Free Republic

President Trump signed two Executive Orders on January 8 instructing the Interior Department to streamline the location of broadband infrastructure for the rural U.S. on federal properties. Now, if the FCC would only follow in that same spirit. The FCC has authority over licenses for electromagnetic spectrum for communication over the airwaves. That includes TV and radio broadcast stations; desktop computers, laptops or tablets communicating over the internet through Wi-Fi; cellphones communicating through satellites; military communications by various means; and medical devices monitoring patients for doctors and hospitals. Under the Radio Act of 1912, the FCC is authorized to license...

Someone earning $10,000 could be subject to maximum federal taxes under this limit of $1,500 per year. But someone earning 100 times as much at a million dollars would still be subject to maximum federal taxes of 100 times more, at $150,000 a year. The tax burden could still be skewed proportionally more to the upper income earners, but only by reducing the burden on the lower income earners. In other words, lower rates than 15% could still be imposed on those at the lower income levels, while the highest could still be subject to a top rate of 15%.

As if we didn’t know it before, today we learned why the Secret Synod was conducted in secret, with the faithful not being permitted to see the texts of the participants’ addresses or even to know which bishop or cardinal was advancing which position. The Secret Synod was conducted in secret because evil advances in shadows. Many others, and not just traditionalists, have already expressed outrage over the disastrous “Relatio post disceptationem,” which appeared on the Vatican website today, October 13. This is the anniversary of Pope Leo’s vision of Satan’s attack on the Church (leading to his composition of...

It’s not so much that he thinks he’s above the law as that he thinks he is the law. The duties of the President of the United States are spelled out in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, which states, inter alia, that the President “shall take Care that the laws be faithfully executed.” As Stanford Law Professor and former federal judge Michael McConnell explained in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “This is a duty, not a discretionary power. While the president does have substantial discretion about how to enforce a law, he has no discretion about whether to do...

President Obama started his Democratic Convention nomination acceptance speech with one overriding truth: “But when all is said and done – when you pick up that ballot to vote – you will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation. It will be a choice between two different paths for America. A choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future.” Truer words were never spoken. Because America is deciding in this election whether it wants to ditch the economic system that made us the richest, most prosperous nation in the history of the world, for the hope...

With a second term for Obama, the world-leading America we have known and hoped to leave to our children will be gone. Last Friday's jobs report confirms that Obama is well on his way to transforming America into a third world country, with declining living standards and perpetual economic stagnation. Argentina enjoyed the world's fourth highest per capita GDP in 1929, on par with America at the time. But then the nation lost its way in embracing a leftist, union allied government, which took control of the economy and imposed wildly irresponsible taxes, spending, deficits, and debt. After World War...

The key to the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling will be clear recognition of constitutional alternatives to Obamacare. On November 14, the Supreme Court granted the Writ of Certiorari to hear the appeal of the cases testing the constitutionality of Obamacare. The resulting decision will mark an historic watershed not only in the restoration of constitutional jurisprudence, but in fundamental, market reform of the entire entitlement state... --snip-- While the decision of simpatico Judge Laurence Silberman upholding the Obamacare mandate is somewhat troubling, that reflected Silberman's poorly reasoned conclusion that he was bound as a lower court judge by the Supreme...

President Barack Obama's speech to the nation Monday night was highly disturbing. Because read carefully, it reveals a president wildly divorced from the fundamental realities of the nation he is supposed to be leading. President Obama actually told America on national television that it is a nation "with a system in which the deck seems stacked against middle class Americans in favor of the wealthiest few." It is incomprehensible how a man serving as president of these United States could make such a fundamentally false assertion about his own country. The president further proclaimed Monday night that "most Americans don't...

The Bush Tax Cuts: The Final Word and Beyond For how many years have Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and other Democrats been telling America that Bush cut taxes only for the rich? If so, where did all those middle class tax cuts come from that everyone is now talking about extending? The Republicans are holding the middle class tax cuts hostage? It was the Republicans who enacted the middle class tax cuts, nearly 10 years ago now. That would be $3 trillion in middle class tax cuts over the next 10 years. Obama and Pelosi are talking as if these...

House GOP Leader John Boehner created a stir last month when he called on President Obama to fire his top economic advisors, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy Larry Summers, because of the Administration's disastrous economic performance. But while Summers is, indeed, a clueless Keynesian, and Geithner is a career bureaucrat, they are not the source of the problem. The source of the problem is the Godfather of the Administration's economic policies, President Obama himself. Consequently, what is needed is not to fire Geithner or Summers, but to fire Obama. While President Obama is...

Just over a year ago, in July 2009, this column predicted in an article entitled "2010" that a political earthquake was coming this year that would shake Washington to its foundations. In October 2009, I argued that the real danger facing Republicans was that they would underestimate their strength this year, and not win all the seats they could win by failing to recognize soon enough just how vulnerable even established Democrats would be. At the time this was laughed off as wild-eyed, unhinged, bluff and bluster. Today, one year later, it is actually conventional wisdom. The political earthquake is...

The health policy atrocity that Washington Democrats are now finalizing represents an ugly new turn in American politics. From almost the founding of the Republic, we have seen demagogues seek to sway public opinion in their favor with crass arguments appealing to base motives in the electorate, from racism to class warfare to xenophobia. But that is NOT what we are seeing in Washington today, on issues from health care to "global warming" to federal deficits, spending, taxes, welfare, energy, and beyond. What we are seeing in Washington today is much worse. What this mob currently in power is telling...

In last year's campaign, the one true thing Obama said to his critics was, "The political ground is changing under your feet." But what is not sufficiently recognized is that is going on again, right now, in the opposite direction. That is what yesterday's elections showed. And what yesterday's political earthquake revealed about the landscape is that the biggest miscalculation going on right now is that the Republicans underestimate their own strength. As a result, they may fail to take maximum advantage of the political tsunami that is coming in 2010, just building to what is to come in 2012....

The latest Rasmussen poll shows Chris Christie, the Republican nominee for Governor in New Jersey, beating the incumbent Democrat John Corzine by 4 points, even with a third party conservative in the race drawing over 10 percent of the vote. In Virginia, Republican gubernatorial nominee Bob McDonnell is so far ahead of his Democratic rival Creigh Deeds that Democrats have already begun to argue on the front page of The Washington Post who is at fault for blowing that race.

President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are rushing to enact legislation that would overhaul the way health care is financed and delivered in the United States. It would dramatically increase the role of government in virtually all aspects of health care. Such an initiative should be carefully studied to determine whether it actually solves problems in the health care arena or makes them worse. National health plans similar to what President Obama is proposing have been adopted in other countries. They always start out promising universal access and free or reduced-price health care. But they end up with massive institutional...

Next year's elections are going to produce a political earthquake. That is because we currently suffer the most left-wing government in our nation's history. After just 6 months in office, the flower children that rule Washington in overwhelming numbers are already smashing through all records regarding federal taxes, spending, deficits, and debt. Obama and his ultra-left Democrats adopted a so-called stimulus bill raising spending a trillion dollars that never had a prayer of actually creating jobs and promoting long-term economic growth, because it was based entirely on old-fashioned, brain dead, proven to fail, Keynesian economics. Though we would have to...

Sarah Palin's resignation as Governor of Alaska is a brilliant liberating move for her career, and a potential turning point for the national conservative movement. The biggest problem with her responsibility as Governor of Alaska is that the state is so far away from the rest of America. No one hears of the good work she has been doing there, and the left is free to paint their own false caricature of her. ... I am hoping she spends two weeks of every month now touring the states doing fundraisers for a the sweeping Republican revival in 2010 that is...

Barack Obama called for House passage of the cap and trade tax bill last Friday by calling it a jobs bill. The bill is designed to raise the price of energy in the U.S. so much that it will reduce the use of fossil fuels by 17% by 2020 and by 83% by 2050. Sentencing the U.S. economy to high cost energy is not a particularly good strategy for creating jobs. The Charles River Associates, a Harvard based economics consulting firm, estimates a net loss of jobs from the bill of about 2.5 million each year. This is surely a...

Everyone in Washington knows the record Federal deficits and debt are out of control and can't continue. President Obama knows it. The ultraliberal Democrat Congressional leadership knows it. Rank and file Congressional Republicans and Democrats know it. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has been openly saying so. Obama's economic policies, adopted by the Democrat-controlled Congress, call for total Federal borrowing of $3.5 trillion this year alone! The Federal debt is projected to soar over the next 10 years to a peacetime record of 84% of GDP, and to keep on growing past the all-time record of 113% of GDP during World...

On its current course, the Middle East is headed for nuclear war. The only question is whether someone will act to take history off that course. That won't be the left wing extremist/narcissist we now have in the White House, who is lost in his own dream world. Like Adolf Hitler, the theocrats who run Iran have told us exactly what they plan to do. They plan to build nuclear weapons, and use them to "wipe Israel off the map." They have said this plan is rooted in their fundamental religious beliefs and doctrines regarding the return of their God...