Free Republic

The delay in implementation of ObamaCare's employer fines won't keep them from growing between now and when they finally hit in 2015. Each year, the fines will grow in line with the growth in average per-person health insurance premiums relative to 2013. Here's the problem: Average wages generally grow slower than health premiums, and the wages of low-income workers lag average wage growth. That means the penalties will gradually loom larger and larger relative to wages for modest-skilled workers, giving employers a bigger incentive to cut them to part-time. Even if health premiums grow at an average 3.5% annual rate...

A report that another provision of ObamaCare -- one that would cap out-of-pocket health care costs -- was being delayed brought a defiant challenge Tuesday from a top Senate Republican, accusing the president of "illegal and unconstitutional" acts in changing laws without congressional approval. "The president doesn't get to write legislation, and it's illegal and unconstitutional for him to try and change legislation by himself," Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Fox News. The New York Times first reported on Tuesday that the administration is giving some insurers and employers a one-year grace period to adhere to the limit, which otherwise...

One might expect that the extra scrutiny applied to conservative political groups by the IRS would have ended after the practice got exposed three months ago. At least according to a recent deposition from the House Ways and Means Committee investigation into the scandal, IRS agents still are being directed to automatically apply extra scrutiny to applications mentioning the Tea Party, even if no other political activity is indicated in the application: Q: “If you saw – I am asking this currently, if today a Tea Party case, a group – a case from a Tea Party group came in...

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — A controversial gun measure proposed by a Southern California lawmaker that would require background checks for all ammunition purchases statewide is moving forward in Sacramento. Senator Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) first introduced Senate Bill 53 last December, which would require anyone wishing to purchase ammunition in California to first obtain a Ammunition Purchase Permit issued by the Department of Justice, valid for one year from the date of issuance. To obtain such a permit, the holder would have to pass a traditional background check as well as a mental health check, according to De León....

BELLEVUE, WA – -(Ammoland.com)- You heard it straight from the horse’s mouth. Jay Carney said Obama will sign the UN Arms Trade Treaty “before the end of August…We believe it’s in the interest of the United States.” This is very strategic timing considering Congress is on a 5 week vacation lasting thru the month of August! These back door tactics are nothing new for the Obama Administration, which is why we are using tactics of our own to stop his anti-gun agenda. We have the home fax numbers of every Senator so while they are absent from the Capitol we...

This Fall, Harvard University Press will release The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, by the 35-year-old historian Ben Urwand. Alexander Kafka previewed the book in The Chronicle Review. “Urwand found that Nazi officials considered some American films ideologically useful—among them Gabriel Over the White House (1933), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Our Daily Bread (1934), and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)—and that the studios expressly marketed certain titles in that vein,” Kafka writes. “ For instance, Gabriel Over the White House, an American fascist fantasia about a fed-up, divinely inspired president dissolving a chaotic Congress and whipping the...

Last Thursday, Texas based email provider Lavabit suddenly shut down their encrypted email service, leaving behind a message for its customers on the company's website. The owner of Lavabit, Ladar Levinson, intimated that the company had received a secret search order from the government and shut his business down to avoid being "complicit in crimes against the American people."

I don't know who the critter is, but I recognize the voices of awake Americans. Do not give in to despair. Find a town hall. Make a phone call.

President Obama is quietly moving forward with gun control regulations. A Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives(ATF) Final Rule published Tuesday in the Federal Register and a news release issued last Friday by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) are recent developments ignored by the mainstream media even though Vice President Joe Biden announced last week that the administration would be using executive orders to advance “gun control” goals following a Senate battle that could not muster the votes to do so legislatively. President Obama has side-stepped Congress by implementing portions of the UN Small Arms Trade...

...Remember on Friday how one of President Obama's efforts to get people to trust the government more concerning the NSA's surveillance efforts was to create an "outside" and "independent" board to review it all?... ...Except, that was Friday. Today is Monday. And, on Monday we learn that "outside" and "independent" actually means setup by Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper--the same guy who has already admitted to lying to Congress about the program, and has received no punishment for doing so. This is independent? From this we're supposed to expect real oversight?!? This is from the letter sent to Clapper:...

As California Congressman Henry Waxman promised, he has introduced a Bill to ban the sale of “Parts kits” for “Assault Rifles, Assault Shotguns, and Assault Pistols." This also includes a ban on Receiver blanks. The Bill defines an “assault weapons parts kit as: “ any part or combination of parts not designed and intended for repair or replacement but designed and intended to enable a consumer who possesses all such necessary parts to assemble a semiautomatic assault weapon…” Which raised the question of vagueness in the law as to which components of an “Assault Weapons Parts Kits” could be sold...

Following in the well-worn footsteps of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Blueprint for Federal Action on Illegal Guns, this week the Council on Foreign Relations released a memo urging the Obama administration to disregard the will of the American people and Congress and unilaterally enact a series of gun controls. Entitled, A Strategy to Reduce Gun Trafficking and Violence in the Americas, and written by CFR Senior Fellow for Latin American Studies, Julia F. Sweig, the memo pins the ills of Central and South America on U.S. gun owners and urges the president to curb our rights to...

Just listening to Rush He is discussing the increase in people giving up US citizenship. I have thought about this as have many in my family. But where to go? Is it really an option politically and financially? Which culture would be the best fit for an ex-American citizen? What kind of legal hassles would result? Please be specific as to why you feel the country you state is the "best" country to immigrate to; political/social atmosphere, wage, social mobility, entrepreneurial opportunities, etc.

Financial QUESTION: Obama and Democrats Trying To SEIZE Retirement Accounts (IRAs, 401Ks) ? Aug 9, 2013 I want to know what other Free Republic Members know about this H.R. 2035: Automatic IRA Act of 2013 I got an e-mail stating: "Obama & BIG Government Are Planning To Seize Retirement Accounts!" President Obama’s FY2014 Budget Plan brings us one Large step closer to De-Privatizing IRA’s & 401k’s. Much like Obamacare, Obama’s “Automatic IRA” will force employers with 10 employees or more, to “automatically” enroll their workers in the new Government run accounts. Obama’s Automatic IRA will be managed by the Social...

Buried in a lengthy Washington Post article about President Obama’s environmental policy is an illuminating anecdote about just how debatable the administration views climate change — namely, not at all: In an agency-wide address to employees Aug. 1, (Interior Secretary Sally) Jewell took the unusual step of suggesting that no one working for her should challenge the idea that human activity is driving recent warming. “I hope there are no climate-change deniers in the Department of Interior,” she said. The address does not appear to be posted on the department’s website, so the Washington Examiner can only go by the...

Vice President Joe Biden is calling Democrats to action to stop grassroots conservatives from electing more Republicans in the mold of Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX). In a fundraising letter for the Democratic National Committee, first reported by Ed Krayewski at Reason, Biden wrote told prospective donors that a “group of freshmen senators are running the show in the Republican Party” and played up the possibility of a government shutdown over ObamaCare.

By PAUL PRESTON The new motto under the bear on the California State flag is going to have to be revised from “California Republic” to California Soviet Republic” if proposed Senate Bill 1 by State Senator Steinberg is passed and signed into law. SB 1 came about following the massive defeat of Prop. 31 in last November’s election which was defeated by California Voters 61% to 39%. Cal Watch Dog’s Wayne Lusvardi in his November 9, 2012 article tilted :http://calwatchdog.com/2012/11/09/prop-31-would-have-ended-californias-republic/“>Prop. 31 would have ended California’s republic”, commented “Republicanism Upheld Only by Accident: The reason attributed to Prop. 31 losing by...

President Obama promised he would unite the world…and he’s right.Representatives from dozens of nations have bitterly complained about an awful piece of legislation, called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), that was enacted back in 2010.They despise this unjust law because it extends the power of the IRS into the domestic affairs of other nations. That’s an understandable source of conflict, which should be easy to understand. Wouldn’t all of us get upset, after all, if the French government or Russian government wanted to impose their laws on things that take place within our borders?But it’s not just foreign...

White House press secretary Jay Carney defended the National Security Agency's spying activities saying that “only a small percentage of Internet traffic is being monitored.” “Is there any question that the vast majority of what people do on the Internet is mindless drivel?” Carney asked. “I mean, the number one topic is porn. Only a tiny fraction of the activity represents matters of interest. That's the activity we've got every right and obligation to monitor.” One of the “tiny fractions” Carney maintained merits scrutiny “is the communications of persons hostile to the Government—including so-called Tea Partiers. Let me remind you...

For the second time in less than a year, Minnesota authorities are prosecuting Alvin Schlangen for unauthorized delivery of farm produce. Schlangen offers members of the private buying club, Freedom Farms Co-op, the benefit of his volunteer delivery service. The Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) demands that the Stearns County District Attorney stop the deliveries by bringing charges against Schlagen. Schlagen's customers, many of whom have no other convenient means of getting food to their homes, are irate at the MDA. “A lot of those on Schlagen's route are house-bound or handicapped,” said Elisabeth Berry. “More to the point, though,...

The Brain Dead American Media missed this veiled threat in Obama's opening statement: "We shouldn’t forget the difference between the ability of our government to collect information online under strict guidelines and for narrow purposes, and the willingness of some other governments to throw their own citizens in prison for what they say online" Tell that to the arab who made a movie and posted it to the Net and who was blamed for creating the Benghazi Attacks ? Tell that to all those who have been surveilled by federal agencies using the NSA databases ? Obama often uses words...

This is how Democrats say thanks– Today Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went on KNPR in Las Vegas to discuss current affairs. One question he faced was about union uproar over Obamacare. Harry Reid said it’s time for them to give up their Cadillac plans and “put some skin in the game.” “Let’s understand where we are with the unions. One of the things we’ve learned with all of the hearings we held, dozens and dozens of them, is that if you have insurance you have to be able to have some skin in the game as we say in...

Charging that Delaware officials have stopped cooperating with his investigation, Sen. Chuck Grassley on Friday sent a pointed letter to the state's Division of Revenue in which he outlines specific, outstanding questions that still swirl around the handling of former U.S. Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell’s tax records. “On multiple occasions, my staff has requested a copy of your records retention policy, the opportunity to speak with [officials at the state's Division of Revenue] and other clarifications related to these matters. To date, you have failed to respond,” the letter from the Iowa Republican reads in part. In a case first...

Chilling video from a home in Dekalb County, Ga., shows local police entering a house illegally, berating the home’s residents and then tackling them to the ground. The entire incident took place because the mother of the home, Natania Griffin, was two weeks late on paying a $1,000 fee to the county. Griffin’s 23-year-old son, Donovan Hall, recorded the event. He was alarmed and confused when police began banging loudly on his door in the middle of the night. “I was immediately confused as to why the police would be at my house,” Hall told the Huffington Post. “The knocks...

<p>The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.</p>

The National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said Thursday it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the U.S. spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security. "What we're in the process of doing - not fast enough - is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent," he said. The remarks came as...

The email service reportedly used by surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden abruptly shut down on Thursday after its owner cryptically announced his refusal to become "complicit in crimes against the American people."Lavabit, an email service that boasted of its security features and claimed 350,000 customers, is no more, apparently after rejecting a court order for cooperation with the US government to participate in surveillance on its customers. It is the first such company known to have shuttered rather than comply with government surveillance."I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or...

The seeds of the IRS targeting of conservative groups were planted by Eric Holder in 2001 when as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton he convinced incoming Attorney General John Ashcroft to seize the building of a conservative megachurch, says the church’s retired pastor. “Our church was taken over by the IRS in 2001 based on the recommendations of Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to incoming Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft,” said Greg Dixon, former pastor of the Indianapolis Baptist Temple. “The church was the sacrificial lamb to pave the way for the future targeting of conservative groups. We...

Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

Again, I offer my back yard as an asylum to anyone in Colorado who still wishes to breathe free air. Bring your own tent, RV hookups not provided. If you are tired of looking at Cuba under Castro, China under Mao, Russia under Stalin, or (insert the name of a power-crazed fascist here) for examples of what will happen when ersatz dictators get completely beyond the pale, you can always turn to Colorado. If you follow the news at all, you know that Colorado is not far from going completely over the edge into some kind of tie-dyed dictatorship. Whether...

Bernie Kozen stands near the scene of Monday's shooting on Tuesday, August 6, in rural Pennsylvania. Kozen, a local parks director, is being hailed as a hero for stopping the alleged gunman, Rockne Newell, who opened fire at a town council meeting in Ross Township on Monday night, August 5, killing three people, police said. Newell had been in an ongoing feud over property rights with the township's board of supervisors.

President Obama tells comedian Jay Leno that "We don’t have a domestic spying program." He made the comment during a taping of Leno's TV show. Obama also says the U.S. is not overreacting by closing some U.S. embassies for a week. The president tells Leno, "The odds of dying in a terrorist attack are a lot lower than they are of dying in a car accident, unfortunately." And the president says of Russia's Putin, "There are times when they slip back into Cold War thinking and Cold War mentality. What I continually say to them and to President Putin, that’s...

That headline is not a lie. The greatest orator since Abraham Lincoln had a serious policy discussion with . . . wait for it . . . Jay Leno. During that serious, I mean really serious, talk, Obama explicitly stated that it was unfortunate that Americans were less likely to die in a terrorist attack than in a car accident. Really: POTUS said the U.S. was not overreacting. POTUS said people can still take vacation, just do so in a “prudent way” by checking on the State Department Websites for up-to-day information before making plans. “The odds of dying in...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today issued a final rule for the amount of renewable fuels to be added to the nation’s transportation fuel supply in 2013. The most publicized issue related to renewable fuels has been the ethanol “blend wall,” the theoretical point at which ethanol use will be surpassed by the amount of ethanol required by law. As Americans drive less, demand for gasoline falls also reducing demand for ethanol. Because blenders are required either to use the mandated amount, regardless of demand, or pay for credits for the amount they don’t use, the EPA has been...

The federal government has determined that obesity is a national health epidemic, and while obesity-prevention goals were established at the national level in 2012, the question now is how to determine if those goals are being met—not just nationally, but in your very own neighborhood. The federally funded Institute of Medicine (IOM) has just released a report listing 83 ways to “assess the progress made in every community”—and at the national level—in the fight against obesity. Some of the benchmarks would require new legislation or executive action to change the way we live and work. …

WASHINGTON — As hundreds of commuters emerged from Amtrak and commuter trains at Union Station on a recent morning, an armed squad of men and women dressed in bulletproof vests made their way through the crowds. The squad was not with the Washington police department or Amtrak’s police force, but was one of the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response squads — VIPR teams for short — assigned to perform random security sweeps to prevent terrorist attacks at transportation hubs across the United States. “The T.S.A., huh,” said Donald Neubauer of Greenville, Ohio, as he walked past the...

America has a two-party system. But it’s not Republicans versus Democrats. It’s the ruling class — Republicans and Democrats — against everyone else. Consider how President Obama just gave Congress its very own Obamacare waiver. Obamacare includes a provision that should cost each member of Congress and each staffer $5,000 to $11,000 per year. Needless to say, the ruling class was not pleased. Congress wasn’t about to try to exempt itself from this provision explicitly, though. If John Q. Congressman voted to give himself an Obamacare waiver that his constituents don’t get, he wouldn’t be John Q. Congressman much longer....

To call growing concerns about the size, depth, history, ways and operations of our now-huge national-security operation "esoteric" or merely abstract is, simply, absurd. Our federal government is involved in massive data collection that apparently includes a database of almost every phone call made in the U.S. The adequacy of oversight for this system is at best unclear. The courts involved are shadowed in secrecy and controversy. Is it really wrong or foolhardy or unacceptably thoughtful to wonder if the surveillance apparatus is excessive, or will be abused, or will erode, or perhaps in time end, any expectation of communications...

When former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked the existence of a massive spying program siphoning up Americans' personal phone records earlier this year, President Obama declared: "I welcome this debate and I think it's healthy for our democracy."Shortly thereafter, his administration revoked Snowden's passport and hit him with Espionage Act charges (filed under seal, naturally).That's the thing about the self-styled "most transparent administration in history": Often you can't find out what they're up to until somebody breaks the law to let you know.One suspects Obama "welcomes this debate" about as enthusiastically as Anthony Weiner greets the debate over...

Surveillance Society: The government says spying on U.S. citizens is acceptable since it's merely a means of fighting foreign terrorists. But what if the government used espionage in investigations of common criminals? The program is so sneaky that officials are trying to cover it up. "Law enforcement agents," says Reuters, "have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin — not only from defense lawyers, but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges." Criminal investigations should be launched, and suspects deprived of liberty, only "when there's a reasonable amount of suspicion, supported by circumstances sufficiently strong to justify a prudent...

RIVERSIDE (CBSLA.com) — Two Hemet church members who were arrested while reading the Bible outside a DMV office were expected to be in court when their trial begins Monday. Brett Anthony Coronado, 42, of Reconciled Christian Fellowship in Hemet, and Mark Allen Mackey, 59, a Calvary Chapel Hemet church elder, visited the DMV at 1200 S. State Street on Feb. 2, 2011, before business hours and began to read passages from the Bible. After a security guard approached Mackey and instructed him to leave the premises, the men continued reading, claiming their First Amendment rights protected their actions and that...

Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin (D-Mich) rejected a request from ProPublica for a copy of a Defense Department document listing the countries the United States is currently at war with. “Who we are at war with is a matter for the Government, not the general public,” Levin maintained. “Under the Constitution, war-making powers are vested in Congress and the President. We will decide what role others will play if and when it becomes necessary to do so.” Concealing this information from the general public isn’t the only measure undertaken by the US Government. The US Army...

<p>Members of Congress have been repeatedly thwarted when attempting to learn basic information about the National Security Agency (NSA) and the secret FISA court which authorizes its activities, documents provided by two House members demonstrate.</p> <p>From the beginning of the NSA controversy, the agency's defenders have insisted that Congress is aware of the disclosed programs and exercises robust supervision over them. "These programs are subject to congressional oversight and congressional reauthorization and congressional debate," President Obama said the day after the first story on NSA bulk collection of phone records was published in this space. "And if there are members of Congress who feel differently, then they should speak up."</p>

Based on the White House’s past lawlessness and corruption in the service of Obamacare, I’m willing to venture the following prediction: The Obama administration will announce in August, probably in a classic Friday news dump, that (1) it will offer Exchange subsidies to workers enrolled in multiemployer union plans, and (2) it will pay the FEHBP contribution toward the Exchange premiums for members of Congress and their staffs. Here’s what makes this prediction interesting: neither of those things would be legal. So, for the record, I really hope this prediction does not come true.The last time I made a prediction...

The bad news is that governments do a lot of things they shouldn’t do. The good news is that I never run out of material.I’ve even created some sub-categories, such as my U.S. vs U.K. government stupidity contest and my great-moments-in-local-government series.But I never thought I would have a special category about bureaucrats vs. Bambi.1. Bureaucrats in Virginia filed three misdemeanor charges against a man for the horrible crime of rescuing a deer that was hit by a car.2. Bureaucrats in Maryland fined two men $90 each for not having life jackets when they had the gall to rescue a...

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges. "It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up...

<p>To adapt H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the cynicism and self-dealing of the American political class. Witness their ad-libbed decision, at the 11th hour and on the basis of no legal authority, to create a special exemption for themselves from the ObamaCare health coverage that everybody else is mandated to buy.</p>

Your guns are in danger. Obama has stopped defending the Second Amendment. He did not get his gun control agenda passed in the Senate. So, he’s unconstitutionally trying to use the United Nations to control your guns. Don’t let him. Obama is getting dangerously close to signing the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. If he signs this treaty and the Senate ratifies it, the Second Amendment is toast. And your guns will be in the control of dictators around the world. This sounds like a bad movie or a conspiracy theory, and I wish it were. But it’s real. 130...

The Fourth Amendment protects us from random invasions of our homes by police, right? We know we're secure in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects" unless the cops demonstrate probable cause to a judge and get a warrant. Except... Except when they don't. The fact of the matter is that police have a lot of leeway to bust your door down and take a look around if they fear that waiting for a warrant could lead to loss of evidence or danger to people. Or lead to something, anyway. That end run around the Fourth Amendment is called "exigent circumstances,"...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.