Free Republic

A bill to prohibit already high cell phone taxes from going up even further has cleared its first Congressional hurdle today, passing out of a House Judiciary subcommittee. The Cell Tax Fairness Act places a mandatory five year break on all new, discriminatory state and local wireless taxes. The move is certainly a welcome one. States have increasingly targeted cell phone service for revenue to cover overspending problems, mostly out of fear that broad based tax hikes anger voters. These taxes have spiraled out of control to the point where the average consumer pays 15% in taxes on wireless service......

...This bill is redundant, expense and wasteful. It would authorize $5 billion for various energy retrofit projects, an enterprise the government has little business subsidizing – if these loans were profitable to make, private industry would be making them. Other areas of concern we have with the bill are: The bill is duplicative because there are already many government projects that are supposed to fund energy efficient projectsThe stimulus bill allotted $4.7 billion for weatherization and only $368 million of that has been spent for that purpose after one year, due mainly to illegitimate and inefficient use of the moneyIn...

Corporate America to East Coast Elitists: Take a hike! That’s one way to interpret the fact that business recruiters now rank Penn State, Virginia Tech and Purdue among the top 25 schools that produce the most qualified college graduates, according to a Wall Street Journal study. Asked by the Journal to rate majors and schools that “best prepare students to land jobs that are satisfying, well-paid and have growth potential, . . . recruiters made clear they preferred big state schools over elite liberal arts schools, such as the Ivies.” The results showed that while recruiters still hire Ivy League...

...Cost of Government Day was celebrated nationally on August 19, meaning that the average American had to toil for a full 231 days in order to pay off their burden of government. Nearly a month later, New Jersey doesn’t finish paying off their burden of government until after 257 days of work, a difference of 26 days. This mammoth government is financed by taxes, and New Jersey has done its fair share of tax hikes: in the past eight years, residents of New Jersey have faced an additional $22 billion in taxes—a hideous increase of $2472.86 per man, woman, and...

..."It is painfully clear that excessive spending by government, coupled with the looming threat of a $3.8 trillion tax hike on January 1 that will raise taxes on 56% of all business income -- including on the vast majority of the small businesses that are the engines of job creation -- will further discourage private-sector job creation. If both parties are serious in the pledges we have made to focus on jobs, it is critical that legislators on both sides of the aisle come together and use what time remains in this Congress to enact legislation that removes these harmful...

...The hearing, being held to discuss the anti-tussive ingredient dextromethorphan found in cold medications, could catalyze a rulemaking process that would require any medicine containing dextromethorphan to be restricted by prescription. This move would represent an enormous government intrusion into personal consumer decision based on negligible evidence that dextromethorphan presents any kind of risk. Nanny staters are quick to point to a 70 percent increase between 2004 and 2008 in emergency room visits involving dextromethorphan to justify this intrusion; they fail to acknowledge that this puts dextromethorphan-related visits at a little over 1 percent of all drug-related incidences. Moreover, this...

Complete Title: Retired JAG Officer Says Judge’s Ruling Against Discovery for Lakin Could Derail Case Based on Legal Precedent ### A retired JAG officer with over 23 years of experience, says the military judge who ruled against discovery for a Greeley Army officer may have derailed the government’s case based on precedent from another high profile case involving a military officer. Lt. Col John Eidsmoe, a retired Air Force officer who works for former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore at the Foundation for Moral Law, said Lakin is “raising legitimate constitutional questions” regarding President Obama’s eligibility to be commander-in-chief. Eidsmoe...

9/11/01 will remain one of the worst days in American history. Along with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, the date of September 11th will not be forgotten by Americans who lived through that awful day. Yet, it must be noted; nine years later we still will not define those responsible. I do not support any conspiracy theory (governments are too incompetent to carry out any conspiracy), but it must be said that nobody in power correctly identifies our enemy and his nature. President Bush called them "evil-doers", and they were that. President Obama called them the...

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has advertised the controversial Ground Zero mosque as an Islamic outreach to the community, a cultural center open and intended to unify all religions. Today, he still stands by that assertion, even as his proposed mosque continues to exact the opposite effect before it’s even built. Now, harsh critics, such as Chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, William Murray, are presented with even more perplexing information in the form of Sharif El-Gamal (pictured), the mysterious developer behind the mosque. Reportedly a waiter by profession who suddenly “came into” the kind of money to spearhead a $100...

ew York is the third-to-last state to reach Cost of Government Day, the day on which taxpayers are finally done paying off the cost of local, state and federal spending and regulations. New York celebrates their Cost of Government Day today: September 10. While this is the first time New Yorkers have had to wait until September to pay for the size of their government, they are no strangers to laboring long into the year to achieve that dubious goal - both in 2009 and 2010 only two states have had later Cost of Government Days than the Empire state:...

The Federal Communication Commission’s multi-billion dollar Universal Service Fund (USF) has a rocky history of waste and abuse. Yet, a new proposal by the Commission would make it even worse, directing up to $400 million in universal service support to subsidies for just two network providers. And, yes, their names are literally written in the FCC’s proposal. The newly outlined “health infrastructure program” is intended to help rural health care providers to connect to broadband networks. The FCC’s plan is to subsidize up to 85% of the cost for health care organizations to connect to broadband networks, but only if...

...This is all well and good, except that it brings to light yet another of Senator Kerry’s many flip flops, as Kerry’s stance on the current net neutrality issue illustrates a pro-government regulation, anti-free market mindset. “The overarching policy goal of the 1996 Act is to promote a market-driven, robustly competitive environment for all communications services,” reads the 1998 letter. “Given that, we wish to make it clear that nothing in the 1996 Act or its legislative history suggests that Congress intended to alter the current classification of Internet and other information services” In the 12 years since Kerry committed...

...Having spent hundreds of millions of dollars helping Democrats build their huge majority over the past four years, organized labor is frustrated by the absence of a tangible victory — they have no single piece of legislation to hang their hat on. Sure, Obama issued executive orders favoring unions in construction and federal contracting, scuttled pending free trade agreements with allies, appointed numerous union-friendly officials to prominent positions, funneled billions in stimulus dollars to unionized workers, and coddled the UAW during the Chrysler bankruptcy process, but labor wants more. Due to their falling popularity with the American public, labor unions...

...Democrat Presidents: John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama on tax cuts and their impact on the economy. Read more: http://www.atr.org/video-jfk-vs-obama-tax-cuts-a5379#ixzz0z3DQ2bnk

The Cordoba Initiative’s planned thirteen-story Islamic community center which will be constructed at only 600 feet from Ground Zero, and the ensuing political turmoil that it has created, demonstrates the exact point of ideological battle—that is the civilizational clash—between Islam and the West. Much of the media has gone off the deep end, painting any opposition to a mosque near Ground Zero as typical American Islamophobia.... Meanwhile hate crimes against Jews continues to outstrip those against Muslims by 6 to 1 with hardly a yawn from the media. Regardless, there are several very important questions on this issue that need...

Over the past week, several political-insider wizards of smart have deemed Republican senatorial hopeful Christine O’Donnell unelectable – almost taking it to the point of vitriolic screeds you’d expect to hear from left-wing commentators, which would probably appear as a guest on MSNBC in their prime time lineup. Their issue: In an interview, O’Donnell had claimed she could be the potential target of political opponents and that she had to be extra careful when she would go home at night. “They’re following me,” she told The Weekly Standard. “They follow me home at night. I make sure that I come...

To "refudiate" or not to "refudiate." Merriam-Webster has declared Sarah Palin's made-up verb its 2010 "Word of Summer." The respected publisher says the pseudo word is the one most-often searched by users of its online dictionary. Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska, used it twice in July, once on a news show and later in a Twitter posting where she called on peaceful Muslims to "refudiate" the plan to build a mosque near ground zero in Lower Manhattan. Palin deleted the non-word, replacing it with another tweet, saying "peaceful New Yorkers" should "refute the...

From his hospital bed Captain Howard Prince had a clear view of the TV screen as President Lyndon Johnson came on to address the nation. It was March 31, 1968, and the war in Vietnam was going badly. Prince knew. He’d been downrange, fighting in the rice paddies and marshes of Southeast Asia.

Harry Reid (D-Nev.) made news Tuesday when he announced that he would try to pass an energy bill during the lame-duck session. This comes as a surprise to most as Reid pulled his energy bill right before recess began as he couldn’t muster up the requisite votes. Even more surprising is that Reid said a key component of his lame-duck bill would be a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), a contentions policy amongst Members. RES requires that a percentage of a state’s energy production be derived from “clean” energy sources, generally understood as wind and solar. Government imposed RES are...

Last week, President Obama's tax reform commission came out with their long-overdue report--buried on a Friday during the August recess. One area of the report worth exploring is the section on "return free" tax filing--a polite way of saying that the IRS would do your tax return for you, calculate your balance due or refund, and leave it up to you to take on City Hall. This is a bad idea because it puts the IRS in a conflict of interest. The IRS has an interest in maximizing the legal amount of tax owed. Taxpayers have an interest in minimizing...