Free Republic

(CNSNews.com) – Five months after a bipartisan group of lawmakers urged the Obama administration to announce immediately its intention to stay away from a United Nations racism conference to be held in September, the State Department announced Wednesday that it would not attend the event. The plan has stoked controversy both because earlier such events have been marred by anti-Israel rhetoric, and because of the conference’s venue and timing – in New York City, just days after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The decision to avoid “Durban III” came in a letter from State Department official Joseph Macmanus to Sen....

(CNSNews.com) – John Bryson, President Obama’s nominee to head the Commerce Department, told a University of California Berkeley audience in 2010 that a cap and trade system was a good way to hide a carbon tax from the public. Bryson, formerly the CEO of Edison International, said that a carbon tax was the new “third rail” of politics because politicians wouldn’t want to tax energy directly. “I think it’s still unlikely there’ll be a carbon tax bill because I think in the end a very high percentage of the members of Congress think it’s kind of the third rail to...

(CNSNews.com) - Joseph E. diGenova, former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said today it would be a crime for Rep. Anthony Weiner (D.-N.Y.) to file a complaint with the police claiming his Twitter account had been hacked if he knew it had not been hacked. Last Friday, a Tweet that included a lewd photograph was sent from Weiner’s Twitter account to a 21-year-old woman in Seattle, whom the 46-year-old congressman followed on Twitter. Weiner issued a statement saying that his Twitter account had been hacked and that someone had sent the lewd photograph to the woman as a...

(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) mocked his involvement in a Twitter photo scandal on Wednesday, telling a female reporter, “I was perhaps, if you forgive me, a little bit stiff yesterday.” Emily Miller of The Washington Times asked Weiner on Capitol Hill: “Are there pictures out there of you half undressed?” He responded: “You know, this is part of the problem with the way this has progressed and one of the reasons why I was perhaps, if you forgive me, a little bit stiff yesterday.”

(CNSNews.com) - The Department of Health and Human Services says patients should have the right to see who has accessed their electronic health records. On Tuesday, HHS' Office for Civil Rights announced it has proposed changes to the HIPAA privacy rule that would allow people to receive a report on who has seen their protected health information. The proposed regulation, intended to "foster transparency and patient trust, as well as to discourage inappropriate behavior," is now available for public comment.

(CNSNews.com) – A group of radical clerics in Pakistan wants the country’s Supreme Court to declare certain passages in the Bible blasphemous – because they depict as flawed certain biblical characters whom Muslims regard as Islamic prophets. If the court fails to do so, they said, then lawyers will submit an application for the Bible to be formally banned in Pakistan. The campaign, announced by the clerics at a Lahore mosque and reported Tuesday in the Karachi daily The News and the Urdu-language Roznama Islam, is the latest attempt by radicals to use the country’s blasphemy laws to shield Islam...

(CNSNews.com) – John Bryson, President Barack Obama's nominee to be secretary of commerce, said it was “incredibly important” that the United States pass cap and trade legislation and that America needed to be a global leader in combating man-made global warming. “I regard it as incredibly important that the United States comes forth in this year with federal climate change legislation as a foundation for moving ahead,” Bryson told the U.N. International Energy Conference in late August 2009. “I think we in the U.S. have an obligation to assist in significant ways in providing leadership in this community of nations...

(CNSNews.com) – The latest election of countries onto the U.N. Human Rights Council has prompted questions about the number of free democracies on the body – again a minority this year – and whether the situation is improving. Using rankings calculated by Freedom House – based on annual scores for political freedoms and civil liberties – of the 47 countries that will serve on the Geneva-based HRC following an election in New York last Friday, 21 are “free,” 12 are “not free” and 14 are “partly free.” The seats on the council are divided up into the five regional groups...

(CNSNews.com) – The special election victory Democrats scored in New York’s District 26 on Tuesday is not the repudiation of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) Medicare reform plan that top Democrats are claiming it is. Kathy Hochul, the Democratic victor, only garnered 47 percent of the vote. “Kathy Hochul’s victory tonight is a tribute to Democrats’ commitment to preserve and strengthen Medicare, create jobs, and grow our economy. And it sends a clear message that will echo nationwide: Republicans will be held accountable for their vote to end Medicare,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement on Tuesday....

(CNSNews.com) - Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, a former U.S. senator who as a crew member of Apollo 17 was the last human being to step foot on the moon, says that the U.S. government should phase out NASA and create a new agency focused on exploring deep space and establishing American settlements on the moon and ultimately Mars. “I think it is time to start over,” Schmitt told CNSNews.com while discussing the U.S. space program in an “Online With Terry Jeffrey” interview. It was 50 years ago yesterday that President John F. Kennedy spoke to a joint session of Congress and...

(CNSNews.com) – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he was not willing to change Medicare despite the fact that the program has an estimated $24.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities--the amount of money the government is obligated to pay, above what it gets in tax revenue, to honor future benefits under the Medicare program. At Reid’s weekly press conference on Tuesday, CNSNews.com asked the senator, “According to the Medicare trustees, Medicare’s got $24.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities – how many of those trillions in unfunded liabilities are you willing to cut to bring the program into solvency?

(CNSNews.com) -- Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was adamant in telling CNSNews.com on Wednesday that the Obama administration does not favor tracking and taxing Americans for every mile they drive--a so-called Vehicular Miles Traveled (VMT) tax. LaHood had personally suggested that the administration look at a VMT early in his tenure at the Transportation Department and it had recently been reported that the administration was considering such a tax. In a Feb. 20, 2009 interview with the Associated Press LaHood said, "We should look at the vehicular miles program where people are actually clocked on the number of miles that they...

(CNSNews.com) – Republican presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty says he wants to trim the size of the federal workforce and bring pay and benefits of public employees in line with the private sector. But when asked Wednesday whether that would include eliminating any federal agencies, Pawlenty did not name any and would only say that he would scrap Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two formerly federally-sponsored financial services institutions that were made independent of the federal government in 2008. He made the remarks at the Cato Institute, as part of his “It’s Time to Tell the Truth Tour.” “When I was...

(CNSNews.com) – In an early test of state immigration reform laws, the Supreme Court ruled on the side of enforcement regarding an Arizona immigration law that allows penalties up to revocation of business licenses for employers that knowingly hire illegal aliens. The Arizona law in question in this case required employers to use E-Verify, an electronic federal system that is currently voluntary that allows employers to determine the legal status of job applicants and employees. The court ruled 5-3, with Justice Elena Kagan not participating, to reject the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s argument that the Arizona law pre-empted federal control...

(CNSNews.com) – Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told CNSNews.com on Wednesday that the administration's new $500 million early learning initiative is designed to deal with children from birth onward to prevent such problems as 5-year olds who "can't sit still" in a kindergarten classroom. “You really need to look at the range of issues, because if a 5-year-old can’t sit still, it is unlikely that they can do well in a kindergarten class, and it has to be the whole range of issues that go into healthy child development,” Sebelius said during a telephone news conference on Wednesday...

(CNSNews.com) - A Democrat won Tuesday's special congressional election in New York's 26th District, and her party sees it as evidence that voters are rejecting Republican calls to reform Medicare. But a free-market advocate says the Democrat won because of the Republican candidate's shortcomings. In a statement congratulating Democrat Kathy Hochul on her victory, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz noted that Hochul won in a "solidly Republican district," despite being outspent by a 2-to-1 margin: "Tonight’s election result is not just a victory for Congresswoman-Elect Kathy Hochul, it’s a victory for the residents of Western New York and...

(CNSNews.com) - As recently as last month, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was pushing for a clean debt ceiling measure. “You don’t have to have a lot of things attached to raising the debt ceiling. You can do that separately,” he told reporters at an April 14th press conference. Now a House GOP plan to hold a vote on a clean extension of the debt ceiling is coming under fire by Reid. It will send "a terrible message to the international community," Reid said Tuesday.