Free Republic

Our new Townhall cousin Conn Carroll tracked the trends. Oof: In fact, since the government shutdown began, every poll that has been taken shows Obamacare gaining in popularity, not declining.The Washington Post/ABC News poll shows support for Obamacare rising from 42% approve/52% disapprove to 46% approve/49% disapprove.CBS shows support for Obamacare rising from 39% approve/51% disapprove to 43% approve/51% disapprove.CNN shows support for Obamacare rising from 38% approve/57% disapprove to 41% approve/56% disapprove.Rasmussen shows support for Obamacare rising from 43 approve/53% disapprove to 46% approve/48% disapprove. None of those gains are dramatic but they’re all in the wrong direction. Here’s...

If you happen to be in Washington, DC, between now and January, you can see a piece of Jewish history that was never supposed to see the light of day. The National Archives is now exhibiting restored holy books and communal documents that belonged to the Jewish community of Iraq. In 1940, the Iraqi Jewish community numbered 137,000 people. Jews made up more than a quarter of the population of Baghdad. A 2,500-year-old community, Iraq had for centuries been a major center of Jewish learning. The Babylonian Talmud was written there. The rabbinical academies in Karbala and Baghdad were considered...

You might have thought that the ultimate culpability for the current problems plaguing ObamaCare belong to the administration that sloppily designed, forcefully passed, and hastily implemented the gigantic redistribution project — but you would have been wrong. Ranking Democrat of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the one holding the health care hearing this Thursday, is here to tell you why: KIRSTEN WELKER: Based on what you know right now, was the president or Secretary Sebelius made aware of those problems before this system was launched?WAXMAN: I don’t have any information about that, but no one could have possibly known...

Tuesday, October 22, 2013 The Progressive Psychoracialists of McRacism Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Chris Matthews, MSNBC's own Wise Latina, began his latest attack by denouncing Ted Cruz's racism against "Browns". Cruz had told a San Antonio audience that it was good to leave D.C. and come back to America. >"This isn’t a casual reference," Matthews declared. Like Freudian psychoanalysts, MSNBC psychoracialists know that there are no such things as casual references. A misplaced comma can reveal unspeakable hidden depths of racism and does every time Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes run short of material. The...

The best part of this is that he admits he doesn’t know if the site actually needs more money or not. “Give them a little” is something he seems to say almost reflexively, I guess because when a government program is failing badly, that’s just what you do. For Hoyer, throwing another hundred million or two into this quicksand is really just a symbolic vote of confidence in it, I think, nothing more. When you’re $17 trillion in debt, it’s all Monopoly money at this point anyway.I wonder if he knows that the site’s already three times over budget. I...

Country music icon, satirist and one-time gubernatorial candidate Richard "Kinky" Friedman has announced his bid for agriculture commissioner in 2014. Friedman will run in the Democratic primary. The 68 year old said he’s interested in legalizing and regulating marijuana as an agricultural crop to revitalize the Texas farming industry.

Juan Williams has a clear grip on responsibility for the failure of a program that got passed in Congress with no Republican votes, and implemented with no Republican management in a Democratic administration. Williams claims that the White House would have delayed the rollout of ObamaCare’s exchanges except for the opposition of the GOP to the program as a whole. As a result, Williams argues, Barack Obama and Kathleen Sebelius had no choice but to lie about the exchanges and let it unfold.Come on — you knew the media would eventually get around to this argument. You just didn’t expect...

It is well-established science that the cooling of the earth has been in the past and would be in the future more disruptive to human existence than atmospheric warming. If we are quite quiet, we may yet hear the sound of extreme irony laughing its head off at our efforts to lower carbon dioxide emissions and, thus, initiating or strengthening cooler weather conditions that would bring massive hunger and movements of populations, precisely the opposite condition wished for by the anthropogenic global warming crowd. However, no one may be able to spend their waking hours smirking if it turns out...

Bob Costas is one of the premier sportscasters and a very smart guy, so it was somewhat surprising to see him join the chorus of those decrying the fact that the owner of the Washington Redskins is resisting pressures to change the name of his football team. The argument is that American Indians are offended by the name, though there is no compelling evidence that most American Indians are worked up about it. Nor is there any evidence that anyone intended the name to be insulting, either this team or any number of other sports teams that have called themselves...

[A]s CBS News reported this morning, Health Care dot gov’s new price-quote option — designed to let you see a price before entering all of your personal information — is low-balling everyone’s premiums. If you’re 49 or under, it quotes you a rate for a 27-year-old. If you’re between 50 and 64, it quotes you a rate for a 50-year-old. The result is that the site will always lowball your price unless you are exactly 50 years old, by somewhere in the range of 50 to 80 percent. Just watch:

America’s public pension funds are in trouble because sketchy Mr. Wall Street sold some slack-jawed pension fund managers on risky investments with promises of high returns that may never materialize. Or so Matt Taibbi seems to believe. In a recent piece in Rolling Stone, Taibbi blames public pensions’ current woes on “Gordon Gekko wanna-be’s” (sic), “scorched-earth takeover artists like Bain Capital,” and “Wall Street,” who used the financial crisis to lure weakened pension funds into investing in “alternatives.” Alternatives are investment vehicles that are different from stocks, bonds, and commodities in that they are typically traded by individuals without the...

I recently gave five reasons why the shutdown fight was worthwhile and my number one reason was that it’s better to be on offense than defense. It seems I’m not the only one to reach this sensible conclusion. Here’s some of what Fred Barnes wrote today for the Wall Street Journal. In the deal that ended the government shutdown, Republicans…got almost nothing they’d sought. But what has been largely overlooked is that the deal didn’t curtail, much less end, the automatic spending cuts known as the budget sequester. And undoing the sequester is what President Obama and Democrats wanted most...

Before it even launched, red flags went up about the Obamacare website. Health insurance companies complained about it, and the site crashed during a test run. But nobody told the President of any of it, the nation's health chief told CNN. Kathleen Sebelius said President Barack Obama didn't hear that there may be problems with the sign-up portal for his signature health care law until it went live on October 1. That's when the site nosedived into a technical abyss.

Jobs: Here we go again, another employment report showing "unexpectedly weak" job growth. Pretty soon Americans are going to figure out, as computer geeks like to say, "It's not a bug — it's a feature." Across Wall Street, the consensus was 180,000 net new payroll jobs in September. But some investment houses had quietly raised the bar to 200,000, believing the economy had "firmed up" in recent months. But just like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, only to have Lucy pull it away at the last second, our nation's pre-eminent economic thinkers keep having their predictions dashed on...

"It started with a coffee date. Now I'm married with kids. How the heck did that happen?"How indeed? Life sneaks up on us. Change occurs in tiny increments. Before you know it, the order of life has been inverted.It's the same with the law. Aristotle knew what he was talking about when he wrote "Jealously maintain...the spirit of obedience to law, more especially in small matters; for transgression creeps in unperceived and at last ruins the state, just as the constant recurrence of small expenses in time eats up a fortune."The California slippery slope of anti-freedom legislation – whatever the...

This month, more Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles (MRAPs) have found their way from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the Main Streets of America. These are just the latest acquisitions in a growing practice by Pentagon that's militarizing America's municipal police forces. Police departments in Boise and Nampa, Idaho, each acquired an MRAP, as did the force in High Springs, Florida. The offer of war-ready machinery, at practically no cost, has proven hard to resist for local police departments. Increasingly, they are looking like soldiers equipped for battle. The growing similarity between our domestic police forces and the U.S. military...

FARGO – The Obama administration asked North Dakota’s largest health insurer not to publicize how many people have signed up for health insurance through a new online exchange, a company official says. During a Monday forum in Fargo for people interested in signing up for coverage via the exchange, James Nichol of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota told the crowd his company received the request from the federal government earlier Monday. Nichol is a consumer sales manager for the company. Still, a spokeswoman from Blue Cross Blue Shield says about 14 North Dakotans have signed up for coverage...

As Twitchy reported last night, Sen. Ted Cruz declared it “great to be back in America” as he returned to Texas and a packed house to welcome him home. Tonight, Cruz attended a similar event in Arlington, Texas, where he promised not to speak for 21 hours, referring of course to his famous filibuster. Cruz was reportedly greeted in Arlington with a standing ovation that lasted anywhere from 9 to 14 minutes. Last night’s standing ovation in San Antonio was reported to be only 8 minutes, although there was “Green Eggs and Ham” cake at that event.

World View, an offshoot of privately owned Paragon Space Development Corp., is developing a balloon-launched, near-space ride for $75,000 -- less than one-third the current cost to fly on Virgin Galactic's suborbital SpaceShipTwo. World View passengers will soar to an altitude of about 30 kilometers (about 100,000 feet) -- far short of SpaceShipTwo’s intended 110-kilometer (68-mile) high peak. Inside the capsule there will be little sensation of microgravity. Rather, the whole point of the ride is the view.

According to Kathleen Sebelius, Barack Obama knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about the fundamental problems with the Oct. 1 roll-out of his namesake legislation that will affect nearly one-fifth of the nation's economy. He didn't know about the last-minute test of the website expected to handle millions of customers and how it had crashed when only a few hundred samplers tried to get on at the same time. He had no idea that IT people had been expressing deep concerns for months that the site costing hundreds of millions of dollars was being constructed like an "Our Gang" clubhouse. According to...