Free Republic

SEE: Ted Cruz readies for next round of tea party-fueled fight Gromer Jeffers Jr. 03 February 2014 10:36 PM Now, Cruz said, he wants to engage voters on other issues as well. He said he hoped Congress would use this year to overhaul tax and regulatory policy. And later he expressed his support for ideas like a flat federal income tax rate for everyone, saying people should mail back their tax returns on a postcard. “We need to get back to the policies that work, like fundamental tax reform,” he said. This is very disturbing. What we really need to...

by John Urban | TopRight News A potentially disastrous security breach by the Pentagon was discovered by sheriff's deputies during a routine traffic stop in Southern Arizona. Pinal County deputies stopped a 2006 Ford Expedition for a traffic violation. The Mexican national initially presented an Arizona Identification Card, in the name of Armando Villalobos of Phoenix. A records check revealed that not only did the illegal alien have no driver's license, but there were outstanding felony warrants for his arrest in Texas.The suspect eventually told the deputy that his real name was in fact Mario Bustamante, 37, and that he was in...

WASHINGTON — House speaker John A. Boehner told rank-and-file Republicans that his leadership team was drafting “principles” for overhauling immigration laws that will be presented in coming weeks. Boehner made the remarks Wednesday during the first private meeting of House Republicans in the new year. House Republicans have struggled to respond to the Senate's immigration bill that passed in June, which would create a path to citizenship for 11 million immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally. Boehner refused to bring the Senate bill up for a vote in the House last year and instead said the House should consider a...

The often stale British political system is being rocked by its very own Tea Party. The UK Independence Party (UKIP), formed in 1993 opposing Britain’s entry into the European Union, failed to make an electoral dent for a long time. However UKIP has built up steam in recent years and is spearheading a seismic shift in the British political spectrum. In this year’s local elections – the British version of midterms -- UKIP took a stunning 23 percent of the vote, up from the 3.1 percent they won in the 2010 national election. Their leader, Nigel Farage, is buoyed by...

With the new year comes new insane laws from California, making it officially America's Sanctuary State -- treating illegal aliens who broke the law to enter the U.S. as well as law-abiding citizens, protecting illegals from deportation, and putting public safety at grave risk. In October, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), signed eight bills handing special rights to illegal aliens. The controversial legislation includes allowing illegal alien obtain driver's licenses, preventing employers from denying jobs based on "immigration status", and barring state and local law enforcement from detaining illegal aliens when directed by ICE, DHS or Border Patrol. The legislation claims that...

An even split of Democratic and Republican legislators back a bill supported by Rep. Justin Amash, aiming to end the country's domestic surveillance programs. The legislation, titled The USA Freedom Act, would, if signed into law, curb the National Security Agency's ability to conduct communications sweeps and close a "back door" to information by requiring a court order when performing searches of Americans in data already collected without warrants. The Hill reported during the weekend that the bill has at least 102 cosponsors, including 51 Democrats and 51 Republicans... According to The Hill, members of Congress are placing increased pressure...

It doesn’t look like any GSE (housing finance) reform will be taken up in 2013. Partly because the leading contender, the Corker-Warner housing finance “reform” bill is so flawed. What does Corker-Warner do exactly? It shuts down two enormous mortgage insurance companies (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and creates one gargantuan government insurance company (Federal Mortgage Insurance Corporation). Ah, nationalized mortgage insurance. This is particularly bizarre given that the FHA already exists as a national mortgage insurance agency for mortgages. Like single-payer healthcare systems (as in UK’s NHS), you take what the government decrees for you. But Obamacare is really...

For Chicago lawmakers who thought Tuesday's pension vote was politically dangerous, just wait until next year. Then on the docket in Springfield: gravely needed reforms for the retirement systems that benefit Chicago teachers, city workers, laborers, firefighters and police. **SNIP** Combined, the city of Chicago's four pension funds are $19.5 billion in the hole and only 36 percent funded. Add another $9.5 billion in unfunded liability from the Chicago teachers' fund for a grand total of $29 billion.

I fondly remember the days of Milton Friedman with his book and PBS series “Free to Choose.” That was in 1980 at the end of Carter-era and the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. Fast forward to 2013. We now have less freedom of choice, thanks to Congress and the Administration. Take for example healthcare insurance. Now, everyone must have healthcare insurance, even if you don’t want it. I went to healthcare.gov and saw that my choices were slim and my insurance premium rose to $1,366 per month. And no subsidy. Plus, I get to pay for sex change operations, Sandra...

The Obama administration on Tuesday moved to issue new rules that would curtail political activity by tax-exempt nonprofit groups, with potentially significant ramifications for one of the fastest-growing sources of campaign spending. The proposed rules, announced by the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service, would expand and clarify how the I.R.S. defines political activity and then establish clearer limits for how much activity nonprofits can engage in. Such a change — long urged by government watchdog groups — would be the first wholesale shift in a generation in the regulations governing political activity. The move to curtail nonprofits follows...

It’s not just red-state Democrats who want to take aggressive steps to mend controversial provisions in Obamacare. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that she will co-sponsor a bill by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) to require insurance companies to continue offering their existing health care plans — a way to make good on President Barack Obama’s promise that consumers can keep their current coverage if they like it.

Fixing Outmoded Institutions Ever wonder how states like Florida whose legislatures are overwhelmingly Republican still vote for bad dem candidates for president, or how you get a dem senator in a place like Louisiana? What you're seeing is that manufacturing votes cannot buy a state house. In other words, dems can manufacture all the votes they want in places like Dade County or Philly, and the GOP will still win its own territories, it's only in a national or atatewide race that vote manufacturing can decide a race for a public office. That says that the very first thing we...

For a marketplace to function properly, a legal system must incentivize good behavior and punish bad behavior. Lawsuits exist to make the wrongly injured financially whole by the injurer. If the wrong party is required to pay for an injury, justice is not served. Likewise, if an individual is awarded a windfall of overcompensation for an injury, justice is not served. These scenarios are just as problematic as if a defendant were to not compensate the injured for an injury they legitimately caused. Lawsuit Reform for Competitive State Economies, a new report from the Task Force on Civil Justice, translates...

It is no coincidence but on the contrary highly significant that the British modern welfare state was born after the Second World War.  Having fought together against Hitler provided that sense of unity that is necessary for people to willingly financially support total strangers. For a welfare state to succeed that sense of an entire society's belonging figuratively to the same family is a conditio sine qua non. Another necessary condition is a general sense of trust, the perception that the welfare recipients will not exploit and take advantage of the welfare donors' generosity. Both these indispensable conditions have now...

The mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have certainly had their share of problems and controversies. Both are in conservatorship with the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) after suffering devastating losses. This comes after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac denying they have a government guarantee, but were bailed out by the Federal government after all. I never thought in a million years that Republicans, Democrats AND the Obama Administration would be on board with winding down the Democrat Darlings. But former Obama FHA Commissioner Dave Stevens summed it up nicely: “There is a bipartisan effort here that’s thoughtful and...

The DREAM Act is really remarkable and the fact that the American people have largely accepted it is even more remarkable. It essentially creates a standard that doesn't exist in any other portion of our laws. There are no laws that I know of that protect the children of AMERICAN CITIZENS who commit crimes in the way that this DREAM Act does. Innocent American children suffer every day as a consequence of their the actions of their parents. Think about this simple example. Lets say you are 3 years old and you are being cared for by your single dad....

WASHINGTON -- By most, if not all, measures, President Barack Obama has surpassed his predecessors in ramping up security along the nearly 2,000-mile southern border of the United States. There’s more money being spent, an increase in border agents and more fencing. The number of people being deported is up and the number of people apprehended trying to enter the United States is down. The flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico has slowed. Yet if Obama thought that tough action on the border would help persuade reluctant Republicans to support a rewrite of the nation’s immigration laws, he was wrong....

Border security" is a bogus holdup for immigration reform. Let us prevent this worthy legislation from becoming a giant rip-off benefitting the military-intelligence industry. Millions of people in this country have paid a deplorable price for surreptitious border passage. So-called "coyotes" have extracted up to $10,000 per person per trip; yet these victims have been subjected to mass murders, tortures, locked vans abandoned in deserts, kidnappings and rape. Why does anyone assume that coyotes act independently of the heavily armed cartels in their nearly sovereign territories?One proposed immigration strategy suggests we should punish the victims by imposing a bureaucratic maze...

(LANSING, MI) -- Senator Patrick Colbeck and Representative Nancy Jenkins were joined in a Lansing press conference by a group of experts in the medical and financial fields to discuss the implications to the State of expanding the Affordable Care Act (ACA - aka Obamacare) and a proposal to reform Medicaid that would expand access to coverage without expanding government (SB's 459/460).

Skip to 3:45 for the key bit, in which a guy who’s willing to go nuclear in a quixotic bid to defund ObamaCare warns his party not to be too obstinate in resisting immigration reform — or else. Mark Krikorian summarizes his logic this way: Mark Krikorian @MarkSKrikorian Give your toddler all the candy he wants, because otherwise he´ll just take it anyway: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/marco-rubio-immigration-executive-order-95487.html … (Snip)In fairness to him, Rubio’s not making this up. Amnesty shills on the left have warned, with increasing volume lately, that King Barack might decide to grant de facto amnesty to illegals via executive order