Free Republic

My note: This was not a real petition, but these ignorant Californians didn't know and gladly signed away.

Women in America's armed services will have new options for what units they can join in coming years, the Pentagon says. The military said in January that it will end its combat exclusion that set a minimum size for units in which women could be deployed; the limit kept many women away from front-line combat units. The shift means women could join elite forces such as the Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. Depending on the job, women could begin training to join combat units in the next one to three years, according to several military officers who spoke at a...

President Obama insists his policies are driven by a "common sense" approach. He also speaks in terms of "we the people" and "the government is us." Such declarations are reminiscent of old Soviet posters displayed for all to see: "ALL POWER BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE" and "PEOPLE AND COMMUNIST PARTY ARE ONE." But the real power in the USSR was in the hands of Communist Party leaders. They, in the name of the people, defined foes of centralized government as "enemies of the people." Similarly, Obama's Department of Homeland Security has defined right-wing extremists as "those that are mainly anti-government,...

US President Barack Obama has argued that parochial schools are an impediment to the establishment of a lasting peace in Northern Ireland. Speaking to a crowd in Belfast, during a trip to Northern Ireland for a G8 summit meeting, Obama said that “segregated schools” block the path to full reconciliation. “If towns remain divided, if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can't see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division, it discourages cooperation," he said. …

The Catholic media is up in arms over comments President Obama made during a speech while in Northern Ireland for the G8 summit. Obama made what is described as “an alarming call for an end to Catholic education,” in spite of the fact that it is considered “a critical component of the Church.”

The deadline draws closer by the hour. In New York, the band of good-government reformers, labor unions, enviros, community organizers, religious leaders, and more have until Thursday night, when the current legislative session ends, to press state lawmakers to pass legislation combating political corruption and kickstarting a public financing program for statewide elections. Standing in their way: The odd coalition of breakaway Democrats and Republicans who control the state Senate and who are blocking the public financing bill, which passed the state Assembly earlier this year and is backed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Friends of Democracy, the super-PAC run by...

Forget Islam: Exercises focuses on fictional 'Free America Citizens' group While two brothers reportedly motivated by Islamic fundamentalism were carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing, the city was hard at work planning a mass casualty terrorism-training exercise in which the perpetrators were American militiamen whose logo includes Uncle Sam hats. The Boston Globe revealed the plot of “Operation Urban Shield,” a simulation by the Department of Homeland Security costing $200,000. The program was slated to take place last weekend to train local Boston law-enforcement agencies to work together to thwart a terrorist threat. The Boston newspaper reported officials from a...

The immigration bill the Senate began debating this month will create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the US.The immigration bill will create a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country. Mother Jones reported: Pointing to a section of the bill that mandates a CIS “photo tool” database to enhance E-Verify checks (PDF), Wired last month ominously warned that it “would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the US” through the collection of state-issued photo IDs....

Herman Cain, who ran unsuccessfully for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, told a gathering of conservative activists in Washington, D.C., on Saturday that they shouldn't wait until 2016 to "take our country back". "This train is running full speed down the tracks towards socialism and towards communism," he told the Faith and Freedom Coalition. "Yes, I said it. Before we stop it and reverse it, we got to slow it down. That's what we do in 2014." Cain, who suspended his campaign amid allegations of sexual harassment, told the activists he has a plan for a conservative rebound. "After...

<p>George Orwell was right. He was just 30 years early.</p> <p>In its April cover story, Wired has an exclusive report on the NSA's Utah Data Center, which is a must read for anyone who believes any privacy is still a possibility in the United States: "A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.... Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.�... The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013." In other words, in just over 1 year, virtually anything one communicates through any traceable medium, or any record of one's existence in the electronic medium, which these days is everything, will unofficially be property of the US government to deal with as it sees fit.</p>

George Orwell's famous novel, 1984, was published in 1949, and he predicted that people in the future would have no privacy, as governments would monitor all their activities. The "big brother is watching" phrase became well known. But Orwell could never have predicted the technologies of the future, when he described a fictional system of oppression based on technologies that were available in 1949. In 1949, there were no personal computers, no cell phones, no internet, no satellites, etc. In the communist regimes of 1949, most people did not own telephones, therefore there were no phones to bug. Most people...

The man who tried to make human-ape hybrids Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was a gifted scientist, a dedicated conservationist, and a practical, grounded man who expanded everyone's understanding of animal husbandry. He also, for years, tried to make human-ape hybrids. The post-revolution USSR was a nation that wanted to wholly embrace new technology and progressive science while reinforcing traditional nationalistic pride. It's no wonder that Ilya Ivanovic Ivanov fit right in. He was a biologist who wanted to split his talents evenly between innovation and preservation. Ivanov got a lot of Soviet and international support because he'd been doing useful work...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday that “cultural hesitation” makes it more difficult for some Hispanic parents to want to enroll their children in public pre-school programs because of their preference for family and friends. Duncan’s remarks came when asked about pre-school and the Hispanic community at an event to mark the anniversary of Educare of Washington, D.C., a preschool for children from six weeks to five years old. …

PELL CITY, Alabama -- St. Clair and Bibb county authorities are confirming there were roadblocks at several locations in their counties Friday and Saturday asking for blood and DNA samples. However, the samples were voluntary and motorists were paid for them as part of a study, they said. According to Lt. Freddie Turrentine of the St. Clair County Sheriff's Department, it isn't the first time such roadblocks have occurred in the area. "They were here in 2007," said Turrentine, the supervisor in charge of the roadblocks, which took place in several locations in St. Clair County Friday night, early Saturday...

War is hell and should be else there would be more of it, but there are things that are far worse. Living in a godless tyrannical Marxist/fascist hell with no liberty, no religious, political or economic freedom for one. No thank you. I'll stand by the constitution and defend my God-given unalienable rights, including the rights to free speech, free religion, to be armed, to be free from government spying, freedom from over-reaching tyrannical government, etc., etc., etc. The corrupt democrat politicizing of our government agencies must stop NOW!! The government snooping programs MUST be shut down NOW! Our borders...

This little item could give the IRS’ whole “targeting” conservatives scandal a brand-new twist. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) tweeted that he observed IRS agents training with AR-15s when he toured the Department of Homeland Security: A few weeks ago when I toured a DHS facility I saw #IRS agents training with AR-15's. I'm looking into the issue now. #PJNET

The revelation that the National Security Agency is tracking every phone call each American makes, and broadly mining internet data puts President Obama at the center of yet another controversy. He and supporters in the Republican leadership, not Edward Snowden, are making themselves villains. Two sets of issues are central. Do NSA practices strike a reasonable balance between the threats posed by global terrorism and right to privacy? Are these the least intrusive necessary? Are safeguards against abuse adequate? Will Edward Snowden be thrown in jail for revealing classified information under the Espionage Act or other statutes? The president argues...

NSA leaker Ed Snowden claimed to have broken both of his legs while training for Special Forces. "In 2003, he enlisted in the US army and began a training program to join the Special Forces. Invoking the same principles that he now cites to justify his leaks, he said: "I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression"." That is simply not true as the statement from the Special Warfare Center & School below clearly points out. "Snowden was never a student at...

<>

Honeywell has announced a new Wi-Fi-controlled thermostat that is intended to be distributed by municipalities instead of purchased at retail by consumers in order to better manage energy consumption across a town or city. South Sioux City, Neb., will be the first community to deploy the new thermostat to help its 13,000 residents manage electricity costs, which are said to have risen steadily there in the past three years. In the future, other municipalities will recruit residents to reduce energy consumption when demand spikes, a strategy known as automated demand response, or ADR. As part of this, the residents would...

After you read this- you will wonder what country we are in. Tom Francois is an outspoken critic of Barack Hussein Obama- and has a robust Twitter presence. He also likes to dabble with his "paint" program to create funny cartoons. He has never threatened the President in any way, manner or form. On April 11, 2013, he heard relentless pounding on his door shouts of "Police!" The officers introduced themselves as members of The Secret Service and asked if they could "take a look around." Since Tom had nothing to hide (and he didn't want any return visits) -...

We aren’t communist? When the obvious is obvious, why is it that there are those who can’t seem to see the obvious? Strange metaphor is it not? That we in this nation have those who can’t see this obvious scenario that this nation is as communist as any that has ever been, or will ever be! Perhaps it’s our identification of what we use as the yard stick to measure what is a communist government? When we look at the definition of communism, it is obvious that it had never existed, will not ever exist, and cannot exist as it...

The White House signaled Monday that President Obama will delay signing a controversial arms trade treaty until after Congress leaves for summer recess. White House spokesman Jay Carney said the president aims to sign the pact “before the end of August.” Obama could have signed it as early as Monday. The National Rifle Association (NRA) opposes the treaty, and the delay would allow Obama to sign the pact during the August doldrums, with Congress out of town. That time frame appears to validate the concerns of treaty advocates who had worried the administration would wait until the cover of darkness...

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News. Faulk said he joined in to listen, and...

Sales of George Orwell’s ’1984′ are up 69 percent on Amazon, according to a list on the website.The book’s 60th anniversary was on June 6th, amidst a flurry of real-world news stories on secret government surveillance. ... Update: As of 3:22 p.m. EST, sales of Orwell's '1984' are up 91 percent on the Amazon "Movers and Shakers list."

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I would describe this man as an American hero, as a person willing to risk life, limb and liberty in order to expose to the American people one of the most extraordinary violations of the American principles, value judgments and the Constitution itself in all of our history. A person so familiar with the intelligence community, as you just heard from the excerpts that you just played. He's aware of the personal danger to himself. He knows of the likelihood of prosecution. But he also understands that the government listening to half the country is not what...

The UK Guardian revealed the source for its stories on the NSA phone-monitoring story (and, evidently, the Washington Post story about the PRISM Internet snooping program) is a 29-year-old IT specialist for defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton named Edward Snowden. He says he enlisted in the Army with an eye towards fighting in Iraq because “I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression,” ended up spending three years as a CIA security technician, and voted for Barack Obama. He now claims to be deeply disillusioned about Iraq, the CIA, and Obama....

... Bill Hemmer asked the judge what he thinks we need to understand about what Snowden is telling us. Judge Napolitano explained that the government has granted itself this sweeping authority without a national debate about how much privacy Americans are willing to sacrifice... He said the government wants Americans to sacrifice liberty in return for the promise of security... ...

(CNSNews.com) – House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on Thursday that health insurance premiums will go up under Obamacare because people who did not buy insurance before, and thus had no premium at all, will now be forced to buy insurance. She also urged people to be “optimistic” about Obamacare. “You just see,” Pelosi said. “I mean be optimistic about it. It is a very, very exciting enterprise.”

Elizabeth Hofacre has turned out to be a gold mine to investigators of political corruption at the IRS. The Cincinnati-office specialist didn’t take kindly to having the entire mess dumped on the shoulders of her colleagues and herself, and has made it plain in depositions that this was no low-level innovation. The Hill became the latest media outlet to peruse the transcripts, and added a little more to the growing public record of the targeting effort’s genesis in Washington rather than Cincinnati: An IRS staffer in Cincinnati told congressional investigators that a Washington official was the driving force behind the...

Heads or Tails?- By: Larry Walker II -Carla Dean: “Well, who's gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?” – Quotes from Enemy of the StatePRISM is allegedly a covert collaboration between the NSA, FBI, and nearly every tech company you rely on daily. PRISM has allegedly allowed the government unprecedented access to your personal information for at least the last six years. I say allegedly because every tech company in question denies its existence.According to the Washington Post: The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio...

Remember those assurances that the Iraq war would pay for itself once oil revenues began gushing forth from a liberated Iraq? It is paying off -- for China. Iraq War Paying Off -- for China The New American 03 June 2013 Remember those assurances that the Iraq War would pay for itself, once those oil revenues began gushing forth from a liberated Iraq? Well, a decade later, the Iraq War is paying off after all -- for China. "We lost out," said Michael Makovsky, a former Defense Department official in the Bush administration. "The Chinese had nothing to do...

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin Last February Maxine Waters in an interview stated “The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” She continued to reveal “That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before”. This week Americans were surprised to learn that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting phone call information of American Verizon customers. Like all of the...

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article titled "Reading Hayek in Beijing", in relation to the award of Manhattan Institute's Hayek Prize to Yang Jisheng, a Chinese journalist and author of Tombstone, a painstakingly researched history of famine in China during the period of Mao Zedong. Prior to the communist revolution, China was a highly advanced economy. With the implementation of Mao's Red Book teachings, China suffered many episodes of starvation, poverty, and economic collapse. Yang lost his father during the famine that took 36 million Chinese lives during 1958-1962. The article noted that the source of all the...

President Obama supports many things he opposed as Senator Obama—such as unlimited terrorist detention—but for flip-flopping with a high degree of artistic difficulty nothing beats his judicial filibuster ultimatum on Tuesday. If Republicans don't confirm his three, yes, three, new nominees to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, he'll unleash Democrats to gut the Senate's filibuster rules. Mr. Obama didn't explicitly state the threat portion of that ultimatum—he's leaving that dirty work to the reliable Harry Reid. But everyone knows that's the subtext of Tuesday's announcement, which is a political attempt to realign the balance of power on an appeals...

<p>This is about the best cliff notes version of the Obama regime ever.</p>

CAPITOL POLICE SUDDENLY WANTS TO SEE TEA PARTY WEBSITES BEFORE PROTEST APPROVED. And they are taking weeks to grant the request.The Tea Party Patriots were planning a rally in Washington DC on Wednesday June 19th. But they ran into a wall. The Capitol Police want to see their websites first. Kevin Mooneyhan from the Tea Party Patriots described this latest assault on the Tea Party: Below is the timeline of events surrounding our June 19th rally at the Capitol. We haven’t done anything to publicize this event yet because we wanted to make sure we had the permit in hand....

PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe has said he won't step down because of pressure from Britain and other countries for a change in government. “You want me to retire? You do not talk of retirement when elections are coming, do you?” the 89-year-old president told Kyodo News in an interview in the Japanese city of Yokohama where he was attending and a thre- day summit on African development. Mugabe will lead his Zanu PF party in elections to choose a substantive government this year, replacing the coalition administration he formed with rival Morgan Tsvangirai after disputed polls in 2008. The Constitutional Court...

In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year. Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS. The IRS's assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan. The examples point to...

Seriously? Huh. When something’s happening in the world in the late afternoon hours on the east coast, I always turn to Chris Matthews to find out (a) how its Republicans’ fault and (b) how racism is motivating it. Oh, and (c) how Obama’s handling it really, really well. As embarrassing as Phil Griffin’s admission here is, it has the shining virtue of being true. Candor is sufficiently rare in politics and media that I kinda want to pat him on the back for admitting it, even though it’s insane that he persists in letting his network operate this way. At...

1. Lenin: Trade Unions are a School of Communism The "card-check" debates in the US Congress reminded me of my own experiences with trade unions in the USSR, where organized labor was part of the official establishment and union membership was universal and mandatory. It also reminded me of how that system's seemingly magnanimous goals - fairness, economic equality, and social justice - in real life brought forth a rigged game of wholesale corruption, forced inequality, and grotesque injustice. Years later, the same Orwellian misnomers are catching up with me in America. One of them is called "Employee Free Choice...

Watching the celebration at the NRA convention over the defeat of background checks was the most nauseating experience of the day. I am not a New York gun control liberal, either. I support a shotgun for home defense, a handgun for limited conceal/carry, and an assortment of hunting rifles to balance West Virginia's exploding deer population (as evidenced by hourly collisions with cars). So, I am hardly out of the mainstream. But, the gun safety debate is B.S. This foaming at the mouth, Obamar is coming for the guns, Nanny Bloomberg is a bad billionaire, and most despicable of all,...

New Jersey: Court Upholds Man Arrested For Visible Gun Case In Car New Jersey appellate court upholds five-year sentence for ex-cop who was driving with his legally owned guns. Readington TownshipMotorists driving through New Jersey can be subjected to a warrantless search if their luggage is similar in appearance to a gun case, an appellate court ruled last week. The Superior Court's Appellate Division upheld a five year prison sentence against Dustin S. Reininger, a former police officer who was in the process of moving from Maine to Texas when a Readington Township police officer recognized the cases in the...

The term “useful idiot” is attributed to Vladimir Lenin, and refers to those in the West who were overly sympathetic to the Soviet cause—often to the detriment of their own country. Today’s useful idiots are not so much in favor of a Communist country (although sympathy toward Cuba does occur with this group) as they are biased toward what can be called a “Leftist” philosophy. Unfortunately, the terms “Left” and “Right” themselves provide much confusion. This terminology has been used since the early French Revolutionary era, and originally referred to the seating arrangements used in the French Legislative Assembly of...

From: Bill Montgomery To: Brian Reilly Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2012 8:30 AM Subject: Website Submission Dear Mr. Reilly, Thank you for taking the time to write and for the concerns you have expressed. There are a couple of points of analysis, though, in determining whether a criminal charge can be filed, regardless of the charge or who the suspect might be. The first is whether I have jurisdiction over the case. That requires that some conduct had to have occurred in Maricopa County for me to have jurisdiction. From the Sheriff’s Office investigation into suspect documents produced by the...

Walt & Lillian Disney with Richard Nixon and his family at Disneyland, 1959 We tend to think of Hollywood as a bastion of leftism, and rightly so. Books like Ron Radosh’s Red Star Over Hollywood demonstrate the deep-seated left-wing dominance of the entertainment industry. Even with the leftism prevalent in Hollywood’s Golden Age, many unabashed conservatives found success without compromising their principles, including one of the most creative minds in the business — Walt Disney.Several biographers and writers that I’ve read have tried to declare that Walt Disney was apolitical, but I find this conclusion not to be true....

Syndicated columnist Diana West says the ultimate conclusion of her new book shocked even her. “Americans have been betrayed … by our leaders going back to FDR’s administration in the 1930s because we were penetrated by Soviet agents to such an extent that our policies and, indeed I argue, our character as a nation was subverted,” she explained in an interview with The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas about her book, “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character.” “I don’t believe we won World War II,” West added. “I believe that we were actually carrying out Soviet strategy due...

There is a reason why snobby elites on the Upper West Side of Manhattan generously donate to leftist causes and support leftist politicians. Snobs and radicals often act in accord because they are not opposites, as some believe, but rather spiritual cousins - equally despising "the bourgeois," sharing a low view of humanity as herd animals, and sorting people not on their individual merits but by color, income, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and any other characteristic except the content of their minds. Elitists share the presumption that people of the world cannot think for themselves and have no room in their...

The Justice Department begged a federal judge to not tell Fox News reporter James Rosen that it was tracking his telephone calls and emails in a probe regarding a national security leak. U.S. Attorney Ron Machen argued in 2010 that the traditional 30-day notice period did not apply to Rosen as Justice secretly monitored his Gmail account, according to new exhibits unsealed this week and disclosed by The Hill. “Where, as here, the government seeks such contents through a search warrant, no notice to the subscriber or customer of the e-mail account is statutorily required or necessary,” Machen wrote in...

The Department of Justice is demanding its employees affirm homosexuality and the broader LGBT agenda. This week, the DOJ mailed an internal two-page document, titled “LGBT Inclusion at Work: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Manners,” to DOJ managers in advance of “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month,” LifeSiteNews.com reported. Obama designated June as “pride” month in a presidential proclamation May 31, 2011. The document, which was emailed to DOJ managers, was produced by DOJ Pride, an independent DOJ employee association. WND can find no similar “sensitivity brochure” distributed by DOJ that emphasizes the First Amendment religious freedom rights...