Free Republic

Americans for Tax Reform once again presents these handy Bingo cards which you may use to check off terms and phrases likely to be used during President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday. As a bonus, print out the different versions of the card and watch the speech with your friends or family. There are five different versions! How to Play: 1) Make sure you "like" ATR on Facebook and follow ATR on Twitter. 2) Print out as many of the Obama Bingo cards listed below as you'd like. 3) Watch the ATR Facebook page and Twitter account...

On January 12, the Indiana Senate Committee on Corrections, Criminal, & Civil Matters passed Senate Bill 54, an important step in the fight against eminent domain abuse. This legislation would mandate that state universities seeking to acquire private business property to compensate the business owner for estimated future earnings in addition to the traditional fair market value of the property. Senate Bill 54 is the brainchild of State Senator Doug Eckerty (R-Yorktown) and was prompted by the plight of a Muncie, Indiana businessman who found himself in competition with the biggest of all big businesses, the government. For the last...

...14. Obamacare Blue Cross/Blue Shield Tax Hike (Tax hike of $0.4 bil/took effect Jan. 1 2010): The special tax deduction in current law for Blue Cross/Blue Shield companies would only be allowed if 85 percent or more of premium revenues are spent on clinical services. Bill: PPACA; Page: 2,004 15. Obamacare Excise Tax on Charitable Hospitals (Min$/took effect immediately): $50,000 per hospital if they fail to meet new "community health assessment needs," "financial assistance," and "billing and collection" rules set by HHS. Bill: PPACA; Page: 1,961-1,971 16. Obamacare Tax on Innovator Drug Companies (Tax hike of $22.2 bil/took effect Jan....

COMPLETE TITLE: More Dirty Politics...ABC Sits On Interview With Newt's Ex-Wife, Who Promised In 1995 To "Undermine" A Newt Presidential Run ### Don't tell me this is a coincidence. The same day Willard Romney begins his new round of personal attacks to stop Newt Gingrich's rise in the polls in the South Carolina primary, the Drudge Report says ABC News is sitting on an interview with Newt's second wife, Marianne, and is debating the ethics of releasing it before the important primary Marianne Gingrich has said she could end her ex-husband’s career with a single interview. Earlier this week, she...

Round 15: GOP DebateBy: Larry Walker, Jr.The first three minutes of the January 19th CNN-GOP Debate was such a crock, that I turned it off, and caught up the highlights later on. In one less notable tirade, Mitt Romney exclaimed, "Mr. Speaker, you talk about all the things you did with Ronald Reagan and the Reagan Revolution and the jobs created during the Reagan years and so forth. I mean, I looked at the Reagan diary. You were mentioned once in Ronald Reagan's diary. And in the diary he says you had an idea in a meeting of young congressman,...

...These were unconstitutional appointments that the President called “recess appointments”. Unfortunately for President Obama, the Senate was not actually in recess, this was just a tactic the White House used to pull a fast one on Congress. In the last few days several organizations have put forth lawsuits against the President. Three of the most important groups to mention are the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, the National Right to Work Committee, and the National Federation of Independent Business. Each of these groups are challenging that the appointments made by President Obama are not only frowned upon, but in fact...

On January 9, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case involving yet another instance of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) overreach. Sackett v. EPA involves two Idaho property-owners with a .63 acre parcel near idyllic Priest Lake. In 2007, Michael and Chantell Sackett sought to build a home on their bucolic real estate and began preparing their land for construction. Their dreams were thwarted when the EPA asserted that their property was a federally protected wetland. The EPA ordered Mr. and Mrs. Sackett to reverse their actions and obtain a multi-thousand dollar permit prior to any subsequent home...

Congress is back this week in Washington, but the hysterics of nanny staters hardly ebbed over the holidays. In the New Year, activists have turned their ire to regulatory agencies, asking the government to pick winners and losers in private industry. Most recently, an association of pharmacies has demanded the Federal Trade Commission arbitrarily restrict the pharmaceutical industry rather than allowing businesses to respond to consumer demands. In pursuit of this goal, the National Association of Chain Drugstores has launched a scare campaign: TooBigToPlayFair.com. The NACD alleges that a merger between two Pharmacy Benefit Managers (companies that work with both...

President Obama's "Jobs Council" today released their annual report. In the tax section, much attention is given to the need to cut the corporate income tax rate. Reading most of the report, it sounds like something that might be written by ATR or another free market organization. It points out how the U.S. has the highest corporate income tax rate in the developed world, a full 14 percentage points higher than the OECD average of 25 percent. It also points out how big U.S. trade partners like Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom are continuing to cut their corporate rate...

*snip* The reason he'll win? He knows who he is. And the Republican politicians don't know who they are. They've forgotten what they're about, or perhaps like some isolated tribe, they've lost the language necessary to explain it to themselves. Their voters know this and don't really believe them anymore. And that's why Obama will win. And the Republican establishment that seeks to unseat him? Their guy Mitt Romney calls himself a conservative. But he's really a John Kerry in Republican clothing, right down to the phony laugh, and his past flips and flops will haunt him in defeat. Shouldn't...

We here in south Florida need some Freepers help here. I live in Palm Beach County and mitt Romney showed up here to campaign yesterday and many here are in a trance like a bunch of drones. I was getting emails urging me to come to the Romulan rally and now this column. I have been shocked to see people who I have never dreamed would fall for this fraud - fawning over him. He's owned the airwaves for the past month but TODAY I heard his first attack ads on SANTORUM surprisingly - instead of Newt. Evil is cunning...

“...[M]ust suppress our desire to be overly prescriptive to derive some predetermined outcome.” Yet, “overly prescriptive” rules to “derive a predetermined outcome” are exactly what they and the FCC want. An unconditional green light to the Commission to auction spectrum will result in restrictions on which companies can bid for spectrum, along with regulations and mandates on how the spectrum can be used. The FCC consistently pushes rules focused on achieving outcomes during spectrum auctions with mixed or failed results. This is exactly how Net Neutrality came to be, and how the FCC botched the D Block and devalued the...

In December 2010, Congress enacted a 2 percentage point payroll tax reduction, bringing the FICA rate down from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent as a part of the legislation extending unemployment benefits and preventing tax rates from rising. All throughout the debate Democrats billed the reduction as a temporary move, slated to expire on December 31, 2011. Congress is considering whether to extend this rebate. Because it was always a temporary measure, opposition to this extension cannot fairly be called support for a tax increase. There is ample evidence that Democrats always believed the payroll tax rebate to be temporary....

When President Barack Obama offers his Jan. 24 State of the Union address, it will mark exactly 1,000 days since the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate has passed a budget. The Senate has not bothered to pass a budget since April 29, 2009. “The Republican-led House of Representatives passed the Paul Ryan budget that reduced Obama’s spending levels by six trillion dollars over the next decade. The Democrat-controlled Senate has not passed a budget in three years," said Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist. "When President Obama tries to blame a ‘do nothing’ congress for his problems….he is half right. The...

Confused about the proposed tax reform from each of the presidential candidates? Be confused no more. ATR has compiled a single chart that covers the essential differences between each candidate's plans. As proposals change, this chart will be updated, so be sure to bookmark it and share it with your friends using the Facebook, Twitter, and email links above.For an html version, please click here.

The Island belongs to the Western Visayas group and is located in the northwestern tip of Panay, in the west Visayas of Region VI, neighboring the Sibuyan Sea. The island has three major Villages namely; Yapak in the North, Balabag in the middle, and Manoc-Manoc in the south, and numerous small barrios or barangays or sitios, all linked together by a maze of paths, labeled into five commercial stations.

Last year saw a slew of states review telecommunications laws designed for a bygone era. Tennessee phased out special charges for in-state long distance calls that subsidized phone companies. Florida and Kansas now allow companies subject to price regulations to better compete with new, less regulated providers. Increased competition has resulted from convergence in the industry, as providers once broken into segregated markets (e.g., cable TV, local and long distance phone, wireless, etc.) now all offer similar broadband phone and video services, or at least a pipe to get them. However, state laws have been slow to change, regulating some...

With the year drawing rapidly to a close and so many quotes to chose among - serious and humorous, conservative and liberal, rabid media outbursts, Obama's choicest lies, the liberal chameleon Mitt Romney - what are your personal quote(s) of the year for 2011?The quote may be comforting or disturbing, enlightening or confusing, endearing or maddening . . . but, c'mon, you know you have one.

"THE PUBLIUS ENIGMA: Newly Revealed Evidence Establishes That President James Madison’s Administration Required Citizen Parentage To Qualify Native-Born Persons For U.S. Citizenship. I was recently forwarded an incredibly amazing article from the October 10, 1811 edition of The Alexandria Herald newspaper. RXSID of Free Republic sent it with a brief note, stating, “Check out this case.” The Herald article is entitled, The Case of James McClure. The author is…PUBLIUS. Publius was the pseudonym used by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, for their anonymous authorship of The Federalist Papers. By 1811, Hamilton was dead and Jay retired. My research...

Despite a referendum from House Republicans, the National Labor Relations Board is moving forward with its Ambush Election rule. The NLRB finalized the rule yesterday, making cosmetic changes to the original proposed rule. Unsurprisingly, the Ambush Election rule still silences workers and burdens employers. Here’s what DC’s labor experts are saying about the rule: “With the unemployment above 8 percent for almost three years, the NLRB Final Election Rule is another slap in the face at out-of-work Americans. The rule, which reduces the time before elections for union representation and prevents employers from presenting the facts to their workforce, will...