarized the difference between them in two sentences: “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” And that’s a way of thinking about culture as well. Does culture put things together or take things apart? What made the traditional family remarkable, a work of high religious art, is what it brought together: sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship, emotional kinship and...