Free Republic

This weekend, I had the opportunity to speak with a group of anti-amnesty protesters in Annapolis, Maryland. They were a small but very enthusiastic group and were grateful that I was there to provide a greater awareness for their cause. They protested at the intersection of West St. and Route 2 in Annapolis, a short drive from the governor’s mansion, where Martin O’Malley is seeking to bring illegal immigrant children, who crossed the southern border to Maryland. One of the ladies I spoke with was part of the “Free Republic” group. While they didn’t organize this particular protest, they...

The New York Times notices the smoke collecting on the ceiling of the auditorium of the world and wonders whether there might be something to worry about. Peter Baker in an article titled “Crises Cascade and Converge, Testing Obama” notices that things are falling apart. “Not long after a passenger jet exploded in midair and plummeted to the ground in Ukraine last week, escalating a volatile crisis pitting the United States and Europe against Russia, President Obama’s thoughts turned to Syria.” Baker has a thought. These problems may be linked. Rarely has a president been confronted with so many seemingly...

A key House panel voted on Thursday to authorize Speaker John Boehner to sue President Barack Obama for failing to faithfully implement Obamacare. The House Rules Committee vote was 7 in favor, 4 against. All the Republicans voted for it; all the Democrats voted against it. It brings the resolution closer to full House vote, expected next week before Congress adjourns for a five-week summer recess.

The decision comes amid a tightening of security by the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, which has seen dozens of grenade and gunfire attacks the last two years. Earlier this year the U.S. increased the number of security personnel at the embassy and put armed Marines behind sandbag bunkers on the embassy roof. The State Department also reduced the number of U.S. personnel here by moving a regional USAID office out of the country.

Representative Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, is releasing a major document this morning laying out a conservative approach to reforming federal anti-poverty programs (he’s speaking on it this morning at the American Enterprise Institute). Not all of his proposals are specific legislation and some endorse existing legislation. Roughly speaking, here’s what in it: Offer states the option of a big block grant to replace existing federal welfare programs Ryan proposes a pilot program called the “Opportunity Grant,” which offers states the ability to use the funds they currently get for a range of programs to run individually...

The Obama administration has filed a brief with the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver indicating it plans to develop an alternative for Catholic and other religious nonprofit employers to opt out of providing federally mandated contraceptives they object to including in their employee health care coverage. Several media outlets, including AP, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, reported July 23 that the administration said it would come up with a "work-around" that would be different than the accommodation it currently has available to such employers. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as part...

ASPEN, Colo.—Al Qaeda, nation states, and criminals are preparing for major cyber attacks against U.S. infrastructure that could be comparable to the devastating September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, a senior Justice Department official said on Thursday. “We’re in a pre-9/11 moment, in some respects, with cyber,” said John Carlin, assistant attorney general for national security in the Justice Department.

BATTLE MOUNTAIN — Once again ranchers who run cattle on the Argenta Allotment in Lander County were told Wednesday that due to drought a number of areas would be closed to livestock. Pete and Lynn Tomera were told by the Bureau of Land Management they had a week to remove cattle from nine segments of the allotment ... We have 7 days to ride the entire mountain and have the cattle off. We are right in the middle of haying and are forced to drop everything and begin gathering cattle,” the Tomeras wrote. “We are forced to put the cattle...

The Obama administration is coming under fire for once again making a unilateral change to ObamaCare -- this time, quietly exempting the five U.S. territories and their more than 4 million residents from virtually all major provisions of the health care law. The decision was made a week ago, and was a long time coming. For months, the territories have been complaining that the law was implemented so poorly in their regions that it destabilized their insurance markets. Until now, the Department of Health and Human Services claimed its hands were tied. But last Wednesday, the department reversed course. The...

Federal Election Commission Chairman Lee Goodman issued a stark warning on Wednesday when he suggested that political speech and press freedoms were under assault by federal regulators. In August, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will engage in a bus tour promoting his new book, The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea. This was revealed in the release of a letter from the FEC following a request from Ryan’s attorneys to ensure that the House Budget Committee chairman remained in compliance with campaign regulations. Ryan’s team asked for and received permission to use campaign funds to purchase his own book in order...

Central American presidents sharply criticized Washington on Thursday for failing to address the root causes of violence and poverty in their countries that helped spur a recent influx of child migrants to the United States. “Washington must understand that if there exists drug violence in Central America, if there is no peace, if there is a lack of opportunity, this will redound to enormous costs to the United States,” Honduras’s Juan Orlando Hernández said during an appearance with Guatemala’s Otto Pérez Molina at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The two leaders repeatedly described the situation as a “crisis”...

What if you were allowed to vote only because it didn't make a difference? What if no matter how you voted the elites always got their way? What if the concept of one person/one vote was just a fiction created by the government to induce your compliance? What if democracy as it has come to exist in America today is dangerous to personal freedom? What if our so-called democracy erodes the people's understanding of natural rights and the reasons for government and instead turns political campaigns into beauty contests? What if American democracy allows the government to do anything...

The family of two people murdered by a man sentenced to the death penalty by lethal injection showed no remorse when his execution dragged on for nearly two hours. Jeanne Brown watched from the gallery at the Arizona State Prison Complex as Joseph Rudolph Wood, who shot her sister and father dead in 1989, died on Wednesday. She angrily brushed off his attorneys' complaints that Wood suffered during the execution. "You don't know what excruciating is," Brown told the media after Wood was pronounced dead. "Excruciating is seeing your dad lying there in a pool of blood, seeing your sister...

Has the Obama administration competently and effectively managed the government? A Fox News poll released Wednesday finds a majority of American voters says no -- including about a third of Democrats. A 58-percent majority says the White House has not been competent at managing the federal government. Some 32 percent of Democrats join 67 percent of independents and 84 percent of Republicans in holding that view. Click here for the poll results. Forty percent of voters do say the administration has been competent at running the government.

Here in southeastern Virginia, our biggest city, Norfolk, is saddled with an unwanted claim to fame. As The Washington Post has reported, Norfolk is the place "where normal tides have risen 1.5 feet over the past century and the sea is rising faster than anywhere else on the East Coast." NPR notes that the Norfolk area "is particularly vulnerable because the land is sinking as sea levels are rising." Scientists from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science here at the College of William and Mary predict, according to the Post article, that "if current trends hold, by the end of...

I may regret writing this column. Retaliation by a state agency is an ugly thing. My best hope is that the bureaucrats who have made my life a living hell for these past few months don’t read insignificant little articles written by nobody columnists for a bi-weekly newspaper. It wasn’t bad enough that the cable, phone, credit card, garbage, power, and water companies, along with the Florida Retirement System and bank, gave me major grief after Frank died. Apparently it doesn’t matter that no payment was ever late or not paid in full. Since Frank was the primary, they reasoned...

More than 320 of the thousands of immigrant children who have streamed across the U.S. border from Central American countries have been placed with relatives living in Connecticut, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said. Some activists in New Haven have pressed the administration to make the former Gateway Community College property available to house the children. In a statement released Tuesday night, Malloy said officials are exploring the possibility of using the property, which is owned and controlled by the Board of Regents.

Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court might have already tipped their hand on the latest substantial legal threat to Obamacare, according to one Yale law professor. And if they did, it would be good news for the Obama administration. A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled Tuesday that Obamacare's language did not allow people shopping on HealthCare.gov to access tax credits if they purchase insurance through the federal website. If that decision were to become law, affecting the 36 states served by the federal exchange, it would strip subsidies from nearly 5 million people and send their premiums skyrocketing....

Scandal: An internationally accredited information-technology asset-management firm says the IRS has some explaining to do as our patience is taxed with tales of even more convenient computer crashes. Private-sector organizations as vast as the Internal Revenue Service typically have redundancy built into their information technology systems, as secure record keeping is the key to managing their businesses and staying in business. Such records, if nothing else, are often required to be kept by law, and often by the IRS itself. As we have noted, Lois Lerner's lost emails from the critical period when the IRS was serving as a political...

Our country’s future, the future of the American people – and indeed the future of the world’s people as they emulate the American example – could well be so spectacularly wonderful that the phrases “shining city on a hill” and “American exceptionalism” are one day looked back upon as historical understatements. There is no greater gift – no greater secular value – than the opportunity to live a human life upon the Earth, no matter how disadvantageous our circumstances. (As for spiritual values, we “see through a glass darkly” now and look forward to experiences beyond our comprehension.) Read more...