Free Republic

There are things you expect to see at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and there are things you don't. One of the things you probably don't is an audience cheering and applauding arguments for legalizing pot and bemoaning the war on drugs. A panel titled "Rocky Mountain High" held Thursday afternoon started out as a debate between Mary Katherine Ham of Fox and Hot Air and Christopher Beach a staffer for former Drug Czar William Bennett's radio show. But as the debate wore on it became clear the real disagreement was between Beach and the overwhelming majority of the...

[1]Last week, there was one of those mommy-and-daddy-are-fighting moments on Fox News as two powerhouse conservatives debated one of the most important issues facing the right. In one corner, was the dagger-sharp and stunningly beautiful and did I mention beautiful Ann Coulter. In the other corner, was the valiant, good-hearted and, you know, perfectly presentable in his own way Sean Hannity. No one can doubt either the patriotism or the fearlessness of these two. You may sometimes disagree with one or the other, that’s fine, but it seems undeniable that both have the good of the country first and...

<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>

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...

We now know who Robert Sarvis is and certainly not a genuine libertarian and more like a LINO (libertarian-in-name-only). Like with the Republican Party, the Libertarian Party over the past couple election cycles has put up candidates with no real principle (Gary Johnson and Bob Barr). Robert Sarvis is no exception to the rule. For one thing when it comes to fiscal issues while he sounds conservative he really isn’t. He doesn’t support tax cuts (actually supports new taxes on roads), he doesn’t oppose medicaid expansion and isn’t part of the Austrian Economics crowd. Rather calls himself “pro-business” and not...

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...

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...

Republican rivals Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky are escalating their feud over national security policy and liberty. In comments at a forum of Republican governors in Aspen, Col. Thursday, Mr. Christie said the libertarian strain championed by Mr. Paul currently coursing through the veins of political parties — as evidenced by broad, although ultimately unsuccessful, lobbying in the House of Representatives against NSA surveillance programs this week — is dangerous. “This strain of libertarianism that’s going through parties right now and making big headlines I think is a very dangerous thought,” Mr. Christie...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Thursday took a big swing at libertarian-leaning lawmakers in both parties, calling the ideology, when applied to national security, “a very dangerous thought.” His comments come just one day after the House narrowly rejected a sweeping amendment to defund the National Security Agency’s surveillance program. Addressing the bipartisan coalition that joined together to nearly push the so-called Amash amendment through, Christie told lawmakers who harbor libertarian views on the issue to explain their position to the victims of 9/11, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake reports. He also included Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in...

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...

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...

Literally "Evangelical church Day". The Lutherans have theirs as do the Catholics. Germany having been an ecclesial bother for quite a while, with the "we are church" segment among older people, the Lutherans nonetheless manage to outdumb them. Here photos from an "erotic service" in the "Carthusian church" (guessing it no longer belongs to Carthusians). People got to massage each other. One hopes Catholics will stick to the hand-holding. Admittedly, the man who unfortunately is archbishop of Los Angeles, might like this, he likes to have dancing and prancing going on around him after all. After the dancer you...

PRIME Minister John Howard was forced to back down in his attempt to bring in tough new immigration laws today after one of his own senators refused to support him. The Government announced this afternoon that it was withdrawing the Bill from Parliament. "It was made very clear to me this morning that a government senator would cross the floor and vote against the legislation," Mr Howard said. "The intention of that government senator was communicated directly to me in a one-on-one discussion that we had." Mr Howard said another government senator had proposed an amendment to the legislation that...