Free Republic

The prospect of four more years of Barack Obama in the White House has caused several conservative voices (among them, The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger, Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer, and noted Ronald Reagan scholar Paul Kengor) to opine that President Obama’s second term portends the passing of the Reagan era, the reversal of his pro-growth policies and the attempted burial of Reagan’s credo, “government is the problem.” None of this is news. It is a given that Obama and his fellow progressives reject Reagan’s values and philosophy. They will continue to try to expand government. There is, however,...

The White House is poised to release a cybersecurity executive order on Wednesday, two people familiar with the matter told The Hill. The highly anticipated directive from President Obama is expected to be released at an event Wednesday morning at the U.S. Department of Commerce, where senior administration officials will provide an update about cybersecurity policy. The White House began crafting the executive order after Congress failed to pass cybersecurity legislation last year. Officials said the threat facing the United States was too great for the administration to ignore.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The government has authorized the killing of American citizens as part of its controversial drone campaign against al Qaeda even without intelligence that such Americans are actively plotting to attack a U.S. target, according to a Justice Department memo. The unclassified memo, first obtained by NBC News, argues that drone strikes are justified under American law if a targeted U.S. citizen had "recently" been involved in "activities" posing a possible threat and provided that there is no evidence suggesting the individual "renounced or abandoned" such activities. The document was disclosed as a bipartisan group of U.S. senators...

PBS' Frontline program on Tuesday night broadcast a new one-hour report on one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering. What this program particularly demonstrated was that the Obama justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable. What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly...

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says in a statement: Fitch Ratings agency recently said, if the debt limit is raised without substantive deficit reduction, our nation's credit rating could be downgraded. The President's plan to simply borrow more money without any reform in Washington puts us all at risk. The first step to fixing this problem is to pass a budget that reduces spending. The House has done so, and will again. The Democratic Senate has not passed a budget in almost four years, which is unfair to hardworking taxpayers who expect more from their representatives. That ends this year....

Two key memos outlining the Justice Department’s views about when Americans can be surreptitiously tracked with GPS technology are being kept secret by the department despite a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU to force their release. The FBI’s general counsel discussed the existence of the two memos publicly last year, yet the Justice Department is refusing to release them without huge redactions. (You can see the heavily censored versions sent to the ACLU here and here, and our original FOIA request here.) The Justice Department’s unfortunate decision leaves Americans with no clear understanding of when we...

The widely anticipated senate bill soon to be introduced by gun-banner extraordinaire Diane Feinstein will do far more than eliminate “assault weapons” (AW’s) and “high capacity” magazines. According to a summary on the senator’s website, concealed carry license holder Feinstein–who proposed an outright ban on all handguns while packing her own for self-defense—will demand that owners of guns affected by her legislation: pay a $200 fee for EACH banned weapon owned; submit pictures, fingerprints and register AW’s with the ATF; have local law enforcement attest to the owner’s identity and specify the address at which each weapon will be kept....