Free Republic

When it comes to exploiting the tragedy of the Sandy Hook massacre to push a completely unrelated gun control agenda, President Obama has no peer. The White House announced today that it would hand over the President’s weekly internet and radio address to Francine Wheeler, mother of 6-year-old Ben Wheeler, who was murdered by Adam Lanza in Newtown, Connecticut. Jay Carney, summing up the emotional appeal of the administration’s gun control agenda, admitted that the exploitation of the families had been “critical” to progress on gun control.

The gun bill passed cloture in the Senate with 68 votes today. How does this happen, in what we are told is the world’s greatest deliberative body, when senators have not even seen the text of the legislation? Speaking on the Senate floor minutes before the vote to move gun-control legislation forward, Mike Lee (R., Utah) urged postponing the cloture vote because none of his Senate colleagues has yet had a chance to read the entire bill. “We’re trying to prevent the ability of members to push through legislation before anyone has had the time to read and evaluate the...

>An interesting admission in the Washington Post:Moments after clearing the first procedural hurdle, Democrats and gun control groups began readying themselves for a potentially more difficult fight: Weeks of Senate debate defending their carefully crafted legislation against possible amendments — particularly a plan to allow gun owners to carry concealed weapons from one state to another — that would kill the bill’s underlying goal. If the underlying goal of the "universal background check" bill is not to "keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentaly ill", both of which are prevented from obtaining concealed carry permits, one...

ALBANY, N.Y. - An Albany, New York high school English teacher who asked students to imagine they were Nazis and give reasons why Jews were evil may be disciplined, a school district spokesman said on Friday. Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard was expected to personally apologize on Friday to families of Albany High School students who were given the writing assignment, said Ron Lesko, a spokesman for the district. Vanden Wyngaard issued an apology in the press on Thursday night after a local newspaper reporter showed school officials the assignment, which had been published on the paper’s website. Lesko confirmed that...

Even as the mandated sequester bites into U.S. federal spending -- and newly appointed Secretary of State John Kerry boasts that he is cutting his budget by 6 percent -- the State Department is planning to boost spending on the United Nations in 2014 by more than 4 percent to at least $3.6 billion