Free Republic

The last year marked a number of milestones for the gay marriage movement, as it adds to its list of legal and legislative victories, earning approval from a majority of Americans along the way. The two largest victories came from the Supreme Court in June, when justices struck down the Defense of Marriage Act preventing same-sex couples from receiving federal benefits, and invalidated an effort to restore California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage... On the legislative front, six states, Rhode Island, Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, Hawaii and Illinois, legalized gay marriage in 2013, with marriages taking place in each state...

Popular Congressman Justin Amash, R-Mich., is fighting back against his primary challenger Brian Ellis with a Star Wars-themed campaign event titled “The Establishment Strikes Back: Join the Rebel Alliance.” Amash, the two-term libertarian congressman who introduced the Amash Amendment to rein in the National Security Agency spy programs, will hold a “money bomb” event Dec. 16 to raise money for the congressman’s re-election campaign. Amash’s campaign had $164,000 cash on hand at the end of July, while his opponent has the ability to self-fund and is backed by Big Business. “The good news is that [Ellis] doesn't have grassroots support,...

A participant in a White House-sponsored review of surveillance activities described as “shameful” an apparent decision to leave most of the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk spying intact. Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute, said Friday that the review panel he advised is at risk of missing an opportunity to restore confidence in US surveillance practices. “The review group was searching for ways to make the most modest pivot necessary to continue business as usual,” Meinrath said... According to the leaks, the review group will recommend that bulk collection of every American’s phone call data continue, possibly by...

Under pressure from Democrats in the state, N.J. Gov. Chris Christie today accepted the resignation of his top staff appointee to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey after a controversy over whether several local lanes were shut down on the busy George Washington Bridge for political reasons. In the hastily arranged news conference this morning, Christie announced that Bill Baroni, the deputy executive director of the Port Authority, will be replaced by Deborah Gramiccioni, whom Christie called one of his “most trusted friends and advisers over the last 10 years.”.. The flap is over the mysterious closure...

Fifty-six percent of Americans ages 18-29 disapproved of the Affordable Care Act, the poll found; when it was worded as “Obamacare,” the disapproval was 1 point higher. And less than a third planned to buy health insurance from an exchange... ..President Obama’s job-approval rating had dropped to 41 percent, about the same as the president’s approval rating among the population as a whole, with 54 percent disapproving. The poll also found that a surprising 47 percent of millennials would recall Obama if they could; 46 percent would not. For a group that has been among Obama’s staunchest supporters, these numbers...

2012 Libertarian Party presidential nominee and chairman of the Our America Initiative, Gary Johnson announced yesterday the formation of a 527 Super PAC called Our America PAC. The new Super PAC has the goal of supporting and ultimately getting into elective public office, principled candidates committed to smaller government, fiscal conservatism and individual liberty... Yesterday, Johnson said of the new Super PAC, “From the realities of government-run healthcare setting in to the continuing disclosures of the breadth of NSA’s domestic spying, more Americans than ever are ready to take a serious look at candidates who offer real alternatives to business-as-usual....

Senior figures behind efforts to curtail the powers of American spy agencies have seized on the decision by the world’s largest tech companies to call for radical surveillance reform, saying the unexpected intervention is a potential “game-changer”. In an open letter published jointly on Monday, eight tech giants, including Apple, Google and Facebook, said disclosures by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that basic rights and freedoms were being undermined. The companies – which also include Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, LinkedIn and Twitter, and have a combined value of $1.4tn – called for widespread changes that, if enacted, would...

An even split of Democratic and Republican legislators back a bill supported by Rep. Justin Amash, aiming to end the country's domestic surveillance programs. The legislation, titled The USA Freedom Act, would, if signed into law, curb the National Security Agency's ability to conduct communications sweeps and close a "back door" to information by requiring a court order when performing searches of Americans in data already collected without warrants. The Hill reported during the weekend that the bill has at least 102 cosponsors, including 51 Democrats and 51 Republicans... According to The Hill, members of Congress are placing increased pressure...

Readers of this page are well aware of the revelations during the past six months of spying by the National Security Agency (NSA). Edward Snowden, a former employee of an NSA vendor, risked his life and liberty to inform us of a governmental conspiracy to violate our right to privacy, a right guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. The conspiracy he revealed is vast. It involves former President George W. Bush, President Obama and their aides, a dozen or so members of Congress, federal judges, executives and technicians at American computer servers and telecoms, and the thousands of NSA employees and...

..[B]y the time the Bush era was winding down, the whole administration, including the president, was stewed in terrible, Cheney-level disapproval ratings. And now, almost no one who played a significant role in that administration is anywhere to be found in electoral politics, beyond the tertiary orbits of Punch-and-Judy cable news and the remains of what used to be the conservative "think tank" circuit... Unlike the Reagan administration, the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration, the George W. Bush presidency elevated precisely no one to the ranks of national leadership who wasn't there before. The 2008 Republican presidential primaries...

Despite the reticence of most of Virginia’s Republican legislators to talk about it and the best efforts of outgoing Gov. Bob McDonnell to shoot it down, the possibility of the GOP-dominated General Assembly stepping in to decide the winner of the closely contested attorney general race is not a dead issue. You’ll recall that Republican Mark Obenshain narrowly lost the Nov. 5 election to Democrat Mark Herring by an incredible 165 votes out of more than 2.2 million ballots cast. Electoral boards across the commonwealth are gearing up to begin a week-long recount process to make certain the ballots were...

For years, American opinion on gay marriage has been shifting. Now lawmakers are in a mad dash to catch up. In less than two weeks, seven senators--all from moderate or Republican-leaning states--announced their support, dropping one by one like dominos. Taken together, their proclamations reflected a profound change in the American political calculus: For the first time, elected officials from traditionally conservative states are starting to feel it's safer to back gay marriage than risk being the last to join the cause... "They're reflecting what they're seeing in the polls--except the most extreme of the Republican base," former New Jersey...

CBS News chairman Jeff Fager held meeting with “CBS This Morning” staffers Tuesday and took questions about the botched “60 Minutes” report, Politico’s Dylan Byers reports. Correspondent Lara Logan and her producer Max McClellan are on a leave of absence, following the results of an internal report on their discredited story. Logan was notably absent from Sunday’s “60 Minutes” open...

Prosecutors were pushing for 16-year-old Ethan Couch to spend 20 years in prison. However, State District Judge Jean Boyd sentenced Couch to a decade of probation. There was no debate about who was behind the wheel last June, when Couch plowed into and killed four people. Couch has admitted to being the driver, and court records show his blood alcohol level was .24 at the time of the crash, three times the legal limit for an adult. Prosecutors also presented evidence that Couch and some friends stole beer from a Burleson Walmart on June 15, the night of the crash....

A handful of Republican Party officials is quietly advancing a new batch of rules aimed at streamlining a chaotic presidential nominating process that many party insiders viewed as damaging to the their campaign for the White House in 2012, multiple GOP sources told CNN. In a series of closed-door meetings since August, handpicked members of the Republican National Committee have been meeting with party Chairman Reince Priebus in Washington to hash out details of a sweeping plan to condense the nominating calendar, severely punish primary and caucus states that upend the agreed-upon voting order and potentially move the party's national...

Obama secretly signing away U.S. sovereignty Click this link to learn more: http://www.wnd.com/2013/10/obama-secretly-signing-away-u-s-sovereig... Anyway the Republicans are getting ready to help Obama destroy America with this dangerous treaty. This webpage's existence, Made In America on Food Products, Patents on life threatening surgeries and Generic Drugs will all be gone if this Treaty gets Fast Tracked. According to the Financial Times just released today, THE REPUBLICANS IN THE HOUSE HAVE STRUCK A DEAL WITH PRESIDENT OBAMA TO ALLOW ONLY 51 VOTES IN THE SENATE TO RATIFY THIS AMERICAN SOVEREIGNTY DESTROYING TREATY. Please read from the Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ce008052-5dfd-11e3-8fca-00144feabdc0.html... I urge Justin...

A team of surveillance experts on Wednesday delivered preliminary recommendations to the White House on whether and how to amend U.S. spying policies. President Obama appointed the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, as it is officially known, as part of his response to global outrage over secret American surveillance programs. The panel's task is to advise the administration on how best to balance security needs against privacy concerns. The group briefed National Security Adviser Susan Rice, counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco and other staff from the National Security Council at the White House, according to NSC spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden....

Is it possible to predict who is most likely to die at the hands of a gun? Not shootings like those at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., or the Washington Navy Yard, but the all-too-common shootings that occur in neighborhoods across the country. The idea is not far-fetched if one drills down into the nature of gun violence, which, in the way it is transmitted, bears striking similarities to public health epidemics such as cholera in Haiti or HIV/AIDS in the United States. Epidemics of any kind are not random... More than 40 percent...

This week in Washington, Senator Marco Rubio accused a fellow American of treason. Edward Snowden drew the Republican's ire by informing hundreds of millions of innocent people that the NSA is spying on them... Anyone familiar with the Snowden story will understand why Rubio's comments are misleading. Americans are concerned about their civil liberties because of the accurate information the former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor leaked. He isn't responsible for any conspiracy theories, except in the sense that a conspiracy is "an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act," and he exposed NSA and GCHQ cooperation on...

Cisco announced two important things in today’s earnings report: The first is that the company is aggressively moving into the Internet of Things—the effort to connect just about every object on earth to the internet—by rolling out new technologies. The second is that Cisco has seen a huge drop-off in demand for its hardware in emerging markets, which the company blames on fears about the NSA using American hardware to spy on the rest of the world. Cisco chief executive John Chambers said on the company’s earnings call that he believes other American technology companies will be similarly affected. Cisco...