Free Republic

TALLAHASSEE — The decades-old dream of high-speed rail in Florida died Friday when the state Supreme Court turned down a last-minute lawsuit to save the project and U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced he would send Florida's $2.4 billion to other states.

Influenced by the president’s mandate to “bend the health care cost curve,” the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing to deny late-stage breast cancer patients access to the critical, but expensive, life-extending drug Avastin. The FDA wants to “de-label” the drug, a move that would force patients with insurance or Medicare coverage to pay for the drug out of their own pocket in order to survive. Now patients groups are speaking out. Led by the Susan B. Komen Foundation for a Cure, 15 patient advocacy groups have petitioned the FDA to reverse their effort to ration the drug. In...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama has signed a bill to reduce the disparity between federal mandatory sentences for convictions for crack cocaine and the powder form of the drug. Obama’s signing of the bill in the Oval Office was open only to news photographers but not the rest of the media. He made no remarks. But as a longtime thorn for the black community, the matter is important to a key Obama constituency. The quarter-century-old law that Congress changed with the new bill has subjected tens of thousands of blacks to long prison terms for crack cocaine convictions while...

Barack Obama seems to have a pattern of using ceremonial or stately events as opportunities to ambush and humiliate people. This behavior is unpresidential and reveals a vindictive streak that makes Richard Nixon look like Mister Rogers. A few examples of Obama's taking pleasure in administering public pain to others: During the State of the Union Address, he chose to direct his ire at the justices of the Supreme Court, located in the front rows. After the Supreme Court issued a ruling in favor of the First Amendment regarding political speech, Barack Obama famously chose to dress down the black-clad...

I imagine by now that most people here have had a chance to listen to the statement made by Charles Sherrod (as displayed in a YouTube video, "Charles Sherrod And His Uncle Toms" that "we must stop the white man and his Uncle Toms from stealing our elections." This statement brings several thoughts to mind, namely: Who made Charles Sherrod the decider for who is and isn't an uncle tom? Would he have the right to say that blacks must adhere to a certain political worldview or otherwise they are an uncle tom? How could Charles Sherrod's words help to...

He meant Emancipation