Free Republic

The constitutional issues involving President Barack Obama's executive orders on amnesty far transcend the issue of illegal immigration. The president’s action strikes at the very heart of our separation of powers. The Constitution reserves to Congress alone the power to enact and alter law, and charges the president with the responsibility to faithfully execute those laws. If the president can seize legislative power in this manner and then boast to an audience that he himself has changed the law, then the separation of powers becomes meaningless, and our constitutional Republic will have crossed a very bright line that separates a...

The ever-growing list of Bill Cosby accusers has just grown by one, with model Beverly Johnson telling Vanity Fair that Cosby drugged her in the mid-'80s. According to Johnson, the incident occurred during an audition for “The Cosby Show.”

Kurds in northern Iraq are holding hundreds of ISIS fighters prisoner, including one who told FoxNews.com in an exclusive interview that he killed as many as 70 people in the service of the radical jihadist army. “Omar, “ a 25-year-old former Islamic State fighter from the Iraqi village of Dor sal-hadeen, said he killed scores of his countrymen and foreign contractors after joining “Daesh,” as ISIS is known in the region, in June. He said he fled the terrorist army in October, but was quickly captured by Kurdish security forces. “They came to our area and forced me to protect...

The cromnibus had an unlikely savior Thursday afternoon in the form of a lame-duck lawmaker who used to raise reindeer. Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.), who lost his primary earlier this year, was originally among the conservative Republicans who voted against the rule. Without the help of Democrats, Republicans could only lose 17 of their own to pass the rule, which sets up floor debate for the underlying "cromnibus" spending bill. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) intervened once there were 18 Republican defectors — and not a single Democrat voting "yes." Many Democrats will vote against the government spending measure because they...

Jonathan Gruber felt little constraint in making the various statements that have been trumpeted by conservative media because most of what he said was completely unremarkable in health policy circles. Here are some of the health care truths that few people want to hear. Employer Benefits Are Not a Gift from Benevolent Bosses Every penny spent on your benefits is a penny taken out of your wages. The richer the benefits, the less money you take home every week. Companies think in terms of total compensation. A good accountant might be worth $78,000 a year to a company. The company...

No. Look this way. Not that way.You have to ask: If it's such a serious issue for the Bush Administration to have "tortured" detained terrorists back when we still had a president who cared about fighting terror, why did Senate Democrats wait seven years to release their report on this purported atrocity?The answer is simple: Politics. On the one hand, they're running out of time as the Senate majority. But more importantly, there are serious issues that demand the attention of the public, and it's not in Democrats' interests to have the public pay attention to these things. That's why,...

  Human Rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali fled the Netherlands after years of threats from Muslim extremists. Hirsi Ali dared to speak out against radical Islam and the horrific treatment of women in the Muslim world. In 2006 Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to America.Ayaan Hirsi Ali by Malene LauritsenAyaan Hirsi Ali is the author of The Caged Virgin: Holland’s shameful treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.Ayann Hirsi Ali told a reporter recently that Joe Biden tried to lecture her on Islam.The Truth Revolt reported: In a recent interview with the Washington Examiner, human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali discussed the...

David Hooks was shot in the back and head as he was lying face down on the floor during a drug raid by Laurens County deputies. That's according to the lawyer representing his family. It's been nearly four months since David Hooks was shot to death during a drug raid at his East Dublin home. 13WMAZ's Paula Rotondo spoke to his wife, Teresa Hooks and the family's lawyer, Mitchell Shook. Hooks died Sept. 24 while deputies served a search warrant at his home. They were looking for drugs, but didn't find any.

It's a holiday miracle: give the worst creditors access to cheap money for longer-and-longer terms and hey presto, 'expensive' stuff is available to everyone. Retail sales modestly beat expectations in November (+0.7% vs +0.6% expectations) despite the NRF previously reporting the worst extended Thanksgiving shopping weekend since Lehman which surely got lost in the Arima-X-12 seasonal adjustments - sending USDJPY spiking to confirm what great news this is. What was the great news? A 0.1% beat of the key ex-autos and gas category, which increased 0.6% in November, vs Expectations of 0.5%, and a decline from the upward revised 0.7%...

A Republican has joined Democrats in criticizing the inclusion of a partial repeal of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law in legislation funding the government. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) signed on to a letter with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) that calls on congressional leaders to scrap portions of the $1.1 trillion "cromnibus" that relax restrictions on banks trading financial derivatives. The pair argued in the letter that there is "broad bipartisan support" for removing that particular language. Brown and Vitter, who have worked together in the past on bills to limit big banks, argued that the language was unfairly jammed into...

When you need advice on a subject, you go to an expert. Gov. Andrew Cuomo did just that when he had a policy meeting on the subject of how cops enforce the laws with hip-hop mogul Jay Z — who earned most of his expertise in crime as a crack dealer. The governor’s spokeswoman, Melissa DeRosa, on Wednesday described their confab in Cuomo’s Midtown office as “productive.’’ The two discussed “a top-to-bottom review of the criminal justice system and how we can all work together to pass a reform package,” she said. The rapper built his musical career on songs...

Given President Obama’s increasingly dictatorial rule, it’s a good time to dust off some thoughts on despotism by America’s “forgotten Founder,” Thomas Paine. Best known for writing the revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, Mr. Paine was instrumental in galvanizing support for the American Revolution. Many of his writings are commonly quoted, even while the source fades to misty memory. A just-reissued edition by the American Civil Rights Union of the late constitutional attorney John Armor’s book These Are the Times That Try Men’s Souls: America – Then and Now in the Words of Tom Paine, with a new forward by former...

The Department of Treasury is seeking to order survival kits for all of its employees who oversee the federal banking system, according to a new solicitation. The emergency supplies would be for every employee at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which conducts on-site reviews of banks throughout the country. The survival kit includes everything from water purification tablets to solar blankets. The government is willing to spend up to $200,000 on the kits, according to the solicitation released on Dec. 4. The survival kits must come in a fanny-pack or backpack that can fit all of...

Obama does not want Americans to be free -- to think for ourselves, to have our First and Second Amendment and other constitutional rights or to reject any aspect of His radical transformation of our country and others into nations of which He, in His twisted way, can be proud. Part II of this multipart series deals with Obama's foreign policy. Series IntroductionIn an article posted on January 12, 2014 titled Might President Obama morph into an el Presidente Chávez? I offered parallels and dissimilarities suggesting that it had already started. That's no chip on my shoulder Where's MY parrot? When el Presidente Chávez took office in 1999, he began...

In a Dec. 5 op-ed, the president of California State University (CSU) claimed if you are “light skinned” you have “significant unearned privilege” and routinely think less of those who are different than yourself. In her piece, “Privilege at The Beach,”—referencing the Long Beach area where the school resides—Jane Close Conoley, a white woman herself, asserts that “light skin color and high income levels may attract significant unearned privilege.” Those who qualify for such privilege, often unknowingly exert distrust and “lower expectations of behavior” on those of another skin color. “Those who are less affluent with darker skin or from...

WASHINGTON — The 113th Congress — one of the least productive on record — found itself scrambling Thursday to pass a $1 trillion spending bill amid last-minute brinkmanship and bickering that has come to mark one of the capital’s most polarized eras. A vote on the House legislation could take place as early as Thursday afternoon. But while Republican leaders predicted passage, frustrations emerged over policy additions to the 1,600-page bill, with House Democrats objecting to a provision that rolls back an aspect of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which regulates Wall Street, and another party fund-raising provision that would give...

KASIE HUNT, MSNBC: And are you smart enough to be president of the United States?"

A city ordinance in Fayetteville, Ark, dubbed the transgender bathroom bill because it allows biological males who claim they are females to use restroom facilities for women, was overturned on Tuesday, Dec. 9, largely because of the intense lobbying efforts of Michelle Duggar, the matriarch of the reality-TV show 19 Kids & Counting, carried by The Learning Channel.In Tuesday’s special election the rule, also called the Civil Rights Ordinance, was defeated: 7,523 votes to 7,040 votes, a 52% to 48% victory. In criticizing the ordinance, Mrs. Duggar had said that it affected “the safety of Northwest Arkansas women and children”...

While there are plenty of reasons to dislike the World Bank, United Nations, and (especially) the International Monetary Fund, the worst international bureaucracy on a per-dollar spent basis has to be the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.The OECD used to be relatively benign by the standards of international bureaucracies, but it has veered sharply to the left in recent years and some of the bureaucracy’s “research” now is more akin to talking points from the Obama White House.And it getting worse. I wasn’t even aware that the OECD had a Directorate for Employment, Labour, and Social Affairs, but the bureaucrats...

Natasha Bertrand December 11, 2014PG&E is reporting that 155,000 customers are without power in San Francisco after a massive storm hit Northern California early Thursday morning and fried a Civic Center substation. Officials are preparing for the possibility of debris slides and tidal waves as a result of the storm. As much as 8 inches of rain could fall over 24 hours, and up to 2 feet of snow is expected to blanket Sierra Nevada ski resorts. Heavy rain is long overdue in California, which has been suffering from one of its most severe droughts on record. The storm, which...