Free Republic

Introduction: Stephen P. Halbrook is a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute who has argued and won three constitutional law cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He has taught legal and political philosophy at George Mason University, Howard University and Tuskegee Institute. Dr. Halbrook is the author of eight books including, most recently,  Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and "Enemies of the State" (2014), The Founders' Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms; Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right To Bear Arms, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right, A Right to...

Alternate headline: “America discovers new reason why no one should live in New Jersey.” If you’re feeling deja vu right now, there’s a reason: The case of Caitlyn Ricci is bizarrely similar to the case of Rachel Canning ... after Canning moved out of the family home and sued mom and dad for child support... The Ricci case is similar except that Ricci’s even older than Canning was. Rachel was 18; Caitlyn is 21, an adult legally any way you slice it. And yet, under Jersey court precedent, mom and dad may need to fork over a cool 16 large...

November 16, 2014 Wes ClarkHillary Clinton leads the calling of the hogs after Razorbacks beat LSU Video Link-Turn On Speakers

The president is about to “legalize” 5 million undocumented aliens “living in the shadows in the USA”. Let's not quibble over whether or not he has the legal authority to do so; when he does, the executive branch will treat the commandment as legal, so de facto it will be legal. Where things start to get a bit tricky is in the implementation of this mass clemency. How exactly are these shadow people to demonstrate their eligibility for this benefit? We must assume the level of foreign documentation these people have is somewhere between zero and the whole ball of...

I was thirteen years old when Columbia disintegrated. Space exploration was not even a particular interest of mine at the time, but I remember exactly where I was when the news came. My dad and I were sitting in the living room of my childhood home, listening to NPR. I don’t really recall how I felt when they broke into our program with the news, but I remember well the two emotions that seemed to permeate the coverage that soon become constant: confusion and sadness. As I watched the almost surreal saga of ESA’s Philae this week, I found my...

Darren Wilson was filmed last year threatening to arrest Mike Arman Told resident of Ferguson, Missouri, he was not allowed to film him Footage has emerged of Darren Wilson - the police officer who killed Michael Brown - threatening to arrest a man for filming him. The video shows Wilson approaching a resident in Ferguson, Missouri, and demanding that he put away his camera. [snip]The arrest was filmed in 2013, but was only posted online this week. It shows Wilson telling Mike Arman, a 30-year-old Ferguson resident, to put away his phone or be arrested. Wilson, thinking he is...

Obamacare has apparently been cured. After the registration process was addled with technical glitches in 2013, the second enrollment period under President Obama’s health-care law launched on Saturday with few hiccups. Officials phased in the operation by allowing people to scout out potential 2015 plans the week before the launch, and have targeted uninsured people in nail salons, pizzerias and laundermats.

President Barack Obama addressed MIT economist Jonathan Gruber’s comments for the first time on Sunday. “The fact that an adviser who was never on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters is not a reflection on the actual process that was run,” Obama said at a press conference in Australia, Politico reports. In an interview with PBS in 2012, Gruber said he discussed the Cadillac tax with Obama at the White House. As Slate’s John Dickerson reported on Friday, Obama prominently acknowledged Gruber’s role in helping craft the law in the past....

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) adamantly denied that the trouncing her Democratic Party took at the polls last week constitutes a mandate for a different direction for government. “The problem is that our Party’s underlying message was drowned out by incessant GOP hammering on irrelevant crises and scandals,” she contended. “All the stories about ISIS beheadings, Ebola outbreaks, the flood of immigrants, IRS abuses, NSA spying, government waste and corruption masked the critical point that the Democratic Party is the Party of free stuff. Voters inundated by fears that their lives might be in danger, that their government might...

Students, teachers and parents were taken by surprise after an “active shooter drill” brought the Winter Haven middle school into lockdown as armed police officers burst into classrooms with their weapons drawn. Students at Jewett Middle Academy said they were terrified when police officers burst in the doors for a planned active shooter drill – but students and teachers are irked they were not told ahead of time. snip “We actually thought that someone was going to come in there and kill us,” the station quoted her as saying. But police say they conduct these drills for the absolute safety...

Many folks are now familiar with this so-called “health economist” from MIT, based on the viral video in which he talks about the stupidity of the American voter. As recently exposed by the Washington Times, this limo-liberal fraud, just like his fellow Bay Stater Liz Warren, has gotten quite well compensated working on behalf of the common man. Greedy Gruber knocked down much more than a cool $1 million for his bloviations–most of which are now being at least superficially disavowed by the White House. Now, more material is coming to light… This from a talk he gave in 2012...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered one of his sternest warnings to date about Iran, suggesting the U.S. is failing to see the country's intentions in either the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or Iran. "Iran is not your ally. Iran is not your friend. Iran is your enemy. It's not your partner. Iran is committed to the destruction of Israel," Netanyahu said in an interview with CBS' "Face the Nation" when asked whether the U.S. should try to work with Iran in the fight against ISIS. Both countries want to see the jihadist group...

Pseudo-conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks -- appointed by both NPR and PBS to agree with liberals from the "Republican" side of the political divide on Friday-night "week in review" panels -- is back to bashing Ted Cruz, even though after the election, he admitted Republicans weren't too extreme to win all over the place. On Friday's "All Things Considered," Brooks was bashing Obama with the worst cudgel he could imagine: Mr. President, don't pull a "total Ted Cruz maneuver" and force amnesty by executive order. Oh, he agrees with Obama, but forcing it is just bad manners: DAVID...

GUATEMALA NEWS REPORT TRANSLATION--- Minors in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras will receive refugee status in the United States as of December, according to a plan announced yesterday by the country's vice president, Joe Biden. WASHINGTON DC -The presidents Otto Perez Molina, of Guatemala; Salvador Sanchez Ceren, in El Salvador, and Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras, welcomed the news that Biden gave at the forum "Investing in Central America: creating opportunities for growth", organized by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Biden said that parents who are legal in the US. UU. refugee status for their children who live in the...

After a productive trip abroad, President Barack Obama headed home Sunday on a collision course with Republicans on immigration and an oil pipeline project, showdowns that threaten prospects for cooperation over his remaining two years in office. Given his faltering political support in the U.S. and his party's recent election losses, his trip to China, Myanmar and Australia appeared to offer respite. The president, who was due to arrive in Washington late Sunday, basked in policy breakthroughs with China and warm welcomes in Myanmar and Australia. "I intend to build on that momentum when I return home," Obama said at...

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is the hyper-aggressive group which designates almost anyone critical even of radical Islam as “Islamophobic.” CAIR has done more than any group, except perhaps the Southern Poverty Law Center, at chilling speech on topics of national and international concern. CAIR also is a key component of the Democratic Party coalition, using its media savvy to demonize opponents. I wonder how CAIR is going to wiggle out of being designated by the United Arab Emirates as a terrorist group? Is the UAE “Islamophobic”? Rosie Gray at Buzzfeed Reports: The United Arab Emirates has listed two American...

Charles Darwin worried about a possible hole in his theory of evolution, but some American scientists may just have plugged it. For about a billion years after the dawn of life on Earth, organisms didn't evolve all that much. Then about 600 million years ago came the "Cambrian explosion." Everything changed relatively quickly, with all kinds of plants and animals emerging—which doesn't quite seem to fit with Darwin's theory of slow change, hence "Darwin's dilemma." Now, within a few days of each other, two new studies have appeared that could explain the shift, ABC News reports. One, by scientists at...

Justice is blind, or so it attempts to be. Sometimes justice is deaf and dumb, too. The people of Ferguson, Missouri, await — along with the rest of the nation — the imminent announcement from the local grand jury, either a decision to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown or a decision not to indict the policeman. The latter determination would suggest that the killing may have been justified self-defense. No matter the grand jury’s decision, many citizens in Ferguson and across the country will curse the blindness of what they will believe has...

Leon Panetta and Robert Gates, two former directors of the CIA and Defence Department, on Saturday criticised President Barack Obama's micromanagement of the military. “For the past 25 to 30 years, there has been a centralisation of power in the White House,” Panetta said during a panel discussion at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. “Because of that centralisation of authority at the White House, there are too few voices that are being heard.” Without naming the Obama administration, Panetta said that by the time you get to the White House, the staff has already decided what should be done. Panetta...

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban channeled Ayn Rand in a Twitter tirade Thursday. Earlier that day, Cuban had tweeted an article from The Blaze about net neutrality. When his followers dissented, he hit them with some Atlas Shrugged.