Free Republic

Last week's announcement that "Pay Czar" Kenneth Feinberg slashed compensation for executives at seven large financial firms by an average of 50% stunned Wall Street, stoked the fires of populist resentment, and troubled economists. Will this government-mandated pay cut drive the most talented professionals away from these companies, endangering their recovery? Does it augur further politicization of economic decisions? Lost in the arguments over economics and political theory, however, is a more basic question: Was this action constitutional? Mr. Feinberg's ukase is the most prominent example (and not just by the Obama administration) of the exercise of power by an...

White House technology policy adviser, Susan Crawford will leave her position in January to return to the University of Michigan Law School where she is a tenured professor, according to the Obama administration. Crawford, known as a proponent of controversial net neutrality rules, has been on temporary leave from the university to serve in the White House. That sabbatical, which began two months after she received tenure at the University of Michigan, will end in January. “Susan has done an outstanding job coordinating technology policy at the National Economic Council where her expertise on issues from intellectual property to the...

Cass Sunstein, administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, proposes to abolish traditional marriage as a state-sponsored institution. As many feared, same-sex marriage may become the wedge to destroy the religious and political institutions of marriage and family. Each new day brings to light additions to the torrent of liberal-progressive-socialist attacks upon the basic social and political institutions of Western civilization and its foundation in Judeo-Christian morality. Reducing marriage to no more than issuance of a civil certificate acknowledging the partnering of any two people is exactly what the Soviet Union did. The aim was, and...

The war on conservative speech has moved from the White House to your neighborhood pews. Left-wing church leaders want the Federal Communications Commission to crack down on "hate speech" over cable TV and right-leaning talk-radio airwaves. President Obama's speech-stifling bureaucrats seem all too happy to oblige. Over the last week, an outfit called "So We Might See" has conducted a nationwide fast to protest "media violence" -- specifically, "anti-immigrant hate speech, which employs flawed arguments to appeal to fears rather than facts." Their ire is currently aimed at Fox News and conservative talk-show giants. But how long before they target...

Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Advocated ‘Queering Elementary Education’ Wednesday, October 28, 2009 By Fred Lucas, Staff Writer (CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama’s safe schools czar wrote a foreword to a book in 1999 that called for elementary school children to explore their sexual identities, for teachers to incorporate homosexual themes in grades K-5, for discarding a “hetero-normative” approach to education and for “acknowledging children as sexual beings.” Kevin Jennings, now the assistant deputy secretary for education who heads the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, began the foreword to Queering Elementary Education: Advancing the Dialogue about Sexualities and Schooling (Rowan...

Herb Denenberg, once Pennsylvania's Commissioner of Insurance and a Professor at the Wharton School, describes in The Bulletin, how the whiff of fascism in this Administration is turning into the stench of fascism. He starts with a reminder of the many ways Obama has acted to stifle opposition views and manipulate public opinion and concludes: I've emphasized one aspect of fascism -- its objective of the forcible suppression of opposition. But it also qualifies under the other elements, including the suppression of private enterprise and putting it under centralized government control. That is one hallmark of the Obama Administration, it...

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many "czars" appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent? Did you think that another "czar" would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers-- that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish? Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about...

The Federal Reserve joined the Treasury Department on Thursday in imposing new limits on executive pay, extending the government's control over compensation at taxpayer-owned companies to institutions that are merely government regulated. {snip} However, the Fed's proposed rules have wiggle room: The guidelines would let banks set their own compensation but give the Fed veto power over pay practices that it determines could threaten the safety and soundness of a bank. They would extends the regulators' reach into pay practices affecting tens of thousands of bank employees, from senior executives to traders of complex securities.

America has just suffered the deadliest day of the war in Afghanistan in more than four years, but Obama doesn't have time to worry about that. He's focused on another war: the war against his political enemies. The assault on Rush Limbaugh was just for starters. Today's victim: Fox News. It's not enough that four-fifths of the news networks march in lock step to the Obama administration and have turned from being the watchdogs to Obama lapdogs. During the campaign, they went from being biased to becoming activists for Obama. Obama's communications director, Anita Dunn, was, for the most part,...

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the...

Obama’s “Safe Schools” czar, Kevin Jennings, founded and led GLSEN for 18 years. A current GLSEN lesson plan for “LGBT History” -- intended for schoolchildren – celebrates gay and lesbian activists from the 1950s and ’60s. It recommends the film “Gay Pioneers” which profiles several practitioners and promoters of pornography. GLSEN recommends “Gay Pioneers” for classroom use, for showing at a Gay-Straight Alliance club meeting (invite other clubs!), for a school assembly, or for donation to the school library. (In the past, GLSEN’s website has recommended readings for children describing -- and implicitly endorsing -- adult-child sex and sexual experimentation...

This week Kenneth R. Feinberg, popularly known as the White House Pay CZAR, announced his plan to cut the pay for the top 25 earners at seven companies that received federal government help. On average cut total these executives had their compensation cut by about 50 percent. The companies are Citigroup, Bank of America, American International Group, General Motors, Chrysler and the financing arms of the two automakers. This week Kenneth R. Feinberg, popularly known as the White House Pay CZAR, announced his plan to cut the pay for the top 25 earners at seven companies that received federal government...

Sen. Chris Dodd produced language that allowed Feinberg to cut salariesBy VICTORIA MCGRANE 10/23/09 4:37 PM EDT Remember all the heat Sen. Chris Dodd took earlier this year over writing the loophole in the stimulus that let AIG executives collect $165 million in bonuses? But that same provision had another key section – the authority for a White House pay czar to slash top executive pay at seven financial firms that still hold billions in taxpayer bailout funds. So what Dodd’s legislation gave away in the form of bonuses, it has taken back with special pay master Kenneth Feinberg’s power...

The U.S. government should abolish its sanctioning of marriage, argued Cass Sunstein, President Obama's regulatory czar. Sunstein proposed that the concept of marriage should become privatized, with the state only granting civil union contracts to couples wishing to enter into an agreement. Sunstein explained marriage licensing is unnecessary, pointing out people stay committed to organizations like country clubs and homeowner associations without any government interference. "Under our proposal, the word marriage would no longer appear in any laws, and marriage licenses would no longer be offered or recognized by any level of government," wrote Sunstein and co-author Richard Thaler in...

The U.S. government should abolish its sanctioning of marriage, argued Cass Sunstein, President Obama's regulatory czar.

White House pay czar Kenneth Feinberg is attempting to defy the immutable laws of economics by slashing the payrolls by about 90% at the seven companies that received the most from the Wall Street bailout. The cuts will punish the executives at AIG, Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), General Motors Co., GMAC Inc., Chrysler Group LLC and Chrysler Financial. The cuts will not apply to Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM). Though the move has garnered public support, it may backfire. To read more, click on the image below:

'Safe School Czar' Kevin Jennings, who helps shape educational policy at 1600, had his GLSEN group enter into the New Beginning Initiative, funded by the Open Society Initiative, a group directly funded by George Soros. The initiative was designed to further the gay agenda without Congressional approval.

The White House has told Congress it will reject calls for many of President Obama's policy czars to testify before Congress - a decision senators said goes against the president's promises of transparency and openness and treads on Congress' constitutional mandate to investigate the administration's actions. Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Republican, said White House counsel Greg Craig told her in a meeting Wednesday that they will not make available any of the czars who work in the White House and don't have to go through Senate confirmation. -SNIP-The debate goes to the heart of weighty constitutional issues about separation...

White House pay czar Kenneth Feinberg was the driving force behind the move to order steep pay cuts from bailed-out executives, and did not even seek the president's approval before making his decision. The Treasury Department is expected to formally announce in the next few days a plan to slash annual salaries by about 90 percent from last year for the 25 highest-paid executives at the seven companies that received the most from the Wall Street bailout. Total compensation for the top executives at the firms would decline, on average, by about 50 percent. The sweeping decision, though, came from...

First Amendment: Diversity czar Mark Lloyd's FCC votes Thursday on the issue of net neutrality. Advertised as providing access to all, it will do to the information superhighway what Lloyd proposed for talk radio. Not much was said when $7.2 billion was included in the stimulus bill "to accelerate broadband deployment in unserved and underserved areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits." The administration has big plans for the Internet — like controlling it. Susan Crawford, the so-called Internet czar, told the Wall Street Journal in April that the broadband billions...