Free Republic

... The White House calls — and the president’s decision itself — reflected the clout the immigrant movement has built up in recent years, as it grew from a cluster of scattered Washington lobbying groups into a national force. A vital part of that expansion has involved money: major donations from some of the nation’s wealthiest liberal foundations, including the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Open Society Foundations of the financier George Soros, and the Atlantic Philanthropies. Over the last decade those donors have invested more than $300 million in immigrant organizations, including many fighting for...

Washington will allow some children in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to apply for refugee status from their home countries, Vice President Joe Biden announced on Friday, in a bid to stem an exodus of undocumented migrants to the U.S. border through Mexico. The program only applies to children whose parents are legal residents of the United States. It is unclear how much impact the plan, which begins in December, would have on the migration problem, given a 4,000-person quota for refugee applications from all of Latin America. In a fact sheet, the State Department said there may be some...

Asserting the full power of his office, President Obama is expected to announce a set of reforms to the country’s immigration enforcement system, a plan that would offer a temporary reprieve from deportation to up to 5 million undocumented immigrants. By taking action through an executive order, the president signals to a fractious Congress, where immigration legislation has been stalled for years, that humanitarian concerns must, in the end, be weighed against the costs of inaction. The political fallout on immigration will be volatile. But the human cost of inaction — the families upended, the lives disrupted — is much...

Using the Nazi analogy to discredit political opponents is a popular game that seems to work best as a substitute for honest criticism. Although such comparisons usually do little more than expose one’s ignorance of the actual history of the Third Reich, it doesn’t mean that valid comparisons don’t exist. Within the right context, similarities can be drawn, Godwin's Law be damned. Actually, there’s only one good reason why the subject should ever be brought up in the first place. Nazi Germany was a fundamental transformation of a parliamentary democracy that became a one party dictatorship. Just as important, it...

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of cellphones through fake communications towers deployed on airplanes, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations. The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program. Planes are equipped with devices—some known as “dirtboxes” to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. unit that produces them—which...

Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) says impeachment should be on the table if President Barack Obama moves forward with executive amnesty. Speaking with Breitbart News Wednesday evening, Jones explained that should Obama move to unilaterally legalize undocumented immigrants, it would be a constitutional issue, not an issue to be solved by restricting funding, as some Republicans have floated. “To me a constitutional question means that we have the option of impeachment,” Jones said, explaining that he thinks the best option to confront Obama’s executive amnesty would be impeachment. “We have a Constitution, and I am very disappointed from year to year...

Washington(CNN)--As Congress voted on the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in 2010, one of the bill's architects, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, told a college audience that those pushing the legislation pitched it as a bill that would control spiraling health care costs even though most of the bill was focused on something else and there was no guarantee the bill would actually bend the cost curve.In recent days, the past comments of Gruber--who in this 2010 speech notes that he "helped write the federal bill" and "was a paid consultant to the Obama administration to help develop the technical details...

I was close to beginning this article by saying only in New York. Sadly, that’s not true. There are a number of states today with some truly horrible gun laws and attitudes toward Second Amendment rights. But the Empire State is still right up near the top of that list and this story won’t do much to improve our reputation. Buffalo, New York police are now visiting the homes of those recently departed in search of firearms as part of a new plan to help keep tabs on local guns. The move, put into effect by Police Commissioner Daniel Derenda,...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court said Wednesday that same-sex marriages can go ahead in Kansas. The nation's highest court denied the state's request to prevent gay and lesbian couples from marrying while Kansas fights the issue in court. The state constitution includes a provision banning gay marriage, approved overwhelmingly by voters in 2005.

Healthcare, Fiscal, and Tax 10/22/2014 Jeanne Shaheen's Dishonest Claim That Obamacare Doesn't Cut Medicare Avik Roy In last night’s U.S. Senate debate in New Hampshire between incumbent Jeanne Shaheen (D.) and challenger Scott Brown (R.), Shaheen uttered a flat-out, bald-faced lie: that Obamacare doesn’t cut Medicare spending to pay for its expansion of coverage to the uninsured. It’s a talking point that a number of Democratic Senate candidates—and their enablers in the lefty blogosphere—have been clinging to. And it’s embarrassingly dishonest. “I want to go back to Scott Brown’s suggestion that we’ve taken three-quarters of a trillion dollars out of...

EXCLUSIVE: President Obama is planning to unveil a 10-part plan for overhauling U.S. immigration policy via executive action -- including suspending deportations for millions -- as early as next Friday, a source close to the White House told Fox News. The president's plans were contained in a draft proposal from a U.S. government agency. The source said the plan could be announced as early as Nov. 21, though the date might slip a few days pending final White House approval. Obama was briefed at the White House by Homeland Security officials before leaving on his Asia-Pacific trip last week, Fox...

President Barack Obama should use his executive power to order immigration reform despite Republican threats, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer said Wednesday. "I join with my colleagues in urging the president to take action," he said, "And I urge my Republican friends to understand that that action would be temporary and can be replaced with a bill that we pass through the Congress of the United States." Republicans have responded to Obama's plans with intense metaphors.

SAN DIEGO - The attorney for a Marine under arrest on charges of battery on a police officer and resisting arrest told Team 10 the video recorded by the San Diego Police Department's own body cameras proves the officers were the real abusers. "What you're seeing here appears to be an assault and battery under color of authority," said attorney Paul Neuharth, who shared the video with Team 10. Neuharth is defending one of the Marines against the criminal charges. The incident happened Sept. 21 in the Gaslamp Quarter. According to Neuharth, the Marines were celebrating the return of one...

Dem think tank secret email: ‘All hands on deck’ to sell Iran deal to public By Adam Kredo Published November 12, 2014 Washington Free Beacon A leading liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., has begun enlisting its associates in an “all-hands-on-deck effort to support” the Obama administration as it seeks to ink a nuclear deal with Iran by the end of the month, according to emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The Truman National Security Project, a nonprofit think tank with ties to the administration, is assembling a “crack team of writers” to flood national and local media outlets...

First and foremost, let me disabuse both Marxist Democrats and RINOs of the notion that the Republicans were elected so that they could compromise and get along with the Dems to enact legislation. That is NOT what occurred 4 November 2014. These elections – both nationwide and states' wide – were a repudiation and condemnation of big government, big spending, the US "progressive" (aka "Alinskyite") movement and – of course – Dictator-in-Chief Barack Hussein Obama; both his policies and him personally. In other words, the American people finally awakened from their long and dissatisfying slumber

The Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (PRA) has received court approval of its seizure of the art studio of James Dupree. It plans to bulldoze it and sell the land to a private grocery chain. Despite renovating a dilapidated warehouse and converting it into an attractive and bustling center for artistic expression, Dupree’s property rights are being sacrificed to the PRA’s vision of what the City needs. “It’s a question of whether the rights of the collective community should take precedence over the rights of a single individual,” PRA Executive Director Ed Covington explained. “Far more people will eat the food sold...

Rep. Matt Salmon of Arizona is pushing his Republican colleagues to try to block the president from using executive action on immigration, but his plan is likely to hit strong resistance from House leaders. The federal government is currently funded through a continuing resolution that runs out at midnight on December 11. Salmon, echoing similar calls from Republican senators Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Mike Lee of Utah, proposes that Congress pass a bill that would fund the government until early next year. If the president moves ahead with his executive amnesty, the expiring continuing resolution would give Republicans an...

President Obama used his executive authority to increase the availability of visas for Chinese workers and students, a move that immigration hawks regard as a signal that his promised executive orders regarding immigration are coming soon. “Obama announced a new plan Monday to extend Chinese student visas to five years and business and tourist visas to 10 years, saying the move will boost jobs in the United States,” USA Today noted.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen admitted that it didn’t exercise much effort to track down emails cited in an investigation of IRS abuses involving harassment of conservative political organizations. “Look, we were between a rock and a hard place,” Koskinen contended. “On the one hand, we have Congress and the Courts demanding we produce these documents. On the other hand, some very powerful and dangerous people were very determined that these documents never be found.” “If we defy Congress and the Courts the worst case scenario is we get held in contempt,” Koskinen pointed out. “It’s embarrassing. We look like crooks...

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Jo White said the agency will be focused on implementing rules on executive compensation. “We have three or four [rules] yet to finish, including the clawbacks,” she said in an interview with CNBC at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. The agency has already adopted six rules regarding executive compensation. Under the Dodd-Frank law, the SEC is required to create rules to return compensation that was improperly received, called “clawbacks,” and create a rule to prevent securities exchanges from listing securities of companies that have not implemented such a policy. White said among...