Free Republic

Ellen DeGeneres was a completely slavish toady to President Obama as he appeared on her show to sell Obamacare -- not to young people, but to mothers. The president made his pitch to "especially all the moms out there who may have young people – 26, 27, do not have health insurance, but they think they’re invincible and nothing’s ever going to happen to ‘em – what we’ve said is you never know what life is going to throw at ya." For example, a president who lies about keeping your plan and keeping your doctor. You didn't see that coming!...

The Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies say fossil fuel and carbon dioxide emissions cause "dangerous global warming." Their latest strategy for advancing this thesis involves estimating the "social cost of carbon" — monetized damages associated with alleged climate risks. The agencies assume Earth's climate is highly sensitive to CO2, then hypothesize almost every carbon cost, including the impact on agriculture, forestry, water resources, coastal cities, ecosystems, wildlife and human health. But as a new Management Information Services report explains, they ignore the most obvious and enormous benefits of using fossil fuel and emitting carbon dioxide. Had they followed...

You're walking down the sidewalk and see police officers making an arrest. They're using force, and the man they're arresting is protesting. You pull out your cellphone and start recording. An officer orders you to stop, says you're breaking the law. He demands that you hand over your phone. What should you do? Are you breaking the law?No, according to local lawyers, as long as you were in a public place and not interfering with the officer or his investigation. "You have an absolute right to videotape an officer or anyone else on the street," said Howard Marks, an Orlando...

The Shiite population of Baghdad may take an immense step backward for female equality if a new piece of legislation allowing young girls to marry is passed. The bill called the Jaafari Personal Status Law permits girls that are younger than 9 to marry with only the girl’s father having authority over the match. On Feb. 25, the Jaafari Law gained approval from Iraq’s Council of Ministers and will affect 65 to 70 percent of the nation. The bill proposes additional regulations as well including the prohibition of Muslim men marrying non-Muslim women. The document also states that husbands are...

Does the United States Election Assistance Commission (“EAC”) have the statutory and constitutional authority to deny a state’s request to include its proof-of-citizenship requirement in the state-specific instructions on the federal mail voter registration form? The Plaintiffs— Arizona and Kansas and their secretaries of state—say it does not, and have asked this Court to order the EAC to add the requested language immediately.

Exit strategy: A Hillary Clinton presidential candidacy looks like a sure thing, with marquee Democratic donors and activists mobilizing for what they see as her inevitable entrance into the 2016 race.Yet some of Mrs. Clinton’s closest confidants and allies aren’t sold on the idea that she should run. Their cautions add an unpredictable element as Mrs. Clinton weighs whether to seek the presidency again, a decision she says she plans to make later this year.One of Mrs. Clinton’s top advisers and former aides, Cheryl Mills, believes she should stay out of the contest and has told her as much,...

(Reuters) - The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose less than expected last week, pointing to some underlying strength in the labor market. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 320,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Claims for the week ended March 8 were unrevised. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast first-time applications for jobless benefits rising to 325,000 in the week ended March 15. The four-week moving average for new claims, considered a better measure of underlying labor market conditions as it irons out week-to-week volatility, fell 3,500 to...

The conservative 2016 contender wants to lure young and black voters to the GOP, so he's taking his message to them. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ BERKELEY, Calif. – Rand Paul's swing through Berkeley is just the beginning of his foray into traditionally Democratic territory. After his visit to this liberal stronghold, where he's speaking to students about the NSA and privacy, the Kentucky senator will make stops at the National Urban League in July and at the NAACP in the coming months, if an informal invitation from the group is made official. He's also plotting a trip to Chicago and Milwaukee, Paul said...

Last week I noted that, when it comes to the debate over gay marriage, the left has decided that they’re tired of arguing over the issue and have instead chosen to simply delegitimize opponents of gay marriage as nothing more than bigots. They have done this because you don’t need to debate a bigot, their views being seen as inherently unreasonable. This is, of course, not the only case of such delegitimization. Something very similar is taking place in the debate over climate change. There is a growing consensus on the left that there is but one appropriate position to...

Russian mockery of President Obama has taken a bizarre turn. The newly elected Prime Minister of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, has tweeted (in Russian) a photoshopped image of Barack Obama in a Russian military uniform, implying that our president’s behavior can be explained by his purported status as a deep cover Russian agent. Интересно, после проведения успешной компании по возвращению Крыма, Барак получит полковника? pic.twitter.com/GYhW2jF4zA — Сергей Аксенов (@sergyaksenov) March 17, 2014 Oleg Atbashian of The People’s Cube, a former Soviet propagandist who fled to the West, has a fascinating post explaining what is going on here. Such a jab could...

<p>The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose less than expected last week, pointing to some underlying strength in the labor market.</p> <p>Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 320,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Claims for the week ended March 8 were unrevised.</p>

Ellen DeGeneres was a completely slavish toady to President Obama as he appeared on her show to sell Obamacare -- not to young people, but to mothers. The president made his pitch to "especially all the moms out there who may have young people – 26, 27, do not have health insurance, but they think they’re invincible and nothing’s ever going to happen to ‘em – what we’ve said is you never know what life is going to throw at ya." For example, a president who lies about keeping your plan and keeping your doctor

Evidently the White House realizes that Michelle Obama’s expensive and luxurious family junket to China, accompanied by her mother and daughters, looks like a colossal waste of taxpayer money. That’s the logical explanation for unusual restrictions on media access. No reporters are accompanying her. Even the Obama sycophants at the New York Times are noticing:  "Mrs. Obama is drawing scrutiny for her decision to travel with her mother and her two daughters, who are on spring break, bringing to mind a vacation she took to Spain in 2010 with her daughter Sasha and some friends. She and her entourage paid...

One of the hallmarks of a totalitarian state is that there are so many laws and regulations that no one can possibly know what they are, let alone obey them. Thus everyone is a criminal, and only the despot’s discretion separates the solid citizen from the criminal. Unfortunately, the United States is rapidly approaching–if it has not already reached–this dystopian status. So Glenn Reynolds’s great column in USA Today should be a starting point for lots of conversations. Glenn offers several suggestions for how this situation might be remedied, which, again, are a starting point for discussion. But the real...

In ruling out military action, Obama explained that “the Ukrainians don’t want [an actual war with Russia], nobody would want that.” But if Russia continues to devour their country, the Ukrainians are no less likely to want a war than any of Russia’s other neighbors or former client states would be under similar circumstances. Accordingly, Obama’s statement can be read by Russia as ruling out any U.S. military to stop any future aggression within the former Soviet Union and perhaps within its entire former sphere of influence. Perhaps Obama would have been better advised not to have made this statement....

Published in 1989, After the Ball is a seminal work which laid out a comprehensive plan to establish the “normalcy” of gays and lesbians and secure broader acceptance and rights.  It is subtitled, How America Will conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s.The manifesto was laid out by a pair of Harvard graduates.  Marshall Kirk (class of 1980) became a researcher in neuropsychiatry.  Hunter Madsen (class of 1985) received his degree in Politics and went on to work on Madison Avenue and become an expert in public persuasion tactics and social marketing. Today, twenty-five years after its...

Two years ago, I shared a video about the Environmental Protection Agency’s brutal and thuggish tactics against an Idaho family. That story had a very happy ending because the Supreme Court struck a blow for property rights and unanimously ruled against the EPA (too bad that similarly sound analysis was absent when the Justices decided the Kelo case). Now we have a new example of the EPA running amok Let’s look at a horrifying report about another family in the cross hairs of a rogue bureaucracy. All Andy Johnson wanted to do was build a stock pond on his sprawling...

The spring of 2014 has not yet begun, but a jittery Wall Street was spooked Wednesday by the prospect that interest rates might rise “as soon as” the spring of 2015. That was the immediate response to Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen’s first press conference since taking office. Yellen’s mere suggestion that the Fed might someday pursue a less inflationary policy has been blamed for a drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and armchair central bankers are jumping on the rookie Fed chief for talking the market down. Fed may raise rates as soon as next spring, Yellen suggests:...

Even before polls showed that conservative Oklahoma Senate candidate T.W. Shannon had slashed a 35-point deficit to single digits days after former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin heartily endorsed him, Shannon knew immediately that his upstart campaign had changed when Palin posted her support on Facebook and Twitter last week. "All of a sudden people who hadn't returned my calls started calling back," Shannon told Breitbart News on Wednesday. "And the excitement from our grassroots supporters just exploded. They were already energized, but when Governor Palin came on board, it just kicked in to overdrive." Shannon said, "There are things we...

Los Angeles City Council members have discovered how to cause earthquakes. Three councilmen think fracking may be the cause of Monday’s earthquake in the Santa Monica Mountains, and they want the city, state, and feds to do an in-depth review. Councilmen Paul Koretz, Mike Bonin, and Bernard Parks Tuesday introduced a motion calling for the city, the U.S. Geological Survey, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, and the California Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources to report on whether hydraulic fracturing caused the moderate 4.4-magnitude earthquake, the Los Angeles Times reports. “It is crucial to the health and...