Free Republic

Nike chief executive Mark Parker bagged a raise of nearly 200% for the company's last fiscal year, taking home a total of $47.6 million...

Repeal them all.

Last Friday Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York signed a new bill seeking to crackdown on citizens offering their homes for short term rental through Airbnb. The law would impose fines of up to $7,500 simply for listing a rental on the popular site for travelers. Why would the state of New York pass this law attacking people seeking to earn some extra money to help afford living in one of the most expensive cities in the country? The answer lies with the hotel companies, one of whose CEOs openly celebrated that his company would be able to raise prices...

Trump-resistant and election battling Republicans including two former Presidents, two former Republican nominees, and several former 2016 presidential hopefuls are offering up excuses for why they will not attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next week, notably among them a break with a history of former Presidents attending their party’s convention. Here are ten of the most prominent Republicans who say they’ll skip out on the convention and a few more who will or maybe won’t.

Ted Cruz will deal Donald Trump an emphatic defeat in Wisconsin next week. That’s according to The POLITICO Caucus – a panel of activists, strategists and operatives in 10 key battleground states. Nearly nine-in-10 Republicans in those states chose Cruz as the likely winner of next Tuesday’s Wisconsin presidential primary. Among Democrats, Caucus members by a nearly two-to-one margin predicted Bernie Sanders would defeat Hillary Clinton. In the Republican race, insiders said Cruz has surged ahead of Trump in Wisconsin thanks to GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s endorsement and an electorate that isn’t as favorable to Trump as those in other...

Laws have become too vague and the concept of intent has disappeared. When we think about the pace of change in technology, it's usually to marvel at how computing power has become cheaper and faster or how many new digital ways we have to communicate. Unfortunately, this pace of change is increasingly clashing with some of the slower-moving parts of our culture. Technology moves so quickly we can barely keep up, and our legal system moves so slowly it can't keep up with itself. By design, the law is built up over time by court decisions, statutes and regulations. Sometimes...

Our inalienable—God given—rights as set down in the Constitution are under attack. It’s the agenda of the American left to implement an unholy, “live for today” secularism which will destroy the virtues and truth contained in our founding documents. The strength of our republic was derived from a higher authority. Our government was designed to prevent any group amassing so much power that the society at large would be harmed. It is our culture that should drive politics, not the other way around. Today’s politicians demean that culture and subject the American people to tyranny. The Obama Regime in particular...

Is the Supreme Court broken? MSNBC asks, “Is the Supreme Court broken?” The logic in the online article that asks that question has some merit, and in fact, in some ways the writer asks the right questions. Sometimes, leftists teeter on the truth, but usually their ideology doesn’t allow them to locate the right answers. The basis of Gabe Roth’s questions about the Supremes in his MSNBC article stems from a question that liberal left statist Justice Stephen Breyer asked. “Why should nine unelected people be making decisions that affect you in an important way? And why should you support...

Fiscal Policy: In this time of political partisanship, the two parties at last have found something they can agree on: raising the gas tax. It's a truly awful idea, and might get Republicans kicked out of office. It's shocking that Republicans, who won the last election by promising limited government and lower taxes, would in their first week back in power make noises about joining tax-and-spend liberal Democrats to raise the 18-cents-a-gallon gas tax. But that's exactly what they're doing. Suddenly, a number of Republicans — who should all know better — are saying they'll "consider" a gasoline tax hike,...

When I was in college, I was treated to a fascinating display of hypnosis. At a large university, in an enormous theater, a hypnotist first determined those attendees who were susceptible to hypnosis. Those of us who were not then watched as the hypnotist introduced a trigger word into the subconscious of those under his influence, at the mention of which they would engage in whatever activity he directed. He woke them up, and each time he used the word, they went under the spell, he told them what they would do when they woke up, and we watched as...

Rob Stein is the founder of the Democracy Alliance, an umbrella a group that organizes the funding of left-wing causes by rich liberals and interest groups. In The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado by Adam Schrager and Rob Witwer, at page 7, Stein explains candidly what politics is all about for the Left: “The reason it is so important to control government is because government is the source of enormous power,” Stein continued. “One president in this country, when he or she takes office, appoints…5,000 people to run a bureaucracy, nonmilitary nonpostal service of 2 million people, who hire...

Penn State Young America’s Foundation Chapter were told to take down their table from a designated “free speech zone” on campus. They were handing out Constitutions – on Constitution Day.

Any beachgoers that enjoy puffing away on a cigarette while they sit on the sand or frolic in the surf may have to get their nicotine fix elsewhere, as Oregon has proposed a ban on smoking that would include all 362 miles of beaches on its coastline. The Oregon Parks and Recreation Department has followed up an earlier ban on smoking at most state park properties with this proposal, partly because the agency is worried that all those smokers pushed out of parks will come to the beach, reports the Associated Press. The move would also serve to cut down...

It's horrifying that it's both possible and necessary to parse different kinds of mass slaughter by governments. But the fact is that hundreds of millions of people have been murdered by states because of their membership in ethnic groups, religious beliefs, opposition to the regime of the moment, expediency, or for sheer bloody-mindedness. The term "democide," encompassing all killing by a state (including politicide, genocide and mass murder), was coined by Prof. R.J. Rummel, who died March 2. Democide matters, according to Rummel, who authored 24 books examining the murderous nature of the state, because of its mindboggling scope. It...

In 1999, Kitsap County Prosecuting Attorney Russ Hauge, a Democrat, was prosecuting a legal gun owner for using his gun to defend himself.  Hauge was also a guest instructor on gun laws at the Kitsap Rifle & Revolver Club in Bremerton, Washington.  The gun owner was found innocent of all charges and that did not set well with Hauge who took up two class periods lecturing the students about the case.Hearing what Hauge was saying about the case and gun rights, Marcus Carter, Executive Officer for the gun range, knew that the students did not get the full story.  The...

More than five years after U.S. governors began a bipartisan effort to set new standards in American schools, the Common Core initiative has morphed into a political tempest fueling division among Republicans. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce leads establishment voices—such as possible presidential contender Jeb Bush—who hail the standards as a way to improve student performance and, over the long term, competitiveness of American workers. Many archconservatives—tea party heroes Rand Paul and Ted Cruz among them—decry the system as a top-down takeover of local schools. The standards were developed and are being implemented by states, though Common Core opponents argue...

A handful of Democratic Senators are up in arms about the Golden Globe awards. No, they’re not upset that Breaking Bad beat out House of Cards for best Television Drama Series. Instead, they’re fuming about a few actors using electronic cigarettes during the award show broadcast. They’ve fired off a strongly worded letter to NBC Universal and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for “glamorizing” the use of e-cigarettes. And now they’re going even further in advocating for a ban on these products in the U.S. Capitol. Banning consumption of electronic cigarettes in public has become a troubling trend of paternalistic...

Those pursuing three authoritarian agenda items once considered unthinkable emanating from an administration which has become openly hostile to what once were our basic freedoms can already hang “Mission (Partially) Accomplished” banners on their walls.First, there are the ongoing revelations about the government’s accumulation of digital mountains [1] of personal information on citizens’ daily lives.If there’s a positive result from this, it would be that many Americans have become a bit more careful about their data trail. But the good news ends there. Our emails, Facebook posts, text messages and other communications are subject to easy scrutiny by government...

SEATTLE (CBS Seattle) – According to a recent study, fatal car crashes involving pot use have tripled in the U.S. “Currently, one of nine drivers involved in fatal crashes would test positive for marijuana,” Dr. Guohua Li, director of the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia, and co-author of the study told HealthDay News. Researchers from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health gathered data from six states – California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and West Virginia – that perform toxicology tests on drivers involved in fatal car accidents. This data included over 23,500 drivers that...

There is a foul pestilence making its way across America today. Where once proud bastions of conservatism and traditional American values have stood the test of time, a lingering disease has penetrated and spreads its malicious infection. I'm talking about the progressive liberal plague that occurs when liberals pick up and leave bastions of liberal thinking and move to areas of the country where conservatism was the backbone of the culture. States such as Colorado, Texas, and Florida have all had an invasion of liberals. These entities have left behind states such as New York and Michigan after liberal policies...