Free Republic

As Turkey’s Council of State marked its 149th anniversary of its foundation this week, its president delivered a speech that left jaws among members of judiciary wide open, capturing the picture of how Turkey’s top courts, high justice toed the line with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government. “The notion of separation of powers have become more clear with the April 16 referendum,” said Council of State President Zerrin Gungor. Her remarks represented a complete break with the majority of legal experts and government critics in Turkey over what the referendum meant for the rule of law and separation...

Bay Area Assemblyman got an earful last week as he pushed a largely symbolic bill that would have made it legal for California public employees to be members of the Communist Party. Rob Bonta of Oakland contritely withdrew the measure, which had passed out of committee, after leaders from the state’s large Vietnamese community gave him an earful. California has many problems — none of which are the doing of avowed communists in state government. Instead of worrying about this nonsense, Republicans should be gearing up to fight a frightening Bonta-coauthored bill that makes no direct reference to communism, but...

The Constitution was written with the intent that it must endure for ages to come and be adaptable to the various crises of human affairs. Edmund Randolph, one of the five men charged with drafting the document, observed that it was necessary to stick to basic, “essential principles only; lest the operations of government be clogged by rendering those provisions permanent and unalterable.” The Framers knew that principles of liberty remain constant throughout time, so they provided this foundation for altering future law. Let’s continue our study of the U.S. Constitution with Article I. Article I, Sec 1 basically set...

Miracle? State House passed a bill saying liberties ‘don’t come from governments, but from Almighty God’ May 10, 2017 | Scott Morefield | Print Article From whence do our liberties derive? Are they from the whims of man, of whoever has the power to grant or deny them at any given moment in history, or are they from an almighty, unchangeable force? It’s an important philosophical question, because if the answer is the latter, any attempts to deny humans their God-given liberties are by definition anti-God and worthy of opposition by decent-minded people.

It took some 6,000 years for persons to overcome slavery, serfdom, and oppressive rent and taxation to acquire secure property rights to farmland and to adjacent river water (riparian rights – see Joshua Getzler, A History of Water Rights and Common Law, [2004]). Enter Tim Stroshane, a former Berkeley central planner, activist and environmentalist, who proposes to abolish such property rights because farming monopolists in California allegedly fail to “share” water with the hordes of urbanites that want it. This post revisits Stroshane’s case in his 2016 book, Drought, Water Law and the Origins of California’s Central Valley Project (Reno:...

United Nations aid agencies in Geneva were nervous before Donald Trump was elected: his rhetoric on all sorts of key issues, from migrants to torture, was deeply worrying to a community dedicated to upholding what it believes are fundamental human rights. Once candidate Trump became President Trump, the nervousness increased. The executive order on immigration seemed, to many aid workers, to betray an almost total lack of understanding and compassion for the world's most vulnerable people. Now, 100 days in, there is a sense of wariness. Although that key executive order on immigration may have been stayed by the US...

Former Vermont governor and Democratic National Comittee chairman Howard Dean called out conservative pundit Ann Coulter on Twitter. Dean said, "Hate speech is not protected by the first amendment."

This is a revised version of the constitution. I support a Maine Republic as I feel that the US recently have isolated or forgot about Maine. However I feel like the post I saw from The_Republic_Of_Maine sounded to Theoretical. SO I made revisions that I think is fair. Here's the Original post;http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3159678/posts Now here is mine. PREAMBLE. We the people of the Republic of Maine, in order to establish justice, insure tranquility, provide for our mutual defense, promote our common welfare, and secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessings of liberty, acknowledging with grateful hearts the goodness of the...

Consider fedgov allows rogue state and local governments to publicly ignore and deliberately break fedral laws concerning illegal drugs, illegal aliens, the second amendment, and discrimination based on sex and race. Why cannot then states and local govenrments ignore fedgov court imposed gay marriage, obamacare, abortion, and god back in schools? Why is the left the only one who can say no to federal laws at state and local levels? We must start doing the same. They have no problem doing it when they want to. Either we are all equal and can do the exact same things or none...

Billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban criticized the Congressional Budget Office’s use of a 10-year score to determine the effects of the Republicans' American Health Care Act and said the U.S. Constitution should be amended to make healthcare a right. Cuban compared the CBO’s use of a decade timeframe to the ABC television show Shark Tank, where he stars as one of the investors that hears pitches from business owners. He said one- to four-year timeframes are better but “marginally predictable.”

About 2,000 people were killed and entire neighbourhoods razed in southeastern Turkey in 18 months of government security operations characterised by massive destruction and serious human rights violations, the United Nations said on Friday. The U.N. human rights office said in a report on the period July 2015-December 2016 that up to 500,000 people, mostly Kurds, had been displaced, while satellite imagery showed the "enormous scale of destruction of the housing stock by heavy weaponry". U.N. investigators documented human rights violations including killings, disappearances and torture, often during curfews lasting several days at a time.

We’ve been misreading the Declaration of Independence for centuries. Turns out it says people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and birth control someone else pays for.” That’s the impression supporters of AB249 and SB233 left after testifying Monday. Both bills would require that all Nevada insurance companies provide birth control with no co-pays or other point-of-delivery costs. Supporters lavishly praised those mandates. Many liberals believe in “positive rights,” aka the right to free stuff, like birth control. But that reading necessarily means that government will infringe someone else’s rights. In...

A library in Sweden’s capital is refusing to stock Kurdish economist Tino Sanandaji’s “sincere and evidence-driven analysis” of the country’s immigration policy because the book ‘supports racism’. An examination into the results of mass migration to Sweden over recent decades, ‘Mass Challenge’ was topping Sweden’s book charts within days of its release earlier this month. Sanandaji’s analysis of the nation’s large-scale importation of people from the third world, the resulting social problems and the effects on Sweden’s economy, is based on facts sourced from Statistics Sweden, the National Crime Prevention Council, the National Board of Health and other mainstream and...

I confess that today I was … triggered. Watching CNN in the office, as is my habit while I work, I heard Carol Costello repeat a common claim made by those on the Left who have zero understanding of the American founding. In this particular segment of “CNN Newsroom,” she asked her guests about something President Trump said today. Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, the president said that the people in that room were united by their common humanity. “We are not just flesh and bone and blood, we are human beings with souls, Our republic was formed on...

Just two days after what looked like betrayal in the ongoing battle between religious liberty and the LGBT lobby’s never-ending quest for positive “rights,” President Trump may sign an executive order Thursday protecting religious liberty throughout the federal government. Naturally, the Left is losing its collective hive mind again. In an attempt to stop the president from issuing the order, LGBT groups and left-leaning media outlets leaked the document, according to The Daily Signal. Just hours after the initial leak, the president unequivocally vowed to protect religious freedom at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Your property is the sum of, or fruit of, your life and liberty. You purchase your property, not with money, but with your life and liberty. Say you make $60,000 per year and you purchase a car for $30,000 and someone steals that car. If you never get the car back what else will you also never get back? The thief has not only stolen your car, but has stolen six months of your life and liberty. You will never get that six months back or the liberty you used to work for and purchase the car. Remember your algebra...

"As one who celebrates and strives for diversity, individual freedom, and respect for all lifestyles, I will not participate in dressing or associating in any way with the next First Lady," wrote fashion designer Sophie Theallet in an open letter this week. People magazine reports Theallet, who has designed and donated clothes for outgoing First Lady Michelle Obama numerous times over the last eight years, may not be alone: "A source tells People, 'This has already been going on for months. Designers wouldn't lend to Melania, Ivanka or Tiffany, so they either bought the items themselves or wore Ivanka's brand....

Californians have passed a ballot initiative that expands on some of the nation’s toughest gun control measures. Proposition 63 won on Tuesday and in early reporting had 63 percent of about 4.5 million votes cast. It calls for a ban on large-capacity ammunition magazines; background checks for ammunition sales and speeding the seizure of firearms from people who are no longer allowed to own them.

RESPECT AND HONOR

Diminish Private Property Rights This article is based on a recently prepared memorandum of law and correspondences dispatched to 13 members of Congress explaining the unconstitutionality of the pending legislation discussed below. Energy and forest management are not generally assumed to be interrelated policies. Nevertheless, U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (AK-R) is pushing a massive 792-page Senate Energy bill incorporating more than 393 amendments covering these and other policy areas which many in Congress have not likely read. The bill is No. S.2012 - the North American Energy Security and Infrastructure Act of 2016, which, according to nonprofit Western States Constitutional...