Free Republic

The March unemployment report by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that, in February, the unemployment rate remained 4.1 percent for the fifth consecutive month and the number of unemployed persons was essentially unchanged at 6.7 million. Without question, the economy is humming right along, and America is close to, if not at, full employment. It’s taken longer than many economists expected. President Obama certainly wanted full employment, but he wanted his regulatory agenda more. President Trump has done what he can to release the Obama brake, and the economy has quickly responded, averaging almost 3% GDP growth over...

Within four hours of becoming president of the United States, Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to limit immediately the effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) in ways that are revolutionary. With the stroke of a pen, the president assaulted the heart of the law that was the domestic centerpiece of his predecessor’s administration. How did this happen? How can a U.S. president, who took an oath to enforce the laws faithfully, gut one of them merely because he disagrees with it? Here is the back story. When ObamaCare went through Congress in 2010, all...

Ever since Donald Trump effectively won the Republican presidential nomination by decisively defeating Ted Cruz in the Indiana primary, Congressional Republicans led by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have engaged in unseemly public hand-wringing about whether they will or will not accept the people's choice. Unwilling to support the positions that Trump campaigned on -- reducing immigration, adopting a pro-American trade policy, and returning education to the local level -- Speaker Ryan dusted off his own policy agenda and promised to roll out a series of position papers to compete with those of the presumptive...

There’s a lot of pearl clutching on the political right this week, so much so you’d be hard-pressed to differentiate it from the constant pearl clutching on the left. Facebook, it is alleged, “censors” conservative news. But does it really? And does it matter? There are not many people in the United States younger than 50 who don’t have a Facebook account. Exactly none of them were forced to open one. When they did they accepted the fact that they were playing in someone else’s backyard. Facebook owes the government no justification as to how it conducts its business as...

Cultural civil war can be avoided by getting government out of marriage There is no question that the media, political, and cultural push for gay marriage has made impressive gains. As recently as 1989, voters in avant-garde San Francisco repealed a law that had established only domestic partnerships. But judging by the questions posed by Supreme Court justices this week in oral arguments for two gay-marriage cases, most observers do not expect sweeping rulings that would settle the issue and avoid protracted political combat. A total of 41 states currently do not allow gay marriage, and most of those laws...

MOSCOW, May 14. /ITAR-TASS/. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has instructed the Finance Ministry to prepare and submit proposals by July 1, 2014 to lay off 10% of public servants, said the government official website which posted Medvedev’s instructions upon results of his annual report on government’s working results in 2013 at the State Duma. The Prime Minister delivered the annual government report on April 22. The premier stated particularly to ponder another 10% cuts of public servants in regions and at the federal level, because Russia needs “a modern, compact and effective state personnel oriented at people’s requests.” Meanwhile,...

Fifty-six percent of Americans ages 18-29 disapproved of the Affordable Care Act, the poll found; when it was worded as “Obamacare,” the disapproval was 1 point higher. And less than a third planned to buy health insurance from an exchange... ..President Obama’s job-approval rating had dropped to 41 percent, about the same as the president’s approval rating among the population as a whole, with 54 percent disapproving. The poll also found that a surprising 47 percent of millennials would recall Obama if they could; 46 percent would not. For a group that has been among Obama’s staunchest supporters, these numbers...

The libertarian philosophy is taking the Republican Party by storm, according to a poll conducted by FreedomWorks, a DC-based grassroots service center with over 6 million members. With Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) and many other liberty-minded politicians gaining influence, libertarianism has generated new interest inside the Republican Party, much to the chagrin of the GOP's political establishment.... "FreedomWorks' poll shows that 42 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of the word ‘libertarian,' and only 10 percent don't know the word, compared to 27 percent who don't know nationally," they added. And the term "libertarian" may...

WAKE FOREST, NC, August 20, 2013 — Many Americans see the Tea Party as a bigoted movement of uneducated white men that caters to big business and the rich. That does not and never has accurately described the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party is not an officially a political party, though there are Tea Parties affiliated with the movement. It has no central leadership. People who identify with the movement do not come just from Republicans or identify only as conservatives. Independents, Democrats and liberals are all represented. It lacks any significant representation only from those who call themselves...

"On Feb. 13, President Obama released his fiscal year 2013 budget proposal, which includes $3.67 trillion in new spending. That’s a 3.7 percent decline from 2012 levels, after adjusting for inflation. Discretionary programs—like education, the military, and environmental protection—account for $1.15 trillion, or 31 percent, of the new budget. That includes around $73 billion for education, a 2 percent increase over last year. A poll by the Pew Research Center found that 62 percent of Americans support increasing education funding—the strongest support for any type of spending—even when asked in the context of how the federal government should reduce budget...

Back in 2010, I wrote about the Free State Project, which is based on the idea that libertarians should all move to New Hampshire and turn the state into a free market experiment.I was impressed when I spoke at one of their conferences and gave them a plug, but more recently I’m running into people who are so discouraged about America’s fiscal outlook that they’re thinking of moving to some other nation.Wealthy people seem to prefer Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, while middle-class people mostly talk about Australia and Latin America (mainly Costa Rica or Panama).But maybe Canada is the...

Since the official end of the Great Recession, America's public sector has shrunk. And shrunk. And shrunk some more. We've said goodbye to about 600,000 government jobs, handing the economy a nasty self-inflicted wound in the process. But how small has our public sector really become? Here's one way to think about it: Compared to our population, it hasn't been this size since 1968. Your dreams are coming true Baby Boomers. We're almost all the way back to the Summer of Love! First, credit where it's due. The Hamilton Project has produced a beautiful graph illustrating the government employment to...

EXCERPTS: ...Is it Moral? Does it recognize the existence of the higher law, the Natural Law which is a participation in God's Law? Does it affirm that there are self evident truths? Does it recognize the fundamental human rights with which we are all endowed and acknowledge that these rights are not given to us by civil government but by God? Does it affirm the nature and dignity of the human person as created in the Image of God? ... recognize the primacy of true marriage and the family and society founded upon it and serve the true common good?...

Some of the areas/functions the federal government should not be involved in per the constitution (see enumerated powers of congress and the Bill of Rights, the 9th and 10th amendments, etc): Health Education Welfare Housing Mortgages Student loans Subsidies Health insurance Retirement insurance Mandating insurance contracts of any kind Trade unions Government workers unions (huge conflict of interest) Jobs (other than not creating an environment that kills them) Banking/finance Free markets The stock market The economy (other than not overstepping its constitutional bounds and creating havoc) The working environment Global warming Crime in general (other than treason, piracy, counterfeiting, etc)...

Fourth, Remember the Difference Between Republicans and Conservatives. Conservatives look at the endorsements Mitt Romney has garnered from such establishment figures as former President George H.W. Bush and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and most importantly from business-as-usual Washington insiders, such as lobbyist Ed Gillespie, and they see advocates of positions they often opposed, not friends of the transformational agenda that won the Tea Party wave election of 2010. Surveying Romney’s record and agenda, and most importantly the people he is likely to bring to Washington to implement his agenda, movement conservatives see little likelihood a Romney administration will differ...

This was posted on one of GaryNorth.com forums. The battle for America’s political soul is always fought on the battlefield of federal politics. That’s why conservatives lose, generation after generation.” Dr. North, would you please elaborate on this, why you believe the battle for America’s political soul is fought in Federal politics and why it is that conservatives continue to lose, generation after generation? From the time of the ratification of the United States Constitution, American politics shifted to the national level. One of the things that I realized late in my career, even though I had been trained as...

Does the Tea Party now support politicians who favored bailouts and the ObamaCare individual mandate? Such a statement sounds like an oxymoronic joke, about as likely as a pacifist who backs war or an atheist for Jesus. But the answer, according to exit polls from New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida primaries, is an emphatic “yes.” According to each of these exit polls, the vast majority of self-identified Tea Party supporters have backed either former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (left) or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich over anti-bailout candidates such as Texas Congressman Ron Paul, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum,...

On January 21 Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina Primary. But he did it, in part, by using racist rhetoric, characterizing President Obama as “the best food stamp president in American history.” Since then, he has continued to drive this distortion hoping it will somehow resonate with voters. It’s not likely to work, because most Americans understand that food is fundamental. Presidents do not put people onto the food stamp rolls. People, predominately people with children to feed, become eligible for food stamps. The food stamp program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, is a critical safety net for...

This was in 2008, BEFORE HE WAS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT!

Georgia Turns Into Shaky Ground for Gingrich By TRIP GABRIEL February 18, 2012 ATLANTA — If Newt Gingrich has any hope of a comeback, it must begin here, in the state he represented for 20 years as a congressman and where the haul of delegates to the Republican National Convention is the biggest prize of the Super Tuesday contests next month. Yet when asked about the once-unthinkable possibility that he might lose the primary in Georgia, where Rick Santorum is surging just as he is nationally, Mr. Gingrich offered a shrug. “Given this kind of a year, who knows?” he...