Free Republic

“Under the current administration, we have . . . seen an explosion in the spending for welfare programs,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor claimed in support of a new, House-passed rule requiring the annual budget resolution to detail past and projected growth of entitlement programs and propose reforms to them. The rule will “allow us to begin to responsibly control the growth of these welfare programs and ensure they can help those who need them most,” he argued. But, Rep. Cantor’s statement ignores two key facts: ■First, safety net programs are not a primary cause of the nation’s long-term budget...

Supporters of punitively high tobacco tax rates should be careful what they wish for. According to the Mackinac Center’s latest estimate of cigarette smuggling rates, Michigan is No. 10 nationally in the proportion of cigarettes being smoked here that are illegally smuggled in. This is the third such estimate the Center has produced, and the details are disconcerting. The smuggling rate here increased 12 percent since 2009, with contraband smokes now representing 29.3 percent of all consumption. The increasing rate of both casual and commercial cigarette smuggling over the past two decades is staggering. Casual smuggling occurs when individuals shop...

New effort by James O'Keefe

FrackNation is an independent documentary that recently premiered in New York City's Chelsea Clearview Cinema. The film will be shown on Mark Cuban's cable station AXS.TV on January 22 at 9 p.m. Eastern. Since accusations fly freely on both sides of the fracking issue ("the fracking war" might be a more appropriate phrase here), and billions of dollars -- literally -- are being contested around the world, the producers decided the best way to fund the film would be by using the website Kickstarter.com to aggregate small donations -- and also not take any money from energy industry executives. PRNewswire...

Journal News gun permit map used by burglars to target White Plains home? January 14, 2013 by TIMOTHY O'CONNOR and MEGHAN E. MURPHY / meghan.murphy@cablevision.com A White Plains residence pinpointed on a controversial handgun permit database was burglarized Saturday, and the burglars' target was the homeowner's gun safe. At least two burglars broke into a home on Davis Avenue at 9:30 p.m. Saturday but were unsuccessful in an attempt to open the safe, which contained legally owned weapons, according to a law enforcement source. One suspect was taken into custody, the source said. The gun owner was not home when...

Last week the New York Times published an opinion piece that offered atheism’s response to the evil/tragedy in which 20 children and six adults were murdered at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut. What prompted Susan Jacoby to write her piece was a colleague telling her that atheism “has nothing to offer when people are suffering.” She wrote the piece, “The Blessings of Atheism” (“It is Here and It is Now!” screams the subhead), to prove her colleague wrong by offering a consoling atheist alternative to religion’s consoling belief in an afterlife. Atheists cannot believe that there is any...

If laws were enough to deter criminal behavior prisons would be empty. The latest effort to "control" guns in America is as likely to deter someone intent on breaking the law as outlawing lust would affect one's libido. What's in a heart can't be controlled by restricting what's in a hand. Following the Newtown tragedy, President Obama vowed to seek the passage of an assault weapons ban and hastily assembled an administration-wide gun control task force, an effort that amounts to little more than a political act designed to impress what Rush Limbaugh calls "low-information voters." Government must be seen...

Up to 50-80% of all guns in circulation could be covered Press reports now make it clear what Vice President Joe Biden’s gun control package will look like. Biden wants to impose: * A Feinstein-like semi-auto ban which, according to experts who have done the counting, could ban up to 50% of all long guns currently in circulation and up to 80% of all handguns. Incidentally, if you wanted to keep the AR-15 you currently have, you would have to have a 6-month FBI background check, be fingerprinted, and get a machine gun-type license. * The framework for national gun...

In the final press conference of his first term, President Obama called on House Republicans to pay the bills Congress has already racked up. He also reiterated that he will not negotiate over the debt ceiling. President Obama warned congressional Republicans Monday that a failure to raise the federal debt ceiling in the next several weeks would spell “disaster” for the US and global economies. And he reiterated his position that he will not negotiate over the debt ceiling. “These are bills that have already been racked up, and we need to pay them,” Mr. Obama said in the last...

Related to the prior post on managerial decision making [4th Downs and Beyond: Coaches as Optimizers], Jim Harbaugh has finally won over almost all his critics for his decision to hand the starting QB job to Colin Kaepernick as Jim Trotter from SI.com discusses.  For me, the most interesting part of this is Harbaugh’s willingness to flout conventional thinking and management his resources.  Replacing your winning QB with an young and untested QB is the kind of thinking that will get media and former players screaming if it doesn’t work out, just like going (and failing) for 4th down on...

Barack Obama, frustrated with continued construction in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has reportedly become “inured” to the issue and has begun telling colleagues that Israel is acting against its own best interests. If accurately reported, such comments, expressed by the head of state of the country Israel considers its closest ally, may represent a new low in relations between this US administration and Jerusalem, which in recent years have suffered strains over the Palestinian and Iranian issues. According to the report by Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg published Tuesday morning, Obama last month began repeating the mantra that “Israel...

A longtime substitute teacher in Phillipsburg, NJ, has been fired after he shared a Bible verse with a student – and upon request gave the child a Bible. The Phillipsburg School Board voted Monday night to terminate the employment of Walter Tutka. He was accused of breaking two policies – distributing religious literature on school grounds and another policy that directs teachers to be neutral when discussing religious material. “It’s unfortunate the Phillipsburg School District chose the path of religious hostility and intolerance against a retired man serving his community and simply responding to a student’s intellectual curiosity,” Hiram...

With the administration’s debt ceiling deadline fast approaching, House Republican leaders are considering a four-year debt limit increase that would take the issue off the table for the rest of President Barack Obama’s presidency. The plan would, however, come at no easy price for Obama, who pledged as recently as Monday morning not to negotiate with Republicans on a debt ceiling hike. Republicans would demand major tax and entitlement changes — the latter of which has been anathema to many Democrats — and they could also ask for movement on the sequester and an expiring continuing resolution that must be...

The federal government will hit the statutory limit on its debt within the next two months, and further borrowing would require congressional action. Almost everybody recognizes that such action will need to take place, since no one has proposed a way to end all deficit spending immediately. But Republicans want to make sure that as Congress takes that action it both highlights the problem of overspending and takes steps to address it, while Democrats want to make sure that the problem receives neither attention nor remedy. To achieve its end, each party has focused on a different element of the...

A Swede who gained worldwide fame for having his love of hard rock classified as a disability says he remains addicted to heavy metal music five years after being granted social security benefits for his affliction. "I'm still very addicted," Roger Tullgren, 47, told The Local this week from his home in Hässleholm in southern Sweden. "I listen to heavy metal music 24 hours a day."

Would you like to save $20,000 this year? Of course you would. Here’s how: Plan a month-long vacation to Disneyland, and budget $20,000 for the trip. Then don’t go. Presto! You just “cut” your family budget by 20 grand. This sounds absurd—because it is. Yet that is precisely how Washington operates. A couple of weeks ago, President Obama claimed on national TV that “I cut spending by over a trillion dollars in 2011.” But as many people quickly pointed out, in fiscal 2011 federal spending rose from $3.4 trillion to $3.6 trillion. Nevertheless, the President repeated the claim on Jan....

SALT LAKE CITY - A book about a lesbian couple raising children has returned to a Utah school district's library shelves, amid a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union. Officials with the ACLU of Utah say they were informed of the district's decision Monday, two months after the suit was filed.

The 92-year-old music store become the latest high street casualty of the credit crisis and called in administrators. Some 4,350 jobs are at risk if the chain closes. The blow follows the recent collapses of camera trader Jessops and electrical retailer Comet that together cost more than 8,000 jobs. Today restructuring giant Deloitte will be confirmed as administrator and will look to trade HMV’s 230 UK stores and find a buyer. But experts said that at BEST a profitable “core” of stores will remain trading. It is understood HMV has emailed all stores telling staff not to accept gift card...

Former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III declared in an exclusive Newsmax TV interview that President Barack Obama could easily be impeached if he bypassed Congress and enacted gun-control legislation by executive order.

Gun control alone will not solve the complex problem of guns and extreme violence. We have an access problem. The mentally ill should never have access to guns. Eight of the nine killers in mass shootings in the United States in 2012 had a history of mental illness or suffered from untreated mental illness. Their families, friends, classmates, teachers or coworkers knew something was wrong. The mass murders (defined by the FBI as four or more murders during one incident) occurred across the country -- including one right here in Minneapolis -- and targeted schools, movie theaters, stores, religious facilities...