Free Republic

<p>Wal-Mart’s wages are so low that many of its workers must rely on food stamps and other government aid programs, costing taxpayers as much as $900,0000 at just one Wal-Mart Supercenter in Wisconsin.</p> <p>So how did the report’s authors come up with the $900,000 figure? First, they took into account the number of Wal-Mart stores and employees across Wisconsin and the per-person costs of Badgercare, the state’s health care program, estimating that the cost of the publicly funded health care comes to $251,706 per year for a Supercenter that employees 300 workers.</p>

Another Obama success story… When George Bush left office the War in Iraq was won. Today the flag of Al-Qaeda flies over Fallujah. It only took five years for Obama to lose all US gains in Iraq.(video at link)The Washington Post reported: A rejuvenated al-Qaeda-affiliated force asserted control over the western Iraqi city of Fallujah on Friday, raising its flag over government buildings and declaring an Islamic state in one of the most crucial areas that U.S. troops fought to pacify before withdrawing from Iraq two years ago.The capture of Fallujah came amid an explosion of violence across the western...

This week the Senate voted across party lines to pass a bill that would reduce the cost of living adjustment (COLA) for military retirees including disabled retirees and survivors. The Washington Free Beacon reported that a provision in the Ryan-Murray budget agreement no longer exempts disabled retirees. The original agreement stated that “This would not affect service members who retired because of disability or injury.” After the bill passed the House, the new summary removed the exemption granted to disabled retirees and survivors. It would be too easy to accuse just one party of this chicanery for remember, this was...

In a new fundraising email, the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF) said House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is targeting conservatives in the same way that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status. "What these leaders are doing to conservatives is no different from what the IRS got caught doing to them this summer," Senate Conservatives Fund executive director Matt Hoskins wrote in the email sent to supporters on Monday. "They're using their power to discriminate against people they see as a political threat." The fundraising email on Monday follows Boehner strongly criticizing conservative outside groups for urging lawmakers...

In a secret meeting on Tuesday morning, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) hosted a bipartisan group of senators and House members in the Capitol’s basement. According to several participants, the lawmakers plotted ways to stop the use of U.S. military force in Syria. Since the diplomatic situation is fluid, there was no final consensus on how best to combat the administration, but potential legislative maneuvers, press appearances, and letters were discussed. Several undecided members asked questions. Aides say Paul planned the gathering over a week ago, and the list of attendees grew by the day. He is pleased, especially, by...

President Obama will meet with several LGBT groups during his trip later this week to St. Petersburg, a move likely to ruffle Russian President Vladimir Putin after the recent passage of a series of anti-gay laws. The president will meet with human rights activists Lev Ponomarev and Lyudmila Alexeyeva, legal aid NGO director Pavel Chikov, and Coming Out, a St. Petersburg-based LGBT organization, according to a report in BuzzFeed. The decision to meet with the activists in not unprecedented — Obama also met with human rights leaders in 2009 — but comes amid a period of heightened tension with the...

Tea Party activists are planning a rally outside Speaker John Boehner’s (R) Ohio office on Tuesday, vowing they will rebrand President Obama’s healthcare reform law “BoehnerCare" if he does not get behind a conservative effort to defund the legislation. “If he funds it, he will own it,” said Janet Porter, president of Faith2Action, one of the groups scheduled to participate in the rally, according to The Washington Times. Boehner, along with congressional GOP leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), has yet to voice support for the effort. A group of right-wing lawmakers vowed before the August recess to...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie conflated statistics when he claimed Sen. Rand Paul’s “pork-barrel spending” is the reason Kentucky receives more federal funds than New Jersey for every tax dollar it sends to Washington. The figures cited by Christie are affected very little by pork-barrel spending.Moreover, Senate Republicans have imposed a voluntary ban on earmarks — otherwise known as pork-barrel spending — since the Kentucky senator took office in 2011. So Paul hasn’t brought any of the traditional pork-barrel spending to Kentucky.Paul also added some confusion to the issue when he seemed to suggest that Kentucky’s ratio was the...

EACH of us took turns over the past 43 years running the Environmental Protection Agency. We served Republican presidents, but we have a message that transcends political affiliation: the United States must move now on substantive steps to curb climate change, at home and internationally. There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected. The costs of inaction are undeniable....

Unfortunately, the fall of Rome is a pattern repeated by empires throughout history ... including ours? A group of libertarians gathered in Las Vegas recently for an event called "FreedomFest." We debated whether America will soon fall, as Rome did. Historian Carl Richard said that today's America resembles Rome. The Roman Republic had a constitution, but Roman leaders often ignored it. "Marius was elected consul six years in a row, even though under the constitution (he) was term-limited to one year." Sounds like New York City's Mayor Bloomberg. "We have presidents of both parties legislating by executive order, saying I'm...

If Republicans don’t quash the libertarian streak shown recently by some of their members they risk following the destructive lead of Democrats in the 1960s, says GOP Rep. Peter King of New York. “When you have Rand Paul actually comparing [NSA leaker Edward] Snowden to Martin Luther King or Henry David Thoreau, this is madness,” King said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “This is the anti-war left-wing Democrats of the 1960s that nominated George McGovern and destroyed their party for almost 20 years. I don’t want that happening to our party.” …

Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes and Republican Matt Bevin may become unlikely allies in trying to tear down Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in the marquee Senate race of the upcoming cycle. Both are signaling plans to frame McConnell with similar themes, targeting his personality and "scorched earth" campaign style as much as his policy positions. The strategy reflects what his opponents believe to be his greatest vulnerability — McConnell's deep unpopularity among Kentucky voters of both parties. But it's also a strategy informed by the challenges Grimes and Bevin face in trying to defeat what many observers agree...

ASPEN, Colo. — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Thursday offered a clear broadside against Republicans drifting toward a more libertarian view of foreign policy, lumping Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in with them and suggesting they explain their position to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The House earlier this week narrowly voted against a reduction in funding for the National Security Agency, as libertarian-leaning members from both sides joined together to vote for the amendment. “As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on

Sen. Lindsey Graham told a "cheering" audience Tuesday that if the relationship between the U.S. and Iran doesn't improve by the end of summer, he will ask Congress to authorize going to war."If nothing changes in Iran, come September, October, I will present a resolution that will authorize the use of military force to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb," the South Carolina Republican said, according to a post on CQ Roll Call, at a conference for members of Christians United for Israel today. "The only way to convince Iran to halt their nuclear program is to make it...

People aren’t bailing out of the Republican Party to go over to the dark side. They are leaving because thanks to the ongoing infestation of the party by liberal statists, they don’t see a fundamental difference between the GOP and the Democrats. The Lesser Evil argument that has persuaded some of us to vote for the likes of John McCain is no longer cutting it: A new study by the Frontier Lab, a conservative market research group, found that Republican voters who leave the party do so because they are tired of being told to vote Republican as the “lesser...

Henry Kissinger: Balkanized Syria Best Possible Outcome Jurriaan MaessenExplosiveReports.Com June 24, 2013Former secretary of state eyes breaking up of current-day Syria into “more or less autonomous regions”In a very recent presentation at the Ford School, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger commented on the current Syrian situation, expressing his preference for a broken-up and balkanized Syria to emerge out of the current Assad-controlled unity (from 19 minutes and 30 seconds onward):“There are three possible outcomes. An Assad victory. A Sunni victory. Or an outcome in which the various nationalities agree to co-exist together but in more or less autonomous regions, so...

As we noted on Friday, even though Schumer completely repackaged the amnesty bill with only 3 days to comb through 1190 pages, the fix is in. Every Democrat is prepared to vote for this bill, and at least 10-12 Republicans couldnÂ’t care less about their constituents. They have the votes. They donÂ’t care about the American people. Amazingly, there is a supermajority of Senators who are more in tune with the whims of foreign lobbies than with the security needs of the American people. I have no plans to reread this entire bill in order to ascertain all the changes...

Two Republicans came to Washington as United States Senators. Both were immediately haled as being the future of the Party. Both were young, charismatic and claimed they were devoted to the conservative cause. Both have been talked about as potential Presidential candidates. The problem is, only one of them is a conservative. One is Ted Cruz and the other is Marco Rubio. Ted Cruz burst on to the scene last year in Texas, defeating a RINO Establishment candidate. He has quickly become a superstar. He has stood steadfastly against Amnesty. Yesterday, after the Supreme Court ruled that states could not...

How can we tell that the conclave made a good decision in elevating Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the papacy? Exhibit A (through at least D): liberals are annoyed. But leftists' problems with Pope Francis, well-emblazoned as they were within hours of the announcement, reveal some crucial truths about the Church that even many Catholics are loath to confront. When it came to Benedict XVI, the willfully uninformed chattering class had a field day -- rather, a field eight years -- with the thoroughly discredited "Nazi pope" meme. (We might call noted luminary and theologian Susan Sarandon the "Nazi ambassadrix" in...

Last week, Conservative pundit Ann Coulter told me and a thousand young libertarians that we libertarians are puss- -- well, she used slang for a female body part. We were in Washington, D.C., at the Students for Liberty conference, taping my TV show, and she didn't like my questions about her opposition to gay marriage and drug legalization. "We're living in a country that is 70 percent socialist," she says. "The government takes 60 percent of your money. They take care of your health care, your pensions ... who you can hire ... and you (libertarians) want to suck up...