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By the pen and the phone.The President is not going quietly into that good night and lame duck isn’t on the menu as far as he’s concerned. Barack Obama’s next fourth quarter play seems to be an attempt to go around congress and restrict the Second Amendment rights of millions of Americans based on data in the Social Security system. Specifically, if you are someone collecting benefits who has their payments handled by another family member or third party, you could find your information being turned over to the feds and your gun rights suspended. (From Fox News) The...

Back in 2008 Barack Obama promised his supporters that he would not take their guns. ““I believe in the Second Amendment. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away… But I am not going to take your guns away. So if you want to find an excuse not to vote for me, don’t use that one because it just ain’t true. It ain’t true.” Via Free Republic:(VIDEO-AT-LINK)His campaign also ran this ad: “Barack Obama WON’T Take Away Your Gun…”But that was in 2008. Now this… Barack Obama is...

The Obama administration wants to keep people collecting Social Security benefits from owning guns if it is determined they are unable to manage their own affairs, the Los Angeles Times reported. The push, which could potentially affect millions whose monthly disability payments are handled by others, is intended to bring the Social Security Administration in line with laws that prevent gun sales to felons, drug addicts, immigrants in the United States illegally, and others, according to the paper. The language of federal gun laws restricts ownership to people who are unable to manage their own affairs due to "marked subnormal...

Seeking tighter controls over firearm purchases, the Obama administration is pushing to ban Social Security beneficiaries from owning guns if they lack the mental capacity to manage their own affairs, a move that could affect millions whose monthly disability payments are handled by others. The push is intended to bring the Social Security Administration in line with laws regulating who gets reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, which is used to prevent gun sales to felons, drug addicts, immigrants in the country illegally and others. A potentially large group within Social Security are people who,...

The Legacy Lives On! Mark’s Lost Dog & Cat Rescue Foundation “Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny precisely because its principles are the founding principles.” --Mark Levin in Liberty and Tyranny Welcome to “The Levin Lounge”… Step in and have a virtual FRink.Taking the country by storm, one radio station at a time – and kicking the BUTTS of the competition! Welcome all, to the most FUN LIVE THREAD on FreeRepublic.com! You can call Mark’s show: 1-877-381-3811

The projected Social Security shortfall is likely to hit younger workers hardest. Social Security has two trust funds: the Old-Age and Survivors (OAS) fund, and its smaller sibling, the Disability Insurance (DI) fund. Last year’s report said the combined reserves of both funds would be exhausted in the year 2033, at which time it could pay only 77¢ on the dollar of its benefit obligations. The DI fund, however, faces a more immediate crisis. It will run out of money in 2016—as in next year—and its 0.9% payroll tax levy will then collect only enough to pay 81% of its benefit obligations....

The 2016 presidential race is heating up, and politicians are already talking about the subject of “Social Security reform…” But don’t be fooled – this seemingly innocuous phrase hides the true intention of this political rhetoric: Social Security cuts. For example, Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, who is pegged to run for the republican ticket, recently told a reporter: “I’m going to ask [people] to give up a little bit to make sure the system doesn’t fail… If we don’t, the baby boomers are going to wipe out Social Security and Medicare. We’ll become Greece.” Graham has been proposing...

There is bad news to come regarding Social Security - not merely for the "1 percenters" but for ordinary Americans, who must either pay more to Social Security or receive less from it. Expanding Social Security, as some of members of Congress have proposed, isn't rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It is like adding more passengers. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released its latest financing projections for the Social Security program, showing a long-term funding shortfall that has more than quadrupled since 2008. The program's trust fund, which in 2008 the CBO projected would last until mid-century,...

Instead of accepting their application for benefits to begin at age 70, the agency's representative instead gives the person a six-month retroactive payment! This act resets the person's entitlement back to what it was six months prior and wipes out half a year of Delayed Retirement Credits (DRCs). The person loses 4 percent off their monthly benefit check in exchange for a six-month lump-sum payment they didn't ask for and don't want. ... "Based on SSA regulations, retroactivity is automatically applied to applications filed after FRA unless retroactivity is expressly restricted by the claimant," he wrote. "If this is a...

Republicans will risk political pushback to put entitlement programs on the agenda during the presidential election. Some changes are in the wind for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—entitlement programs that account for 45% of the federal government’s payouts. Many of the changes are still years away. But some of them will start next year, smack in the middle of the presidential election campaign, forcing candidates to address issues that they and their advisers generally try to steer clear of when they’re running. Kicking off the rare election-year debate: a move to rescue the Social Security disability fund image: http://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png before...

A major cyberattack on U.S. federal personnel data was far graver than the Obama administration has acknowledged, with hackers obtaining information on every federal employee, the president of a government workers union claimed Thursday. In a letter to the director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), J. David Cox, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said that based on the information provided by the OPM, the hack was much broader than previously thought. “Based on the sketchy information OPM has provided, we believe that the Central Personnel Data File was the targeted database, and that...

I’m not sure retirement is a good thing. Not the way it’s done now. The way it’s done now, it seems to me that we’re marginalizing our most skilled workers, fostering idlers and turning old age into a near useless stage of life. It used to be that people didn’t retire. They worked til they died. And if they couldn’t work, hopefully their family or their church took care of them. But everyone who was physically and mentally able to do some useful task did so. The difficulty arose when people became what used to be called senile, or when...

I thought I could quit him. I swear I did. From the first time we met, in Iowa in 2007, Mike Huckabee was nothing but trouble, unsettling my fixed ideas, seducing me into pooh-poohing some of my staunchest convictions. The man was never really my type—the farthest thing from it—but you know how that can make an attraction stronger. Forbidden love and all that. Most of my friends, of course, never approved. He's not like the rest of them, I'd protest. When he says he hates Wall Street and wants to build infrastructure, he means it. He's a Republican poking...

Sen. Ted Cruz outlined how he would fix Social Security, striking a balance between candidates who propose immediate cuts and those who wish to leave it mostly in place.(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Cruz said he’d keep benefits the same for seniors and those close to retirement in a June 4 interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto. For everyone else, he’d propose gradually increasing the retirement age, limiting the increase in benefits to the inflation rate and allowing workers to keep some of their tax payment in a private account. Cruz makes strong impression on conservative non-profit The Council for National Policy–a secretive, conservative non-profit...

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said a Social Security Trust Fund does not exist and that the U.S. is “way underestimating” the size of its national debt. “The notion that we have a trust fund is nonsense – that trust fund has no meaning whatsoever except for the fact as an all private fund to benefit programs, if it runs out of money, you can only pay out in cash flows that come in but the probability that will happen is not particularly high,” Greenspan recently told the Fiscal Summit held by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation,...

A government watchdog says Social Security overpaid disability beneficiaries by nearly $17 billion over the past decade. Many payments went to people who earned too much money to qualify for benefits, or to people who weren’t disabled anymore. Some payments went to people who had died or to prison inmates. …

(CNSNews.com) - Jeb Bush says he would considering pushing back the Social Security retirement age by as many as five years and scaling back benefits for Americans who paid into the system but who also have accumulated wealth. "We need to look over the horizon and begin to phase in, over an extended period of time, going from (age) 65 to 68 or 70. And that by itself will help sustain the retirement system for anybody under the age of 40," Bush, a potential contender for the Republican presidential nomination, told CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday. Bush also wants...

Your Social Security Number can be stolen in under an hour. And hundreds of website run by the government, universities and financial institutions among other companies are at fault. ... ... ... It works essentially in the following way. Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6789? No! Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6790? No! Is my victim's SSN 123-45-6788? Yes! ... ... ... Very commonly all the hacker needs is: A victim’s last name A victim's birth date A vulnerable website the victim uses. ... ... ... Are any big players exposing SSN’s? I have a list of hundreds of websites who are...

Between Chris Christie and Senator Warren (D-MA), Social Security reform is getting more media coverage today than at any time in the past 30 years. From hearing the details, you might conclude they are talking about different government programs. They aren’t. These people are part of the changing debate that is taking shape in Washington. For decades, any problem that developed within Social Security was fixed by shifting the cost to future workers. Today that isn’t possible. What is the problem? Social Security contains a massive imbalance between resources and promises. The Trustees of the Social Security’s Trust Funds estimate...

America has a giant long-run problem largely caused by poorly designed entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. So when I wrote last month about proposals by some Democrats to expand Social Security, I was less than enthusiastic. …demographic changes and ill-designed programs will combine to dramatically expand the size of the public sector over the next few decades. So it’s really amazing that some politicians, led by the clownish Elizabeth Warren, want to dig the hole deeper. …I’m surprised demagogues such as Elizabeth Warren haven’t rallied behind a plan to simply add a bunch of zeroes to...