Free Republic

In "Constitutional government in the United States", Woodrow Wilson writes the following: (page 70-71) Some of our Presidents have deliberately held themselves off from using the full power they might legitimately have used, because of conscientious scruples, because they were more theorists than statesmen. They have held the strict literary theory of the Constitution, the Whig theory, the Newtonian theory, and have acted as if they thought that Pennsylvania Avenue should have been even longer than it is; that there should be no intimate communication of any kind between the Capitol and the White House; that the President as a...

The push to reform entitlement programs is at the heart of debates about the future of the US budget. Many Republicans want big changes as Medicare and Medicaid, in particular, consume a larger share of federal spending. Most Democrats merely want to ensure the programs' survival. Entitlement programs include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (welfare). How much do you know about them? [...]

Former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), President Obama's pick for Defense secretary, expressed regret for a past comment about the “Jewish lobby” that has threatened to derail his nomination. In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) released Monday, Hagel called the remark a "poor choice of words," and vowed that he would work to "expand the depth and breadth of U.S.-Israel cooperation" if confirmed for the Pentagon’s top post. "I regret saying it," Hagel wrote. "I used that terminology only once, in an interview. I recognize that this kind of language can be construed as anti­-Israel. I know the pro­-Israel...

Barack Obama is laying out a revolutionary agenda for his second term, and he’s calling up his heaviest artillery to enforce the transformative presidency delayed in the first. The campaign to confirm Chuck Hagel will be no campaign for the fainthearted summer soldiers who know only small-caliber combat. The emerging White House strategy is to repeat and repeat the canard that anyone who criticizes the president and his agenda is a racist, probably a Klansman and maybe even a conservative. If the canard is repeated often enough, some people will believe it, even if they’re mostly people who believe it...

McALLEN — Federal authorities arrested three men accused of holding 51 undocumented immigrants, threatening them with a handgun and a machete as well as paddling them to keep them in line. The arrests came after a Guatemalan immigrant managed to escape the house and alert authorities. On Friday afternoon, agents with U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations division went to a house in the 6600 block of North Bentsen Road, where they arrested 51 undocumented immigrants and three men who, in addition to being immigrants from El Salvador, were in charge of holding them...

<p>MEXICO CITY (AP) — More than 54,000 Mexicans have signed a petition calling on the United States to take further steps to combat weapons trafficking.</p> <p>Mexico says the majority of guns used by the country's violent drug cartels are smuggled over the border from the United States.</p>

Gun control advocates, in their infinite wisdom, seem to think they have the definitive answer to this question. The answer is "less than ten." Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York is seeking extensive gun control legislation to "tighten the assault weapons ban" and "ban all large-capacity gun clips." To these ends, he addressed the gun "extremists" by quipping, "It's simple -- no one hunts with an assault rifle. No one needs ten bullets to kill a deer." The first time I remember being introduced to this feeble (yet somehow, incredibly persistent) argument for gun control was while watching an Eddie...

You know that old saying that there are no dumb questions? It's not true. I know. As a journalist, I've asked my share of stupid questions. Yet even in the context of my own shortcomings, I do not understand what the White House press corps is thinking during what passes for a news conference in the Obama White House. Consider Monday's news conference. The last presser of President Barack Obama's first term spanned 53 minutes. Seven reporters asked questions -- after Obama called on them as if according to script. In his fashion, Obama answered a couple. There's a law...

Featured Term (selected at random):HUMANITARIANISM An ethical system that places temporal welfare of the human race as an exclusive goal of human effort and basic standard of conduct. It makes the personal and social good of human beings the primary object of human existence and subordinates, if it even considers, the worship of God to the interests of human beings. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

“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...