Free Republic

“I disagree with the Supreme Court’s ruling and believe that state governments were intended to serve as a check on the federal government,” said Ritze, R-Broken Arrow. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is better known as ObamaCare, is an example of federal overreach and my legislation will authorize the state to resist it and ban the enforcement of it.”

....Under the health care law, by 2014, states must implement a health insurance exchange, or a Web-based marketplace where people can shop for insurance, or defer to a federal program. States need to submit plans to the federal government by Nov. 16 that demonstrate their readiness to launch health exchanges. ....."We care about having a health care safety net for the vulnerable Floridians," Scott said on Fox. "But this is an expansion that just doesn't make any sense." ....."Hopefully we won't have to worry about it because by November we're going to have a new president-elect who is going to...

As another hearing is scheduled for this Thursday at 10:00am on the Senate floor and we get closer to a June vote on the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), I would like to call out attention on the remaining 20 Republican Senators that have not yet signed the letter to Sen. Reid which would block the passage of this bill. Yes I wrote about this few weeks ago in hopes that RedStaters would help prod their Senators into getting on board to stop this UN agenda. There has been some success since my last diary, probably due to your...

Looks like the end is drawing near, and one can smell sulphur. I will guess first. (Location is optional but I put one down anyway). Please join, too.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's absence from the spotlight, his creation of a formal advisory committee, and media leaks of medical details are feeding speculation of a downturn in his nearly year-long battle with cancer. With a presidential election looming for October 7 in the OPEC nation ruled by Chavez since 1999, Venezuelans are obsessively focused on his condition and fretting about the consequences of a possible succession struggle. Should the rumors be true - and they are fiercely denied by government officials - an end to the Chavez era would shake Venezuela and have major repercussions around...

In a display of defiance at the U.S. Capitol’s governing gun lobby, Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., and eight colleagues have introduced legislation to reinstate a ban on carrying loaded firearms in America’s national parks. The legislation was prompted by January’s murder of Mt. Rainier National Park ranger Margaret Anderson. Anderson was shot as she set up a road block for a car that didn’t stop at a chain-up checkpoint. By Joe Sebille“The dreadful and deeply saddening event that occurred on Mt. Rainier makes me question why on earth people should be allowed to carry loaded weapons in our national parks,”...

“We have to look at the root cause of why the economy is struggling as much as it is,” Santorum said. “Government intervention. Government regulation. Government taxation. Government is crushing and destroying the American spirit and the American free enterprise system.” Santorum said that government spending was impinging on personal freedoms and ultimately chipping away at what made the country great. “When the government gets as big as it’s gotten and starts to take over more of your life, then you get smaller as the individual, you get weaker, you lose control over your lives. You lose the rights that...

One of the most influential evangelical leaders in the United States says Christians should go to jail rather than comply with the Obama administration’s mandate to provide all contraception, including abortion-inducing drugs, in their health care plans. Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), told LifeSiteNews.com “we will not comply” with the Dept. of Health and Human Services’ mandate requiring religious institutions to cover abortifacient products such as Plan B, Ella, and the IUD. “We want the law changed, or else we’re going to write our letters from the Nashville jail, just...

In a major step towards global centralization of election processes, the world's dominant Internet voting company has purchased the USA's dominant election results reporting company. When you view your local or state election results on the Internet, on portals which often appear to be owned by the county elections division, in over 525 US jurisdictions you are actually redirected to a private corporate site controlled by SOE software, which operates under the name ClarityElections.com. The good news is that this firm promptly reports precinct-level detail in downloadable spreadsheet format. As reported by BlackBoxVoting.org in 2008, the bad news is that...

Hugo Chavez, who has been fighting cancer, was rushed to a military hospital for emergency care following kidney failure, according to reports.

As a way to solve the national debt crisis, North Carolina Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue recommends suspending Congressional elections for the next couple of years. “I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover,” Perdue said at a rotary club event in Cary, North Carolina, according to the Raleigh News and Observer. “I really hope that someone can agree with me on that.” Perdue said she thinks that temporarily halting elections would allow members...

The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination - that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from...

The citizens of Virginia will soon be able to express their support for smaller government and protest the Federal Government's intrusion into the affairs of private citizens with their license plates. At the recent Virginia Tea Party convention, 912 Richmond, gathered over 475 signatures in support of the issuance of a special license plate bearing the legend DON'T TREAD ON ME..it is now a BILL for the General Assembly

<p>RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- A federal judge has issued a worldwide injunction stopping enforcement of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, ending the military's 17-year-old ban on openly gay troops.</p> <p>U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips' landmark ruling issued Tuesday was widely cheered by gay rights organizations that credited her with getting accomplished what President Obama and Washington politics could not.</p>

<p>Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been linked to a prostitution ring, the New York Times is reporting on its Web site. He not expected to continue his term, multiple sources in the state Legislature tell CBS 2, setting off one of the largest scandals in modern New York state political history.</p>

SADDAM Hussein is dead. The mighty dictator met a criminal's end on the gallows. The murderer responsible for 1 1/2 million corpses is just a bag of bones. For decades, the world pandered to his fantasies, overlooking his brutality in return for strategic advantages or naked profit. Diplomats, including our own, courted him, while the world's democracies and their competitors vied to sell him arms. Saddam always bluffed - even, fatally, about weapons of mass destruction - but the world declined to call him on his excesses. Massacres went unpunished. His invasions of neighboring states failed to draw serious punishment....

MIAMI, Dec. 17 - The number of Cubans intercepted at sea while trying to reach the United States is at its highest level since tens of thousands took to the Florida Straits on makeshift rafts and in small boats in the 1994 exodus sanctioned by President Fidel Castro. The sharp rise - and an increase in clashes between would-be immigrants and the Coast Guard - are inflaming tensions over a policy enacted in response to the 1994 migration that allows Cubans without visas to stay if they reach American soil but turns back those caught at sea. The "wet foot,...

Terrorists: The murderous and once-powerful despot who asked others to die as martyrs for him turned out to be a coward hiding in a rat hole. It was a fitting end.Saddam Hussein's capture away from the gilded comfort of his palaces should be a clear message to head-of-state terror mongers (and depraved rabble such as Osama bin Laden): Make proper choices and changes or be forced — literally — underground. Repent or find yourself a spectacle — unshaven and disheveled as you are examined like a beast in a stockyard.The unforgettable images the world is seeing of the feral-looking Saddam...

The Silveira Threat How long will the Second Amendment live? Silveira v. Lockyer is a Second Amendment lawsuit which has, according to Gun Week (Sept. 1) "gained almost cult status among gun owners." This status is mostly to the benefit of the gun-prohibition lobby, for Silveira has already seriously harmed Second Amendment rights, and the damage may not be over. The suit was filed in February 2000, to challenge the 1999 amendments to the 1989 California "assault-weapon" control act (AWCA). The complaint blew its credibility on at the very beginning, opening with a fabricated quote attributed to Hitler. The quote...