Free Republic

Reflections on Barack Obama's legacy... While there is nothing particularly “happy” about warfare, some aspects are even more distasteful than others. There must be shooting in battles; there must be conquest of land; this is what warfare is made of. But some tactics go too far… such as mines. In the 1990s, for example, the Ottawa Convention sought to put a global end to the use of mines – both land and sea varieties – an aspect of warfare that still costs several thousand lives per year worldwide, even long after the wars in which they were used have ended....

Character is often revealed in seemingly small gestures. Amid all the speculation about how retired Marine general James Mattis will manage to lead the behemoth called the Department of Defense, one personal experience I had a decade ago as a young staffer in the office of the Secretary of Defense sticks in my mind as a demonstration of Mattis's natural leadership ability. It was also an act of pure kindness I have never forgotten. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, as large numbers of wounded warriors started to come home to the United States to recuperate at Walter Reed...

The Democratic Party is broken, no longer the party of JFK. Democrats simply ran out of altitude and ideas, or, as Thatcher so brilliantly said, "other people's money." This election sold more antacid pills, caused more counseling appointments and maybe turned more sober liberals into drunks than any election in my lifetime. They refuse to believe it could happen in the U.S. of A. where billions of dollars and at least 50 years were spent patiently transforming the mass media, much of our federal and state bureaucracy and the entire education system into slobbering disciples of ‘progressive’ re-education, big government...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced new workplace regulations requiring employers to accommodate the languages spoken by prospective hires and current employees or “face sanctions including fines and/or revocation of permission to operate.” Oddly, the EEOC cited “the growing diversity of the nation’s workforce as the justification for the new rule.” Under the new regulations requiring employees to speak or understand English is now deemed unlawful discrimination. “Employees have the right to communicate in a language of their own choosing,” EEOC Chairperson Jenny Yang argued. “It is the employer’s responsibility to learn the language of his employees or hire...

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education did not sit well with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. “In nominating DeVos, Trump makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on shifting control of education into the hands of students and their parents,” she complained. “This defies logic and can only lead to the destruction of the public education system.” Weingarten dismissed the consumer empowerment concept as “a naive perspective for the delivery of as complex a product as education. Does a parent really know what’s best for her child? Can we,...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the most partisan agency in the federal government in terms of donations to candidates, according to campaign finance data. Employees at the CFPB, which was created by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, contributed nearly $50,000 during the 2016 campaign with all of that money going to aid Hillary Clinton or her rival, the insurgent socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Agency employees made more than 300 donations during the campaign. Not one went to a Republican candidate. Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wisc., a frequent critic of the agency, said that it is...

President-elect Donald Trump certainly has his work cut out for him: Undoing all of the damage done by President Barack Obama over the past eight years. Mr. Obama instigated an unprecedented — and unconstitutional — expansion of power by the federal government that poses a danger to our liberty, our freedom, and our economic well-being. Last Tuesday’s election gave us a chance to pull our constitutional republic back from the brink and preserve the greatest nation the world has ever seen.

President Obama has implemented more costly rules and swamped America with more federal red tape than any other administration, and now he has set another regulatory record: his team has filled 70,000 pages in the Federal Register faster than any other president. Team Obama crossed the 70,000-page mark this week and is on schedule to print seven of the fattest eight Federal Registers in history, according to a new analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Vice President of Policy Clyde Wayne Crews. "Let's put this in some perspective," said Crews in the report provided to Secrets. "The day after Columbus...

Every US state has a motto. Some are interesting, like “Live Free of Die,” in New Hampshire, and some are sadly truthful, like, “Our Government is Vampiric” in Massachusetts. Just kidding. It’s more along the lines of “We’ll Tax You to Death,” or something like that. Anyway, some, like the motto for the 49th state, Alaska, are very upbeat and offer a sense of adventure. In Alaska, politicians tell us to look, “North, to The Future.” But, a shocking move by the federal government might inspire Alaskans to change their motto to, “Our Land Is Being Stolen By The Feds!”...

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) issued a report this week indicating that the IRS had discovered more than a million cases of identity theft but failed to notify any of the victims. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen defended the lack of effort to inform the taxpayers whose identities were stolen as "not the agency's job. Look, in the vast majority of these thefts the stolen IDs are merely being used by undocumented residents to obtain employment. There is no negative impact on the government. If a person's ID is stolen and someone else uses it to get a...

Say goodbye to those "antibacterial" soaps. The Food and Drug Administration says they do little or nothing to make soap work any better and said the industry has failed to prove they're safe. Companies will have a year to take the ingredients out of the products, the FDA said. They include triclosan and triclocarban. Soap manufacturers will have an extra year to negotiate over other, less commonly used ingredients such as benzalkonium chloride.

It's been quite a long time since I completed the audiobook version of Philip Dru: Administrator. Since then, the archive page has been accessed 6000+ times. There are several ways to download the audio: directly from librivox, librivox has an app you can download to your phone, plus mp3 files can be shuffled about in a multitude of ways - so this metric is not entirely accurate. But its the only one I've got. Over the course of several years, I've helped drive forth the education about progressivism to over 6000 people, just with this one thing. I could clearly...

When Derrick DeAnda helped a family escape from their rolled-over car he was just trying to be a good Samaritan. He didn't expect to be billed $143 by the late-arriving EMTs for "medical care." "I didn't need any 'medical care,'" DeAnda said. "I had one small cut on one of my hands. The EMT gave me a band aid. I can't see how that could possibly cost so much." The bill from Cosumnes Community Services District was described as "standard practice" by Cosumnes Deputy Chief Mike McLaughlin. "If you're at the scene of an accident that we attend you're going...

It started with the best of intentions. In WWII, Western Europeans couldn't help but be impressed by the sheer numbers of American troops, equipment, and supplies moving through their countries, all under one flag and all speaking one language. After the war, various politicians in Western Europe noted how their continent and the United States - though both were roughly the same population, one had free travel for goods and people while the other didn't - and asked, why can't we do that here? And so the grand EU idea was slowly borne, and envious attempt to copy the US...

Making the rounds right now is an exchange that I certainly hope is authentic, between the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife and ranchers Larry and Amanda Anderson. It seems the Oregon bureaucrats want permission to survey the AndersonsÂ’ ranch land for purposes of tracking species decline.... ....here is the AndersonsÂ’ splendid reply... Thank you for your inquiry regarding accessing our property to survey for the yellow-legged frog. We may be able to help you out with this matter. We have divided our 2.26 acres into 75 equal survey units with a draw tag for each unit. Application fees are...

President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch have joined former director of the Phoenix VA Medical Center Sharon Helman’s suit against wrongful termination. Helman was fired in 2014 following the nationwide VA scandal that erupted after it came to light that veterans were dying while waiting for care at the facilities she oversaw. She was also subsequently convicted of a felony after pleading guilty to accepting bribes. Despite this blemished performance in her job, Helman is now contending that her firing was too hasty. Lynch agreed, saying that “the 21-day limit for filing an appeal of the firing was too...

This week, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald rebuffed critics of the agency’s long queues for medical treatment of ailing veterans, comparing them to the long lines to get on rides at Disneyland. “No one is on the Disney Corporation’s case for the lengthy wait-times at their theme parks,” McDonald asserted. “Why should we get worked up over wait-times at VA hospitals?” “You know, if people can tolerate waiting an hour for something as frivolous as a roller coaster ride shouldn’t they be willing to wait a reasonable amount of time for something as crucial as medical care?” the Secretary...

This week Nevada District Judge Eric Johnson dismissed the ACLU’s case against the state’s school choice law. A change to Nevada statutes creating an education savings account (ESA) program that permits students and their parents to choose how to be educated was the source of the ACLU’s ire. Author of the legislation, State Sen. Scott Hammond (R-Las Vegas) said his aim was “to enable families to completely customize their child’s educational experience, and ensure students can match education options and providers to their unique learning needs.” These accounts can be used to pay for private school tuition, online learning, special...

On May 10 former Navy SEAL 10 member Carl Higbie published Enemies, Foreign and Domestic: A Navy SEAL’s Story. The book highlights the difficulty of winning on the battle under President Obama and the equally daunting task of telling the truth of the enhanced politicization of the military post-George W. Bush. Enemies, Foreign and Domestic contains a lot of information for individuals who have wondered what it is like to be a SEAL or what the process of becoming a SEAL entails, and it provides background on Higbie and his childhood experiences. But the book ultimately turns on the...

The German Army had to shorten its participation in recent NATO war-game exercises because the government's labor regulations restrict the number of continuous hours troops can be on duty. Minister of Defense Rinehart Schwachkopf defended the move asserting that "preserving the rights of the worker against exploitation is an essential function of the German government. If we start discarding rights on the pretext that 'defense is too important' to have to comply with regulations intended to protect these rights we raise the question of what are we fighting for if not to protect Germans' rights?" Schwachkopf acknowledged that "enemies of...