Free Republic

Sales tax rates are going up in parts of California on Wednesday and will, for the first time, hit double digits in some Northern California cities. Shoppers in Albany, Hayward and Union City and San Leandro in Alameda County and El Cerrito in Contra Costa County will pay 10 percent starting next month. If a bill in the state Legislature passes, more areas could be paying that much. The statewide sales tax rate is 7.5 percent. State law allows cities and counties to add up to 2 additional percentage points in local sales and use taxes. The Legislature passed bills...

A driver of a vehicle tried to ram a gate at the National Security Agency building in Fort Meade Monday morning, resulting in a shooting, authorities say. It is not clear if anyone has been injured. There are two vehicles with damage outside the gate. Anne Arundel County police say the National Security Agency is handling the investigation, WUSA9 reports. The incident happened around 9:30 a.m. local time.

Police opened fire on a vehicle that attempted to ram the gates at the National Security Agency, according to multiple media reports. It is unclear if there are any injuries. This a breaking news story and will be updated as more information comes available. Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/mar/30/police-shoot-vehicle-ramming-nsa-gates-ft-meade-re/#ixzz3VsXmFSU4 Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

Britain is to blame for illegal immigrant problems on the French side of the Channel because of its lack of commitment to the “European project”, the mayor of Calais has claimed. Natacha Bouchart accused the British government of “despising” the native population of Calais and said the UK should be forced to sign up to Europe’s open borders agreement. Miss Bouchart intensified her war of words with Britain as the French port struggles to cope with thousands of illegal immigrants, mainly from African countries, who have gathered in the town to attempt illegal crossings into this country. She repeated previous...

Driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants are under discussion at the Minnesota Legislature — again. Previous attempts to allow the undocumented to drive legally have failed, but this year the measure should pass. As public safety officials have argued for years, the change would make roads safer. Opponents of the proposal say that the licenses would enable voter fraud, cause homeland security risks and reward those who have already broken immigration law. However, in this case public safety interests trump other concerns. The driver’s license dilemma is yet another result of America’s broken, outdated, schizophrenic immigration policies. The honest reality is...

A new study says that nearly one of every three farmworkers in Utah is an undocumented immigrant. So is one of every six construction workers. The Pew Research Center released a study Thursday that uses U.S. census and other government data to examine labor trends among undocumented workers nationally. It included a variety of state-by-state information. It estimates that 31 percent of the farmworkers in Utah in 2012 were undocumented immigrants, as were 17 percent of all construction workers. Randy Parker, CEO of the Utah Farm Bureau Federation, says the numbers are surprising at first, but may be close to...

MSNBC correspondent Jeremy Lancaster sat down with government official Darrin Cornia to discuss recent rumors that have been in circulation in regard to registered motorcycle owners being placed on a classified FBI gang list. After a few moments of introduction, Lancaster bluntly asked the following question,” Mr. Cornia, if I were to make the statement, all registered motorcycle owners are currently showing on a classified FBI gang list, would the statement be true or false? Cornia responded by saying, “That would be a true statement, the FBI has been collecting and compiling Department of Motor Vehicles and Drivers License Division...

"Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory," Wall Street Journal foreign affairs columnist Bret Stephens writes • Stephens advises Israeli government to "repay contempt with contempt." In an exceptionally sharp critique published on Monday, Wall Street Journal foreign affairs columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Bret Stephens ripped apart U.S. President Barack Obama's foreign policy. The op-ed, titled "The Orwellian Obama Presidency," detailed the flaws of Obama's approach to foreign affairs. "To adapt George Orwell's motto for Oceania: Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory," Stephens wrote. "There is an upside-down...

Press Secretary Josh Earnest advised Republicans “not to lose any sleep over the president using his executive power to raise taxes. First, it hasn’t happened yet. So why fret about something that may not occur?” “Second, and even more important, if the president does decide to raise taxes there’s nothing anybody can do to stop him,” Earnest added. “The Internal Revenue Service is subordinate to his authority. If he orders them to increase the government’s take from taxpayers they will unhesitatingly obey. They most certainly won’t be swayed by anything any member of Congress or the courts might say or...

“He thinks he is going to do a Nixon to China. He is the man who is going to develop the entente, the understanding, the condominium with Iran to run the Middle East. We will join with them. We are going to recognize their presence, their dominance in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, and now in Yemen as that will be the reward for having cut a deal with us on nuclear weapons.” “That’s impossible, O’Reilly said, “because if that ever were to come true, we would alienate all of the Sunni nations. Saudi Arabia, the Emirates…” “But that’s exactly...

President Obama has lamented that special interests dominate the world of politics. My first reaction was to laugh out loud. After all, we are listening to the words of a politician/community activist who has done his very best job handing over the country to the communist bankers that are loosely referred to as the New World Order. This is the same Obama who has supported continued bail-outs of criminal bankers, has overseen and mandated a failing education system (i.e. Common Core), and has mandated a failing health care system that has instituted death panels (e.g. Obamacare age related treatment exclusions)....

Operation Jade Conditioning First, let’s cover what Joint Military Exercise Jade Helm 15 is not: it is not a covert plan for the military to conquer the Southwest and institute martial law. And no, the hundreds of special operations troops and thousands of other military personnel taking part in Jade Helm 15 are not bad guys who are out to establish tyranny in America. Those are straw man arguments, posited to be rejected. But the elimination of the straw men does not mean that Jade Helm 15 is benign. Reality check, please: does anybody reading this seriously believe that President...

File this under "If they had been doing their damn jobs" Go to about the 6 minute mark...the experts and the talking heads are only just beginning to figure out what they should have known Obama would do all along.

Back in 1997, when Bill Clinton's EPA was pushing stricter air pollution rules, then-EPA administrator Carol Browner scoffed at complaints that the new rules would be so strict as to eventually ban backyard barbecues.

The traveling “I Have a Name” exhibit that highlights the struggle of undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America is scheduled to be on display at the Landmark Center in St. Paul in April. The exhibit is a collection of 30 life-size photos and a booklet detailing the perilous journey each immigrant undertook in search of a better life in the United States. The exhibit aims to restore dignity to the estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants nationwide. “‘I Have a Name’ seeks simply to give a few of those immigrants from Mexico and Central America a face, a name, their...

“Universal voting would counteract money more than anything,” makes as much sense as anything else Obama has said. The idea that people utilizing their freedom of association to pool resources in order to influence politics is somehow corruptive of the political process stems from the unspoken idea that the country is one big commons owned collectively by us all and the government's purpose is to decide how to fairly allocate the commons. In an actual free country there is no such problem. The country isn't one big socialized commons. But in a socialized country where the presumption is that everything...

Wal-Mart Fights Bid to Curb Gun Sales New York’s Trinity Wall Street Church Challenges Assault-Rifle Sales By Joann S. Lublin and Paul Ziobro March 22, 2015 7:38 p.m. ET A U.S. appeals court showdown looms next month for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in a case with potentially broad impact on how much influence investors can have over their companies. The dispute concerns Wal-Mart’s sales of assault rifles with high-capacity magazines. New York’s Trinity Wall Street church wants shareholders to vote on a resolution calling on Wal-Mart’s board to review management decisions to sell the weapons, as well as other products that...

The federal bureaucracy, in the form of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, recently announced a ban on ammunition used in AR-15 rifles, which are among the most common firearms in America, but then suddenly backed off. So breathe a sigh of relief and move on? Not if you like the Second Amendment, according to a National Rifle Association commentator. Colion Noir, a practicing attorney who graduated from the University of Houston, has been described by the Los Angeles Times as someone who doesn’t fit the stereotype of NRA members: “Old, fat, white guys.” “At 29, he’s not...

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means If 2014 was the year of militarized police, armored tanks, and stop-and-frisk searches, 2015 may well be the year of technologized police, surveillance blimps and scan-and-frisk searches. Just as we witnessed neighborhood cops being transformed into soldier cops, we’re about to see them shapeshift once again, this time into robocops, complete with robotic exoskeletons, super-vision contact lenses, computer-linked visors, and mind-reading helmets. Similarly, just as military equipment created for the battlefield has been deployed on American soil against American citizens,...

Currently there are 73 federal agencies that have full-time armed officers with arresting authority. According to a 2008 report by the Department of Justice, there were 120,000 full-time law enforcement officers working for federal agencies and 24 different federal agencies employed at least 250 full-time officers. Federal agencies with at least 250 full-time officers included the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Mint, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Veterans Health Administration. While speaking before the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison said, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” Despite this...