Free Republic

President Joe Biden urged Americans during his address to Congress Thursday not to fear government intervention in their lives, reminding them his administration is “We the people.” “It’s time we remembered that ‘We the people’ are the government. You and I,” Biden said, “not some force in a distant capital, not some powerful force that we have no control over. It’s us. It’s ‘We the people.

When President Joe Biden recently announced a $2.3 trillion spending plan, on the heels of the nearly $2 trillion bailout bill enacted in March, some Democrats in Washington complained. Their complaints: The price tag was not big enough, and the Washington power grab was not ambitious enough.... ...Less than 6% of Biden’s $2.3 trillion plan goes toward roads and bridges. Less than 2% goes to upgrade and repair America’s waterways, lakes, dams, ports, and airports. And while the Biden administration likes to cite expanding broadband as a priority, an idea that has bipartisan support, the administration devotes less than 5%...

One government agency has decided that the results of employee ratings are too discriminatory, and eliminated the process entirely. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced on Monday that it will now award all employees the highest rating regardless of performance reviews. The CFPB, which oversees transactions in the financial sector for the federal government, decided to no longer conduct employee reviews because there were just too many apparent “significant disparities” between the races, ages, and locations of its employees. According to American Banker, this new policy is set to cost over $5 million dollars, as it will now pay employees...

All three can be good or bad depending on how much, how and for what used. That a little bit might be good does not mean that a lot more will be better.RadiationMany years ago, in the mid to late 1940's and early 1950's when I was a young boy, shoe stores had X-ray machines permitting one to view images of the bones in one's feet. Health hazards were recognized but generally ignored. Although most of the dose was directed at the feet, a substantial amount would scatter or leak in all directions. Shielding materials were sometimes displaced to improve image quality, to make the machine...

I'm no good at Mounted Shooting, but Todd (aka Captain America) didn't miss a target all day. Dangit. Ben Franklin wrote: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” The government needs to stay out of our garage, refrigerator, church, gun safe, bookshelf, etc. America, are you willing to give up freedom for more government control? Take a look at this article linked at the top of Drudge. Government is out of control and too many citizens are sheepishly and sleepily okay with it all. This is not what...

One of the many problems with ObamaCare is discovering that a self-bought policy is government run. What is the problem with a government policy? Well...it's government run. They get you coming and going. There's a pretend choice that is no choice, and even that non-choice is eventually forced out of business so that all is subsumed under the reality of a bureaucrat deciding if you get a heart bypass or a quick sendoff to the great beyond. Fake choices abound when dealing with politicians. That's why one simply must wonder about the Gingrich/Santorum splitting of the conservative vote. Who benefits?...

Newt Gingrich promised ahead of the Republican presidential debate in Arizona on Wednesday night that voters will witness the return of “big solutions” Gingrich and that he plans to leave the negativity backstage. “I think you’re going to see the person I’ve been in 15 out of 17 debates, which is focus on the big solutions, talk with the American people and try to stay out of the kind of negativity that unfortunately has characterized way too much of this race,” Gingrich said on Fox News when asked what kind of candidate people can expect to see at the Mesa,...

Rick Santorum's taken a large lead in Michigan's upcoming Republican primary. He's at 39% to 24% for Mitt Romney, 12% for Ron Paul, and 11% for Newt Gingrich. Santorum's rise is attributable to two major factors: his own personal popularity (a stellar 67/23 favorability) and GOP voters increasingly souring on Gingrich. Santorum's becoming something closer and closer to a consensus conservative candidate as Gingrich bleeds support. Santorum's winning an outright majority of the Tea Party vote with 53% to 22% for Romney and 10% for Gingrich. He comes close to one with Evangelicals as well at 48% to 20% for...

COMPLETE TITLE No Guts, No Glory DeMint: Why 'cooperate and compromise' when 'the other team ... are there to beat you' ### South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint is just saying “no” to compromise with liberals. “I can guarantee you the [Super Bowl] coaches are not telling their players to go out on the field and cooperate and compromise with the other team,” DeMint said at The Heritage Foundation’s Blogger’s Briefing Tuesday, during a discussion about his new book “Now or Never.” “There is a reason for that, the other team has an opposite goal, they are there to beat...

I’m rather tired of all the people who don’t like Romney trying to claim Rick Santorum is not a big government conservative, or not a pro-life statist. I would support him before I would support Romney too, but I have no intention of giving up ideological and intellectual consistency in the name of beating Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum is a pro-life statist. He is. You will have to deal with it. He is a big government conservative. Santorum is right on social issues, but has never let his love of social issues stand in the way of the creeping expansion...

Results from Democratic firm Public Policy Polling poll of likely GOP caucus goers: Newt Gingrich (22 percent), Ron Paul (21 percent), Mitt Romney (16 percent), Michele Bachmann (11 percent), Rick Perry (9 percent), Rick Santorum (8 percent), Jon Huntsman (5 percent), and Gary Johnson (1 percent). The poll’s margin of error is 4.2 percentage points. Down in the weeds, PPP notices a couple of factors that might be contributing to these numbers: He’s [Gingrich] also seen a significant decline in his favorability numbers. Last week he was at +31 (62/31) and he’s now dropped 19 points to +12 (52/40). The...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich‘s hobby, he says, is studying “dinosaurs and other fossils.” He openly mourned the death of Knut the polar bear.Gingrich believes it is a “false dichotomy” to group policies according to whether they deal with the country’s economic problems or protect the environment. Instead, he thinks government can incentivize the production of new energy technologies, which would consequently help the environment and the economy by making the country less dependent on foreign oil. And he is not short on ideas of how to do it. “One generation’s science fiction is the next generation’s practical reality,” wrote...

Gallup finds that 82 percent of Tea Party affiliated voters deem Newt Gingrich an acceptable Republican presidential nominee in 2012. They don't seem to realize that if he wins the nod their movement is doomed, regardless of how the general election goes. The Tea Party cannot support Gingrich without betraying its core principles. But the movement also cannot disclaim him once he is the Republican nominee. Tea Partiers with a better instinct for self-preservation would see that none of the Mitt Romney alternatives still running would be as corrosive to their cause as the former Speaker of the House. Why?...

Republican presidential candidate and Texas Rep. Ron Paul told reporters in a New Hampshire grocery store Thursday that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is being a “free ride” by sex-obsessed journalists. Paul explained that a pointed attack ad released by his campaign Wednesday was necessary because the media’s coverage of the GOP horse race “is way out of whack.” “I think that he’s getting a free ride,” Paul said, according to Boston NPR station WBUR. “And I’ve worked with him for a long time. And I think the points I made on the various issues, he’s a flip-flopper, so he...

A new study shows that a majority of Americans believe God is the guiding force that is leading America's economy and the government is too big. As a result, sociologists concluded these believers are upset about U.S. economic policy because they believe increased government regulation and interference in personal freedoms go against God's plans. According to the Baylor Religion survey data released Tuesday, a majority of Americans (73.1 percent) agreed or “strongly” agreed with the statement “God has a plan for me.” Of those who believe God has a plan, more than 96 percent said that government was doing too...

A group of Senators questioned the general attorney for the National Security Agency Tuesday about whether U.S. intelligence agencies are using cell phone geo location data to track U.S. citizens without their knowledge. According to The Wall Street Journal, the leader of the National Counterterrorism Center Matthew Olson told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that: "There are certain circumstances where that authority may exist."

And, no, the term “child dinner” does not mean that moppets are on the menu. They are handed one, though, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Education. Via Julie Gunlock at NRO’s The Corner blog, we learn that the Obama administration is expanding its child-dinner program from 13 states to all 50 (or, if Obama gets his way, all 57 … or is it 58?). Anyway, Gunlock has the details: ... This bit of government expansion, by the way, is courtesy of the lame-duck session of Congress. ... And what’s next for the (nearly literal) nanny state after this? AmeriCorps...

Want to know the real reason Washington and Beacon Hill are so afraid of the Tea Party movement? Follow the money. If you live in Salem, follow it to one of the 45 city employees earning $100,000 a year or more - up from 34 just two years ago. The median household income in Salem is less than $60,000. At the state level, follow it to the MBTA worker at “The Ride” - a door-to-door ride service with the noble goal of helping handicapped folks get around. But as the Boston Globe-Democrat reports, spending in just 10 years has gone...

Sen. John McCain on Monday rejected a "big government" takeover of the health care system, saying he wants to empower families to make more medical decisions. "I've made it very clear that what I want is for families to make decisions about their health care, not government, and that's the fundamental difference between myself and Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton," McCain told reporters in Miami, Florida, referring to the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. "They want the government to make the decisions, I want the families to make decisions," he said. During a speech...

What approach do you favor to lower the deficit and balance the budget? Decrease Spending Increase Taxes Both