Free Republic

Colorado’s decision to legalize marijuana was a bad idea, the state’s governor said Friday. Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat who opposed the 2012 decision by voters to make pot legal, said the state still doesn’t fully know what the unintended consequences of the move will be. If I could've waved a wand the day after the election, I would've reversed the election and said, 'This was a bad idea,’” Hickenlooper said Friday on CNBC's “Squawk Box.” “You don't want to be the first person to do something like this,” he said. He said that he tells other governors to “wait...

The federal government spent $432,000 to study gay sex apps.  I never knew that gay sex even required an app; I always thought two guys, a tub of vaseline, and a big bottle of tequila was all that was needed.  But apparently: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent nearly a half a million dollars studying gay hookup apps such as Grindr. The government awarded $432,000 to Columbia University to interview gay men who use GPS dating apps and determine whether it increases their likelihood of engaging in risky sexual behavior. Gay sex between men, by definition, is...

In the pages of the Times of Trenton on January 20, a psychologist named Ronald J. Coughlin published an op-ed titled “Fundamental Changes Would Better American Society.” Mr. Coughlin is worried about a lot of the right things: alcohol abuse, the divorce rate, childbearing out of wedlock (particularly among teens). But what ideas he has for “fundamental changes”! The idea, for instance, that because science tells us about the maturing brain we ought to raise the drinking age to twenty-five is going to go over big, with an electorate that can vote at eighteen. (Mr. Coughlin may want to...

Evidently, Republicans don’t feel competent enough to make a case against infanticide. Why else would the GOP pull its 20-week abortion-limit bill? Here’s a short list of things that are less popular than banning late-term abortions: “Acting” on climate change. “Free” community college. Taxing the wealthy. Building the Keystone XL pipeline. President Barack Obama. Future President Hillary Clinton. Every Republican who’s thinking about running for president. A new Marist poll finds that 84 percent of Americans favor some level of further restrictions on abortion. And regardless of their feelings about the legality of the procedure, 60 percent believe it to...

While Iran’s march toward a nuclear bomb has provoked a major clash between the White House and Congress, Iran’s march toward conventional domination of the Arab world has been largely overlooked. In Washington, that is. The Arabs have noticed. And the pro-American ones, the Gulf Arabs in particular, are deeply worried. This week, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized control of the Yemeni government, heretofore pro-American. In September, they overran Sanaa, the capital. On Tuesday, they seized the presidential palace. On Thursday, they forced the president to resign. The Houthi have local religious grievances, being Shiites in a majority Sunni land. But...

It is all to the good that the Boston office of the FBI has launched a public- relations campaign to get citizens to report cases of suspected political corruption. It is also comforting to know that the FBI has established a tip line (844-NO-BRIBE) as well as a website where people can report cases of suspected corruption by their local state rep. There will even be FBI billboards set up promoting the FBI's "Stop Corruption Now" campaign that will list the phone line and the website address. The FBI announced the new campaign at a press conference last month.

It seems that the sole purpose of SOTU is to seduce America with grand promises of sugar-coated interventions to be undertaken with other people's money. For libertarians, sitting through this kind of speech is naturally a dark experience. For libertarian Millennials, the takeaway from this particular speech is that the President sees economic growth as an invitation to redistribute income through schemes that we will ultimately pay for. But Obama misleads us when he attributes favorable economic conditions to his own policies. As it turns out, the stimulus package and the redistribution that Nancy Pelosi famously championed as a job...

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - Gun maker Remington has moved a lawsuit by families of those shot in the Sandy Hook school massacre from state to federal court, where at least one expert says it has less chance of succeeding. Nine families sued Remington and others in Bridgeport Superior Court in December arguing the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle used in the shooting should not have been sold for civilian use because of its overwhelming firepower. A 10th family joined the lawsuit adding a wrongful death claim....

Bread and circuses — and free day care — at the State of the Union.-snip- Tonight, Alex and I watched Mr. Obama’s SOTU speech. It was great. Give everyone free day care. Who pays for it? Where do they find enough qualified day-care workers? Where do they train them? Everyone gets free education. Wait. Isn’t public education up through high school already free? And the ones who need it most, the blacks and Hispanics, drop out at terrifying rates. Who will make them stay in school and do their homework? Who pays for this? And where do the teachers come...

With the SOTU behind us, what’s left for Obama in his lame duck years?Looking at his record, it’s difficult to see any promise of accomplishment. His entire tenure has been one vast Gobi of negative achievement unparalleled in the history of this Republic. His domestic record--to mention only the highlights--consists of the Stimulus (“shovel-ready jobs”), ObamaCare, forcing tens of millions out of the workforce, decoupling the stock market from the economy as a whole, and a still stumbling recovery. His “post-racial presidency” is a sad joke, with race relations in a state of tension unseen since the late 60s. His...

As if to prove that global-warming alarmism is in fact a political movement rather than a scientific one, the U.S. Senate, composed primarily of carbon dioxide-spewing attorneys, voted this week to declare that the climate is changing as it always has, and that (natural) climate change is “not a hoax.” Warming theorists celebrated the news, as if a majority vote by lobbyist-controlled politicians — who remain less popular than cockroaches in most polls — constituted evidence of Truth. In the end, though, despite their cheering, many climate alarmists apparently either did not understand the measure or were deliberately trying to...

President Obama was asked about his 'first wife' in a PR-disaster interview on Thursday after picking three of the most popular YouTube content creators to interview him. GloZell Green, a popular YouTube fixture known for her extreme acts like eating a ladle full of cinnamon, offered the president three samples of her trademark green lipstick as gifts for his daughters – and for the woman she called Obama's 'first wife.' 'You know something I don't?' Obama cracked before Green corrected herself and referred to Michelle Obama as 'first lady.' But the PR disaster that was the White House's 50-minute-long 'YouTube...

..............[U.S. Senator Jeff] Sessions last week accused the tech industry of perpetuating a "hoax" by claiming there is a shortage of qualified U.S. tech workers. "The tech industry's promotion of expanded temporary visas -- such as the H-1B -- and green cards is driven by its desire for cheap, young and immobile labor," wrote Sessions, in a memo he sent last week to fellow lawmakers. Last summer, Sessions attacked Microsoft's push for more H-1B visas as it laid off 18,000 employees. Now, as subcommittee chairman, Sessions will have the ability to conduct investigations and hold oversight hearings. That Senate memo...

The head of the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records said he plans on being at work Friday morning despite having his security pass taken away and being fired by Gov. Tom Wolf. Erik Arneson, who was appointed as executive director by Gov. Tom Corbett, was met by an attorney from the Pennsylvania Department of Community & Economic Development on Thursday. Arneson said his security pass, office key and state-provided vehicle was taken from him. But that's not going to stop him from being in his office Friday morning. "[Wolf] doesn't have the authority to do it," Arneson said. "It's an...

Staff of the Washington Health Benefits Exchange, which manages the state’s Wahealthplanfinder health-insurance exchange, told its board today that it had significantly improved the processing of account invoices and payments to insurance carriers. Richard Onizuka, CEO of the exchange told board members that of the accounts processed in December, those with carrier-payment problems were down to 1.7 percent, and those with invoicing problems were 1.5 percent. “We are seeing some improvement,” Onizuka said. “It still means that too many people are being affected.” “It seems enormously high to me,” new board member Mark Stensager said. “And it’s a trend that...

Column one: Iran, Obama, Boehner and Netanyahu Iran has apparently produced an intercontinental ballistic missile whose range far exceeds the distance between Iran and Israel, and between Iran and Europe. On Wednesday night, Channel 2 showed satellite imagery taken by Israel’s Eros-B satellite that was launched last April. The imagery showed new missile-related sites that Iran recently constructed just outside Tehran. One facility is a missile launch site, capable of sending a rocket into space or of firing an ICBM. On the launch pad was a new 27-meter long missile, never seen before. The missile and the launch pad indicate...

At his inauguration as Maryland’s 62nd governor, Republican Larry Hogan promised to usher in an era of bipartisanship and cooperation in a state capital dominated by Democrats, even as he outlined an unabashedly conservative pro-business agenda. “We must get the state government off our backs and out of our pockets so that we can grow the private sector, put people back to work and turn our economy around,” Mr. Hogan said in a speech delivered on the steps of the State House. As he began his speech amid a flurry of snowfall that dusted the crowd, Mr. Hogan with a...

Doctors’ house calls are considered a thing of the past, but not in the appointment book of Dr. Carrol Frazier Landrum, an 88-year-old physician from Edwards, Mississippi. The good doctor will see you no matter who you are, where you are, or how much money you have — as long his 2007 Toyota Camry can deliver him to your location. But now his state’s medical board wants to see him gone. Dr. Landrum, a WWII veteran, was forced to make a change after crime drove him from his Edwards, Mississippi, office two years ago, and he couldn’t find another space...

The news has been leaked to the New York Times: the Department of Justice has concluded its federal investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and it has reached substantially the same conclusions as the local grand jury that chose not to press charges against police officer Darren Wilson. Let’s reiterate that. Eric Holder’s Justice Department has looked at the case and decided that the evidence indicates Officer Wilson was justified in shooting Michael Brown. This is actually not much of a surprise. When local prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced the grand jury’s decision not to prosecute the...

A note to House Republicans: Today is the 42nd anniversary of the decision in Roe v. Wade. I never need reminding of which anniversary it is — it ’s always the same as my age. I was one of those who entered the world through a pregnancy of the sort we call “unplanned,” though as a Hayekian type I do not object to being the “result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” I was born about three months — call it a “trimester” — before Roe. In my case, the result was an adoption. Mine...