Free Republic

Rep. Michele Bachmann believes that President Obama has committed impeachable offenses and that the nation could be on the cusp of the kind of civil disobedience that led to the public uprising in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood. Speaking with conservative talk-show host Rusty Humphries in a tea party town hall teleconference, Mrs. Bachmann, Minnesota Republican and head of the House Tea Party Caucus, said that it could be hard to impeach the president because Democrats control the Senate and the tea partyers should stand strong against the Obama administration in the budget stalemate that led to the government shutdown....

TOLEDO -- Locally in the Glass City, we can see the affects of the government shutdown at our museums, monuments, and national parks. The gates are closed and locked, denying access completely to the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge. TSA employees were still working at Toledo Express Airport, but when WNWO called the TSA to find out if they would be affected, there was a message that said the public relations representative did not have access to her voicemail or email due to the government shutdown. In a letter from Marcy Kaptur's office in the 9th District, it read, "...only services...

For all those “conservatives” who support Common Core education reform, congratulations: Your side is acting like typical liberals. You’re lying about Common Core and when that doesn’t work, you and your liberal allies are willing to use naked force. Whatever else Common Core is about, it’s not an attempt to implement “standards.” At least in one case, it’s a wholesale rewriting American history, the constitution and common sense. And in another recent case, it’s about the ability to belittle, harass, and arrest the parents who just won’t shut the hell up. We told you so. “Greenville County Schools is...

Well, WyoThreeper and myself arrived at the State Capitol today to take part in some good ol' fashion civil disobedience. The news crews were already there interviewing people. A Noon, the organizer of the event, Ryan Teluja, started speaking, making his point on why we were doing what we were about to do. He 'broke the law' first by accepting a 9mm pistol mag that held more than 15 rounds with another gentleman. Then in return, he gave the same gentleman an AR15 magazine for his rifle. Then he offered a magazine for sale, and someone offered him $10 for...

The campaign of civil disobedience in Birmingham ended with a deal between white business leaders (77 in all) and black leaders to desegregate the city and hire more black employees in private businesses and city government alike. On the afternoon of Friday May 10th Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and Dr. Martin Luther King appeared with other black leadership to announce the deal and a few hours later white business leader Sidney Smyer released a statement acknowledging the deal. White leaders kept a low profile fearing retaliation. The Ku Klux Klan had kept quiet during the protests in Birmingham, but they had...

The July 4 armed march on Washington just got a little more interesting. A day after telling City Desk that he would still try to enter Washington with a loaded gun, rally organizer Adam Kokesh changed tactics. Now, he wants citywide civil disobedience over whatever law participants consider unconstitutional. "This is now a call for mass civil disobedience on July 4th anywhere in Washington, DC," Kokesh writes on his march's Facebook event page. "Break whatever unconstitutional law you choose." Kokesh declined to comment on the move, promising a full announcement next year. But the shift to a citywide strategy seems...

After his late Wednesday release from jail Dr. Martin Luther King was angry. He thought jail time would advance the movement but President Kennedy wanted to defuse any increase in tension. The Kennedy Administration cajoled Birmingham's black leaders to get him out. MLK had hoped JFK would help the civil rights cause but Kennedy wanted to hold the coalition of northern blacks and liberal whites who with southern segregationist whites had narrowly elected him president in 1960. King now set an 11am Thursday May 9th deadline for a final deal between white business leaders and black leaders in Birmingham to...

When the "Senior Citizens Committee" of Birmingham got together late on Tuesday May 7th the business leaders who had defeated Bull Connor felt defeated by the civil rights protests and the demands for integration in the city. At least one of them suggested asking Governor George Wallace for a martial law declaration. But the pressure was on for a negotiated solution. The official line from the Kennedy Administration was that the President was "monitoring" the situation in Birmingham but in reality his people were leaning on the business leaders and Dr. Martin Luther King for a negotiated solution. The negotiations...

When non-violent protestors faced the dogs and water cannon of Bull Connor in Birmingham, spectators by the hundreds were angered. They shouted at the police and firefighters to be sure, but then some of them picked up rocks and other objects and began to hurl them. As the media spread the images of the violence around the country sympathy and outrage spread. People were moved to give money to the protest movement, others wanted to come down and get arrested like the children who first walked into the paddy wagons did. And yet others were just angered towards police and...

On May 3, 1963 Eugene "Bull" Connor was still officially the duly elected Commissioner of Public Safety responsible for the police and fire departments of Birmingham. But the election a month before of business community backed Albert Boutwell as mayor had his days numbered pending a final ruling from the Alabama Supreme Court. After the massive protest by hundreds of black children, some as young as six and seven years old, the day before Connor's jails were filled with them. He had no more room. When hundreds more students emerged from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church at noontime, Connor had...

FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY THE PIVOTAL MOMENT IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT OCCURRED IN BIRMINGHAM WHEN CHILDREN MARCHED INTO BULL CONNOR'S POLICE LINES. At noon on Thursday May 2nd the first protestors came out of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to leave the black part of Birmingham headed for downtown in violation of a court injunction. But there was something different because they were high school students recruited into a fading protest effort that had begun nearly a month ago on April 3rd. Dr. Martin Luther King had urged his organizers to come up with something to draw national media attention...

Back in the days of Operation Rescue protests blocking abortion clinic entrances I was in the mainstream media supervising news coverage on weekends when the demonstrations occurred. Police had apparently infiltrated the movement because they had advance knowledge of the first protests. They knew when I knew about a protest. I told protest leaders not to call me in advance but to wait until the protests began. I would then call the reporter and photographer to send them out. When Martin Luther King led a failed campaign of civil disobedience in Albany, Georgia in 1962 police and FBI informants were...

Southern Christian Leadership Conference Executive Director Wyatt Walker called it "Project C" for confrontation. After a failed campaign of civil disobedience in Albany, Georgia the year before, Dr. Martin Luther King planned a new better planned campaign in Birmingham for the spring of 1963. There was a sense of hope in the air on Wednesday April 3rd. A "new era" was being hailed in Birmingham with the 8-thousand vote victory for white reformers who intended to change the city's commission form of government with a strong mayor and city council. The business leaders of Birmingham had engineered the campaign to...

With massive protests already planned, environmentalists see new signs Obama is going their way. Environmentalists are promising mass arrests and acts of civil disobedience if the Obama administration moves forward with a controversial pipeline project through the Midwest — even as Obama's political arm seeks to use the project in its latest fundraiser. Opponents to the Keystone XL pipeline, which would run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, said they have more than 50,000 recruits ready to be jailed as part of one of the largest broad-scale direct-action protests in their movement's history. "With our Keystone XL pledge of...

The main provision of the bill is that any transfer of a firearm, no matter how fleeting, needs to go through an FFL and the transferee needs to have a background check performed through the NICS system. There are some exceptions, but they aren’t very good ones. As one of the provisions designed to “alleviate the fears” of the gun-owning public, it looks like there’s a provision in here that permanently sets the price of all FFL transfer fees to the same amount. That number will be set by the Attorney General, which these days is still Eric Holder. The...

THE RESEARCH PROBLEM Ours is a society increasingly characterized by the use of extra-institutional means of waging and resolving conflicts. As the state becomes increasingly unable or unwilling to intervene in public conflicts, more and more individuals join social movements as a means to protect and expand their rights and interests. As a consequence, the use of civil disobedience, one method of nonviolent action, has become more common. Civil disobedience refers to "the deliberate and peaceful violation of particular laws, decrees, regulations, ordinances, military or police orders, and the like," either because such laws, etc. are considered unjust or because...

The Resistance Begins: New York Gun Owners Refuse to Register; “Largest Act of Civil Disobedience in State History” Mac Slavo January 25th, 2013 With emotions running high in the aftermath of the Newtown Sandy Hook shooting, politicians on the State and Federal level have begun introducing legislative actions to curtail access to firearms protected by the Second Amendment. In Missouri, parents may soon be forced to register firearms with their child’s school under threat of criminal penalties. In Massachusetts, another proposal would require storage of semi-automatic rifles at government approved storage depots. And, in the State of New York, congressional...

What makes a breach of law an act of civil disobedience? When is civil disobedience morally justified? How should the law respond to people who engage in civil disobedience? Discussions of civil disobedience have tended to focus on the first two of these questions. On the most widely accepted account of civil disobedience, famously defended by John Rawls (1971), civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies. On this account, the persons who practice civil disobedience are willing to accept the legal consequences...

Ate tonight at the Chick-Fil-A at roughly the corner of FM1960 and North Eldridge in Cypress, Texas, a suburb of Houston.

This is a personal declaration, which I wish to make in front of Free Republic, and anyone who comes across it. As a whole, the ACA (aka ObamaCare) is bad law; in that through it the government is over stepping its bounds and is becoming more overly intrusive in the daily lives of Americans. The mandate, now tax, is especially onerous, because it penalizes American citizens for non activity. With the Supreme Court ruling on June 28th, 2012, the government now has precedent to try and force Americans, who are literally doing nothing into activity, through the threat of a...