Free Republic

It's been widely reported that Wisconsin Democrats have been discovered at their secret hideout at a Best Western in Rockford, IL, outside the jurisdiction of Wisconsin state troopers who would like them to return to Madison to do their job. While Republicans are at work, their colleagues across the aisle decided a contentious budget fight would be the perfect time to skip town for a little R&R in Rockford. I'm a big fan of traveling, and I always like to pack my vacation agenda to the gills so I can really experience new places to the fullest. I'd like to...

For the third year in a row, states and the federal government have raised discriminatory taxes on wireless phone and broadband service. According to a comprehensive study in this month’s State Tax Notes, the average American pays a whopping 16.26% on their wireless phone and broadband bills, with Nebraska residents paying as much as 23.69%. Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of the federal government, which has raised the federal Universal Service Fund Tax from 2.99% in 2006 to 5.05% today. However, the problem also comes from state and local governments, which continue to raise telecom...

Once upon a time, the United States was the greatest industrial powerhouse that the world has ever seen. Our immense economic machinery was the envy of the rest of the globe and it provided the foundation for the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. But now the once great U.S. economic machine is being dismantled piece by piece. The U.S. economy is being gutted, neutered, defanged, declawed and deindustrialized and very few of our leaders even seem to care. It was the United States that once showed the rest of the world how to...

A Buffalo-based company is the latest to get in on the medical brokering scheme that’s gaining ground in Canada as lengthy wait times force more and more people south of the border for treatment.

Sunday, April 06, 2008 "The Police are the Public, and the Public are the Police." The title to this post is a quote attributed to Sir Robert Peel. Known as the "Father of Modern Policing", Sir Robert was the man responsible for the creation of what many believe to be the first modern professional police department -- the Metropolitan Police Force in London. Prior to Sir Roberts little experiment, the British in the 1800's had a strong antipathy for the idea of a full-time police department -- matter-of-fact, it was seen as a threat to liberty and a (and this...

For a decade now U.S. city planners have obsessively pursued college graduates, adopting policies to make their cities more like dense hot spots such as New York, to which the "brains" allegedly flock. But in the past 10 years "hip and cool" places like New York have suffered high levels of domestic outmigration.

Simple Chemistry and the Real Greenhouse Effect. Truths: 1. Most of the Sun’s radiation that gets to the Earth’s lower atmosphere passes through substantially unabsorbed. 2. Most of the radiation is then absorbed on contact with the Earth’s surface. This includes the majority water and the minority land. 3. Most of the Earth’s surface is either water or moist vegetation. Most of the radiation from the sun is converted to infrared wavelengths at or near the surface. The water molecules absorb the infrared radiation causing increased vibration within the individual water molecules. This is converted into translational energy during intermolecular...

I know of three people I know well that have died or will soon die of cancer. This put my faith and my bucket list in mind. I have many places I want to visit before I die but if I am like my friends and I get a 1 year to live acclaim I can see by them....I won't be healthy to enjoy... An Alaskan Cruise...Inspired by visiting the CPAC page and watching Palin's show. So I looked into Alaskan Cruises What is your bucket list anybody ever been on an Alaskan cruise? leave Vancouver or Seattle?

The United States faces a crushing debt of well over $14 trillion and adds to it at a rate of roughly $4.15 billion per day on average. The absolute first step in paying off this debt, which will be a problem to be dealt with likely through this entire century, is to balance the federal budget so that no more is added to it. This process will be extremely difficult and very drawn out in and of itself because the total gap between what the government collects in taxes and what it currently spends is about a $1.5 trillion deficit...

...California, facing a half of trillion dollar unfunded pension liability, is home to the nation’s largest ticking pension time bomb. Noteworthy is that calls for pension reform are becoming increasingly bipartisan, especially in blue states like California where left-of-center interests are beginning to recognize that ballooning pension costs are taking up an increasing share of the budget and diverting scarce state resources from progressive pet projects and programs. As the Manhattan Institute’s Fred Siegel recently noted in the Wall Street Journal, government-sector unionism is a relatively recent development, a product of the 1930s, that liberals originally had great reservations about......

...Feb. 4, 2009 – Obama signs federal tobacco tax hike: Just sixteen days into his presidency, Obama signed into law a 156 percent increase in the federal excise tax on tobacco– a hike of 62 cents per pack. Obama’s signature on this tax hike was a violation of his central campaign promise – a “firm pledge” that no American making less than $250,000 would see “any form of tax increase”. The median income of smokers is just over $36,000. March 23, 2010 –Obama signs the healthcare bill into law: Obama’s signature on the health care bill enacted two dozen new...

College students may not face brighter job prospects after graduation but they feel better about themselves. “Through a recent social media study of Facebook, Twitter, and message board posts and comments regarding New Year’s resolutions, CUnet, a leading provider of performance marketing solutions for the higher education sector, found users to be optimistic toward completing or pursuing higher education goals,” according to PR Newswire. “Using CUnet’s social media analysis tools, the study looked at 1,093 resolutions about higher education that were posted between December 25 and January 8 to gain a better understanding of the attitudes and concerns of students.”...

...As a board member, Becker will likely support initiatives to give union organizers access to private property, force employers to promote unionization, and require the names and addresses of employees to be provided to an involved union. He and others on the NLRB have threatened various states with lawsuits for passing anti-Card Check legislation. All of these moves throw the door wide open to union monopolies and worker intimidation. With control of the House and Senate split, the Left has resorted to pushing noxious rulings through federal agencies. There is no reason to expect this to cease without direct congressional...

During his testimony at a Jan. 26 House Ways & Means Committee hearing on the new healthcare law, Austan Goolsbee squirmed and obfuscated while repeatedly denying an inconvenient truth about Obamacare: the law contains numerous tax hikes on those making less than $250,000 per year -- a violation of President Obama’s central campaign promise not to sign into law “any form of tax increase” on these families. Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio) simply asked Goolsbee, -- chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers -- whether a series of tax hikes in Obamacare were indeed tax hikes. Below are the...

A U.S. District Court halted the imposition of a new Internet sales tax law last week. The court granted a preliminary injunction against the law, arguing discriminates against out-of-state retailers and violates the Commerce Clause. The case was brought by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) following the passage of HB 1193 in last year's legislative session. The law enforces three obligations which violate the constitution. The bill requires out-of-state retailers that do not collect Colorado sales tax to notify Colorado customers of their requirement to remit taxes to the Department of Revenue. Retailers must also report the customer’s name and...

Moody’s Investor Service announced that they will begin factoring unfunded public pension obligations into calculations used to determine state credit ratings. This move was recently pointed out by the New York Times in an article that highlights the nation’s growing recognition of the threat posed by massive unfunded obligations. The numbers are staggering. American Enterprise Institute and Northwestern University have estimated that states unfunded public-pension liabilities is $3 and $5 trillion, respectively. Unfortunately, the board that writes the rules for state financial reporting does not require the inclusion of public pension obligations, funded or unfunded, in state financial documents. This...

As Baby Boomers begin to enter retirement, the reality of the threat that an estimated $3 trillion in underfunded pension liabilities poses to states’ financial futures and taxpayers is starting to set in with lawmakers and the public. An American Enterprise Institute study found states claim to be underreporting their unfunded public-employee pension liabilities by more than $2 trillion. In fact, more realistic estimates show that the unfunded pension liability in California alone exceeds that figure. A more recent study by Northwestern found the collective unfunded liability to be even higher at $5 trillion. With that said, Public Sector Inc....

The following was emailed to me from a friend on youtube named noguff He is an excellent activist promoting libertarianism and always has something excellent to say. He emailed for example this...25 OF THE BIGGEST PROPAGANDA LIES FROM THE LEFT 1. OUR FOUNDING FATHERS were rich racist White men only interested in their own wealth & status, and were non-religious Liberals. 2. THE CONSTITUTION is outdated and has nothing to do with a modern society. It was made to be constantly changed to serve the changing needs of society. Politicians no longer need to abide by it because we should...

President Obama doubled down on his party’s energy policy during the State of the Union. Typical of Democrats, he demonized America’s oil and natural gas producers and looked to subsidize inefficient, alternative sources of energy. Obama: With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015 If Obama’s endgame is energy independence, it is impossible to accomplish this goal without increased access to America’s outer continental shelf and vast natural gas deposits. America currently imports around 60 percent of its...

...A hope, an aspiration, a goal is not the same thing as a plan. The White House now has an obligation to come up with their plan for corporate income tax reform, and we look forward to seeing it. We hope it maintains the following principles: The rate needs to come down--way down. Our 40 percent rate is much higher than the average European rate of 25 percent. Ideally, we'd want to be under that in order to attract jobs and capital from the rest of the worldDon't raise taxes. The President has argued this should be a tax revenue-neutral...