Free Republic

In Houston early Friday, a 19-year-old convenience store clerk shot and killed a 52-year-old man who stole beer, according to police. The matter remains under investigation, but the clerk was not arrested. In Texas and elsewhere, each time someone is shot dead with a claim of self-defense, a grand jury must decide if an indictment is warranted. However, deliberations by grand juries are secret and the basis of their decisions is seldom public. The Chronicle also examined times of death, gender and race of both the shooters and the dead. Citizen shootings most often happen after dark, and involve a...

Government unions tout their ability to get workers higher salaries and better benefits, but union workers are finding that unions cost them more than they are worth. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was able to pick up nearly 40 percent of union households when he triumphed recently in his recall election. But this is just one example. On June 21, the Supreme Court struck another blow when it ruled that public-sector unions could not just extract dues from non-members without proper notice. [Snip] Many union members object to their union’s political spending. In fact, 80 percent believe that a government job...

Mitch McConnell is in the headlines again for saying the odds are against those wanting repeal of Obamacare. “[I]t’s a lot harder to undo something than it is to stop it in the first place,” he said in part. For once, let’s give McConnell the benefit of the doubt and suggest he is talking about the present Congress, not the next Congress, though in actual context he seems to mean both. Let’s be charitable. The truth is, I don’t expect Republicans in Congress to be fully committed to repeal next year even if they have Mitt Romney in the White...

http://www.mittromney.com/forms/other Contact form for Mitt Romney. I just said, "It IS a tax. The Supreme Court said so." I encourage you to do the same.

The Democratic talking points have been issued and are being followed to the letter (see here and here). And they go like this: The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is not a tax; it’s a penalty. Those who suggests it’s a tax are wrong, in error, disingenuous, and dissemblers. Here’s the problem, though: characterizing the Affordable Care Act as a tax isn’t simply the interpretation of Chief Justice John Roberts and a majority of the Supreme Court; it’s the interpretation of the Obama administration. (snip) The Affordable Care Act, then, was upheld as constitutional based on the tax argument put forward...

(snip) ...“Malta, as you know, is an impregnable island fortress,” he (Roberts) said on Friday, according to news reports. “It seemed like a good idea.” The chief justice was correct to anticipate a level of fury unusual even in the wake of a blockbuster decision with vast political, practical and constitutional consequences. The criticism came from all sides. And it was directed not at the court as whole or even at the majority in the 5-to-4 decision. It was aimed squarely at him. (snip) Professor Yoo, the former Bush administration official, said her report (referring to Jan Crawford's book) appeared...

Call it damning with pink praise . . . On today's Morning Joe, BBC's Katty Kay, anchor of the network's American edition, said that Europeans favor the re-election of President Obama because he is more supportive of "European social-democratic values." You know, those wonderful welfare-state policies that have worked their magic so well that Europe now enjoys . . . an 11.1% unemployment rate. View the video here.

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign on Monday rejected a Republican attack on the Affordable Care Act, repudiating a contention made in last week’s Supreme Court decision that the law’s requirement that individuals carry medical coverage amounts to a tax. The Romney team’s refusal to invoke the word “tax” with regard to the individual mandate puts the candidate at odds with others in his party at a moment when Republicans are attempting to capi­tal­ize on the Supreme Court’s decision, which deemed President Obama’s health-care law constitutional. Some Republican-led states are trying to thwart the legislation’s effort to cover the poor. In an...

COVINGTON, Ky. - Federal officials have spent more than $8 million storing about $1 million worth of fireworks seized from a northern Kentucky dealer. The storage costs continue to rise more than three years after a federal judge ordered the return of nearly half the fireworks. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is paying nearly $102,000 monthly to store 44 tractor loads of fireworks at the former Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant in Nebraska. Some of the fireworks may now be dangerously unstable because they have not been stored properly for five years, the newspaper reports. Fallout from the...

Word For The Day, July 3, 2012 In order that we might all raise the level of discourse and expand our language abilities, here is the daily post of "Word for the Day". pleonasm [plee-uh-naz-uhm] -n 1. the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea; redundancy. 2. an instance of this, as free gift or true fact. 3. a redundant word or expression. [1580–90; < Late Latin pleonasmus < Greek pleonasmós redundancy, surplus, derivative of pleonázein to be or have more than enough, itself derivative of pleíōn more ( see pleo-)]

Although the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) strongly discourages spanking, at least half of parents admit to physically punishing their children. Some research suggests that as many as 70-90 percent of mothers have resorted to spanking at one time or another. A new study published in the journal Pediatrics may cause parents to think more carefully before laying a hand on their little ones. Researchers examined data from more than 34,000 adults and found that being spanked significantly increased the risk of developing mental health issues as adults. According to their results, corporal punishment is associated with mood disorders, including...

Lawyers for New York Rep. Charlie Rangel’s Democratic opponent are planning to re-file their court petition citing myriad problems with last week’s primary, after temporarily withdrawing the petition Monday in order to gather more evidence. Rangel challenger, Democratic New York State Sen. Adrian Espaillat, is suggesting the tight race – in which Rangel declared victory – was marred by voter fraud. "Voters have been pushed away, and as a result many feel that they were suppressed from voting," Espaillat declared. “The legitimacy of this election is at place right now ... there was a level of voter suppression. We are...

If the new health care law wasn’t enough of a mess before last week’s Supreme Court decision, that ruling actually added another layer of cost, complexity and political contentiousness to the bill. By striking down part of the law that required states to expand their Medicaid programs, the court tossed a very hot potato into the laps of state lawmakers everywhere. ObamaCare required states to increase eligibility for Medicaid to 133 percent of the poverty line, or roughly $30,000 per year for a family of four. The expansion would also make childless single men (a notoriously high-cost group) eligible for...

<p>Border Patrol agents in Arizona are blasting their bosses for telling them, along with all other Department of Homeland Security employees, to run and hide if they encounter an "active shooter."</p>

A federal judge has blocked the state of Florida from enforcing a new law pushed by firearm advocates that banned thousands of doctors from discussing gun ownership with their patients. U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke, who had already issued a preliminary injunction last September, made her decision permanent late Friday when she ruled in favor of groups of physicians who asserted the state violated their free speech rights. She said the law was so “vague” that it violated the First Amendment rights of doctors, noting the legislation’s privacy provisions “fail to provide any standards for practitioners to follow.” The physicians’...

Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld, who has died aged 88, escaped from Occupied France to join the Special Operations Executive (SOE); parachuted back on sabotage missions, he twice faced execution, only to escape on both occasions, once dressed as a Nazi guard.

A newfound squirrel-tailed specimen is the oldest known meat-eating dinosaur with feathers, according to a new study. The late-Jurassic discovery, study authors say, strikes down the image of dinosaurs as "overgrown lizards." Unearthed recently from a Bavarian limestone quarry, the "exquisitely preserved" 150-million-year-old fossil has been dubbed Sciurumimus albersdoerferi—"Scirius" being the scientific name for tree squirrels. Sciurumimus was likely a young megalosaur, a group of large, two-legged meat-eating dinosaurs. The hatchling had a large skull, short hind limbs, and long, hairlike plumage on its midsection, back, and tail....

For John Roberts, it is Palm Sunday. Out of relief and gratitude for his having saved Obamacare, he is being compared to John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Liberal commentators are burbling that his act of statesmanship has shown us the way to the sunny uplands of a new consensus. If only Republicans will follow Roberts' bold and brave example, and agree to new revenues, the dark days of partisan acrimony and tea party intransigence could be behind us. Yet imagine if Justice Stephen Breyer had crossed over from the liberal bench to join Antonin Scalia, Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas...

I had to run to the grocery store yesterday ( Wal- Mart ) and saw this young woman driving around looking for a parking space. She was about to pull into one way out in the lot when I saw a handicapped spot open by the front door. I whistled at her and pointed to the open spot. She drove up quickly and then rolled her window down and said "You Idiot that's a handicapped spot!!" I said "Oh I'm sorry I saw the Obama bumper sticker and figured you were mentally challenged" She flipped me off and drove away...

There is no “silver lining” to last week’s lawless and illegitimate decision by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and the other four commie liberals to uphold the unconstitutional individual mandate in Obamacare as a tax (something the Court is not supposed to be allowed to do—re-write a law). Any conservative who speculates that Roberts’ grossly wrong-headed majority opinion is somehow good for our side is pathetically grasping at imaginary straws. The fact is that this is perhaps the second-worst Supreme Court decision in American history, next to Roe v. Wade. The two decisions, while concerning very different topics, both...