Free Republic

Over the last week, Planned Parenthood’s slogan – “Care no matter what” – has become even more of a cruel irony after an undercover video exposed one of the organization’s senior doctors callously describing the process by which she harvests aborted babies’ tissue and organs. In the video, Dr. Deborah Nucatola can be seen casually sipping a glass of wine while explaining how, in an abortion procedure, she crushes unborn children above and below their heart, liver, and lungs so that the most lucrative organs can be left untouched. She additionally notes that the federal ban on partial birth abortions...

Taxpayers paid state Supreme Court Chief Justice Nancy Rice nearly $148,000 plus generous government benefits last year. But, since 2007, she collected more than $100,000 in public money teaching University of Colorado law school classes that began during normal judicial business hours, Watchdog.org has found. Public Defender Douglas Wilson and one of his employees, Ann Roan, also were paid for teaching at the CU law school during normal work hours, despite taxpayers paying Wilson more than $138,000 and Roan more than $132,000 a year to do their public defender jobs, documents obtained under state open records laws show. Steve Curtis,...

If you really want to put a spook into people this Halloween, maybe dress up like the Free Market. That's a vision that scares a lot of folks these days – especially those who grow the sugar in our favorite holiday candies. Here in America, where the free-enterprise system should be celebrated, the government artificially props up prices by mandating how much sugar farmers can produce, restricting competition with high tariffs and buying up sugar with taxpayer money when there’s a surplus. That means in the U.S. we’re paying more for sugar and the many products that use sugar than...

The Ebola crisis in the United States has become an anchor threatening to sink the Obama presidency. Already under fire from critics who saw the federal response to the outbreak as disorganized and timid, things went from bad to worse on Wednesday when it was revealed a second nurse had contracted the disease while treating a Liberian man at a Dallas-area hospital. More alarmingly, the diagnosis was made just hours after the nurse, 29-year-old Amber Vinson, had flown from Cleveland to Dallas on a commercial airliner, despite reporting to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that she had a...

War speech at Air Force base produced by private, Dem-friendly company The stage, drapes, and sound system for an 18-minute speech by President Barack Obama cost taxpayers nearly $100,000. “Elite Productions,” the go-to company for prominent Democratic politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, put on the set for Obama’s speech to troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., on Sept. 17. The company provided “stage, drapery, and audio/visual equipment,” according to a contract document made public by the Air Force last week. The government paid the company $94,360 for a speech that lasted from...

Bang! Lee looked up from addressing a package while she waited in line for service at the post office. Despite a lobby packed with customers—without notice—a postal worker slammed down the service window gate and went to lunch, leaving Lee and the other patrons to fend for themselves. The U.S. Postal Service excels at treating customers poorly. My friend Lee’s story is but one of many nightmares of churlish postal workers and deficient USPS customer service. Many government workers get away with behavior that would get them fired if they worked at a private company like McDonald’s or Apple. There...

We're gonna go out on a limb here and say this is DEFINITELY one of the strangest assignments the Secret Service has ever gotten! While President Barack Obama was busy hanging out with Katy Perry at the White House this weekend, his oldest daughter Malia was seeing musicians like OutKast, Skrillex, Lorde, and SO many more! That's because the 16-year-old was in Chicago with thousands of other youths at this year's installment...

Bill Clinton must think it’s still the 1990s when a complacent press could cover up each and every mistake he made (sexual impropriety, lies, theft, etc…). Unfortunately for Clinton and his out of touch wife and daughter, who apparently just can’t get herself to care about money from her $10 million condo in New York City, the internet age can take stupidity viral in about 10 minutes.

Throughout the history of the country, Congress has done some pretty dumb things and their recent abysmal approval ratings shows that the American public is losing faith. Not to say it’s an institution built on imprudent thoughts and actions. No. In reality it’s a venerable institution responsible for some of the most important legal, social and political advancements in modern history. But it’s hasn’t always been smooth sailing. For example, Congress once earmarked $50,000 in taxpayer money to support a museum honoring mules? Congress also spent $1.9 million on a Center for Public Service that would eventually honor a member...

The Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens are receiving $130,000 in public funds to promote Obamacare for a year, according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch. In September, officials with Maryland Health Connection — Maryland’s Obamacare exchange — announced that the team had signed on to be a partner in the promotion efforts for President Obama’s signature health-care law. “Research shows that 71 percent of the uninsured population in Maryland have watched, attended or listened to a Ravens game in the past 12 months,” the Connection’s press announcement explained. “The partnership will provide Maryland Health Connection with the opportunity to...

ADA - "Shoot First, Ask Questions Later: Self-Defense, Stand Your Ground, and the Trayvon Martin Tragedy," will be the title of the discussion during the Ohio Northern University Cultural Conversation hour in the Celebrezze Court Room on Tuesday, Oct. 8, at 11 a.m. The event, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Black Student Union, the Black Law Student Association and the Office of Multicultural Development. Dr. C. Antoinette Clarke, ONU professor of law, will discuss the law of self-defense and the changes to settled doctrine that "Stand Your Ground" laws represent, and she will examine both...

When the G8 summit met in Belfast earlier in the summer, one overriding ambition drove the grand panjandrums of international order: the imperative of squeezing more money out of people and corporations. Sure, these international Fagins—that’s the famed “receiver of stolen goods” in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist—didn't quite frame the issue that way. Instead, these officials, high-living if not entirely high-minded, spoke in more mundane terms of going after “tax havens” or the need to target “aggressive tax planning.” But the real theme of the meeting was best summed up by the lyrics of Joel Gray’s famous song in Cabaret:...

Suddenly, Democrats are in a tizzy about wasteful government spending. At hearings this week into the IRS's misuse of taxpayer dollars to fund staff junkets, Rep. Elijah Cummings, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, bemoaned, "The money that was spent on that -- that's my money! That's the lady who got the early bus this morning. That's her money. The one who makes $35,000. Hers. The gentleman up the street from me who makes 45 (thousand dollars) hauling trash. That's their money! So, it was wasted." But he shouldn't be surprised. What went on at the...

Is welfare corrupt? Of course it is, and in a damning report last week, the Massachusetts state auditor, Suzanne Bump, rounded up some of the scams: Welfare payments issued to recipients long after they were listed as dead. Multiple recipients using one Social Security number – and multiple Social Security numbers being used by one person. Electronic benefit cards from Massachusetts being used in places like Hawaii, Las Vegas, and the Virgin Islands. Tens of thousands of blank EBT cards missing from state welfare offices. Repeated requests for "lost" benefit cards to be replaced. In a report that covered only...

During the 2012 election season the American people were subjected to hundreds of campaign ads. Among these were several geared towards women, and many of these were paid for by Planned Parenthood. According to Planned Parenthood, Mitt Romney was bad for women because he wanted to cut federal funding for the organization, thereby depriving millions of women of "vital services." We heard a lot about cancer screenings in these ads, but very little about abortions. The reality is that abortion is big business for Planned Parenthood, and Uncle Sam continues to be a complicit financier of the organization's ghoulish practices....

A trend has taken shape in Washington, and it has put our country on a devastating path towards potential fiscal ruin. The trend is characterized by an unsustainable penchant for spending money we don’t have. It became crystal clear in last year’s debt ceiling negotiations and was further highlighted by the recent debate surrounding the fiscal cliff; our country is broke, yet our government continues to spend more, risk more and accumulate more debt. Entitlements are often blamed for the vast majority of our spending issues, but our tendency to overspend is not restricted to just these. Parallels exist...

If you earn a middle class paycheck like a lot of Americans do, you saw your Social Security taxes increase last week thanks to the so called fiscal cliff deal passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama. Considering the system is totally broke, losing that extra cash to the government "lock box" makes you think about where that money, and the rest of your tax dollars are actually going. The New York Post has discovered through an investigation that welfare recipients using EBT cards (which work like debit cards filled with taxpayer money, just swipe and buy)...

You may recall that during the presidential election, the Treasury Department refused requests by General Motors to unload the government's stake in the giant automaker. Taxpayers had sunk $50 billion into a union bailout in 2009 and were now proud owners of 26.5 percent of the struggling company. Reportedly, GM had growing concerns that the stigma of "Government Motors" was hurting sales in the United States. At the time, any transaction would have come at a steep loss to taxpayers and undermined the president's questionable campaign assertions that the auto union rescue had been a huge success. Well, now...

<p>Some opinions only get attention because they come from people with advanced degrees who make their living on the taxpayer dime. That’s certainly the case for Hugo Schwyzer, a history and gender studies professor at Pasadena City College.</p> <p>He has a history of blaming white men for most of the mass killings that take place in the United States. Friday’s tragic shootings in Newtown, Connecticut gave him a great opportunity to spout his nonsense once again.</p>

Congress returned to "work" this week (now there's a laugh) to complete its lame-duck session before taking another holiday. Spending other people's money is a taxing experience. Their task is to avoid the "fiscal cliff," a geological construct of their own making. It doesn't take a genius to predict both parties will try to do two things: (1) reach an agreement that will allow each side to take some credit and (2) require those who work for a living to pay government more while they come up with phony, or inconsequential spending "cuts." Whatever they do, payroll taxes are going...