Free Republic

Kansas appears on the verge of becoming among the most welcoming states to people who want to pack heat. A bill promising Kansans the ability to carry concealed firearms — without taking safety training or weathering the background checks required in most of the country — won initial approval in the state Senate on Wednesday. The change, expected to pass Thursday to a likely receptive House, would make Kansas a “constitutional carry” state. That would mean citizens would not need a permit to carry a hidden gun. The bill would maintain the current permit process for people who want to...

When you think of the downstream effects of the Obama administration’s EPA regulations, the first states which come to mind tend to be in coal country and what remains of the rust belt and manufacturing centers. That’s all true enough, but it seems that when the government puts its thumb on the scale, the ripples can be felt in ever widening circles. This includes what might be one of the last states you’d think of… Vermont. Vermont will lose 3.4 percent of its manufacturing jobs by 2023 due to Obama administration climate regulations, according to a report on the...

Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber billed the State of Vermont for hours that “were impossible for him to accomplish ... for one of the invoices, which is September, and this is just an example, he billed out 500 hours a month for his research assistants. Well, the auditor found that he only had one research assistant. So, if you do that math ... the auditor even criticized the Democrat administration up here for this. The people who were supposed to be overseeing this contract did not demand any details at all from Professor Gruber. They just said — they just asked...

Complete Headline: Where’s the Money? Vermont Auditor Reports Jonathan Gruber Overbilled State by At Least $48,000, Calls in Attorney General In a 54-page memo, Vermont State Auditor Doug Hoffer confirms that embattled Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber overbilled the state in invoices he submitted for work Gruber claims was performed by research assistants. “The evidence suggests that Dr. Gruber overstated the hours worked by the RA, but we have insufficient documentation to say any more about his inconsistencies and questionable billing practices. I have referred the matter to the Attorney General for his consideration, which is standard procedure in such circumstances,”...

A top aide to Gov. Peter Shumlin is defending the administration's handling of a contract with Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist Jonathan Gruber, after criticisms were lodged by the state auditor. Administration Secretary Justin Johnson made public his reply to Auditor Doug Hoffer, in which Johnson says officials in the state office of health care reform kept a close eye on work done by Gruber. Hoffer says the evidence suggests that Gruber overstated the hours worked by a $100-per-hour research assistant, and that top state health care officials ignored the obvious signs that something was amiss. The state rewrote...

Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is warning Americans that two ultra-conservative billionaire brothers will soon hold more political power than both the Democratic and Republican Parties. While speaking to a group of supporters in Iowa last week, Sanders explained why he was considering a run for the president of the United States in 2016. "It is likely in a very short period of time that the Koch brothers themselves will have a stronger political presence than either the Democratic or the Republican Party," the lawmaker noted. "I am prepared to take on the billionaire class."Sanders said that a lot...

Vermont on Thursday became the third state to add an extra ObamaCare sign-up period through the end of tax season, adding pressure on federal health officials to take the same approach. While the official ObamaCare deadline passed on Sunday, about a quarter of all state exchanges have added a grace period to accommodate the millions of uninsured people who will be forced to pay a penalty for the first time this tax season. "It would be awful for a Vermont family to have to pay a fee of several hundred dollars or more, and then have to pay 100 percent...

In an unusually harsh attack by an American politician on an Israeli prime minister, former Vermont governor and Democratic chairman Howard Dean lambasted Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, describing him as “a disaster” whose decision to address Congress in March was “a stupid thing to do that has harmed U.S.-Israeli relations greatly.” “I don’t trust Netanyahu. I think he’s not served Israel well,” Dean added. In an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, the outspoken Dean, who was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, said, “It’s outrageous what’s going on. Imagine Obama going to Israel two weeks before...

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) declared the country needs “a fighter, not just an Ivy Leaguer” while expressing that he wasn’t afraid of any of the other GOP candidates and dismissed criticism of his lack of a college degree as an “elitist, government knows best, top-down approach” while arguing “we’ve had [an] Ivy League-trained lawyer in the White House for the last six years…[who has] done a pretty lousy job leading this country” and on Tuesday’s “Kelly File” on the Fox News Channel. After seeing a clip of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean (D) criticizing Walker’s lack of a degree,...

Hundreds of Vermonters on Tuesday night debated proposed legislation that would expand background checks for gun buyers and impose other new firearms restrictions. At a packed Statehouse, the Senate Judiciary and Health and Welfare Committee heard testimony from supporters and opponents of the legislation, though opponents in the hall and nearby rooms where video was piped in easily outnumbered supporters. Several opponents pointed to Vermont’s rank in FBI statistics as the safest state in the country. They argued that Senate Bill 31 isn’t needed. “If I’m being assaulted on a city street, I’d rather have a .38 on me than...

Forty-two years after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in its Roe v. Wade decision, Vermont pro-choice activists gathered in a Statehouse meeting room Thursday morning to remind one another that Congress and other states are making moves to restrict access to abortion. “It’s not a fight that’s going to go away,” former Gov. Madeleine Kunin told those attending the gathering, which was organized by Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. In the nearby Statehouse cafeteria, tables were littered with fliers emphasizing the value of adoption and offering testimonials from women who regretted abortions. The Vermont Right to Life Committee spent...

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent and self-described socialist from Vermont, inadvertently reminded America “progressive” is just another word for “socialist” ... In his column, titled “Fight for Our Progressive Vision,” Sanders called for universal health care, increased government redistribution of wealth, limits on political speech, additional government action against “climate change,” $1 trillion in new infrastructure spending and .... Meanwhile, in Sanders’s home state of Vermont, Democrat Gov. Peter Shumlin announced last month he was abandoning single-payer socialized medicine program Green Mountain Care because it was too expensive. While Sanders is widely seen as a standard-bearer for progressive thought, it’s...

Howard Dean—that celebrated scholar of Islam—has weighed in on today's murderous rampage in Paris and declared that he refuses to call the shooters in this and similar cases "Muslim terrorists." According to Dean, the disregard for the lives of others that these terrorists display "is not what the Koran says." Dean's denial of the obvious puts him in the company of many liberals, most notably including President Obama, who after the beheading of James Foley declared that ISIS "speaks for no religion." View the video here.

Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders says he'll decide by March whether to launch a 2016 presidential campaign and, if so, whether he'll seek the Democratic nomination. Either way, Sanders says he wouldn't run just to nudge the debate to the left. "I don't want to do it unless I can do it well," he told The Associated Press. "I don't want to do it unless we can win this thing." Sanders, a socialist, said he grew up "solidly lower middle class" in a Jewish family in Brooklyn — his father, an immigrant from Poland, sold paint for a living —and...

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) was traveling back and forth to Cuba in secret negotiations to try and secure a release for American prisoner Alan Gross when a woman approached him with an impassioned plea: she wanted a child and she needed his help. The woman, the wife of one of the Cuban spies imprisoned in the U.S. on espionage charges, was in her early 40s and said she was almost out of time. According to Tim Rieser, Leahy’s foreign policy aide, she was “clearly desperate.” That began an unusual effort on the part the senator, who is chairman of the...

BURLINGTON – At 6 a.m. Vermont time today – 12 p.m. Noon at the Vatican – Pope Francis appointed The Most Reverend Christopher James Coyne (@bishopcoyne), until now Auxiliary Bishop of Indianapolis, as Tenth Bishop of Burlington. A Boston native, Bishop Coyne will formally be installed as pastor of Vermont’s 118,000 Catholics on Thursday, January 29, 2015, at 2:00 PM, with a Solemn Mass of Installation in Saint Joseph Co-Cathedral. The Pope’s ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, will be in attendance as the Holy Father’s personal representative. “I am grateful to Pope Francis for his confidence...

Looking over the final voter tallies, the winners and losers for state and federal offices, there remains one undecided gubernatorial contest: Vermont. Unlike other states, if a gubernatorial candidate, whether incumbent of challenger, fails to win a simple majority, the state legislature appoints the next governor out of the top three contenders. Incumbent Democrat Peter Shumlin, won by 2,000 votes, yet got less than half the total vote in the 2014 election. Presently, the legislature sits firmly in the Democratic camp, although Republican gained a few seats. Still, Shumlin has weathered some troubling controversies in Vermont. In his 2014 State...

**SNIP** “It is not the right time for Vermont” to pass a single-payer system, Shumlin acknowledged in a public statement ending his signature initiative. He concluded the 11.5 percent payroll assessments on businesses and sliding premiums up to 9.5 percent of individuals’ income “might hurt our economy.” Vermont’s outcome is a “small speed bump,” said New York Assembly member Richard Gottfried, who’s been pushing single-payer bills for more than 20 years. But opponents says it’s the end of the road. “If cobalt blue Vermont couldn’t find a way to make single-payer happen, then it’s very unlikely that any other state...

The one state that not only embraced Obamacare but insisted on going beyond it to a full single-payer system was Vermont, the haven of hippies and expatriate New Yorkers, which has become one of the most liberal states in the nation. In 2011, it adopted a form of neighboring Canada’s government-financed health care and promised to implement it by 2017. (And Jonathan Gruber was a key architect of this plan as well as of Obamacare.) This week, however, Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, admitted the state couldn’t afford the plan’s $2 billion price tag and consequent sky-high taxes, and pulled...