Free Republic

On Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that Obamacare will place a special focus on members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community because "for too long...[they] were pushed to the side," Paul Bedard reported at the Washington Examiner. "LGBT individuals have faced limited access to health care and insurance. They have been less likely to get the preventive care they need to stay healthy, they have higher rates of tobacco use, and they are often at increased risk for mental health illness," she said. To counter this, the administration is drawing attention to new benefits...

I believe there is a principle of law under which a person may unwittingly waive constitutional rights. An example of this is when invoking the 5th Amendment right against self incrimination. One may waive this right by answering any questions rather than repeatedly invoking the right when asked questions. Does this apply to the Obamacare website, and once a person signs up, they actually place themselves under the federal government’s jurisdiction with regard to Obamacare by signing up and in the process waive constitutionally protected rights? It seems to me that there is no provision in our federal Constitution granting...

Microsoft is moving toward a major new effort to encrypt its Internet traffic amid fears that the National Security Agency may have broken into its global communications links, said people familiar with the emerging plans. Suspicions at Microsoft, while building for several months, sharpened in October when it was reported that the NSA was intercepting traffic inside the private networks of Google and Yahoo, two industry rivals with similar global infrastructures, said people with direct knowledge of the company’s deliberations. They said top Microsoft executives are meeting this week to decide what encryption initiatives to deploy and how quickly.

The Times Of Israel is reporting that a team of negotiators led by White House adviser Valerie Jarrett has been conducting secret talks with Iran about it's nuclear weapons program for the past year. The report states the deal submitted in Geneva earlier this month was a direct result of these secret year-long negotiations between teams headed by Jarrett and Iran's Ali Akbar Salehi. That deal was ultimately rejected when France and Israel raised strong objections,and talks are expected to resume this Wednesday. The White House was very quick to issue a categorical denial of the report. According to White...

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/howard-dean-i-wonder-if-obama-has-legal-authority-do_767096.html

Lyle Denniston looks at four potentially very significant new challenges under way to Obamacare, including one argument that is growing in popularity with the law’s critics. THE STATEMENTS AT ISSUE: “My jaw dropped when I first saw this. This has the potential to sink Obamacare. It could make the current website problems seem minor by comparison.” – Michael F. Cannon, health policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, discussing a series of lawsuits challenging the Internal Revenue Service’s interpretation of a key provision in the new federal health care law, as quoted in an October 25 story by David...

WASHINGTON — As America's road planners struggle to find the cash to mend a crumbling highway system, many are beginning to see a solution in a little black box that fits neatly by the dashboard of your car. The devices, which track every mile a motorist drives and transmit that information to bureaucrats, are at the center of a controversial attempt in Washington and state planning offices to overhaul the outdated system for funding America's major roads.

According to Yahoo answers: The dogs may bark but the caravan moves on. First, know that a dog in Persia is not an animal held in high esteem. It means that the lowly may criticize and complain, but that doesn't stop the flow of events as determined by those of worth.

Over 2.6 million illegal immigrants reside in California and Gov. Jerry Brown is signing more illegal laws to give them the same rights as U.S. citizens. On Thursday, he signed a bill that will allow up to 1.3 million illegals up to obtain CA drivers licenses. Another bill signed by Brown prohibits employers to retaliate against workers because of their lack of citizenship. The CA Governor also signed the “Trust Act” which halts the deportation of illegals when arrested for minor crimes and prohibits law enforcement to contact I.C.E. agents. To add to the illegal bills signed by Gov. Brown,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said he does not expect to have to take any unusual steps to prevent the United States from defaulting on its debt because he believes Congress will raise the debt ceiling before a looming October 17 deadline. "I don't expect to get there," Obama said in an interview with the Associated Press released on Saturday. "There were at least some quotes yesterday that (House of Representatives) Speaker (John) Boehner is willing to make sure that we don't default," he said.

Political bridge-building is usually considered a good thing, but when the “bridge” you are building is the abridgement of the separation of powers, not so much. More Obama Domestic Abuse: Now Look What You Made Me Do… on tap. In an alarming development, word comes from Mark Levin and others in Congress that the President is prepping to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally. You know — usurping the power of the purse granted solely to Congress. That ladies and gentlemen, is impeachment worthy. Mark Levin gets it and America better pay attention: OBAMA: “An economic shutdown, that results from Default,...

(I'm paraphrasing, so I highly recommend listening to the podcast, beginning about half-way through.) In his 10/3/13 broadcast, Mark warns that, based upon Obama's inflammatory rhetoric regarding the debt ceiling, and the supposedly impending "default" on our debt, that Obama plans on acting unilaterally to over-spend the debt limit. Mark correlates a couple of facts. The first is that Obama is harping on "default." Most pundits are reading this as a means of "talking down" the economy, in order to blame the "Republican shutdown" for a weakening economy. But Mark believes that Obama is laying the groundwork for overspending the...

‘It’s the law of the land.” This is rapidly becoming the preferred shorthand argument for why criticism of Obamacare is just so, so wrong. It also serves as the lead sentence of a larger claim that all attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act are really symptoms of a kind of extremist right-wing lunacy. For instance, here’s Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who walked out of the painting American Gothic to deliver this homespun wisdom: “We’re not going to bow to tea-party anarchists who deny the mere fact that Obamacare is the law. We will not bow to tea-party anarchists...

Minutes after midnight on Wednesday, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) rose to give his colleague Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) a breather from what was already a marathon speech warning of the “train wreck” that is resulting from the collision of the American economy with the oppression of ObamaCare. While the remarks delivered by both men were eloquent, engaging, and educational, Senator Lee’s impromptu descant on the unconstitutionality of the Supreme Court’s rewriting of the original healthcare legislation was particularly noteworthy. For nearly an hour and without a teleprompter, Senator Lee rightly accused the Supreme Court of having “rewritten” ObamaCare, converting it...

The United States, the world’s largest arms dealer, has joined more than 90 other nations in signing a treaty that regulates global arms trading, but there is strong resistance in the Senate, which must ratify it. Secretary of State John Kerry, who signed the Arms Trade Treaty on Wednesday, said it was a “significant step” in keeping the world safe and preventing terrorists and others from obtaining conventional weapons. … Addressing U.S. critics of the treaty, the former senator said fears that it would undermine Americans’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms are not grounded in reality. For one,...

As close observers of history and human nature, James Madison and the other Founders of the U.S. Constitution knew that the equal and unbiased application of the law to all people, especially elected officials, is essential to freedom and justice and one of the primary safeguards from authoritarianism and oppression by a ruling class. And so, referring to the members of Congress, James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 57: "[T]hey can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society." Today, elected officials need...

The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved House Bill 4770, which among other things, attempts to define what a journalist is to restrict access to motor vehicle accident reports for a period of 30 days after the accident. The measure is part of three-bill package aimed at impeding so-called “ambulance chasing” law firms. Within the package, the legislation is apparently an attempt to deny "ambulance chasers” quick access to accident reports. However, in that effort the bill sets out to define what does and doesn’t qualify as a “news publication.” “Government cannot license who speaks,” said attorney and MLive columnist...

In the wake of the shooting at the Navy Yard, Obama spokesman Jay Carney said the president is implementing executive actions and reiterated his commitment to strengthening gun laws, including expanding background checks to sales online and at gun shows.

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material. In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then...

Obama is the second fervently anti-American president we have seen. That was hard to accept for a long time, but after the overthrow of our longtime ally Mubarak in Egypt, after Obama's active support for the Islamofascist Muslim Brotherhood, after the Benghazi arms-smuggling operation to Al Qaida-allied rebels in Syria, and now, after Obama's selective outrage against Syrian poison gas attacks in a civil war where 130,000 Syrians have died -- after all those facts I don't think Obama is running a pro-American policy any more. After all, Obama is running the "apologize for white folks" administration. It's the "American...