Free Republic

<p>At 7 AM in California’s rural Central Valley, not long before the recent presidential election, I stopped to talk with an elderly irrigator on the shared border alleyway of my farm. His face was a wrinkled latticework, his false teeth yellow. His truck smelled of cigarettes, its cab overflowing with flotsam and jetsam: butts, scribbled notes, drip-irrigation parts, and empty soda cans. He rolled down the window and muttered something about the plunging water-table level and whether a weak front would bring any rain. And then, this dinosaur put one finger up on the wheel as a salutation and drove off in a dust cloud.</p>

The myth that a complete replacement package has to be in place the moment Obamacare is repealed refuses to die First congressional Republicans said they couldn’t repeal Obamacare because they didn’t have full control of Congress. Then when they gained control of both chambers of Congress congressional Republicans said they couldn’t repeal Obamacare because they didn’t control the White House.

Barack Obama said he wanted to transform America and in many ways he has succeeded. The problem is that his transformation has done enormous and perhaps irreparable damage to the nation by demolishing the people’s confidence that our laws will be impartially enforced. Instead of, as the Constitution requires of the president, taking care that the laws be faithfully executed, Obama and his minions have operated under a completely different concept – that the laws will be enforced (or not) with the objective of maintaining the incumbent party in power. If you doubt that, I recommend reading Liberty’s Nemesis, published...

President Barack Obama didn't embrace the individual mandate during the campaign, which means he would essentially start from scratch in terms of selling the idea to voters. The mandate was a central policy difference with Hillary Clinton, who argued that a mandate was the only way to achieve universal coverage. Let's hope we get the mandate since we know nothing will work w/out it. So how's it going? If I were to talk to one or two decision makers about a few matters, who would that be--Orszag? Rahm or Zeke? Nancy Ann? Or???In this email exchange from 2009 between HDR22...

President Barack Obama offers multiple excuses for why health insurance premiums continue to skyrocket, including blaming Republicans and insurance companies for the problems. He complains that too many reporters spend more time discussing premium increases than explaining why he isn’t responsible for them. “No, I had nothing to do with that,” Obama said, calling it “complicated” despite the “hysteria” that was growing. Obama traveled to Florida to argue that Obamacare was working well, but needed to be fixed

Retired businessman, activist, Free stater and Catholic layman Michael O'sullivan of the New England Alliance for Liberty and Free Markets from Lebannon NH responds to Roger Bauer's family over remarks made in favor of abusing their son Roger Bauer.  Well just when we thought we heard the last of the commie family Bauer, they wont acknowledge that they are the problem not Roger Bauer. Roger's brother and peer-to-peer therapist had this to say... You say hurting never helps anyone, well Roger, sometimes you we have to be hurt so we can be made well.  Jeff Gilman had to be hurt...

https://youtu.be/6Q3VZOT_k_0

In the America I grew up in, the “liberals” were content to use government coercion to confiscate people’s money so they could spend it on their panoply of social engineering and vote-buying projects. They got to compel people to “join” Social Security, subsidize National Public Radio, pay for legions of needless bureaucrats in offices not authorized under the Constitution, bail out political cronies who cried “We’re too big to fail!” and so on. That kind of “liberalism” was bad enough, but the disease has of late developed new and far more vicious strains. Those involve attacks on Americans for not...

BOSTON, July 8, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The Republican governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, has signed a law that would allow members of one biological sex to use the showers, restrooms, and other private facilities of the opposite sex. The law, which goes into effect on October 1, adds the phrase “gender identity” to state anti-discrimination laws, placing sexual identity on par with immutable characteristics such as race and sex. It would require “any public accommodation...without limitation” to open formerly sex-segregated facilities to members of the opposite biological sex. In June, lawmakers overwhelmingly rejected a measure that would have barred sex...

Levin: Populism is Progressivism, Which is Statism (audio: 12:41)

On Thursday night, Conservative Review Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin took on the rising tide of "populist nationalism" with a history lesson. Populism, Levin explained, is really just progressivism. The populist movement in America was the forerunner of the progressive movement, and both populism and progressivism share the same disdain for constitutionalism that conservatives reject.

Donald Trump on Friday urged a roomful of voters to boycott the tech giant Apple so long as its chief executive, Tim Cook, refuses to comply with a court order to assist the FBI with hacking into the cell phone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook. "First of all Apple better give the security for that phone," the Republican presidential hopeful said during a campaign rally in Pawleys Island, S.C. "What I think you ought to do is boycott Apple until such time they give that security number. How do you like that?" "I just thought of it," Trump noted,...

Under a new enforcement provision passed into law earlier this month, the Internal Revenue Service can revoke passports of serious tax offenders who owe more than $50,000 to the government. And Uncle Sam can take away your passport at any time, even when the offender is traveling outside the country. [...] The new passport-revoking provision allows the Department of the Treasury and the IRS to authorize the State Department to take away U.S. passports from individuals with seriously delinquent debts, which the government defines as greater than $50,000, the Arizona Republic reported. ...

Judge Robert Bork wrote a book titled "Slouching Towards Gomorrah" as a way to argue that Western culture was experiencing a decline. The same can be argued about South Korea. This nation was once a bulwark against communism and now it is a nation slouching toward a statist form of government that resembles a dictatorship more that a western style liberal democracy. Back in April, I wrote a piece titled "South Korea Not Ready for Pacific Trade Partnership" where I argued that the deteriorating human rights situation in South Korea was troubling. The Wall Street Journal reported that South Korea...

Families across North Florida are tired of Washington’s manufactured crises and shutdown threats, that's why I've introduced The Shutdown Prevention Act to take away power from the small minority causing Congressional chaos and put it back in the hands of the moderate majority of Democrats and Republicans who believe government should actually govern. Government shutdowns hurt our military and most vulnerable families harder than anyone else. It’s easy for members to abandon their responsibilities and let the government shutdown. It’s harder to roll up their sleeves and negotiate a budget. I think we were elected to do the hard work,...

As the owner of a contracting business, do you feel you are under attack? You should. You are. Capitalism and the free enterprise system are under the most relentless assault seen in the post war era. As a contractor you operate within the capitalist system, but may not feel comfortable defending it. Here are ten reasons why capitalism is morally superior to socialism, or statism (i.e., power and decisions are vested in the state or government). Talk about capitalism’s moral superiority the next time you hear someone parroting the politicians, entertainers, academics, clerics, and professional rabble rousers who are all...

Freedom to travel is a fundamental and internationally recognized human right. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states: Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. Congress ratified the UDHR on April 2, 1992. But it’s now having second thoughts. The “right to travel” makes some politicians very nervous. Consider the issue from their viewpoint. Leaving the country makes it more difficult to detain you if the Feds suspect you of...

I used to think if we had five Nino [Antonin] Scalias or five Clarence Thomases on the [Supreme] Court that we could make a lot of progress. And I have been disabused of that notion for the following reason: There were a series of four or five Supreme Court decisions from 1937 to 1943 which changed — well, changed isn’t the right word — unleashed the government from the constrictions of the Constitution. It unleashed them from being stuck with the enumerated powers, it redefined the Commerce Clause to mean manufacturing and agriculture even if it only has indirect effects...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz offered proposals to address income inequality, an issue that’s already a major one for the upcoming election. Warren called for an end to the so- called trickle down economic theories that seek fewer taxes and restrictions on wealthy individuals and institutions. “These advocates push for deregulation that hobbles the cops on Wall Street,” she said. “We have to work so that the balance is not tilted against workers and toward multinational corporations,” Warren said. Warren has declined entreaties from supporters who want her to...

The former Arkansas governor understands something important about GOP voters: They aren’t opposed to welfare spending as long as it’s for them.For his opening pitch to Republican voters, Mike Huckabee channeled a little of Elizabeth Warren’s fiery populism. Washington, he said in his video announcement, “has done enough lying and stealing. I’ll never rob seniors of what our government has promised them and even forced them to pay for.” He hit this note again in his first campaign speech, with a few shots at his GOP competitors for good measure. “There are some who propose that to save the safety...