Free Republic

President Barack Obama has signed into law a $9.7 billion bill to pay flood insurance claims from Superstorm Sandy. … The House has yet to act on a larger, more comprehensive Sandy aid package. Republican leaders did not bring the bill to the floor before the last session of Congress adjourned. …

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the unemployment rate remaining flat at 7.8 percent shows a “good pace” and that the country is “going in the right direction.” “Good morning. It’s a good morning indeed, I think,” Pelosi said, as she began her weekly press conference on Capitol Hill on Friday. “155,000 jobs added in December.” “Good pace, going in the right direction,” she said. “1.8 million private sector jobs gained in 2012. December was the 34th consecutive month of private-sector job creation.” The government unemployment report released on Friday revealed that the number of unemployed Americans remained unchanged...

House Speaker John Boehner barely held onto his job atop Congress’ lower chamber on Thursday.

BRIT HUME: The only thing I can think of is that he believes that Hagel is a kind of maverick, would not drink the kool-aid as the White House may see it on Pentagon, military spending and so on. That he would be a counterforce over there and not an advocate for the armed forces in a way that even Leon Panetta has become. You know, the warnings that we're hearing, for example, about the affect of the sequester, so-called, on the Pentagon, the dire warnings, have come from Panetta, not from the White House you'll notice. The President isn't...

My dad is in a nursing home and we need to sell his house to pay expenses. We have researched the tax laws and apparently, the threshold is $250K for capital gains. Anything above $250K is taxed at the capital gains rate. What is is now, 28%? This seems unreasonable but apparently true. At one point, I thought that all value for the place of residence could be excluded. Or the threshold was very high. My dad is by no means rich and he has lived in the house fifty + years.

Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) is already looking forward to 2016 and beyond. The congressman yesterday reintroduced a bill to repeal the 22nd amendment establishing term limits for the president.

Only one problem. The story is pure puffery. These so-called “rocket launchers” the LAPD recovered weren't a danger to anyone. In fact, at least one of them was never a danger to anyone. It turns out both were one-use, AT-4 grenade launchers used by the U.S. Army in anti-tank operations. Yes they are grenade launchers (not really "rocket" launchers proper) but these tubes are pre-packaged weapons that can be fired only one time and cannot be reloaded. They are one-shot only weapons. So, yes, that means the tubes the police had were completely and permanently harmless. But even more absurdly,...

I'm giving up on Drudge report for a while, not going to visit it. There is too much subtext going on, incitement and hyperbole, propaganda and manipulation. The picture that often accompany headlines are not in context with the 'moment' but rather stock photographs that portrait an emotion or sense of predicament that the author wants us to feel. Almost every headline for the past few months have been foreboding impending doom of some sort that I don't want to deal with or be reminded about on a daily basis. Just sticking with Fox News, they temper that stuff down...

EBT fraud and abuse: Looking past your state By Todd Shepherd / July 24, 2012 / 7 Comments Fraud is skyrocketing as states shift from issuing paper-based food stamps to plastic, electronic benefits transfer cards preloaded with a monthly limit of cash intended only for food purchases. Examples of fraud prompted Congress to take action, with President Obama signing a law in February intended to prevent EBT cardholders from spending their money on tattoos and at strip clubs, liquor stores and casinos. Here’s a state-by-state listing of some EBT fraud stories: Alabama: Not fraudulent, but are EBT cards becoming a...

As you folks all know I've been pounding the table for years about the fact that if we're serious about addressing what's wrong with our budget we must break the medical monopolies. Indeed, there's an entire sub-category of Tickers dedicated to Health Reform, which I started writing on when the entire Obama mess began and the discussion took off in earnest. But lately I've been asked to look once again at exactly what sort of realistic budget cuts we could make, especially now that the "fiscal cliff" game has been "punted." Let's remember something here folks -- last calendar year's...

It has gone unremarked upon by their peers in the media, but a few people noted it on Twitter. This morning NBC's Meet the Press featuring gun criminal David Gregory ran a graphic of the U.S. national debt clock that showed the debt at $13 trillion, a mere $3 trillion short of where it actually stands.Most notably, former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker tweeted about it.A photo of the Meet the Press debt clock fail was posted to Twitter by Rick VanMeter:As of today, the national debt is over $16,400,000,000,000.

"Obama Plans Broad Gun Control" screamed the Drudge Report headline. So what actions can a responsible gun owner take to stop this legislative insanity? There are, of course, the accepted channels of communications: email and phone calls to your two Senators and the Representative from your Congressional district. Having once worked as an idealistic political intern in a legislative office, I was flabbergasted at the utter contempt that the staff and "my" legislator held for the ordinary voters of the district. Respect was only paid to the large financial donors and their minions. Emails and phone calls may have a...

Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was the subject of many an unkind word before his fall. Though the jokes were usually told in trusted circles only, they were known to many, and fear of reprisal engendered inventiveness. To avoid mentioning Mubarak by name, the president was called “la vache qui rit” (“the laughing cow”), a reference to a type of French cheese. The fear only disappeared with the advent of the revolution. Today, political satire can be found in the media, on the Internet, on social networks or even on protestors’ signs at demonstrations. … For his supporters, Morsi is a...

Oh, dear. The harsh reality of crushed unicorn dreams and the bitter smell of regret. As Twitchy reported, Americans started noticing that Obama’s “fair share” claims weren’t so fair and many were shocked … shocked … that their first paychecks of the year were smaller.

It’s easy to pity Kremlinologists. These are people who spent years, even decades, studying the Soviet Union. Their job was to explain why that country did the things it did, even though those actions so often seemed counterproductive. Suddenly, though, the USSR dissolved and the Kremlinologists were out of work. Louis Michael Seidman hopes to join them on the unemployment lines. He’s a “professor of constitutional law” at Georgetown University. That means students pay more than $60,000 per year to hear him lecture. Nonetheless, Seidman apparently wants to end his cushy teaching gig. “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution”...

A Democratic congressman on Friday yet again introduced a resolution seeking to repeal the 22nd Amendment, thereby removing the limit on how many terms a president may serve in office. It’s a regular occurrence for longtime Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.), who has introduced similar legislation every Congress going back at least through 2001. The 22nd Amendment bars any president from serving more than two full terms in office. It was passed by Congress in 1947 and ratified in 1951 as a reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four-term presidency. Amending the Constitution would require the approval of both the House and...

Even though the 2013 Rand McNally road atlas does not identify any town named Glynco, Ga, this sprawling 1,600 acre campus with its own zip code-31524- is the locus for extensive Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expansion. “Plans are currently under way to build and expand facilities at Glynco to conduct a wide array of programs to support the Homeland Security mission.”(1) Located in the midst of numerous senior citizen and retirement communities, the center is in Golden Isles, “…a series of barrier islands noted for their recreation and retirement living atmospheres” according to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center...

H.J.RES.15 -- Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual... (Introduced in House - IH) HJ 15 IH 113th CONGRESS 1st Session H. J. RES. 15 Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President. IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES January 4, 2013 Mr. SERRANO introduced the following joint resolution; which was referred to the Committee on...

Former Vice-President Al Gore sold his Current TV network to Al Jazeera for a reported $100 million after rebuffing a bid from Glen Beck. Money, as it turns out, was not the deciding factor. “We chose to go with Al Jazeera because of a compatibility of values and objectives,” Gore said. “We feared that Beck, as a purveyor of extremism, would have taken things in the wrong direction. It was clear to us that Al Jazeera was founded with the same goals we had for Current TV. Our decision was basically a ‘no brainer.’” That Al Jazeera has been a...

Most of them were holding machetes, knives, and long swords; they kept on dividing some of them [the villagers], cutting their heads into two, even a little child, no matter how small. And some little children who could run, they would follow them as far as almost half a kilometer to kill them; there was no mercy for anyone trying to escape. The above was a testimonial of a Nigerian man, speaking of an attack on one of his nation's villages. The attackers - the unidentified "them" and "they" in the above passage - were Muslims. And the victims were...