Free Republic

We, as a country, love weird things. We celebrate it, wear T-shirts proclaiming our weirdness, and enshrine oddities that probably should have gone out with the trash a decade ago. And that’s okay. At Yahoo Travel, we went in search of weird, wonderful, and wacky museums that are worth going out of your way to see.

What should American conservatives to do when the leaders of their chosen party have become nearly indistinguishable from liberal Democrats? Vote? Write letters and emails? Make phone calls? Stay at home and refuse to participate? Withhold our financial support? We have tried all of those things – repeatedly, over the course of the past 100 years – but nothing seems to have worked. If anything, today’s GOP establishment leaders are more distant from, and more hostile to, conservatives than at any time since the Republican Party was founded.

In what has been described as a new front in the battle over same-sex marriage, legislators in several states under judicial orders to confer marital status on same-sex couples have introduced bills to forbid state or local officials from issuing marriage licenses to couples of the same gender. The bills would also strip the salaries of employees who issued the licenses, the New York Times reported Thursday.The bills have been introduced in the legislatures of Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, with South Carolina also considering a bill that would allow officials to opt out of issuing such licenses if it...

President Obama believes more states are likely to legalize marijuana following efforts in Colorado and Washington state. "My suspicion is that you're going to see other states look at this," the president told YouTube blogger Hank Green. Obama said that the federal government was "not going to spend a lot of resources" enforcing federal marijuana laws in states that had decided to legalize the drug. He also noted that the Department of Justice was examining how to shift policies for nonviolent drug offenders. In an interview with The New Yorker last year, Obama appeared to tacitly endorse a Colorado referendum...

On January 30, the Southern District Court of Texas will decide whether 25 plaintiff states in Texas v. U.S. should be granted a preliminary injunction to stop the Obama administration’s latest, lawless executive amnesty. Establishing “legal standing” —essentially, a plaintiff’s right to sue — is highly problematic for petitioners aggrieved by the non-enforcement of our immigration laws, but the plaintiff states have skillfully laid out in their briefs a comprehensive case for why they should be granted standing. The states assert several economic interests harmed by the Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) program. They cite, among other things, the...

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called the states the “laboratories of democracy.” President Barack Obama ought to be glad that a handful of states are governed by Republicans doing lab work very different from his own. The economic gains registered in some of those states have played a significant part in pulling America out of its economic doldrums, allowing Obama, after six years in office, to give a State of the Union speech in which he could assert with some validity that the state of the union is “strong.” In his address on Tuesday night, the president “took credit,” as...

President Obama won't claim victory of the Islamic State. But in tonight's State of the Union he will say that he (or "American leadership") is "stopping" its "advance." "In Iraq and Syria, American leadership – including our military power – is stopping ISIL’s advance," Obama will say, according to excerpts released by the White House. "Instead of getting dragged into another ground war in the Middle East, we are leading a broad coalition, including Arab nations, to degrade and ultimately destroy this terrorist group. We’re also supporting a moderate opposition in Syria that can help us in this effort, and...

The 2014 midterm elections gave state Republicans their largest political majorities of the modern political era. In Governor races, the GOP picked up a net 2 states, against expectations of a 2-seat loss. The party also holds 68 of the nation’s 98 partisan legislative chambers, a grip on state government not seen since the 1920s. In only seven deeply blue states do Democrats control both the legislature and the Governor’s mansion. Republicans hold or share control in every other state. Conservatives rightfully worry that Republicans in Washington will pursue a modest agenda with their Congressional majorities, but the states provide...

By now, you’ve likely read plenty about how the Constitution has been twisted to give the federal government power far beyond anything the Founders ever planned. You already know the dangers of an unchecked President, of a Congress that passes bills without reading them, of agencies that do what they want, and judges who believe in precedent over original meaning. So I won’t waste your time sharing more of the same. Is the situation hopeless? Absolutely not. But in order to actually turn things around, a few sacred cows need to be dealt with. Here are TEN STEPS you should...

It is rare for conservatives to score a federal policy victory these days, especially with a Democrat in the White House, but as Michael Barone reminds us, just by playing defense conservatives have done exactly that on transportation. Unfortunately there are some in Congress who want to reverse these gains. The big win for conservatives on transportation comes from two sources. First, when the gas tax was last raised in 1993, it was not indexed for inflation, so the 18.4 cents a gallon collected today doesn't go as far today as it did more than two decades ago. Second, thanks...

One thing that makes the U.S. great: no two states are the same. That diversity leads to distinct strengths and weaknesses, but how can you know what makes North Dakota different from South Dakota, besides a made-up line separating them? Well, in the interest of showing that every state sucks in some way, we picked out one key area where each is most deficient. This is what every state is the worst at.

We have some bad news for American conservatives: The leaders of our party, the once Grand Old Party, are trying to figure out a way to win elections without us, and if or when they do, they will abandon us like yesterday’s trash. If you have any question about this, you need not look any further than this National Journal story from yesterday, reporting that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has “announced” on his Facebook page that he is “actively exploring” a presidential bid in 2016. Spoiler alert: Jeb Bush is not your dad’s conservative. We’re not sure if “actively...

A lawsuit 17 states have brought against the Obama administration’s immigration actions offers a promising restraint against presidential power grabs. December 8, 2014 By Gabriel Malor Led by Texas Attorney General and soon-to-be-governor Greg Abbott, 17 states have sued the United States and the Department of Homeland Security because of the Obama administration’s immigration action. Before we dig into the lawsuit, let us stipulate that the best option for curtailing President Obama’s dubious immigration power grab is action from Congress to roll back his unilateral changes and to address an immigration system that all sides agree has failed. But absent...

Eighteen states, led by Texas, filed a lawsuit today with the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Texas challenging President Obama's executive action on immigration. The suit claims that the White House overstepped its authority by granting amnesty and work permits for 5 million illegal aliens. After filing the federal suit, Texas Attorney General and Governor-elect Greg Abbott wrote in a statement that President Obama's executive amnesty "tramples the U.S. Constitution's Take Care Clause and federal law."Also included in Attorney General Abbott's statement were the states' legal challenges to President Obama's executive action: The executive action on immigration...

Few Americans who entered polling booths for the Nov. 4 election and pulled the lever for their favorite candidate for Senate realize that for most of American history, senators were chosen by the state legislatures. It wasn’t until 1913 that the 17thAmendment was passed, granting American voters the constitutional right of directly electing their senators.While this important amendment may seem innocuous, the reality is that few other changes to our Constitution have had the same detrimental effect on our nation than this single, nearly forgotten alteration.The passage of the 17th Amendment was driven largely by the populist movement of the...

“I don’t want to say they’re unsafe, but they’re dangerous.” That was how President Obama’s former transportation secretary Ray LaHood described America’s roads and bridges in a pre-Thanksgiving interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes. The high-profile story left viewers with the distinct impression that America’s roads and bridges are crumbling, and politicians were to blame. First, let’s dispense with the notion that travel in America is a life-jeopardizing experience. According to the Federal Highway Administration’s own 2013 report, the number of structurally deficient and functionally obsolete bridges has decreased every year since 2000. This same report also shows that fatalities and...

When St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch explained that some exonerating testimony in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, came from several African-American eyewitnesses who described Brown as having charged police officer Darren Wilson before he fired the fatal shots, it was a powerful moment. Such testimony was consistent with physical evidence establishing that Wilson had not fired at Brown's back as repeatedly and poisonously alleged. Indeed, it would seem that the aggressor in this fatal encounter was not Wilson, but rather Brown. According to evidence the grand jury sifted and assessed, it seems that Wilson...

Every party in opposition goes a little crazy. For Republicans in the early Obama era, insanity took the form of the Sarah Palin spasm. Veteran politicos took the former Alaska governor seriously as a national figure. Republican primary voters nominated the likes of Todd Akin, Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle. Glenn Beck seemed important enough to hold a big rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Fortunately, serious parties eventually pull back from the fever swamps. That’s what’s happening to the Republican Party. It has re-established itself as the nation’s dominant governing party. Republicans now control 69 of 99 state legislative bodies....

House Republicans will have their largest majority since the 1930s next year, but that doesn't mean Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) job will be easy.The House GOP leadership's struggles in keeping members in line over the past four years have been well documented. Some of the incoming freshmen will likely join the ranks of conservatives who frequently oppose leadership initiatives.Among the new freshmen, for instance, is one congressman-elect who has called Hillary Clinton the "anti-Christ," another who has suggested Muslims don't deserve First Amendment rights, and yet another who has declared himself open to the idea of the United States invading...

Another underreported fact from Tuesday's election is the extraordinary night Republicans had in winning state legislative seats. The GOP now controls two thirds of state legislative houses – 66 of 99 (Nebraska's legislature is unicameral).  They upped the number of states where they control both house and senate to 24 – one more than they had before the election.  And according to this article in Vox, they cut the number of Democratic-held legislatures from 14 to 7. Republicans made historic gains in state legislatures in 2010. They held on in many states in 2012, or made up for losses...