Free Republic

The time is now to make a change. Regardless of their career, women have had it with being diminished, condescended to, passed over, and belittled. They have had it with inappropriate touching, leering words, innuendos, and emotional or verbal abuse. Regardless if it’s the entertainment world, a school, a doctor’s office, a bank, or Capitol Hill, women have a right to expect behavioral decency in the workplace. Throughout my career, whether in the private or public sector, I have sought to encourage women in the workplace. An acceptance of seediness and vulgarity has seeped into our culture, and now it...

Republicans fulfilled a popular campaign pledge Wednesday when, by a 240-181 vote, the House passed a bill repealing the Affordable Care Act and defunding Planned Parenthood. The bill, already passed by the Senate, now goes to the desk of President Barack Obama, where it surely will be vetoed. Just when, I have to ask, did my Grand Old Party's idea of victory become passing bills that won't become law? What's so glorious about fecklessness? The GOP House put an awful lot of work -- it has voted to repeal Obamacare 62 times -- into passing something that cannot become law...

How did our politicians get so stupid? When I say our politicians are stupid, I’m not talking about ideological differences, I’m talking about stupid in a turkey-is-drowning-while-it-looks-up-in-a-rainstorm kind of dumb. Of course, that’s a myth. Turkeys don’t actually drown themselves to death that way – but, can we say the same for Joe Biden, Barack Obama and John McCain? I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to the staffers who carry their umbrellas and remind them to look down during rainstorms. Now at first glance, saying that our politicians are stupid doesn’t seem to hold any water. After...

WASHINGTON -- The new Republican Congress is just getting started, and the American people are waiting to see how lawmakers deal with the issues they care about most. Anyone who's followed the polls over the course of the Obama administration knows that the economy and jobs have been among our strongest concerns. The Gallup Poll reinforces this in its latest survey, asking people what they think are the biggest problems facing our country. "Economic problems" was, not surprisingly, their top concern -- mentioned by nearly 40 percent, followed by unemployment/jobs generally, the budget deficits and the federal debt, in that...

Mid-January is the time to ask the annual question: Are we ready for a big, noisy, overhyped prime-time production that has outgrown its simple origins and usually leaves us feeling both gorged and disappointed? If not, you may want to skip the State of the Union address and prepare for something humbler, like the Super Bowl. President Barack Obama has been doing his best to make a low-news event a no-news event, by traveling the country unveiling the sort of programs presidents normally use the speech to unveil: free community college, paid job leaves, universal broadband access and more. By...

Deluged with catastrophes, court challenges and criticism, Obamacare (ACA) has had a controversial life to date. Yet it is ready to enter a completely new phase where the implementation gets shifted to the Internal Revenue Service – America’s favorite three words. If you liked the health care plan up to now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. 2010 was actually the first year that the IRS was involved in Obamacare enforcement. The Small Business Health Care Tax Credit went into effect with this filing year. You may remember I wrote that there was mass resistance to this credit by the tax-preparer...

“There's no arguing that who the Republicans decide to elevate into a leadership position says a lot about what the conference's priorities and values are.” (Obama White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest referring to the recent Steve Scalise/David Duke flap.)“...when House Republicans stand by him (Steve Scalise) years later, and GOP White House hopefuls defend or refuse to speak out, they legitimize his actions.” (Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the same issue.) First off, the evidence that twelve years ago current House Republican Whip Steve Scalise addressed a “white supremacist group” titled “European-American Unity and Rights...

Evidence mounts that President Obama is reacting with greater defiance and lawlessness despite Americans' repudiation of his agenda in the November elections, and the word is that Republican leaders in Congress are relaxing their resistance. Isn't it axiomatic that if you reward bad behavior you'll get more of it and that if you punish it you'll deter it? Then why would certain Republicans choose to reward behavior they are on record condemning? I'm talking about not the president's making policy choices we disagree with but which he has constitutional authority to implement. Increasingly, he has become a law unto himself,...

Terry Bean is a donor to the Democratic Party. He has hung out with Barack Obama on Air Force Once. He founded the influential gay-rights organization Human Rights Campaign, which targets and harasses Christians. The organization, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center, labeled the conservative Family Research Council a "hate group." Unsurprisingly, a gay rights activist showed up at the Family Research Council with a bag full of Chick-fil-A sandwiches. He intended to stuff the mouths of Family Research Council employees after he killed them. A couple of weeks ago, the state of Oregon indicted Terry Bean on charges...

Conventional wisdom says that Democrats wanted to campaign this year on jobs and the economy. They were supposedly thrown off message by ISIS and the Ebola scare. But if voters re-focus on jobs and the economy, do the Democrats have a credible plan to offer them? I tried to find out.To begin with, the Democrats have a terrible record to defend. As former US Senor Phil Gramm and Mike Solon wrote in the Wall Street Journal the other day:“The Obama recovery is the weakest in postwar history. If the Obama recovery had been as strong as the average of the...

What day is it?" "It's today," squeaked Piglet. "My favorite day," said Pooh. As a proud member of the "don't just do something, sit there" school of politics, I don't fret much about partisanship and gridlock. Partisanship and gridlock aren't bugs of our constitutional system, they're features. And while everyone likes to see their preferred policies sail through Congress, on the whole I think we've been well served by those features for two centuries. That said, in the spirit of compromise so lacking in Washington, I would like to offer a suggestion for how to fix the alleged dysfunction in...

What should we do about immigration policy? It's a question many are asking, and some useful perspective comes from an article in Foreign Affairs by British-born, California-based historian Gregory Clark, unhelpfully titled, "The American Dream Is an Illusion. The dream to which Clark refers is the idea, promoted by Emma Lazarus's poem at the Statue of Liberty, that this is "a country of opportunity for all, a country that invites in the world's tired, its poor and its huddled masses." The problem, says Clark, is that upward mobility is something of a myth, in America and elsewhere. In his recent...

In the past few weeks, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has referred to Hamas as a "humanitarian organization," likened the thousands of unaccompanied minors at the U.S. border to the "baby Jesus" and flouted House etiquette by heckling a GOP member. When Republicans talk that way, it's a story. Not with Pelosi. "Not a single one of these stories has really perforated into any mainstream press," spokesman Drew Hammill chided me. Too true. Yet these episodes highlight Pelosi's precarious perch atop a party veering ever leftward, like the House GOP seen in a rearview mirror. When CNN's Candy Crowley...

Few have ever heard the name Debo Adegbile. He's President Barack Obama's nominee to head the civil rights division of the Justice Department. A few months ago, his nomination would have been a non-starter -- there is more than a whiff of radicalism in his past. But we are in a new world. Sen. Harry Reid is now absolute monarch of the Senate. Republicans are largely irrelevant. They cannot offer amendments to legislation. They cannot filibuster. I suppose they can write letters to the editor, and march outside the chamber wearing sandwich boards. Before the Reid invocation of the "nuclear...

There is plenty of angst to go around as conservatives lament the surrenders that led to the most recent meaningless “deal” crafted between Democrats and their willing Republican accomplices. But as we move forward amid a web of strategic arguments over how to proceed, it is important to close this month’s chapter with some clarity over what happened and what did not, what is true and what is false. So toward that end, here are the Top 10 lies of the October Struggle: 1. We just dodged a nearly fatal economic bullet. Please. The talk of default and unpaid bills...