Free Republic

On Wednesday, the Republican controlled house voted to further federalize gun laws in this country. While Ryan McMaken has noted the danger in further centralizing gun legislation, there is another deeply troubling aspect to this bill: it expands the ability of the Federal government to restrict Americans’ right to bear arms. During the legislative process, the NRA supported merging the bill aimed at nationalizing concealed carry permits with another piece of legislation aimed at “fixing” the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS.) Obviously this legislation was inspired by the failure of the US Air Force to report the criminal...

the Left engaged in gross abuses of criminal law to intimidate, harass and silence conservatives in the state. The specifics were chilling -- from pre-dawn raids on political activists' homes, to stifling gag orders preventing them from saying a peep about what was happening to them, all in pursuit of criminalizing and punishing the Badger State conservative movement. Eventually, one target violated his gag order and blew the whistle on the whole operation, eventually leading to investigations of the investigations, and multiple courts shutting down the witch hunts with extreme prejudice. ... ruthless the Left had become in its efforts...

Austria's top court has ruled that same-sex couples can get married from the start of 2019, declaring a previous law discriminatory. The Constitutional Court overturned a law that restricted same-sex unions to civil partnerships, according to court documents seen by CNN. The decision brings Austria into line with many other European nations including Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and the UK.

‘We have an obligation to redistribute’ The holiday season is upon us, and leave it to an Ivy Leaguer to play the role of the proverbial stick in the mud. Writing in the Yale Daily News, guest columnist Xuan (who uses the pronouns “they” and “them”) invokes the United States’ “legacy of colonialism, exploitation, slavery and genocide” to argue that Americans’ personal charity isn’t “quite enough” nor “all of morality.” They offer examples of a shady used car salesman and a sketchy entrepreneur who, after screwing over people in the past attempt to make good later in life through charitable...

Popular tech companies—Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others—have strongly protected free speech online, a policy widely associated with the legal norms of the United States. American tech companies, however, operate globally, and their platforms are subject to regulation by the European Union, whose member states offer less protection to expression than does the United States. European regulators are pressuring tech companies to control and suppress extreme speech. The regulators’ clear warning is that, if the companies do not comply “voluntarily,” they will face harsher laws and potential liability. This regulatory effort runs the risk of censorship creep, whereby a wide array...

Seattle’s City Council made national headlines earlier this year when it enacted a city income tax aimed at “high earners.” Immediately, politicians crowed that they had planted a flag of “resistance” to the forces of “Trumpism.” In a court hearing last week, the city defended its war on wealth against several legal and constitutional challenges. The briefing from both sides exposes an inconvenient reality for the levy’s defenders: its real, ultimate victims aren’t necessarily the plutocrats they claim to be targeting. In fact, just the opposite. Some background: there are few precedents from other parts of the country for a...

When Kathia Sotelo Calderon found out that the lump on her neck was thyroid cancer, she wondered how she’d pay for treatment. The 19-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico, who was brought to the U.S. by her parents when she was 7, had no health insurance. As a noncitizen, she didn’t think she was eligible for Medicaid, and she couldn’t buy a plan on the state or federal health care exchanges. While the 2010 Affordable Care Act substantially reduced the number of Americans without health insurance — from nearly 50 million in 2010 to 28.8 million in 2017, estimates from the...

University of California regents meeting on Thursday admonished UC President Janet Napolitano for agreeing to a plan that led to interference in a state audit on the operation of her office. “Her decision and then follow-on actions of her direct reports reflect negatively on the University of California community, which is committed to the highest ethical standards in furthering the University’s mission of teaching, research and public service,” board chairman George Kieffer said in a statement after the regents met behind closed doors for nearly five hours.

The Patterson High School soccer player pulled off his hoodie to reveal a dark blue jersey bearing the name of Neymar, his favorite player, and joined his teammates on the sunny practice field. While the jersey offers the 17-year-old a connection, if mostly in his dreams, to the Brazilian superstar, the sport itself provides the undocumented immigrant from Guatemala something more tangible: a respite from anxiety at a time of stepped-up immigration enforcement. “Maybe they can separate me from my mother. That makes me afraid,” said the player, who asked to be identified only as “Duglas” because of his immigration...

Communism breeds a welfare- dependent society that looks up to the omnipotent government to care for them from cradle to grave. That is not freedom “We condemn freedom of speech that hurts other people’s feelings” – student poster photographed at a rally in California Half of the U.S. population believes that it is a good idea and high time that our country became socialist, on the way to communism. We are told ad nauseam by the highly organized Marxist left that the other communist countries that failed so miserably, oppressed their own people, and killed millions of them, failed because...

Is it possible to imagine a world without carbon-spewing gasoline-powered cars and trucks? California should join the effort and move toward banning sales of new carbon-emitting vehicles as soon as is practical. And maybe even a little sooner. It has become clear that the free market is not working fast enough to wean us from our dependence on fossils fuels to power our cars and trucks, which account for more than 10% of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The national movements to end sales of gas-powered engines are in response to the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to less than...

Four hundred sixty nine different plaintiffs in two class-action lawsuits over Obama-era IRS harassment settled with the Department of Justice Thursday, bringing to a close a dark chapter in the IRS’s history. In 2010 and 2011, the IRS under Lois Lerner, particularly out of the Cincinnati field office, launched what many contended were politically motivated investigations and audits of “Tea Party” and other conservative groups. While no criminal prosecutions ever resulted, hundreds of victims assembled in class-action lawsuits against the federal government. Attorney General Sessions appears to have largely acknowledged the plaintiffs’ claims. In a DOJ press release on the...

Tax Reform: What do you call a tax break that delivers 88% of the benefits to upper-income families and subsidizes rich states at the expense of poor ones? If you're a Democrat, you call it a sacred cow. One provision of the Republican's tax-cutting plan that has drawn intense opposition from Democrats is the elimination of state and local tax deductions for those who itemize. ... Fewer than 22% of tax filers even claim the state and local tax deduction, and the vast majority of these are higher-income families. While 78% of those with incomes above $200,000 claim the deduction,...

Full original title--White female cop takes stand on anti-American NFL ‘ingrates.’ It nets her punishment nobody saw coming Last month, Michigan State Police director Colonel Kriste Kibbey Etue shared a Facebook post displaying the sentiments of literally the majority of America, but one that has gotten her into hot water with liberals in the peanut gallery. The September 24 post, which has since been removed, decries NFL players ‘taking-a-knee’ during the national anthem as “millionaire ingrates who hate America.” Etue was forced to “apologize” for the post three days later. “It was a mistake to share this message on Facebook...

Suppose a crooked prosecutor framed someone and was determined to get a conviction. So he built an entire case on tainted, circumstantial evidence, and testimony from witnesses who had their reasons for wanting the guy in jail. Suppose the prosecutor ignored or hid exculpatory evidence and colluded with the judge to prevent the defendant from presenting a robust defense or cross-examining adverse witnesses. You know what would happen – at least in a fair and just society. The victim would be exonerated and compensated. The prosecutor and judge would be disbarred, fined and jailed. What you may not know is...

British authorities like to pretend that there is equal terror threat coming from both jihadis and “right-wing extremists.” That leads to a diversion of resources that could be used to fight jihadis, and the persecution of innocent people, such as the politician Paul Weston, who was arrested for publicly reading Winston Churchill’s remarks about Islam. The really insidious aspect of this, however, is that for years, Leftist and Islamic supremacist spokesmen have been claiming that any opposition to jihad terror that involved honest discussion of its motivating ideology was “far-right propaganda.” In light of that, what Amber Rudd is essentially...

Their proposals would do nothing to stop mass shootings. By now you’ve seen it a thousand times. On Twitter, in print, and on the air, Democratic politicians and progressive activists try to name and shame conservatives — especially conservative politicians — who offer “thoughts and prayers” in the aftermath of a mass shooting. “Your job isn’t to pray,” they argue. “Your job is to legislate. Your job is to fix the problem.” I hate to pick on Kirsten Powers — because she’s brave and right on many vital issues and also a thoughtful and kind person even when she’s wrong...

"...the latest outcropping of technocratic busybodyism: The scanning of your car’s electronic ear tag, its Vehicle Identification Number or VIN." "Now the guy behind the counter will scan your car’s VIN – which is tied to the DMV – and first find out all kinds of things about you and your car. Then he will tell you which tires you’re allowed to buy. Yes, really."

One of the great liberal (in the true sense of the word) decisions by the Supreme Court is West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, the 1943 case where the justices struck down a law that forced school children of the Jehovah’s Witness faith to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance or face punishment for declining to do so. [...] Today’s “liberals” have forgotten the wisdom of Barnette. They care little about liberty and instead desire to impose their ideas by force. We see their authoritarianism popping up all around, and one place is mandatory speech. A...

...President Donald Trump has recommended a cut of some 30% to the State Department’s budget, which includes the funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development and most of America’s investments in global health. Congress is unlikely to go along with such large cuts, but our best guess is that, by the time the dust settles, key foreign-aid programs will be scaled back. Even modest cuts would represent the reversal of a long-term trend of increasing U.S. support for foreign aid, and a similar mood of retrenchment has taken hold elsewhere. In the U.K., the world’s second-largest aid donor, there...