Free Republic

President Barack Obama swore as far back as 2008 he’d close the U.S.-run prison for terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay. Five and a half years later, he finally took a real risk to get that process moving. The president defied Congress over the weekend, ignoring a 30-day notice rule required by law to greenlight the transfer to Qatar of five alleged members of the Taliban held at Guantánamo in exchange for the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan. It’s Obama’s most assertive move to shrink Guantánamo’s population since U.S. embassy bombings suspect Ahmed Ghailani was flown from the...

President Barack Obama's second inaugural address has been described as one of the most partisan ever given, heralding a sweeping left-wing agenda and demonizing his opponents. But President Obama's target is not simply the Republican Party: it is the Constitution itself, and the values of liberty that it enshrines. In the address itself, President Obama made the case that liberty is not timeless; that it must adjust to the times, and that "preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action"--not to defend those freedoms from infringement, but to give them "meaning" through government regulation and redistribution. White House communications director...

Proposed law scheduled for a vote next week originally increased Americans' e-mail privacy. Then law enforcement complained. Now it increases government access to e-mail and other digital files.

Via Drugsnotthugs.com and Reason's own Cynthia Bell.UPDATE: A reader points out that the dollar amounts on the right Y axis don't add up to $1.5 trillion. The creator of the chart, documentary filmmaker Matt Groff, Tweeted the following in response to a question about where the $1.5 trillion figure comes from: "Short answer: chart shows only fed drug control, $1.5T refers to all costs assoc. w/ drug prohibition, blog on it shortly."First off, I take the blame for not seeing the discrepancy. Shame on me.But here's the funny thing: While the $1.5 trillion figure doesn't correspond to the numbers at...

Barack Obama may have just lost the election. He has foolishly gone to war in an election year with tens of millions of Catholics, Protestants and Jews – Democrat, Republican and independent alike. He has thrown down a radical feminist gauntlet and dared the Church to pick it up. They’ve picked it up. From running up trillions in debt and deficit, to the vast expansion of the size and scope of federal bureaucracy, Mr. Obama has done more in three years to supplant our 236 year-old Constitutional Republic with a Euro-style socialist autocracy – than a lesser Marxist could have...

Man sentenced to life on meth charges DUBUQUE, Iowa A Dubuque man has been sentenced to life in prison on federal drug charges, including one count of attempting to manufacture methamphetamine. 38-year-old Johnny McAtee was sentenced this week after being convicted in June on the meth charge and also possessing pseudoephedrine and other materials used to make the addictive drug. McAtee was convicted on similar charges in 1998 and 2002.