Free Republic

Five GOP Senators who have been negotiating with Gov. Brown on the state budget sent JBro a letter yesterday in which they asserted that their budget talks had hit an impasse. . . . The GOP5 -- Tom Berryhill, Sam Blakeslee, Anthony Canella, Bill Emmerson and Tom Harman -- say they want a spending cap, pension reform and regulatory relief.

At Oscoda Area Schools, parental attendance at parent-teacher conferences has skyrocketed. Teachers are also having fewer absences and missing fewer professional development days. The success is being credited to a merit pay system that the school implemented two years ago to try to get teachers to reach performance goals. Oscoda Area Schools, located in northeast Michigan about 100 miles north of Bay City, has about 1,500 students. The district awards performance points to each of its 82-plus teachers if they reach goals like reducing teacher absences and getting higher attendance at parent-teacher conferences. Those points are used to dole out...

Under liberal rule, it's corrupt, cushy, and ripe for competition. Every crisis, as Rahm Emanuel once hinted, brings with it some unique opportunities. The need for drastic cuts in Texas’s higher education spending could be an opportunity for conservatives to rethink what they’re doing in fundamental ways, building the foundation for a leaner but more effective and freer higher education system. The “fat” years that higher ed has enjoyed over the last two decades — with spending up 74% per student since 1991 — have obscured the fact that the system is badly broken. Conservatives have tended to focus on...

Boehner promises Obama GOP cover if he takes first step on entitlement reformBy Alexander Bolton - 03/03/11 08:40 PM ET Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has privately assured President Obama that House Republicans will not attack him if he makes a proposal to reform entitlement spending, according to sources familiar with the offer. Moreover, Boehner has personally promised Obama that he will stand side by side with him to weather the strong political backlash expected from any proposal to cut entitlement costs. So far, Obama has not taken Boehner up on the deal, as Democratic strategists have warned the White House...

Harry Reid's math problemBy DAVID NATHER | 3/4/11 7:13 AM EST Never mind the House. The real obstacle to solving the standoff over funding for the health care law may be the Senate. As the talks begin on how to fund the government for the rest of the year, there’s a very real math problem that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid faces. There won’t be 60 votes to end a filibuster on any spending agreement that includes the House language to defund the health care law, because Senate Democrats would never go for it. But if it’s all stripped out,...

I promised you an update on this poll in the post about support for collective bargaining once the crosstabs were released. Here you go: The sample is 39D/34R/19I, including leaners, and 14 percent of respondents are union members. As Ed noted a few days ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says 11.9 percent of workers are unionized, so it’s a slight oversample but within the margin of error. On the other hand, Ed pointed out that public employees comprise 17 percent of the work force; in the Journal poll, 14 percent of respondents are public employees, i.e. a slight undersample....

Shortly after the Green Bay Packers turned the nation’s attention to the Midwestern state, Wisconsin once again has garnered the nation’s attention. At stake this time is not a trophy, but a prized retirement package promised to public employees. Throngs of protesters have taken to Madison, Wisconsin to either show their support or disdain for Governor Scott Walker’s plan to require public employees to pay 5.8 percent (the national average is roughly 12 percent) of their salary as a contribution to their pension. The looming issue of funding public pensions is not unique to Wisconsin. Governor Walker’s stand, however, has...

House panel to probe White House health reform officeBy Jason Millman - 02/18/11 05:01 PM ET Republicans on a powerful House panel, who haven’t been shy about flexing their new oversight authority to investigate the healthcare reform law, are setting their sights on a new target – the White House. The Energy and Commerce Committee, which has announced several probes into President Obama’s health department, is now asking the White House’s health reform office to disclose the details of meetings between the administration and outside groups. “We are troubled by the secret negotiations which apparently took place between the [White...

The protests currently taking place at the statehouses in Madison, Wisconsin, and Columbus, Ohio, may soon be coming to a state near you, as state governors and legislators realize they can no longer continue business as usual. I simply don’t understand what makes public employees think they should be totally exempt from the hardships and requirements that many private sector workers have been experiencing for years. Those in the private sector have routinely been required to pay a substantial portion of the costs of their medical insurance and have seen those costs increasing significantly, year after year.

Today, February 17, the Tennessee Legislature introduced NRA-drafted House Bill 1668 and companion bill Senate Bill 1768, the Tennessee Gun Owners Improvement Act. Sponsored by state Representative Judd Matheny (R-47) and state Senator Bill Ketron (R-13), HB 1668/SB 1768 would improve upon the current Tennessee Permit Law by cleaning up redundancies that are found in Federal Law and remove unnecessary restrictions placed on law-abiding citizens.

The reason these top-down solutions don’t work is simple. The people up top don’t know as much as the folks down below. In the case of health care, the people down below are physicians, nurses, hospital administrators and other medical personnel. Most have advanced degrees in medicine or health care management and have years of experience. They know far more about health care than the up-top people such as politicians, HHS bureaucrats and precocious Washington Post policy wonks. It doesn’t take the down-below people long to figure out how to “game the system” after the up-top people “reform” the system.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said Tuesday that President Obama "punted on the budget" and that entitlement programs are driving the national debt. "You have to do entitlement reforms if you are serious about this budget, if you are serious about this debt," Ryan said. "The sooner we tackle it, the better off everyone is." Ryan, who also delivered the Republican Party's response to the president's State of the Union address last month, echoed the GOP leadership's reaction to Obama's 2012 budget proposal by saying he had hoped for presidential leadership on the budget and called for bringing spending...

For three weeks, Egyptians, maybe in the millions, have marched to get rid of their president. Yesterday, they got what they wanted as President Hosni Mubarak announced his resignation. Cairo was a huge stage for celebrations as people sang, danced, distributed sweets and congratulated each other for the success of "our revolution." The young Egyptians known as The Facebook Movement set an example for young Muslims everywhere by proving stronger than Mubarak and his military machine, the largest in the Muslim world. They didn't use car bombs and suicide operations as Khomeinist terror squads had done in Iran in 1979....

Throughout the Middle East, reformers have been driven away by autocratic rulers. We Westerners are desperate to see the political systems in the Middle East evolve from authoritarian theocratic or oligarchical models to some variation of representative government. That desire suffered another setback on Saturday when former Egyptian presidential candidate Ayman Nour, 41, was sentenced to five years in prison for (what outside observers insist are trumped-up charges of) forgery. Up and down the region - Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority - the Western pluralist model of representative democracy has failed because broadminded, Western-oriented reformers have been...

I got this in an e mail from my friend. Congressional Reform: The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971...before computers, before e-mail, before cell phones, etc. Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure. This message asks each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those...

Constitutional showdownA Florida judge distorted the law in striking down healthcare reform. By Akhil Reed Amar February 6, 2011 Earlier this week, after grading student papers from my Yale Law School class on constitutional law, I began reading federal District Judge Roger Vinson's recent opinion declaring "Obamacare" unconstitutional. One thing was immediately clear: My students understand the Constitution better than the judge. I strive to be apolitical in evaluating students and judges alike. Over the years, many of my favorite students have been proud conservatives, while others have been flaming liberals. The Constitution belongs to neither party. As every first-year...

Health reform alive and wellBy Jay MacDonald Friday, February 4 Posted: 10 am ET As expected, Florida U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson ruled this week in favor of a Florida-led lawsuit filed by 26 states to block health care reform. Vinson's ruling, like that of Virginia Judge and fellow Republican appointee Henry Hudson in December, found unconstitutional the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, that requires all Americans to obtain health insurance beginning in 2014. Unlike Hudson, Vinson ruled that the individual mandate was not severable, and therefore voided the entire act. Two Democratically-appointed judges previously upheld...

With healthcare reform law in legal limbo, Dems consider their optionsBy Julian Pecquet - 02/01/11 06:01 AM ET Healthcare reform supporters have begun to seek alternatives to the unpopular individual mandate at the heart of Monday’s surprising decision overturning the entire law. Officially, the Obama administration dismissed Judge Roger Vinson’s decision as a fluke. Two judges have already ruled that the mandate is constitutional, and a third struck down the mandate but not the rest of the law. “The department intends to appeal this ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals,” said Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler. “We strongly...

Dems mount most aggressive fight yet to protect healthcare reform lawBy Julian Pecquet - 01/29/11 07:12 PM ET The White House and congressional Democrats are vowing to aggressively fight back against any efforts to dismantle their signature healthcare reform law despite a State of the Union promise to work with Republicans on improvements. Republicans during the midterm elections successfully tarred the new law as a big government takeover of healthcare crammed down the public's throat. Now Democrats are mounting their most vigorous counter-offensive to date by highlighting the law’s benefits for Americans and painting repeal proponents as stooges of the...

Obama: will not refight battle over healthcare lawBy Patricia Zengerle – 1 hr 19 mins ago WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama said on Friday his healthcare overhaul is an important part of efforts to cut the budget deficit and insisted he will not "refight" the battle to pass the law. With emboldened Republicans vowing to repeal or replace the healthcare law he signed last March, Obama reiterated his case that the changes it brings are necessary to help rein in the price of the government-run Medicaid and Medicare insurance programs, a huge chunk of the U.S. budget deficit problem....