Free Republic

Democrats say we must accept ObamaCare, because it was legally passed by the Legislative branchand signed into law by the country's leader. Well, so was Russia's law against homosexual propaganda. So, does the Obama Administration also think all Americans should accept that law as settled too? Will we see Obama tell all protesters, in the run-up to the Olympics, that they must accept that "settled law" too, and should stop their childish protests against it?

The posturing politicians, pundits, and poobahs in Washington who participated in this latest partial government shutdown once more prove the wisdom of a couple of political tenets: All politics is local, and agents will act in their own best interests. Journalists credit the origin of the first principle to Associated Press reporter Byron Price, who headed the Office of Censorship during the Second World War. Politicians and the general public attribute it to former Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill. The second comes from economists Michael Jensen and William Meckling whose "Theory of the Firm" explains why managers do...

On Monday, some clever folks at seemingly all of the television news networks came up with the idea of an onscreen clock counting down to the federal government shutdown. As the clocks clicked down to zero at 12:00 am east coast time, the tension among the various commentators was palpable. It was as if, at the stroke of midnight, millions of Americans would be destitute in the streets while the United States Capitol crumbled into dust. But nothing much happened, so the clever TV folks started their clocks ticking upwards to remind listeners that as the hours and days accumulate...

Why can't we give Boehner a show of support? Will you call John Boehner and tell him we support him standing strong?

What is your opinion of Pete King? Is he doing the attack conservatives first, then maybe one day he will get around to attacking Democrats? Is the House GOP on a kamikaze mission with the government shutdown? Is he blaming the GOP when he should be blaming the Democrats? Obama is the one acting like an autocrat who says that he gets to decide who is exempt and who isn't. Obama: 1.) Big Business is exempt 2.) Fat-cats in the Senate & House of Reps get taxpayer-funded subsidies for ObamaCare 3.) No defunding of ObamaCare. 4, 5, 6... Repubs, otoh:...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) pleaded with Congressional colleagues “to observe civility in our discourse with one another. Though we may disagree there is no need for us to resort to name calling.” Fresh from this heart-felt plea, Reid labeled House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) “a coward.” The inspiration for this highly personal attack “is Boehner’s inability to break free of the Tea Partiers who are mounting a fundamental assault on the way our government operates. They are challenging the traditional processes and casting the leadership of both Parties in a bad light.” Reid was especially aggrieved that “Boehner...

Simple and unadulterated hatred for Obama has driven the party to alienate the electorate by shutting the government down over their opposition to Obamacare.As I watched the deadlock over the approval of government expenditure finally lead to a partial shutdown of the US government, I could not help thinking how unfortunate it is that US lawmakers are behaving in ways unbecoming of their great and dynamic democracy. At stake in this incomprehensible showdown between Republicans and Democrats is the much-needed Congressional approval to government expenditure. The Republicans, under the sway of a minority of right-wing diehards, decided to use blackmail...

(title truncated for length with a minor edit by me for accuracy. Text below is mostly a transcript of the 2 1/2 minute interview snippet with Ginni Thomas. The money statement is at the very end.) Responsibility for the September 11 Benghazi assault and the deaths of four U.S. citizens — including Libyan ambassador Chris Stevens — lies personally at the feet of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa. “The investigation really is now not about what we know, but about how we can prevent abuse of security before the fact, how we respond...

(Mark Levin has laid out last night what Obama’s plans are should the Republicans hold the line and refuse to increase the debt ceiling. We have been here before, as I found it important to write about two years ago when Obama and the media were considering the unconstitutional and impeachable option of using the 14th Amendment to bypass Congress on the debt ceiling.I felt compelled to partially transcribe Mark’s commentary from last night’s show, because it is very important that we get this information to our Republican members of Congress. I have linked to the relevant articles and podcast...

The president’s health care law is driving down employment in his home state, according to a recent report. Employers in Illinois are cutting worker hours to avoid costly penalties from Obamacare’s employer mandate, where employees in the lowest wage sectors are the hardest hit. The Illinois Policy Institute studied the three employment sectors — retail, food, and merchandise– whose average hours were closest to 30 hours per week prior to the Affordable Care Act. The institute found that all three have now dipped below 30 hours per week, the threshold for a full-time worker under the law. Average hours for...

Public-broadcasting fans love to proclaim that PBS and NPR are bravely “independent” of the government. But sometimes, the facts suggest a close symbiotic relationship. Terence P. Jeffrey of CNSNews.com reports that on the first day of the government shutdown, the Daily Treasury Statement revealed no money for clinical trials for cancer, but the administration awarded $445 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Pay the publicist first!

Media coverage of last week’s opening of online exchanges where people can sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act was dominated by a focus on technical glitches and sign-up hassles. Since they were widely predicted, this led to a ho-hum quality in some reporting. Move along. There’s nothing to see here. But those who looked a little deeper found vast sticker shock. Locally, the San Diego Community College District quietly implemented a new rule this summer that puts a hard cap of 25 hours a week on adjunct faculty, short-term nonclassified employees and student workers. On Friday,...

Over 2.6 million illegal immigrants reside in California and Gov. Jerry Brown is signing more illegal laws to give them the same rights as U.S. citizens. On Thursday, he signed a bill that will allow up to 1.3 million illegals up to obtain CA drivers licenses. Another bill signed by Brown prohibits employers to retaliate against workers because of their lack of citizenship. The CA Governor also signed the “Trust Act” which halts the deportation of illegals when arrested for minor crimes and prohibits law enforcement to contact I.C.E. agents. To add to the illegal bills signed by Gov. Brown,...

Just when you thought Bill Maher couldn’t say anything more offensive than he already has, he outdoes himself.

The government shutdown is being felt close to home for some locals. They say they're being forced out of private homes on Lake Mead because they sit on federal land. Joyce Spencer is 77-years-old and her husband Ralph is 80. They've been spending most of their time in the family ice cream store since going home isn't an option. The Spencers never expected to be forced out of their Lake Mead home, which they've owned since the 70s, but on Thursday, a park ranger said they had 24 hours to get out. "I had to go to town today and...

The weapons-at-school hysteria generally peaks with a suspension. Not so for a high school student in Georgia who is facing felony charges because the contents of a tackle box in his car. 17-year-old Cody Chitwood was busted during a random sweep of the Lassiter High School parking lot by police and this student who has never been in trouble before now faces prosecution, large fines, prison time, and the loss of his plans to join the Air Force in the future due to a hysterical overreaction that has resulted in his arrest. Cody Chitwood, 17, is a senior at Lassiter...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, blamed by Democrats and some of his fellow Republicans as a chief architect of the ongoing government shutdown, struck back on Saturday, faulting President Obama and Senate Democrats for the political stalemate. “Let me be very clear, I don’t think we should be in a shutdown,” Cruz said in a speech to conservatives in the Virginia state capital. “Throughout the course of it, I have said we should not shut down the government. But sadly this is Harry Reid’s and President Obama's shutdown.” The government shutdown began Tuesday when the president refused to give in to...

In the midst of a significant American political crisis, it is easy to forget that twenty years ago this week, Russia’s former president Boris Yeltsin shelled Moscow’s White House—where the country’s parliament met at that time—in a considerably more dramatic and probably more consequential executive-legislative conflict than today’s in Washington. Yet Americans would do well to remember the events that led to the October 1993 crisis. Unfortunately, few still appear to recall October 3 and 4. Even The Washington Post seems to have forgotten; despite its current editorial-page editor’s service as Moscow bureau chief at that time, the paper’s timeline...

Come on Federal Agency heads, Democrats and Obama, hurt us! You're not trying hard enough. Close major highways! Shut off all television, radio, movies and the internet. We're not suffering enough. Stop all disability and welfare checks. We're still laughing at you. What are you going to do next when you don't get your way, throw a tantrum on the mall? I told all of you Obama wasn't the problem. He isn't the problem. The Federal agency heads ARE a huge part of the problem for implementing all of this. The Federal government and everyone who works for Federal agencies...

Leonard Downie, a former executive editor of The Washington Post, is the Weil family professor of journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. This article is based on his report “The Obama Administration and the Press,” forthcoming Thursday from the Committee to Protect Journalists. In the Watergate era, the Nixon administration’s telephone wiretaps were the biggest concern for journalists and sources worried about government surveillance. That was one of the reasons why Bob Woodward met with FBI official Mark Felt (a.k.a. “Deep Throat”) in an underground parking garage in Arlington, and why he and Carl...

The rhetoric is getting worse every day. The Democrats are in full attack mode, aided by their friends in the medial. We have heard John Boehner called a coward (I suppose that could be true) by Harry Reid. The Majority Leader then had the audacity to go to the floor of the Senate and lecture his fellow Senators on civility. His hypocrisy truly knows no bounds. We have seen the Republicans try to fund different parts of the government. Harry Reid allowed a vote on the bill funding the military and it has been signed into law. Another bill was...

Dems say NO to an exemption from ObamaCare (for one-year) for average, hard-working Americans... Dems say NO to ending taxpayer-funded health care subsidies for fat-cats in the U.S. Senate and House of Reps... Dems say NO to ending the ObamaCare exemption for Big Business. Dems say NO to opening up national historic sites that are open 365 days a year - with no federal supervision to boot.

In a bid to protect important functions from being shutdown, Republicans in the House of Representatives are endeavoring to pass targeted funding measures. One of these was a bill to keep the National Institutes of Health open. This bill was rejected by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “The attempt to try to sneak through funding for items regarded as more important than some other federal spending is reprehensible,” Reid argued. “Sure, there isn’t a person here who would disagree that keeping the NIH open would be a good thing, but we can’t let an appreciation for services we all agree...

Those of you who are supposedly outraged or indignant over the partial government shutdown, or have friends or neighbors who are outraged or indignant, I can tell you all how YOU can fix it. All you have to do is tell pollsters who call that you think Obama and the Democrats are responsible for the shutdown. As soon as that hits the papers, the shutdown will be over before the end of the day. That is because it is Obama and the Democrats who shut down the government, because they are so certain that the Republicans will be blamed for...

A police officer who dropped off his daughter at her Phoenix elementary school was asked by the school’s principal not to wear his uniform to the school because other parents were concerned that he was carrying a gun, MyFoxPhoenix.com reported. Scott Urkov is a police officer for the Coolidge Police Department. The department told him not to comment to media inquiries, but immediately after he received the no-uniform request, he posted on Facebook. "Nothing like your kids school calling and asking if I could not come to pick up my daughter in uniform cause parents were concerned when their kids...

A stranger screamed at and grabbed U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy, who has been a vocal advocate for delaying the rollout of the federal health care law, as he walked to the Capitol to vote on legislation, his office said Thursday. He wasn't harmed.

Fifty-seven House Democrats have broken ranks with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer to vote with Republicans to fund parts of the government like veterans programs, national parks and the National Institutes of Health. Sixteen of those Democrats voted for all six targeted appropriations bills, introduced at the behest of House Speaker John Boehner, including measures to fund the National Guard and Reserve, NIH, national parks, the District of Columbia and two separate votes for veterans programs. (The House of Representatives voted twice to restore funding for veterans programs, once Oct. 1 and a second time Oct....

Over the past two weeks, a growing number of House Democrats have broken with their party leadership to vote with House Republicans to approve funding for parts of the federal government that do not involve implementing Obamacare. The number of Democrats voting for funding bills put up by the House leadership that were then blocked by the Democrat-controlled Senate has grown from 2—who voted for a measure to fund the entire government except Obamacare—to as many as 36 who voted to pay members of the National Guard when on inactive-duty training. However, because the Senate Democratic leadership has refused to...

House Democratic leaders believe they have hit on a new way to potentially force House Republican leaders into allowing a vote on a “clean CR” funding the government without any defunding of Obamacare attached. At last count, as many as two dozen House Republicans appear prepared to vote for a clean CR. With Democrats included, that means a majority of the House of Representatives would vote right now to reopen the government. But the House GOP leadership won’t allow such a vote. Dems have hit on a way to use a “discharge petition,” which forces a House vote if a...

Democrats’ seething hatred of the Tea Party movement has clouded Democrats’ thinking and ability to govern **snip**We have seen similar irrational conduct by every senior Democrat, from Obama on down to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and so on. **snip**Since the start of the Tea Party movement in the late winter and early spring of 2009, Democrats have been demonizing the movement in the most crude terms. Every time there is a public act of violence, the immediate response is to look for a Tea Party connection, which never is found. It’s not surprising that in the past couple...

There’s plenty of media coverage regarding the barricaded WWII memorial. Of course, this is a total disgrace—all the more since we have not heard a peep from the VA or DOD. But, is any of this really a surprise? What with a fascist president...

“It’s my way or the highway.” That’s the message D.C. Democrats are sending to America. “I will not negotiate,” says President Obama. “There’s no need for conversations,” says Harry Reid. “We’ve spoken loudly and clearly, and we have the support of the president of the United States.” This could have all been avoided, of course. The House has already sent three bills to the Senate that would fully fund the government. In a desperate attempt to preserve the last remnants of the president’s wilting legacy, Harry Reid is holding government funding hostage.

NEW YORK — The driver of an SUV involved in a bloody weekend confrontation with a throng of motorcyclists was put in “grave danger” and feared for the life of his family when he drove through the crowd, striking a biker on the street, his wife said Thursday. Rosalyn Ng said in a statement that she and her husband, Alexian Lien, had been planning to celebrate their wedding anniversary with their 2-year-old daughter on Sunday afternoon, but instead they were swarmed by a motorcycle rally on Manhattan’s West Side Highway.

CNN anchor Erin Burnett invited Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on her program Wednesday to discuss the state of “negotiations” between Democrats, including the White House, and Republicans in Congress. Burnett argued that Obamacare has become a GOP “obsession” and asked the senator why the Democrats’ offer of a $988 billion spending cap wasn’t “enough” to end the partial government shutdown.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill Thursday granting illegal immigrants driver’s licenses, in a decision immigrant rights groups hailed as a major step forward for their movement. The country’s largest state becomes the latest to reverse course and grant legal driving privileges to illegal immigrants.

Health insurers and individuals began reporting a trickle of enrollments in the new online marketplaces created by the health-care law, as federal and state officials scrambled to try to fix technical problems that have prevented many consumers from buying coverage. After two days without any word on sign-ups, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Louisiana received some reassuring news Wednesday night: Seven people had signed up for its plan on the marketplace that day. “The first day and second we received no submissions,” spokesman John Maginnis said. “This being day three, we were notified through the healthcare.gov website that we had...

**SNIP** While lamenting that we are currently in the third day of a government shutdown, Pelosi cheered that we are also three days into the implementation of the Affordable Care Act — “A dream come true,” she said, “for many people in our country.” Under Obamacare, Pelosi asserted, “many people in our country… can fully realize the promise of our founders of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Healthier life, liberty to pursue their happiness.”

President Barack Obama warned Thursday that as bad as the government shutdown is, a failure to raise the debt ceiling would be even more damaging to the U.S. economy, and called on congressional Republicans to end their “irresponsibility” on both issues. “As reckless as a government shutdown is … an economic shutdown that results from default would be dramatically worse,” Obama said on the morning of the third day of the government shutdown, at an event held at M. Luis Construction Company in the D.C. suburb of Rockville, Md. The president had on Wednesday warned Wall Street that “this time’s...

On October 1, Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges went live. Most of the exchange websites crashed on the first day, a development that led some of the law’s supporters to conclude that there was overwhelming demand for Obamacare’s insurance products. But the Obama administration isn’t releasing figures as to the number of Americans who have actually signed up for exchange-based coverage. “Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one anonymous insurance industry official to the Washington Post. “We are talking single digits.”

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) vowed to bring forward more piecemeal spending bills Thursday, as he expressed confidence President Obama would eventually be forced to negotiate. In a memo sent to House Republicans, Cantor called the Democratic position "untenable" and "unsustainable," adding that a steady diet of narrow funding bills would force Democrats to deal. "I am confident that if we keep advancing common-sense solutions to the problems created by the shutdown that Senate Democrats and President Obama will eventually agree to meaningful discussions that would allow us to ultimately resolve this impasse," he wrote. "The American people ......

by Chris ShugartSome people automatically assume a government shutdown is a bad thing. But before we jump to any hasty conclusions, let’s consider a few governments that probably should have been shut down. Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Cuba immediately come to mind. And you might want to add Iran, N. Korea, or China to a current ongoing list of governments we could do without. Citizens of just about any Third World African nation suffer from oppression and all sorts of deficiencies because they live in countries with lousy governments. Maybe a little less governance deserves a chance. When Congress...

Serco, the British company to whom President Obama awarded a 1.25 billion dollar contract to monitor Obamacare.is under investigation in the UK. They were hired to do the monitoring of criminals wearing a leg tag. As it turns out, one out of every six charges they billed the government were people in prison, out of the country, not wearing a tag, or plain dead. The total amount that Serco collected by fraud is as high as 80 million dollars. The alleged fraud was investigated by U.K.’s Ministry of Justice. Once the audit was complete, they immediately referred it to Serious...

President Barack Obama laid the blame for the U.S. government's partial shutdown at the feet of House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner on Thursday...With 800,000 federal government employees forced into taking leave, some agencies have almost entirely shuttered, including NASA, the Commerce Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick should be sent to prison for at least 28 years for “astonishing” corruption that enriched him and his family while a desperate city slid toward financial collapse, prosecutors said Thursday. The 51-page filing came a week before Kilpatrick is to be sentenced in federal court for two dozen crimes, including racketeering conspiracy, fraud and tax offenses. The government presented a scathing summary of evidence from his months-long trial and said the corruption tops all recent cases prosecuted elsewhere in federal court. Detroit “desperately needed resolute leadership. Instead it got a mayor looking to cash in...

Quick: how much were Social Security, Medicaid and food stamps cut by the sequester? Zero, you say? Those programs were exempted from sequester cuts, and Medicare was reduced by only 2%? Correctomundo! So what was Andrea Mitchell thinking when she claimed on her MSNBC show that the sequester "gutted" social programs? You tell me. View the video here.

While school districts around the country, in wake of the numerous school shootings that have plagued the United States in recent years, have debated whether to have armed guards on school grounds, one school in Arizona recently told a police officer to leave his gun at home — and for that matter, his uniform as well — when he picks up his daughter. Scott Urkov got a call from the principal of Entz Elementary School in Mesa, Arizona, after he showed up at the school in his full police uniform including his sidearm. The cop immediately took to Facebook...

Conservative org claims it has irrefutable proof IRS illegally leaked donor infoThe National Organization for Marriage (NOM) filed suit against the federal government and the Internal Revenue Service Thursday, claiming it had “irrefutable proof” someone within the agency illegally leaked the conservative organization’s confidential tax returns to its ideological opponents last year.NOM is seeking damages from the disclosure, as well as to overturn a statute shielding the IRS from disclosing any information about the incident, according to a complaint filed by the Act Right Legal Foundation on behalf of NOM in the Eastern District of Virginia Thursday.The Human Rights Campaign...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday blocked a House bill providing funding to reopen national parks amid the government shutdown, saying he would not allow the GOP to pick and choose from among favored programs and insisting the only way out is to pass all spending at the same time. Republicans tried to get an agreement in the Senate to restore the parks money along with funding for the National Institutes of Health, the military reserves and National Guard, and veterans affairs, but Democrats objected to each of those agreements in turn. [snip] The debate on the Senate floor...

Now comes the latest gun-grabbing set of liars. Check-out their ridiculous website, which claims that ARPA is a "common sense set of hunters and target-shooters" who want to be "a third voice" in the gun debate. The web page asks you to sign-up. There is no article or link that actually tells you who they are or why they want your name and email. The site offers absolutely nothing. Noted in this month's "First Freedom."

NEW YORK POST — Tourists travelling to Omaha Beach to pay their respects to the 9,387 military dead at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial will find it closed, a victim of the U.S. government’s partial shutdown. The site overlooking the D-Day invasion beaches is one of 24 U.S. military cemeteries overseas that have closed to visitors since Monday. Ten more cemeteries in in France, as well as others in various European countries as well as Mexico, Panama, Tunisia and the Philippines, will remain closed for the duration of the shutdown.