Free Republic

For a very long time now our representatives neither write nor read the legislation they pass into law, nor need they. Proposals of import arrive in their hands fully formed by the real government. Those owed exceptions are excepted and those owed favors are favored, and they call it consensus. Those who express contrary opinion are bribed, threatened, extorted or otherwise neutered, and why not, they represent nobody, which is what The People have become—nobody. Contrary opinion itself is politicized, medicalized or militarized until it's not merely contrary but illegitimate and dangerously so. In short, our actual opinions as we...

Ivy League schools usually cloak their jealousies in politesse, but President Obama’s decision to give the commencement speech at Barnard, and not Columbia, his alma mater across the street, has unleashed online exchanges as nasty as any hair-pulling, eye-gouging schoolyard brawl.

The e-mail from the Obama campaign found the right target: Dave Hunt, lifelong Democrat from Upper Manhattan and owner of an Irish saloon, had contributed to President Obama’s 2008 victory drive. Now, just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, barackobama.com was peddling “O’Bama” T-shirts, playing on the president’s wee trace of Irish blood and his joke on a visit to Ireland last year that he had “come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.” But Mr. Hunt, an owner of Coogan’s in Washington Heights, noted something wrong with the message on the T-shirt itself: below...

Gene Sperling, director of the White House's national economic council, said today at an official meeting that "we need a global minimum tax": “He supports corporate tax reform that would reduce expenditures and loopholes, lower rates for people investing and creating jobs in the U.S., due so further for manufacturing, and that we need to, as we have the Buffett Rule and the individual tax reform, we need a global minimum tax so that people have the assurance that nobody is escaping doing their fair share as part of a race to the bottom or having our tax code actually...

I am a medical sociologist, which means I study the health of whole societies. I've spent more than 20 years studying the best possible ways to address alcohol problems in societies -- what works and what doesn't to protect people from harm. I work as a professor in the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and at the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute. This allows me to connect with other scientists who come from very different backgrounds but who want to work together on big problems -- think of a Manhattan Project, only one focused on protecting...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, has spent about $9.8 million to store $44 million in steel that it bought but did not use to build fence along the U.S,-Mexico border, according to a report from the DHS Inspector General.

Should public school officials have the right to prevent students from wearing pro-American garb on Cinco de Mayo? This question has been at the heart of a California court battle between the Morgan Hill Unified School District and students who were told by a principal and assistant principal that they could not wear American flag t-shirts on the Mexican holiday back in 2010. Following the incident, a lawsuit against the district was launched by the students and their families. This week, the case came to a close, with a federal judge ruling against the students — a blow that is...

Scores of protesters were arrested in Manhattan Saturday as a march against social inequality turned violent.

What started out as a patriotic gesture intended to remember the nearly 3,000 lives lost on September 11, 2001, ended up becoming a major verbal scuffle that one North Arizona University student calls “a free speech violation.” The incident, which has likely evolved into something much larger than either side originally anticipated, occurred when students were passing out American flags on their public university campus last Friday. The Arizona Daily Sun shares more about the commemorative activity:

The banner at the start of the CNBC segment reads “What’s the Deal?” And that’s a question some viewers may have asked by the end of the segment after watching CNBC’s Rick Santelli go very nearly grandma-punching crazy in a segment about spending and the debt ceiling. “I don’t believe in compromise on spending,” Santelli shouted. “There’s no compromise. Stop spending.” And from there it got weirder. Referring to a comment from Warren Buffet about the debt ceiling negotiations referring to the negotiations as a game of Russian roulette, Santelli said “there’s a bullet in the gun. If we keep...

DISCLAIMER: All day I've been deliberating whether to post this piece of food news. It's so gross, I had to stop reading about it midway through, zen out to photos of My Little Ponies and then revisit the article after gathering strength. So friends, if you're feeling mentally tender or if you're currently eating please do not read any further. The above photo at left is a burger made from steak sauce, soy and the burger you ate a few months ago. Put frankly, a doody burger. A Japanese scientist has created a patty made from human feces and he's...

An 11-year-old boy in Orange, MA is in the middle of flag controversy after he and his family claim one of his teachers banned him from hanging a picture of an American flag he drew in the classroom because it might offend other students. The boy‘s dad is adamant his son’s civil rights were violated. But the school has a different take, and says the prohibition was because the boy disobeyed instruction

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns. The 111-to-42 vote followed tougher measures to broadly eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states. But unlike those efforts, the push in Massachusetts was led by Democrats who have traditionally stood with labor to oppose any reduction in workers’ rights.

It may be hard getting a job in today's labor market, but Workforce Central Florida is prepared to give you a cape — a shiny, red cape. At least while supplies last. The region's federally funded jobs agency is spending more than $73,000 on a media campaign to raise awareness of its services.

To encourage healthful eating, Chicago school doesn't allow kids to bring lunches or certain snacks from home — and some parents, and many students, aren't fans of the policy. Fernando Dominguez cut the figure of a young revolutionary leader during a recent lunch period at his elementary school. "Who thinks the lunch is not good enough?" the seventh-grader shouted to his lunch mates in Spanish and English. Dozens of hands flew in the air and fellow students shouted along: "We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!"

"When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When people fear the government, there is tyranny." -Thomas Jefferson It's said the composers of the Constitution intended to constrain the central government by charging it with protecting the rights of the citizen. This was clearly a lapse in judgment, a pratfall actually, the kind requiring many tankards of the previous autumn's cider. Since those wonderful days of yesteryear, generations of our best and brightest have not merely alienated our inalienable rights, they've criminalized most of them. The work has been exacting and exhausting but it's yielded a dark parallel to the...

Last month almost 600 of you commented on our post about Bill Maher’s rant about Americans are like stupid dogs. We’ll apparently he is determined to prove the point. He’s trotted out the line once again. This time with Michael Moore! (video follows)

Last week's elections may have seemed like a repudiation of liberalism, but the San Francisco board of supervisors appeared unfazed. The city's governing body went ahead and fired a bunker buster into the Happy Meal, decreeing that restaurants cannot put free toys in meals that exceed set thresholds for calories, sugar or fat. Libertarians are livid, parents are peeved and even advocates of healthier fast food think the ban will be counterproductive.

Mayor Bloomberg's latest health campaign -- cutting salt intake -- has targeted soup as one of the big sodium offenders to be taken down with new city ads. The ads, which will be plastered on subways for the next two months, feature a half-opened can of soup with a geyser of salt spewing from the top and forming a heap around the can.

A woman lies tied to the ground as a group of men gather round her, repeatedly throwing stones at her. She appears to plead for help but despite her cries, they continue to rain stones down on her until she lies still. Disturbing pictures today released to ABC news purport to show Taliban militants stoning a woman to death in north-west Pakistan.