Free Republic

In 1958, U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater framed his opposition to the National Defense of Education Act (NDEA) in the form of an old Arabian proverb: “If the camel once gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow.” Goldwater, the grandfather of the modern conservative movement, understood government at its most basic. Through my years spent inside the federal government, as a former analyst for the CIA, a Reagan-appointed federal prosecutor, and then as a U.S. Congressman -- I can personally vouch for the accuracy of Goldwater’s observation about the true nature of government: No matter how much...

Brussels is guilty of using ‘flagrant’ power grabs to expand its control over British life, according to the Government’s top law officer. In an outspoken attack on Europe, Attorney General Dominic Grieve said ministers are set to go to court to stop the European Commission straying ‘beyond its remit’. He accused Eurocrats of trying to ‘subvert’ the position of nation states and said they have ‘lost touch’ with the people of Europe. Mr. Grieve, usually a moderate voice who urges other ministers to be more positive about Brussels, said he was ‘frankly astonished’ at how EU institutions have attempted ‘to...

Happy holidays from the Obama administration. Federal agencies are currently working on rolling out hundreds of environmental regulations, including major regulations that would limit emissions from power plants and expand the agency’s authority to bodies of water on private property. On Tuesday, the White House released its regulatory agenda for the fall of 2013. It lists hundreds of pending energy and environmental regulations being crafting by executive branch agencies, including 134 regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency alone. The EPA is currently crafting 134 major and minor regulations, according to the White House’s regulatory agenda. Seventy-six of the EPA’s pending...

".......Reid clearly felt strongly about the [filibuster] when Democrats were the minority party in the Senate, and he insisted that as majority leader he would never target the filibuster. However, as the problems with the Obamacare rollout continue to mount, and the president barrels headlong into lame-duck territory amid plummeting poll numbers, Reid is invoking his “right to change how I feel about things.” As is the president, apparently. Reid’s change of heart dates back to October 2011, when he used the nuclear option to scale back the ability of the Republican minority to offer amendments, something he has effectively...

Young Voices is a new project which exists to achieve greater media representation for promising college students and young professionals. Every week a different Advocate will comment on the stories which impact their lives. The Supreme Court case Bond vs. United States will determine whether Congress can pass laws otherwise outside its Constitutional authority through the use of treaties. Writing in Slate, University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner posits that fears about the federal government abusing new powers are overblown. However, considering the federal laws recent narrowly avoided treaties would have implemented, including a law which would have outlawed...

Did you know that the Obama administration is negotiating a super secret “trade agreement” that is so sensitive that he isn’t even allowing members of Congress to see it? The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being called the “NAFTA of the Pacific” and “NAFTA on steroids”, but the truth is that it is so much more than just a trade agreement. This treaty has 29 chapters, but only 5 of them have to do with trade. Most Americans don’t realize this, but this treaty will fundamentally change our laws regarding Internet freedom, health care, the trading of derivatives, copyright issues, food...

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Days after a Republican was elected mayor of Annapolis, City Council members say they will revisit legislation that would strip the mayor’s office of much of its power. Democratic Alderman Ross Arnett of Ward 8 tells The Capital he will introduce a charter amendment to move Annapolis to a council-manager style of government. The city manager would report directly to the City Council, not the mayor.

The 17-year pause in global warming is likely to last into the 2030s and the Arctic sea ice has already started to recover, according to new research.A paper in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics – by Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Dr Marcia Wyatt – amounts to a stunning challenge to climate science orthodoxy.Not only does it explain the unexpected pause, it suggests that the scientific majority – whose views are represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – have underestimated the role of natural cycles and exaggerated that of greenhouse gases....

Since 2008, the idea of third parties started to gain more popularity across America.  Principled conservatives and libertarians united against both the Democrat and Republican establishment started to explore methods of opposing Washington elites and the status quo. The Tea Party had some success – and has continued most successfully – with primary campaigns which put principled people like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul in races as the Republican candidate.  Once they won the GOP nomination, winning the general election was often pretty straightforward. Yet many liberty activists have become disenchanted by the two party system and are turning to other options....

ACT Inc. announced today that it is developing a new series of assessments for every grade level, from 3rd through 10th, to measure skills needed in college and careers. The tests, which would be administered digitally and provide instant feedback to teachers, will be piloted in states this fall and scheduled to be launched in 2014, says Jon Erickson, the president of education for ACT, the Iowa City, Iowa-based nonprofit testing company. The "next generation" assessment will be pegged to the Common Core State Standards and cover the four areas now on the ACT: English, reading, math, and science. "It...

There is no evidence that the Syrian government ordered the massacre with chemical weapons, but the West will blame it anyway because they want war, investigative journalist Neil Clark told RT. RT: As we can see the US, Britain, France and Turkey are all waiting on options in Syria. How ready are they to move from words to action at this point? Neil Clark: They are really bent on war and whatever the UN inspectors do this week won’t matter because it is a replay of 2003 when Saddam Hussein was bullied into allowing weapons inspection teams into Iraq. They...

Apple Inc.'s AAPL +1.27%e-book problem is spilling over into its other media businesses. After winning last month an e-books antitrust suit against Apple, the Justice Department on Friday asked a federal judge to limit Apple's influence in the publishing market and give the government oversight of the iTunes Store and App Store. . The government proposals, if accepted, could give music, television-show and content owners more leverage in negotiations with a company that has been an aggressive bargainer in opening up traditional media to digital distribution

Residents of Maryland may or may not know that over 100 new laws will be effective July 1. The laws include myriad new or adjusted rules on licenses to serve alcohol, requiring union representation fees for those in public education institutions, and fifteen million dollars in potential bond debt.Garrett County Memorial Hospital is a 55 bed hospital. Senator Edwards (Republican, D-1) sponsored the successful bid to authorize the County Commissioners to borrow up to $15,000,000 in order to assist in financing the cost of hospital improvements. The votes for this legislation were 135-0 in the House and 46-0 in the...

Well, it's good to know where his head is at: From Yahoo News: "Sen. Lindsey Graham would propose censoring Americans' 'snail' mail if he thought it would help protect national security, the South Carolina Republican said Tuesday. But for now, he says he doesn't think it's necessary." The direct quote is: "If I thought censoring the mail was necessary, I would suggest it, but I don't think it is." Graham went on to liken it to World War II, when international mail was subject to inspection and censorship. "When you wrote a letter overseas, it got censored. When a letter...

LONDON, June 19 (Reuters) - The world should stop arguing about whether humans are causing climate change and start taking action to stop dangerous temperature rises, the president of the World Bank said on Wednesday. Kim Jim Yong Kim said there was 97 to 98 percent agreement among scientists that global warming was real and caused by human activity. "If you disagree with the science of human-caused climate change you are not disagreeing that there is anthropogenic climate change. What you are disagreeing with is science itself," Kim told a Thomson Reuters newsmaker event in London.

David Cameron is planning new powers to muzzle Islamic hate preachers accused of provoking terrorist outrages such as the killing of soldier Lee Rigby. The Prime Minister wants to stop extremist clerics using schools, colleges, prisons and mosques to spread their “poison”, and is to head a new Tackling Extremism and Radicalization Task Force (TERFOR) made up of senior Ministers, MI5, police and moderate religious leaders.The high-powered group will study a number of measures, including banning extremist clerics from being given public platforms to incite students, prisoners and other followers—and forcing mosque leaders to answer for “hate preachers”. It will...

The president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press on Sunday called the government's secret seizure of two months of reporters' phone records "unconstitutional" and said the news cooperative had not ruled out legal action against the Justice Department. Gary Pruitt, in his first television interviews since it was revealed the Justice Department subpoenaed phone records of AP reporters and editors, said the move already has had a chilling effect on journalism. Pruitt said the seizure has made sources less willing to talk to AP journalists and, in the long term, could limit Americans' information from all news outlets.

CNSNews.com) - Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a report documenting attempted abuses of federal power by the Obama administration on Tuesday, saying the administration “knows virtually no bounds.”

Is Spielberg, an ardent Democrat supporter, warning the American people by showing his outstanding film that bad things can happen to helpless populations? Or is he simply observing the 20-years since the making of a movie about the Nazi destruction of the Jewish people? There is certainly a theme in the film about an unarmed population being overtaken by a military force unafraid to shoot civilians. And so today we have military commanders who have assured Obama that they are prepared to follow illegal orders and also do this very thing. Or am I being paranoid?

One of the problems with horrible tragedies is that evil men get to do evil things while we are in shock and distracted. Thus, evil compounds evil.On December 21 Techdirt posted a story that very few people seem to have picked up on, but which deserves attention. The Office of Foreign Assets Control seized most of the advance money paid to a couple of Americans for producing a comic book. They did so on the grounds that money sent to write the comic book was supporting a terrorist organization!The script for the graphic novel was written by David Axe, an...