We’re all familiar with the story behind this article’s headline. It was the last day of the Constitutional Convention, Sept. 18, 1787, when a prominent Philadelphia socialite, Elizabeth Willing Powel, confronted Benjamin Franklin outside of Independence Hall and asked him, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy”?
Franklin was overheard replying, “A republic, ma’am. If you can keep it.” Continue reading
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies on Capitol Hill on May 14, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times
The Trump administration said on July 18 that the United States is rejecting a World Health Organization (WHO) agreement that it says gives the global health body too much power.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the formal rejection of the 2024 amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). Continue reading
Why is probably the most open-ended indirect question ever posed, yet it’s on my mind constantly. An indirect question is a rhetorical device used to provoke thought or conversation, and it makes an excellent opening for this article.
My formal training leads me to question everything, how to discover answers and possible solutions, and then how to test them. However, the questions I’ve been asking lately don’t seem to have clear-cut answers; they lead to more questions. That’s what I learned outside of the formal arena.
Life is a cruel teacher; after all, she kills all of her students.
Am I asking the wrong questions, or are the answers that ambiguous? Continue reading
March 31, 2009 – Are you shocked? Hell, I”m not. When you sleep with the Devil – you take it in the assets.
So, a few months ago, while Junior was still in residency at 1600, the (once) B I G Three Auto makers from the Mutha City (Detroit) came to town to beg for financial AIDS from Big Brother and the holding Company (CON-ress). They all flew down to the city of DeCeit – Washington, you know – BIG cars, loose wimmen, little choir boys (pages) and 535 Traitors with no balls.
Moe (Alan Mulally), Larry (Robert Nardelli) and Curly (Richard Wagoner) came in on those BIG corporate jets, each of which I am sure has burled paneled walls, BIG screen tv’s, a fully stocked bar, and maybe even some more loose wimmins! Wearing their BEST $3,000 Armani suits with their rich, Corinthian leather shoes (sorry Ricardo), they plopped their BIG asses down at the table in front of the CON-gressional twits and stated their cases, as to why they should be bailed out, like the boys on Wall Street and Bankers Alley.
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Suffer the Little Children…
There cannot be any real doubt in the minds of most conservative and freedom-loving Americans that the U.S. public school system and communist teachers, from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, have done more damage to our society on the whole than any other entity in recent memory. And by and large, through the people’s own complacency and careless, assuming attitudes, the American people created this situation themselves. Continue reading
Tribute to the Teachers ~ Alexandra Nechita, 1995
The predictable consequences of the right wing’s war on public schools are being felt as educators leave their communities – and their profession.
When Rosalyn Sandri returned to teach English at her high school alma mater, she never imagined it would end in a forced resignation. Only three years after stepping into her Texas classroom, she walked out of it for the last time. She’d never see her students again.
“They didn’t even let me say goodbye,” she said.
The week before her dismissal had been unremarkable – long days spent grading essays and assigning homework. In September 2024, Sandri, 33, had started publicly transitioning as a transgender woman, something she said her fellow teachers and students welcomed kindly. She shared her journey on TikTok, including one video documenting the euphoria of being called “ma’am” for the first time. Continue reading
Economists have for months warned that tariffs would cause an inflation surge, but as of July, there’s little evidence of that in economic data, despite about $100 billion in tariffs already collected by the Treasury. Fortune asked economists to explain why. The possible reasons range from “it’s too soon” to “consumers won’t stand for it.”
Since the first weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, when the president signaled a wholesale reimagining of the international trade system on a scale not seen in decades, mainstream economists have warned that prices would surge.
The mantra, repeated by everyone from mainstream economists to factions of the GOP, has been clear: A tariff is a tax on consumers. Businesses said the same, with three -quarters of importers in a recent New York Fed study declaring they planned to pass on some tariff costs to customers.
But halfway into the year and well into the most consequential reshuffling of trade in half a century, tariff-fueled inflation is missing in action. Continue reading
Everyone seems to be getting the vapors over the Trump administration’s new, aggressive scrutiny of those people who have become U.S. citizens through the naturalization process, but for me, it’s simply a heightened awareness that far too many new “immigrants” – legal and illegal – have used our freedoms, laws and system to take advantage of any weak link they could find, and it’s far past time to bring the gravy train to a halt, to bring the deceptions and subversion to a halt. Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice is doing exactly what several past administrations failed to do, and no one can find any real fault in her orders or those of President Trump’s in this regard, unless of course they are already in the camp of the damned anti-American Democrat Party communists. Continue reading
It’s a common practice that when things have gone wrong for too long, the ailing system requires a complete reset. It’s an opportunity to reassess the current process and incorporate changes to address deficiencies or rectify problems. However, when the system is so corrupt and focused on divisive elements rather than its intended goal, it’s time to start over.
That’s a direction we haven’t taken for a very long time as a country; not since 1776, as a matter of fact. Merka seems to prefer the band-aid and cobble approach to everything, but there are only so many patches you can make before the underlying fabric will no longer support them, and the patches hold other patches in place, rendering the original indistinguishable from the changes. You can’t tell where the repairs end and the original begins.
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A massive data leak has compromised the healthcare records of more than eight million Americans.
Cybersecurity researchers found the information was exposed in an unprotected dental marketing database, allowing anyone to see the details online.
The dataset included roughly 2.7 million patient profiles and 8.8 million appointment records.
It included names, dates of birth, addresses, contact details, and sensitive healthcare metadata enough to form a detailed profile of each patient. Continue reading
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations… evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.” – Declaration of Independence (1776)
We are now struggling to emerge from the wreckage of a constitutional republic, transformed into a kleptocracy (government by thieves), collapsing into kakistocracy (government by the worst), and enforced by a police state algogracy (rule by algorithm).
This week alone, the Trump administration is reportedly erecting protest barricades around the White House, Congress is advancing legislation that favors the wealthy, and President Trump is grandstanding at the opening of a detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Against such a backdrop of government-sponsored cruelty, corruption and shameless profiteering at taxpayer expense, what, to the average American, is freedom in an age when the government plays god- determining who is worthy of rights, who qualifies as a citizen, and who can be discarded without consequence?
July 3, 2011 ~ This weekend we are hearing a lot about FREEDOM and LIBERTY. Many speeches shall be made and columns written about the *Founding Fathers* and the Patriots who gave their lives so that we may live in FREEDOM and LIBERTY in America. Many columns will be written quoting the *Founding Fathers*.
I am asking readers to really examine just how free are Americans today after all those lives that have been given in the quest for Liberty and Freedom. We hear so much about the sacrifices that the Founding Fathers and the American soldiers sacrificed on our behalf. In spite of all those lives – American falls deeper into Slavery and loss of Liberty than ever before. It matters not who sits in the Oval Office or in the Halls of Congress… Freedom, Liberty, keep fading further and further from view. Continue reading
I don’t believe there has ever been so sweet a stanza sung in all of American history, as these words, from ‘God Bless America’ – written by Irving Berlin in 1918 – which I first heard at the age of six during television broadcast of the Ed Sullivan Show on October 6th 1963, as the world famous singer, Miss Kate Smith, belted them out with a heartfelt soulful, soaring pride and love that made an indelible, everlasting impression upon my young mind, heart and soul. And now, each time this song plays somewhere within my hearing, my chest swells with the same pride, emotion and love I felt back in 1963, and every once in a while, tears come to my eyes, as I remember those days and then realize how far away America has fallen from those times.
Hippocrates, for whom the Hippocratic Oath is affectionately named, covers the breadth and depth of his knowledge and teachings from his life as a healer. Scholars believe it to be a compilation of his writings and teachings, estimating that it was written in the 4th or 5th century BC. The most memorable phrase attributed to Hippocrates, “First do no harm”, as an admonition to the physicians who would follow him, is a paraphrase of ‘either help or do not harm the patient,’ and probably ‘I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm.’
It offers a comprehensive list of cautions for covering topics such as Abortion, Religious Themes, and Euthanasia. Hippocrates’ central premise is to ‘Treat the patient, not the disease’, which is a real departure from where we find ourselves today in Merka and the Business of Medicine – or as I like to think of it, “Making Pain Pay”!
It happens to every society, eventually, and Merka’s next in the queue…
I was unsure of the title for this piece. What-cha-ma-call-it is too vague, and Business as Usual is non-descriptive but true, and I can’t believe what I’m seeing is threadbare and worn out. Truth be told, this is not only a title, but a synopsis of the article, which is what a title should be.
Congressional hearings are like a train wreck, a structure fire, an automobile accident, or a dumpster fire; something compels you to stop, to look, and to watch; you can’t seem to turn away. That’s how I feel about the direction we’re headed after watching these pointless congressional hearings. In my last article, I called them “The Real Housewives of Congress.” Continue reading
Editor’s NOTE: Today is June 29, 2025. In a matter of days, many of us will remember what the date July 4th once represented – Independence Day. There is little meaning of it anymore. In simple terms – America Must Be Cleansed and Purified Through the Fires of Civil War. Please join us on the Federal Observer for this very special column from Justin O. Smith. ~ Jeffrey Bennett, Editor
I hate like hell to always write what I myself see as such negative pieces, but as badly as I wanted to write something positive and hopeful to honor the 250th anniversary of America winning Her independence from Great Britain, there was very little for me to draw from over the past two or three decades even, to suggest our people were still aligned with those beautiful principles that made it all possible.
The American people have become so unbelievably weak, overall, from my perspective, that it blows one’s mind to think that these are descendants of people who took on superior forces and great odds to fight to be free. The vast majority can’t even put down the Cheeto bag or take their fat ass up and off the couch to take out the week’s garbage, much less make any real stand and fight for true freedom and liberty for all; the vast majority doesn’t even seem to really care if tyranny wins the day and a king takes hold, so long as they don’t have to truly be independent or do anything harder than push a few buttons on a cash register each day, or go to Walmart to use their EBT card to get a week’s worth of groceries.
Yes, I know there are still many great young people out there who have been taught at home by their parents, that there isn’t any substitute for self-reliance and real knowledge and skills. Many will suggest I am being far too critical, but I really don’t believe I am, not when we see so many way far left communists being put up today as candidates for many public offices across the nation and crowds of Millennials and GenZers are cheering them on as if it’s always been a totally normal thing to support communism in America. As this population grows and rises into an ascendant and ever more powerful position, it cannot bode anything other than one of the most unsettling, dangerous situations America will ever again face.
Win, lose or draw, no matter what MAGA and Trump do over the next three and a half years, this country is headed for civil war, because its enemies have grown too large and powerful, with backing and support from communists abroad too, that it will not be contained or properly restrained, in order that the country may function properly.
Our enemies-from-within have had a real taste of the power they craved under Obama and Biden, and they are not about to cease and desist or stand down now in regard to their well-known, oft stated agenda to fundamentally transform America and destroy our republic.
I’m actually not too much against ending the republic as it now stands, given that it is in such a miserable, bastardized state, just as long as something better is standing in the wings ready to take its place – a new way forward that places individual liberty above the needs and demands of government, where freedom actually means freedom and one’s home cannot be taken from them by anyone for any reason once it’s paid for in full – where states can’t pass illegal laws to erode and subvert our rights as set forth in the Bill of Rights – and where we truly are free to pursue life, liberty and happiness in every meaningful, righteous manner known to man.
The following post provides a comment from a viewer, and an emotional video from a man who was amazingly talented, but most importantly who has taken the words (also posted below) of Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright from 2007 and turned them into something of his own. At the later stages of George Michael’s life – he had mastered his craft as both a singer and a song-writer, and his ability to LIVE each song as he presented it is something to behold and cherish. The peace which he has brought to me over the past few days has been amazing, I feel the need to share with you what I have felt. Each reader will draw from the following what moves your own emotion. ~ Ed.
I was doing a bit of reflecting on my past and my overall life recently, and every time I fall into such a deep thought process, I always remember what an important role both my Grandmothers played in my life — my Grandfathers too, but it was the Grandmothers who gave me the love I ultimately needed.
I don’t know if there’s a place for such a piece at The Federal Observer or not, but This is a TRUE STORY and autobiographical in nature. Continue reading