Free Republic

The Founding Fathers, authors of the Constitution, were obsessed with any form of government that could become too powerful, too willing to use force to oppress citizens. They had cause. They had fought a long war against the greatest power of their age, ruled by a king with nearly absolute power. They fashioned an instrument designed to ensure that the President could not rule by edict and defused power among three branches of government. We have a President currently running for reelection against Congress, Wall Street, Republicans, and the right of citizens to be free of an overly intrusive government....

According to statistics provided by high-ranking FBI sources, more than 98 percent of those individuals on the federal government's sole Terrorist Watchlist1 are associated with international terrorism (foreign nationals or Americans attacking Americans based on international extremist ideologies). The remainder are associated with domestic terrorism the FBI defines as "Americans attacking Americans based on U.S.-based extremist ideologies."2However, despite a growing national discussion of homegrown violent extremism, it is important to put that discussion in context: Today, less than 2 percent of all watchlisted persons are U.S. citizens. On any given day, there are about 550,000 individuals on the Watchlist: approximately...

Under this administration and this Congress — which includes the Republican-controlled House of Representatives led by Speaker John Boehner — the right of Catholics to freely exercise their religion is treated with less deference than the presumed right of stockyard owners to fill the skies with effluvia. I mean this literally. When Congress wants to stop the Executive Branch from doing something, it has a simple constitutional means: Deny funding for that activity. The $914.8 billion spending law Congress passed last week to keep the government funded through the end of fiscal 2012 — which does not come until Sept....

They don't work. They've never worked. And Obama's no friend of the middle class. It was more than a little disconcerting to watch President Barack Obama pretend to be a friend of the middle class in Kansas on December 6, and to watch the press lap it up as if it was the gospel truth. The record shows that Obama’s and his party’s policies, plans, and proposals have done more harm to the middle class than any administration in my lifetime. One of Obama’s core claims is that the policies of the past, coming from largely Republican administrations espousing and...

(LifeSiteNews.com) - The Obama administration has indicted a second individual suspected of helping a nine-year-old girl escape a custody claim by an unrelated lesbian, who is seeking to take custody of her from her natural mother. According to the Associated Press, 46-year old Kenneth L. Miller of Stuarts Draft, Virginia, appeared in federal court on Tuesday to face charges of “international parental kidnapping” for helping Lisa Miller (42) and her daughter Isabella (9) to travel to Canada and ultimately Nicaragua. The Virginia resident reportedly contacted associates in Nicaragua and Canada to request their support for Lisa Miller as she fled...

You can’t say the message of Obama’s December 6 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, should have been a surprise to anyone. After all, he’s been beating the class warfare drum for much of his administration, and the idea of higher taxes on the rich to promote income redistribution is something he telegraphed as far back as the 2008 campaign, with his impromptu reaction in the famous Joe the Plumber incident. During the 2008 presidential campaign Obama also stated an interest in using the capital gains tax primarily as an instrument of “fairness” — even if a rise in the rate would...

A Teen-age President in Search of an Adult Identity Barack Obama keeps looking for a presidential identity not his own. In 2008, he wished to be JFK — whom he often referenced as a youthful and charismatic figure supposedly similar to himself. So we heard references to Obama’s father’s arrival to the U.S. during the golden Kennedy Camelot years. Caroline Kennedy herself came out of seclusion to assure us that Obama had the same Kennedy zest, and she flirted with a Senate run to help restore the lost age of grandeur. And at the Brandenburg Gate, Obama would have liked...

Has Barack Obama​'s Democratic Party given up on winning the votes of the white working class? Thomas Edsall, the longtime Washington Post reporter now with The Huffington Post, thinks so. Surveying the plans of Democratic strategists, Edsall wrote in The New York Times on Nov. 28 that "all pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned." Of course, an Obama campaign spokesman issued a prompt denial. No campaign wants any groups of voters to know that it has written them off. But Edsall is plainly on to something. Obama campaign strategists have...

I’ve said before that when the Democrats propose a tax credit it’s called a “business incentive” and when a Republican proposes a tax credit it’s called a “loophole.” This game of semantics only works because of a complicit media which is more than willing to apply the Democrat designated classifications to ensure the correct narrative. In reality, all sides are using fancy words to avoid the one word that best describes what is happening: subsidization. Subsidies aren’t necessarily inherently bad. There can be subsidies that work in favor of economic growth or better opportunities for the disadvantaged. But more often...

I understand that the NAACP opposes voter-ID laws. Given the long history of fighting against uses of state law to deny blacks and other minorities the franchise until the Civil Rights Movement prevailed, their deep skepticism over proposed stricter enforcement of eligibility laws can’t help but recall echoes of voter suppression in their communities, even if the new laws are innocent of any racial animus. We still have plenty of mistrust that will take generations to undo, especially given that we still have those with living memories of having been denied the right to vote. Still, if the NAACP wants...

The displacement of the “individual” as a primary category of social and political thought — a distinctly observable trend in the contemporary West — is an infallible sign of civilizational despair. The nexus of causes and factors accounting for this undeniable phenomenon has been analyzed in many different ways and from many different perspectives: the draining of confidence in the “Western enterprise” after two world wars and the devastation of the generations; the natural tendency of a successful civilization to grow tired and lazy in the course of aeonian time, as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee argued in their major...

The corpse of the Super Committee was not even cold before Democrats tore off their silly “deficit hawk” disguises and got back to spending your money like water. As reported by The Hill, they’re itching to throw another $400 billion on the national debt, as quickly as possible: After failing to reach a deal to reduce the deficit, the Senate will move next month to take up legislation that could add more than $400 billion to the deficit. All of the proposals, such as the extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance, are popular but there’s no agreement...

President Obama did voters a favor. During the 2008 campaign and early in his administration, he laid out the standards by which he should be judged. He made it perfectly clear under what conditions he would deserve re-election. And by his own standard he doesn’t deserve a second term. In February 2009, when employment was at 8.2 percent, he declared, “If I don’t get this done in three years, then this is going to be a one term proposition.” Unemployment has yet to return to February 2009 levels, much less fall lower. Based on that standard alone, this should indeed...

The United States government officially passed the $15 trillion debt milestone on Tuesday. The Republican National Committee produced a little video to commemorate the occasion, and remind us of the bygone days when Barack Obama​ stridently declared $9 trillion in debt was too much, and he’d cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term: Many people have become concerned about the staggering amount of American debt purchased by China. Those people can relax, because China is no longer the largest holder of U.S. government debt. Who is? Why… none other than the U.S. Federal Reserve​. That’s...

WASHINGTON DC, November 17, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The recently released findings of a government investigation have raised further suspicions that the Obama Administration essentially “hired surrogates” to push for abortion in Kenya during a critical battle over the country’s new Constitution, according to renowned pro-life congressman Chris Smith. According to a report published Monday by the Government Accountability Office, the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), an Obama grantee in Kenya, repeatedly pushed for liberalization of the government’s abortion laws during the country’s debate over the draft Constitution. Despite the fact that the first draft of the constitution contained no mention...

It is one of the quintessential pillars of the Republican Party — no new taxes. George H. W. Bush got thrown out of office for violating that pledge. But Pat Toomey, Senator of Pennsylvania, is proposing new taxes. He’s proposing $300 billion in new taxes, largely through restructuring and simplifying the tax code. But they are new taxes. So we have the GOP willing to surrender a key plank and the Democrats are unhappy. They want more. They want the GOP to go even higher. Toomey says no dice. I’m starting to think he’s outfoxed all of us by throwing...

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - President Barack Obama insisted Wednesday that the United States does not fear China, even as he announced a new security agreement with Australia that is widely viewed as a response to China's growing aggressiveness. China responded swiftly, warning that an expanded U.S. military footprint in Australia may not be appropriate and deserved greater scrutiny. -snip- About 250 U.S. Marines will begin a rotation in northern Australia starting next year, with a full force of 2,500 military personnel staffing up over the next several years. Obama called the deployment "significant," ..."It also allows us to meet the...

The last time I checked, didn’t the Left call this sort of thing ‘crony capitalism?’ Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work. Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor. As you probably know, smallpox was eradicated in the wild decades ago: mostly because it was a genuinely terrifying threat...

On Aug. 24, federal agents descended on three factories and the Nashville corporate headquarters of the Gibson Guitar Corp. Accompanied by armored SWAT teams with automatic weapons, agents from the Fish and Wildlife Service swarmed the factories, threatening bewildered luthiers, or guitar craftsman, and other frightened employees. A smaller horde invaded the office of CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, pawing through it all day while an armed man stood in the door to block his way. "I was pretty upset," Mr. Juszkiewicz says now, sitting outside that same office. "But you can only do so much when there's a gun in your...

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D) is from Maryland. He doesn’t like the fact that Lindsay Graham (R) from South Carolina is fighting the union appointees at the National Labor Relations Board and their attempt to shut down Boeing’s new 787 assembly line in Graham’s own state. As a result, Cummings is accusing Boeing of unduly influencing Graham and is demanding that Congress step aside for the NLRB. In a letter Wednesday to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Cummings said new documents released by the labor board show the agency came under undue...