Free Republic

In choosing to serve her country in uniform, Hayleigh Lynn Perez knowingly accepted a nomadic life. Now the former Army sergeant says she and thousands of other veterans trying to get a higher education are being penalized for that enforced rootlessness. Under the Post-9/11 GI Bill, the federal government will pick up the full in-state cost for any honorably discharged service member wishing to attend a public college or university. But because the often intricate rules governing residency differ from state to state, and even within university systems, many veterans face a bewildering battle to exercise the benefits they've already...

$16.4 trillion – that’s the latest figure for America’s massive national debt. Nearly $6 trillion of this debt was racked up in the first term of the Obama presidency – a 50 percent increase. It is horrifying to imagine what the debt will be when Obama leaves the White House in 2016, unless Congress has the willpower to stand in the way. Meanwhile, as the world’s superpower is literally drowning in debt, President Obama is basking in the warmth of the beaches of Hawaii, at an exclusive resort way beyond the financial reach of most Americans. The president pays the...

Normally I'd be inclined to run something like this on a Sunday, when I like to explore more faith-based topics. However, today is Hobby Lobby Appreciation Day, where consumers who support the Christian ownership's stand against the HHS mandate that attempts to impose a highly restrictive definition of religious expression can put their money where their mouths are. Since I don't really have a hobby at the moment, I'll instead offer a passage from the open letter written by Hobby Lobby CEO David Green, who explains why he's decided to spend a lot of money and risk even more to...

Pelosi: "Not enough" revenue in "fiscal cliff" deal By Jake Miller House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., argued that additional revenue must be included in upcoming deficit reduction deals, calling the revenue secured by the "fiscal cliff" deal "significant" but "not enough." "The President had originally said he wanted $1.6 trillion in revenue," she said on "Face the Nation." "He took it down to 1.2 as a compromise in this legislation. We get $620 billion dollars, very significant, high-end tax, changing the high-end tax rate to 39.6 percent, but that is not enough on the revenue side." Pelosi declined to...

Washington passed a fiscal cliff deal that honors the most famous cliff diver in history - Wile E. Coyote. Just as Mr. Coyote obtained complex and ludicrous devised plans from a mail-order company Congress cobbled together yet another bill that pretends to have answers but leaves lots of questions and more frustration. Just as the template for the Road Runner cartoon saw contraptions used by Wile E. Coyote "invariably fail in improbable and spectacular ways" each issue that gets resolved in Washington these days is doomed to failure. Part of the reason failure is inevitable is because core problems are...

SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TEXAS): The reason why I'm a conservative is because conservative policies work and they improve opportunities. They are the avenue for climbing the economic dream. And what I have been talking about for many years is opportunity conservatism, that every policy should focus like a laser on easing the means of ascent up the economic ladder. That we should be championing the 47%, to take that now infamous comment. Look, the great thing about Americans -- Americans don't want to be dependent upon government. Dependency saps the spirit, it doesn't work. Americans want to stand on their...

nfluential conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer has praised Republican House Speaker John Boehner for preventing a ‘rape of the Treasury’ by blocking a larger relief bill for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Bohener and the GOP leadership have been criticized by New York-area Republicans for failing to pass a $60 billion bill to the floor, with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie calling it ‘disgusting.’ Instead, the House passed a much smaller bill dealing solely with flood insurance on Friday, with a larger bill set to follow. Speaking on Fox News’ Special Report on Friday, Krauthammer claimed that Boehner had done the...

Officials say they had to put one of Illinois' maximum-security prisons on lockdown not because of an inmate riot but because dozens of guards called in sick. The movement of inmates was limited for most of Friday at the Stateville Correctional Center in suburban Chicago. Nearly 60 employees failed to turn up to work, an occurrence that Illinois Department of Corrections spokeswoman Stacey Solano called "unusual."

Following NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre's call for placing trained armed guards in each of the nation's public schools, gun control advocates went on the attack and refused to give the idea any meaningful consideration. We thought it might help to review the timeline of the shootings on 14 December 2012 to see if it might be a good idea. Time Event 9:30:00 AM: Classes begin at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. 9:35:53 AM: First known dispatch call - 911 Dispatch: "Sandy Hook School, Caller's indicated she thinks someone is shooting in the building." 9:36:15 AM: Shooting continues - Dispatch: "The individual...

The entirely predictable consequences of the Journal News' decision to publish a map of gun-owners marches on… Rockland County Sheriff Louis Falco, who spoke at a news conference flanked by other county officials, said the Journal News' decision to post an online map of names and addresses of handgun owners Dec. 23 has put law enforcement officers in danger. "They have inmates coming up to them and telling them exactly where they live. That's not acceptable to me," Falco said, according to Newsday. Robert Riley, an officer with the White Plains Police Department and president of its Patrolman’s Benevolent Association,...

David Cameron says he wants to stay on as British prime minister until 2020, calling his agenda of reforms enough to keep him busy through another term. … Cameron told the newspaper (Sunday Telegraph) there was no turning back on policies such as allowing same-sex marriage or the protection of foreign-aid spending, which have been unpopular with his party’s grass roots. He urged critics in his party to “stop complaining.” …

Youtube video: 7:05 This video is well worth the time. John Taylor Gatto-The Purpose of Schooling So?....With the government schools becoming increasingly more prison-like,( and with children literally be arrested for behavior that was once seen as a learning opportunity and handled within the school), do John Gatto's comments ring true? I think they do. If children attend the government's godless prison-like schools and are treated like state prisoners within the prison-like compounds, they risk learning to be comfortable with being state prisoners. The continuation of government schooling has, and will have, evil consequences for the child and for the...

Three years ago, I put together a “Moocher Index” that measured the degree to which non-poor people in a state were benefiting from redistribution programs. As you can see if you click on the nearby table, Vermont was the worst state, followed by Mississippi, Maine, New York, and Massachusetts.I confessed that my Moocher Index was a crude and imprecise tool, but it was one of my most popular posts in the early days of this blog. Probably because it was a way of measuring the degree to which people were being lured to ride in the wagon of government dependency...

("Mythbusting: Israel and Switzerland are not gun-toting utopias," Wonkblog (December 14, 2012)). It is unfortunate then that the body of your research on Switzerland can only be described as "shoddy," at best. At worst it appears more like raw academic fraud.

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi isn't ruling out pushing for upper-income earners to pay more even after the "fiscal cliff" deal that raised their taxes. She tells CBS' "Face the Nation" that "I'm saying that's not off the table." The California Democrats isn't getting into specifics but she does discuss changes to tax law that might involve deductions and other breaks.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi isn’t ruling out pushing for upper-income earners to pay more even after the “fiscal cliff” deal that raised their taxes. … The former House speaker also says the current Republican Party isn’t the “Grand Old Party that did so many things for America that commanded so much respect.” …

The Californian picked to lead congressional Democrats´ efforts on gun control says the positions held by some gun rights advocates are unnecessarily divisive, and that government action should go beyond simply outlawing certain weapons. "I think assault weapons are a pox on the home of every gun owner," Rep. Mike Thompson said Saturday on CNN. "I think that´s the thing that´s going to cause the overwhelming majority of people in this country who aren´t gun owners to have negative feelings about those of us who are gun owners." Thompson is a gun owner and hunter himself,

January 6, 2013 Congress has just raised payroll taxes. It has done it before, and will do it again. Our august solons excuse themselves, however, by pleading that the 2 percentage point hike is merely the sunset of a tax holiday. And necessary to shore up a faltering system. It’s not a triumph of responsibility, though. What is responsibility? Every year the Social Security Administration sends out a helpful note to its “clients” about how much we’ve contributed in payroll taxes. The kindly bureaucrats also warn us not to rely only upon Social Security payments. They don’t tell us that...

Two days ago we posted a discussion around a newly released photo from the White House. The picture was taken in the oval office on Sept 11th 2012: (Snip) The picture was taken at exactly 7:28:16pm DC time. It was dusk outside, and President Obama had just completed a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Why is this important? Because we know the conversation lasted an hour. (Snip) So this phone call between Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama started three hours after the attack began.

During George W. Bush's presidency, it was a matter of liberal faith that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on al-Qaida members "undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer," as Barack Obama once put it. According to Obama, "enhanced interrogation techniques" are wrong, and -- no matter what common sense tells you -- they never work. Asking nicely works best with terrorists. "Zero Dark Thirty" -- Kathryn Bigelow's new thriller about the decadelong quest to bring Osama bin Laden to justice -- doesn't cleave to that liberal orthodoxy. At a preview Thursday, I saw a steely homage...