Free Republic

WND EXCLUSIVE The 1 officer who stands between you and militarized police 'I can nullify any kind of unconstitutional law forced upon the people' The office of sheriff was created to address worries exactly like the rampant militarization of police forces in America, claim two sheriffs who have challenged elected officials in their states over what they believe are unconstitutional abuses of power. “Right now the threat to individual Americans from al-Qaida and other groups is nowhere near the threat we face from officials in our own country who are working at taking away our liberties,” Delaware Sheriff Jeff Christopher...

Nearly six months after the disastrous launch of Healthcare.gov a new glitch has come to light: Incorrect poverty-level guidelines are automatically telling what could be tens of thousands of eligible people they do not qualify for subsidized insurance. The error in the federal marketplace primarily affects households with incomes just above the poverty line in states like Pennsylvania that have not expanded Medicaid. The mistake raises the price of their insurance by thousands of dollars, making insurance so unaffordable many may just give up and go without. Some states chose to run their own marketplaces. It was unknown Thursday night...

One of the hallmarks of a totalitarian state is that there are so many laws and regulations that no one can possibly know what they are, let alone obey them. Thus everyone is a criminal, and only the despot’s discretion separates the solid citizen from the criminal. Unfortunately, the United States is rapidly approaching–if it has not already reached–this dystopian status. So Glenn Reynolds’s great column in USA Today should be a starting point for lots of conversations. Glenn offers several suggestions for how this situation might be remedied, which, again, are a starting point for discussion. But the real...

The police department at the University of California, Santa Barbara has released its official crime report concerning the professor who stole a graphic anti-abortion sign from two abortion protesters, then seemingly assaulted one of the protesters (a 16-year-old girl) and destroyed the sign. The professor is Mireille Miller-Young. She is several months pregnant. A large swath at the beginning of the report is redacted for reasons that are unclear. A few administrative bits are redacted at other points. However, most of the text remains uncensored. “In essence, Miller-Young told me that she felt ‘triggered’” “in a negative way” by graphic...

There are 456 “official” federal agencies, and many of these have bureaucracies within them. According to The Center for Small Government, just the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has 47 separate bureaucracies! Let’s say the average, for the sake of time, is 40. That’s 18,240 bureaucracies, and 700,000 (give or take) federal employees. There are 535 federal legislators in Congress who are elected to oversee, fund, and pass laws to regulate this morass. If we divided it up equally, that’s 42 bureaucracies per Congressman/woman, and 182 bureaucracies per Senator. Congress has roughly 200 committees to discuss all of these, and...

It's Sunshine Week, so perhaps some enterprising White House reporter will ask press secretary Jay Carney why President Obama rewrote the Freedom of Information Act without telling the rest of America. The rewrite came in an April 15, 2009, memo from then-White House Counsel Greg Craig instructing the executive branch to let White House officials review any documents sought by FOIA requestors that involved "White House equities." That phrase is nowhere to be found in the FOIA, yet the Obama White House effectively amended the law to create a new exception to justify keeping public documents locked away from the...

First Lady Michelle Obama will be accompanied by her children and her mother on her trip to China, which begins today. But she won't be accompanied by the press. "Michelle Obama’s trip to China starting on Wednesday will be nonpolitical, the White House says, a 'people-to-people exchange' emphasizing the importance that both nations place on education. As if to underscore the point, no reporters are traveling with the first lady, and she does not plan to give interviews while there," reports the New York Times. The White House is defending the first lady bringing her family along for the ride...

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden. A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

In 2012, in a proceeding straight out of the Inquisition, an Italian court convicted six scientists for providing "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" in the lead-up to the earthquake. Now, a philosophy professor says that case may provide a worthwhile example for the treatment of scientific dissenters—specifically, "climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus."

ROCKVILLE, MD — Thousands of motorists were brought to a standstill when police conducted a massive roadblock to find three crime suspects. Twelve lanes of traffic were shut down and swarms of armed government agents combed through a giant traffic jam performing warrantless vehicle-to-vehicle searches. The busy Tuesday morning commute was abruptly halted just after 10:00 a.m. on March 11th. One driver told ABC News that traffic stopped and he witnessed 30 police cars pass on the shoulders of I-270 near Rockville. “Then, when I saw a wall of police officers with automatic weapons approaching our cars, it was apparent...

Ham and eggs, dictators and plebiscites, tyranny and sham elections, they all go together. So it was wholly to be expected, which means it was wholly a surprise to our ever-alert administration, when the latest tsar decided Crimea was ripe for the picking and sent in the Cossacks (sans identifying insignia for now). As usual in these matters, the local bullyboys, formally known in press reports as militias, backed up the not very well disguised Russian troops. With that little formality out of the way, Vlad the Annexer ordered a plebiscite (and its usual result) for immediate delivery, specifically...

The Obama administration is requiring health plans in Obamacare insurance marketplaces to include a more robust offering of care providers in 2015 after some early backlash over limited networks in the health care law's first year. Health plans selling on the federal marketplaces in 2015 must include 30 percent of area "essential community providers," which are usually health centers and other hospitals serving mostly low-income patients. That's up from a 20 percent requirement in 2014, the first year of expanded overage under the health care law. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the marketplaces, will also...

Participants in the federal high-risk pool created in the health law will have another month to find coverage, the Obama administration announced Friday. This is the third extension for the program, known as PCIP, which was previously set to close Dec. 31, 2013. Existing funds will be used to cover the extension. In a notice posted on the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan website, officials announced that program enrollees who have not yet purchased coverage through the health law’s online marketplaces, or exchanges, could keep their current coverage until April 30 while they continue their search. But they must enroll in...

The NSA has not infected millions of computers with malware, it said in a statement on Thursday. It could though, it seems, as the agency made no attempt to deny the existence of an automated malware delivery system which appears in documents leaked by Edward Snowden this week. According to the documents, the system, codenamed Turbine, is meant to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.” A statement published to the NSA’s official website on Thursday addresses the allegations, saying...

Mark Zuckerberg lashed out at the government for its surveillance practices in a rant today on his Facebook page. “When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.,” Zuckerberg wrote. Zuckerberg and other major tech CEOs have called on the Obama administration to be more transparent about spying efforts. The Facebook co-founder, 29, said he vented about his concerns in a phone call to the president. “The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing,...

--SNIP-- The committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings, said in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner that Republicans have already botched any plans they might have for contempt actions against Lerner, who headed an IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. Cummings, citing opinions from two legal experts and “Supreme Court case law,” said Republicans cannot pursue contempt charges against Lerner because of how the committee’s chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, abruptly adjourned a hearing with the former official last week. The letter said Issa “failed to take the basic — but Constitutionally required — steps necessary to hold...

The possibility to amend the Constitution in the Assembly for indefinite reelection of the elected officials, is gaining support in the block of the Government (Alianza País). This regarding to the possible reelection of President Rafael Correa in 2017. The referendum would be another way to modify such action in the Constitution. According to Virgilio Hernandez, AP Assembly member, is not necessary to “consult the people” in the polls, because the issue is not going through a “reform of the structure of the state.”

House Budget Chairman Paul D. Ryan told his local newspaper that Republican leaders do not have the votes yet to pass a rewrite of the nation’s immigration system. “We don’t have the votes right now,” the Wisconsin Republican told his local newspaper, the Janesville Gazette, in an interview Monday. “Right now, we’re working hard to find where that consensus lies.” Ryan said both the right and left are holding up an overhaul. A poll of House Republican offices by CQ Roll Call found that just 18 members, including Ryan, publicly support the immigration principles Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio...

Undeterred by a recent Public Policy Polling poll that showed he has only a 30% job approval in his native Arizona, Sen. John McCain said on Fox Business’ “Cavuto” that he is considering running for reelection. McCain denied the poll was accurate

If you want to know the back story of the Ukrainian revolution, The Soviet Story tells exactly what happened to Ukraine during the Soviet era - and a lot more.It's the best educational film on the nature of communism, which should be shown to all high school students in America to immunize them against the lure of the “great” utopia. However, I doubt most teachers will do so in today's political climate. This 2008 documentary tells the story of the anti-human ideology the way I see it myself. That was rather surprising, because in today's “progressive” media climate, such...