Free Republic

FULL TITLE FCC COMISSIONER ON INTERNET OVERSIGHT SWITCH "IF YOU CHERISH FREE EXPRESSION," "YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED" THIS IS "IRREVERSIBLE" HANNITY RADIO INTERVIEW ON WEBPAGE On Wednesday’s “Sean Hannity Show,” FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai (R) stated that the plan to “essentially give up the US oversight role…of the Internet” to ICANN is something that should worry anyone who cherishes “free expression, and free speech rights generally,” and could potentially cede oversight of the Internet to “foreign governments who might not share our values.” He further stated that such a move is “irreversible.” Pai said, “This proposal is to essentially give...

When Karen Vaughn went to Dover Air Force Base in 2011 to meet her son’s body, the mother of Navy SEAL Aaron Vaughn didn’t mind that President Barack Obama was there. She and the other family members gathered had one simple request. “What we experienced there is the families unanimously asked Barack Obama to not bring any media, to not make this a media event, that he was welcome to be with us but no media,” she told CNN’s “Legal View” guest host Ana Cabrera on Thursday. “And you know he showed up with cameras, and the next day our...

Shortened title. Full title: Gold Star Mom: If You’re Outraged By Trump, Be Outraged That Obama Ignored Requests To Keep Media Away From Son’s Casket On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Legal View,” Gold Star mom Karen Vaughn said that while the Khan family “probably had a right to be offended” over Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s remarks, President Obama ignored a request by her and other families not to bring media to the return of the caskets of their children, and “if you’re going to just be outraged that one person says something that could be construed as a flippant...

Tuesday the White House released yet another policy to fight climate change, one with potentially far-reaching consequences. The White House’s chief environmental office, the Council on Environmental Quality, finalized a six-year process of shaping how the government’s agencies, across the board, will factor climate change into their decisions. The council’s new guidance involves what activists and environmental lawyers know as “NEPA” — one of those exceedingly wonky policies that is nevertheless critical to how the modern federal government functions. NEPA is short for a foundational 1969 environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act, that required federal agencies to consider environmental...

So, in the era of fighting radical Islamic terrorism, the Obama administration reportedly told workers at the Department of Homeland Security to scrub the records of Muslims with terror ties; information that has been collected for years, according to Philip Haney. Haney broke his silence on the matter last week in The Hill, where he said that the president’s remarks that the intelligence community could not connect the dots post-underwear bomber in 2009 was infuriating since these actions would remove any chance at doing so. Haney had been a DHS employee for 15 years:

On Wednesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced at the United Nations that her office would be working in several American cities to form what she called the Strong Cities Network (SCN), a law enforcement initiative that would encompass the globe. This amounts to nothing less than the overriding of American laws, up to and including the United States Constitution, in favor of United Nations laws that would henceforth be implemented in the United States itself – without any consultation of Congress at all. The United Nations is a sharia-compliant world body, and Obama, speaking there just days ago, insisted that...

In a new book, former Vice President Dick Cheney and daughter Liz Cheney argue that President Obama "has dangerously surrendered [the] nation's global leadership." Before Obama became president, Republican and Democrat presidents understood and delivered on a "75-year, largely bipartisan tradition of ensuring America's pre-eminence and strength," the two write in their book, "Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America." But, "despite the explosive spread of terrorist ideology and organizations, the establishment of an Islamic State caliphate in the heart of the Middle East, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and increasing threats from Iran, China, North Korea and Russia,...

The most disturbing aspect of the scandal around Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server during her tenure as secretary of state is not the former first lady’s penchant for secrecy. What’s truly unsettling is that it has been widely taken as read among both the media and the general public that Mrs. Clinton will likely avoid serious legal consequences for her behavior because the Justice Department is ultimately answerable to President Obama – and Democrats will not use the instruments of government to destroy one of their own. Whether that eventually proves true, the sentiment itself reveals a...

A federal judge in Texas has put President Obama’s deportation amnesty on hold, while another judge in the District of Columbia is poised to rule any day now on whether the House can sue to stop parts of the administration’s Obamacare spending. Meanwhile, no fewer than six federal judges in the District are refereeing Mr. Obama’s broad pledges of transparency and how they stack up against the way his State Department operated under Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary. Indeed, much of Mr. Obama’s agenda — and his legacy — sits in the hands of federal judges across the country, who...

You can rightly complain about the things which go on inside the White House, the State Department, the Justice Department or the EPA and all of the headline grabbing controversies which erupt from them. None of them, however, may be up to nearly as much mischief as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) though it doesn’t seem to catch the attention of the media nearly as much. This week they were at it again and while a bit on the wonky side, a new wrinkle in the rules could spell big trouble for America’s employers and many, many workers....

  NY Sen. Chuck Schumer (D) announced that he will oppose Barack Obama's capitulation to Iran. “I will vote to disapprove the agreement, not because I believe war is a viable or desirable option, nor to challenge the path of diplomacy. It is because I believe Iran will not change, and under this agreement it will be able to achieve its dual goals of eliminating sanctions while ultimately retaining its nuclear and non-nuclear power,” Schumer wrote in a lengthy statement issued Thursday night detailing his decision. “Better to keep U.S. sanctions in place, strengthen them, enforce secondary sanctions on other...

Global Warming: When it comes to climate change, President Obama says we're all in it together. But when it comes to his plan to fight it, some states appear to be more equal than others.

President Obama’s July 31 phone call organized by the anti-Israel group J Street and other progressive Jewish groups could be summed up in one sentence: Please help because, those rich people are helping those warmongering Jews to fight this wonderful Iran deal because they don’t like me and they want war just like they did in Iraq. In the 20 minute call Obama said that opponents of the Iran deal come from the same “array of forces that got us into the Iraq war” and that a “bunch of billionaires who happily finance super PACs” are “putting the squeeze on...

President Obama’s recent comments about the Iran deal “dredge up the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” according to one of the most respected elder statesmen of Israeli academia. When an academic figure of this stature makes such a charge, the Obama Administration and it supporters should pay attention. Haifa University political scientist Abraham Ben-Zvi, who is no right-winger, is not the type to sling around accusations of anti-Semitism. But President Obama’s recent comments about Jewish “money” and “lobbyists” opposing the Iran deal “have taken a particularly harsh and dangerous turn,” Ben-Zvi wrote in Israel Hayom this week. Presidents should...

During the Clean Energy Investment Summit hosted by the White House on June 16, the administration announced a series of initiatives that will include “more than $4 billion in private sector commitments and executive actions to scale up investment in clean energy innovation.” A statement posted by the White House press secretary’s office noted that Vice President Joe Biden would “deliver remarks highlighting more than $4 billion of independent commitments by major foundations, institutional investors, and other long-term investors to fund climate change solutions,” but also stated that the White House “is announcing a series of executive actions that will...

The most precious virtues that made America's great experiment in freedom and individual liberty so unique have taken quite a beating under Barack Obama and his enablers. Now, after six years of abusing the Constitution on domestic policy issues the Senate has agreed that a White House deal with Iran that will lift Congressionally imposed sanctions is not really a "treaty."  This is no justification for ditching the very things that are supposed to give average Americans the last word on public policy through their representatives and major agreements involving nuclear weapons have always before required a vote of two-thirds of the Senate. And yet, the often-repeated White House rallying...

Is a recently proposed Department of Interior rule change a classic "bait-and-switch" plan designed to curtail energy production rather than benefit taxpayers? Opponents of fossil fuel development would have you believe a change is necessary. This proposal would undo the current valuation of coal and replace it with a complex system designed to punish coal producers with higher costs and significant uncertainty. It is not about maximizing revenue for taxpayers; it's about cutting off production of federal coal from Wyoming and other states. ADVERTISEMENT The anti-fossil fuel crowd regularly invokes the same tired argument in a failed attempt to prove...

Climate Change: President Obama's proposal to cut U.S. emissions by 28% over 10 years as America's contribution to a global climate treaty will devastate our economy while doing nothing to reduce temperatures. The "Clean Power Plan" that the Obama administration submitted Tuesday to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change met an end-of-March deadline for contributions to a treaty in the final stages of negotiations. But the proposal, known to climate negotiators as an Intended Nationally Determined Contribution, isn't new. Obama announced the goal of reducing emissions by 28% below 2005 levels by 2025 as part of a joint climate...

Democratic assemblyman slams Obama who is 'desperate' for a foreign policy accomplishment at Israel's expense. Arutz Sheva got the chance to speak with Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-NY) about the fallout between US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, which historians have assessed as being "unprecedented." Hinting at the Senate probe investigating whether Obama funded the V15 campaign against Netanyahu, Hikind remarked that Obama "worked very very hard" to try and prevent Netanyahu from succeeding - which in the end he did, outpacing Labor by 30 seats to 24. The Democratic assemblyman admitted "I don't understand Obama, you know...

American and European citizens and journalists are spurring jihadi violence by protesting the arrival of Muslim populations into their societies, President Barack Obama declared Thursday. “We’ve also seen, most recently in Europe, a rise in inexcusable acts of anti-Semitism, or in some cases, anti-Muslim sentiment or anti-immigrant sentiment,” Obama told a Feb. 19 audience of U.S. and foreign officials and advocates, who met to discuss ways to minimize jihadi violence. Peaceful criticism of Islamic culture is bad, he suggested. ”When people spew hatred toward others — because of their faith or because they’re immigrants — it feeds into terrorist narratives....