Free Republic

Welcome to Obamaland where our inalienable rights are being gradually degraded. Now that President Obama needs never to curry electoral favor again will government’s grasping overreach soon strangle a successful arts-and-crafts company? “We’re just going to have to cross that bridge when we come to it,” says attorney Kyle Duncan of the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty. Mr. Duncan represents Hobby Lobby, a family-owned retail chain risking severe penalties for putting principles before profits. Limited self-government descends into tyranny. Hobby Lobby faces looming fines of up to $1.3 million per day for refusing to abide a spurious provision of the...

Vice President Joe Biden, who is heading up the President’s task force on gun control proposals, announced Tuesday that he would be meeting this week with the National Rifle Association, among other groups. And his timing is just a bit suspect; the day before meeting with the NRA, Biden will be meeting with gun control organizations and shooting victims. Presumably, his welcome for the NRA will be somewhat less hearty. The NRA, under heavy public pressure thanks to the White House’s bully tactics after the Sandy Hook massacre, said it would visit the White House

Ted Cruz may have the aura of a future presidential contender, but is he even eligible...? The newly sworn-in Texas senator and rising Republican star was born in Canada, to a mother who was born in Delaware and Cuban father. That’s triggered a debate about whether he’s eligible for the nation’s highest office... While there’s no legal precedent for Cruz’s situation, most constitutional scholars surveyed by POLITICO believe the 42-year-old tea party sensation would be OK. “The problem is, no one knows what a natural born citizen is,” agreed University of California, Davis law professor Gabriel Chin, who argued in...

To create jobs, jump-start the U.S. economy and drive more money into the nation’s treasury, President Obama should forgo tax increases in his second term and instead embrace much more domestic energy production, an oil and gas industry leader said Tuesday. “Energy access, not taxes, is the key to unlocking new revenues for our government,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, in his annual “State of American Energy” address. His speech focused heavily on recent projections that, with the right policies in place, the U.S. is poised to become the world’s leader in oil and natural gas...

<p>Really. Give the president his due: he fights for what he believes in.</p> <p>In his first year in office, Obama faced a popular backlash against his stimulus spending bill and saw a Republican elected to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in a referendum on Obamacare. Yet despite these and other setbacks, the president declared he had no intention of moderating his approach. “The one thing I’m really clear about is that I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” Obama said in a January 2010 interview.</p>

Georgia Power asked state regulators for permission to shut down 15 power plants yesterday, claiming new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) make the plants too expensive to run. The 15 coal-, oil- and natural gas-fired power plants currently produce 2,061 megawatts (MW) for Georgia energy consumers. Georgia Power plans to close 11 of the plants on the exact day the EPA’s new mercury regulations are set to take effect, April 16, 2015. Georgia Power will seek waivers from the EPA to keep four of the other plants open for a single year, and then shut those down too...

“The tax issue is finished. Over. Completed. That’s behind us.” — Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell “The hard fact is that nothing could have arrested what actually happened…” — British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on the Nazi invasion of Austria “Our affairs have come to such a pass that there is no escape without running risks.” So said a resolute Winston Churchill as, still out of favor with his own Conservative government, he stood up in the House of Commons in March of 1938 to protest the government’s passive response to the occupation and annexation of Austria by Adolf Hitler’s...

Washington - Assembling his second term national security team, US President Barack Obama courted controversy as he named former Republican senator Chuck Hagel to head the Pentagon and his counterterrorism adviser John Brennan to lead the CIA. "My No.1 criteria in making these decisions was simple --who is going to do the best job in securing America," Obama said Monday nominating Hagel, seen as a maverick politician, to replace Leon Panetta as Defense Secretary and Brennan, a key architect of America's drone strategy, to head the Central Intelligence Agency. In making the two controversial picks, especially that of Hagel, Obama...

President Obama plans to ally himself with big business once again by using crony capitalist tactics to pass gun control just as he used them to pass Obamacare. In this case, Obama reportedly plans to make sure that the new gun control law benefits big businesses that sell weapons. “[T]he White House is developing strategies to work around the National Rifle Association that one source said could include rallying support from Wal-Mart and other gun retailers for measures that would benefit their businesses,” The Washington Post reports.“Wal-Mart and other major gun retailers may have an incentive to support closing a...

President Obama has selected one of the worst possible candidates imaginable to become Secretary of Defense. Chuck Hagel has a history of being weak on Jihad and terrorism, the greatest threat to American lives and national security today. Hagel’s nomination should become a “teaching moment.” Just because someone served honorably in the uniform of the United States military or has an “R” instead of a “D” after his name, does not automatically mean that the person is strong on national security policy. Chuck Hagel is as bad on the threat of Jihadist terrorism as anyone in America. Not only has...

Ouch! Nothing hurts quite as much as kicking yourself in the shin. It looks like low information voters across America are waking up from the personality party they’ve been at for the past few years to discover that not only do their shiny Obama-bucks not go as far as they use to, butt now they’re taking fewer of those bucks home. Man, who could have seen that coming? I mean, shoot(am I still allowed to say that?), read Big Guy’s lips. He promised, remember?(snip)READ MY LIPS: NO MORE TAXES! And yet people across the country – not just wealthy Republicans –...

Dianne Feinstein was closely involved in the Million Mom March scandal of 2000, in which this project of Handgun Control Inc. was exposed for using 501(c)(3) tax-exempt money for electioneering. As but one example, the group posted the following on its website: You stand by your guns, Mr. Delay. Come Mothers' Day, we mothers will stand together on the mall of Capitol Hill to remind your PRO-GUN House that on Election Day, the voters will stand by our children. It took the Million Mom March about three days to react to this exposure by admitting that it had lied to...

Eight days after the massacre of 20 first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary, where each child was shot with a Bushmaster .223, The Nation's Gun Show, the biggest east of the Mississippi, opened. "A line already snaked around the building shortly after the three-day event began at 3 p.m., and the parking lot was jammed" at the Dulles Expo Center in Chantilly, Va., wrote Justin Jouvenal of The Washington Post: "With an AK-47 slung over one shoulder, Marco Hernandez offered one word when asked why he was in the overflow crowd at the gun show." "Obama," he said. "I wouldn't be...

A top priority of Democrats nationwide is to try to expand early voting even beyond the more than 40-plus million votes that were cast on days other than Election Day in 2012 or by mail. The present system balkanizes and deprives our nation of the unifying value of one nation on Election Day. The Democrats know that their massive use of early voting was a major factor that enabled them to pile up the winning votes to reelect Barack Obama. Obama enthusiastically supports early voting; he urged 10,000 fans at his campaign speech in Urbandale, Iowa to vote right now...

Esther Duflo is one of those people who are taken seriously by the sort of people who eat up TED talks with a silver spoon. Her big number is how to help people in the Third World up from poverty, which is a surprisingly profitable branch of economics when you consider the sheer number of NGOs and billionaires interested in getting into the aid business. But there’s one particular billionaire at Duflo’s back. Abdul Latif Jameel. Esther Duflo is one of the co-founders of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, more commonly known as J-PAL for the father of Abdul...

On the Friday before Christmas, President Obama announced that he was appointing Mohamed A. El-Erian, the CEO of Pacific Investment Management Company, as the chairman of his Global Development Council. The announcement didn’t get much attention, but it should. It exemplifies what’s wrong with Obama’s approach to economic policy, which amounts to: insult rich people as “fat cats,” raise their taxes, and then choose a favored few of them for special access. If you’re not familiar with El-Erian, you must not be watching CNBC or attending the World Economic Forum at Davos. The son of an Egyptian ambassador to France...

There are now two Americas. One America cherishes individual liberty, respects the Constitution and honors the ideals and traditions that made the United States a great country. The other America, composed of liberal fascists, hates all those values and is pursuing an agenda that will lead to tyranny and oppression.

Deficits: Apparently, President Obama never got around to reading the final report of his own deficit commission. How else to explain his belief that federal spending isn't the cause of the nation's debt crisis? That's apparently what Obama told House Speaker John Boehner during their recent "fiscal cliff" negotiations. "At one point several weeks ago," Boehner told the Wall Street Journal, "the president said to me, 'We don't have a spending problem.'" [snip] When it comes to federal spending, Obama is like the alcoholic who says that the only drinking problem he has is when he can't get a drink.

It's an amazing show of absolute hypocrisy or a terribly cold-blooded power play. Either way, the Obama Administration is showing a shocking lack of common sense and prudence with its latest push for comprehensive gun control. As late as 2011, the Department of Justice was giving automatic assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels... This tremendous stupidity had the precise consequences you might expect: as of September 2011, US assault weapons connected to Fast and Furious were found at 170 crime scenes in Mexico. As of March 2011, 150 Mexicans had been shot because of Fast and Furious. US Border Patrol...

An Omaha Wendy’s franchise announced it would cut hours for 100 employees due to the new Democrat Obamacare health plan. WOWT reported: A fast-food chain is slashing employee hours so franchise owners don’t have to pay health benefits. Around 100 local Wendy’s workers have learned their hours are being cut. A spokesperson says a new health care law is to blame. “Thirty-six to 37 hours a week.” That’s how many hours T.J. Growbeck works at the 84th and Giles Wendy’s restaurant. The money he earns helps him pay for the basics, but that’s not the case for all his co-workers....