Free Republic

Health Reform: Friday's decision to pull the American Health Care Act from the House floor because it lacked enough votes to pass was a culmination of months of bad decisions, poor planning, and terrible messaging by the GOP leadership in the House. This failure undermines not only the party's credibility, but President Trump's purported ability to "make great deals." Worse, it emboldens the left-wing "resistance." Back in early December, we warned in this space that the Republican's ObamaCare repeal effort was "off to a bad start." That was when House Speaker Paul Ryan was talking up a "repeal and delay"...

Does it make health care more affordable? Does it give consumers more choices? Does it provide Americans more control over their families’ health care?

President Trump predicted Friday that pressure on Democrats will compel them to work with Republicans to pass a healthcare reform package after Obamacare collapses. "When it explodes, they come to us and we make one beautiful deal," Trump told the Washington Post's Robert Costa in a phone interview shortly after House leadership pulled the American Health Care Act in the face of conservative opposition. Trump said he believed Republicans came within "five to 12 votes" of passing the AHCA. They needed 216 votes to send the legislation to the Senate.

Democrats are cheering a new poll which shows that likely 2018 voters shift 33 points away from incumbent GOP legislators once they are given negative information about House Speaker Paul Ryan’s healthcare bill. “Voters [in GOP districts] move from approving of their congressperson by 12 points(46% approve, 34% disapprove) to disapproving by 21 points (35% approve,56% disapprove) — a net shift of 33 percentage points,” says Priorities USA, which commissioned the poll of 1,001 likely voters into the popularity of Ryancare, or the American Health Care Act. The Ryancare bill is intended to supplant Obamacare’s takeover of the nation’s healthcare...

A lawsuit in Seattle pits some fundamental rights against each other — it’s civil rights that ban discrimination, and property rights that allow owners to decide what to do with their homes and land. The issue is with a new law that requires landlords to rent to tenants on a “first come, first served” basis. The goal is to make sure all renters are treated equally. But the landlords who are suing say the program is a bureaucratic nightmare and unconstitutional. Critics say it’s all about the survival of the fastest, but supporters say it levels the playing field for...

House GOP lawmakers are preparing to try to fulfill their promise to repeal Obamacare ... or major portions of it. The House is set to vote on the legislation, called the American Health Care Act, on Friday. Republican leaders have already made several changes to placate both conservatives and moderates, but a number of members in both chambers remain concerned. So a lot may change before it reaches President Trump's desk. Critics have ranged from conservative Republicans to insurers to the AARP. Conservatives complain that the bill does not fully repeal Obamacare and that many provisions are too similar to...

CEDAR KNOLLS -- Gov. Chris Christie announced Thursday that New Jersey added almost 13,000 new private sector jobs in February, building on last week's announcement that 2016 marked the largest annual gain in employment in sixteen years. New Jersey's unemployment rate fell from 4.6 percent in January to 4.4 percent last month, making it the lowest it's been since October 2007. The national unemployment rate for February was 4.7 percent. "Over the past year, New Jersey's private sector employers have added 77,000 new jobs," said Christie.

As Republicans prepare to vote on their health care bill, which does not fully repeal Obamacare, a number of Republicans say it’s a mistake to put their names to the plan: “Just let Obamacare collapse, then challenge the Democrats to come in and help us fix the mess they created,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News Friday morning, as lawmakers debated the latest iteration of the bill on the House floor. “President Trump’s going to be judged by the outcome of the legislation, and what I see in the House, I don’t think this legislation is going to move...

President Trump pledged during the presidential campaign to deliver legislation that “fully repeals Obamacare.” By forcing the House to a vote on a bill that does not repeal the health insurance regulations that are the driving force behind the Affordable Care Act’s skyrocketing premiums and low-quality coverage, Republican leaders are abandoning the president’s pledge. The leadership bill would only modify those regulations. As a result, the Congressional Budget Office projects, it would increase premiums 15-20 percent above their already-high levels and leave more people uninsured than full repeal would. House leaders claim Senate rules require a 60-vote supermajority to repeal...

Congress no longer has the credibility to independently tackle a probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and President Trump and his associates' ties to Moscow, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Wednesday. "It's a bizarre situation, and what I think, the reason why I'm calling for this select committee or a special committee, is I think that this back-and-forth and what the American people have found out so far that no longer does the Congress have credibility to handle this alone," McCain told MSNBC's Greta Van Susteren. "And I don't say that lightly." McCain's comments come amid an...

The Keystone Pipeline project was expected to create tens of thousands of high paying jobs in the oil industry. The project itself would create 20,000 construction jobs. And the pipeline would bring oil from Canada and North Dakota to refineries in the United States. (Bob McCarty) Obama rejected the plan in 2011 and again in 2015. This week the Trump State Department signed and issued permits for the completion of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Gabriel Sherman writes that White House chief strategist and former Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon (or, for those concerned with SEO, Steve Bannon) has privately expressed concern that the American Health Care Act (AHCA) betrays the populist voters who put Donald Trump in the White House.

President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Labor, Alexander Acosta, said during a congressional hearing that he believed it is “not the intent” to replace American employees with cheaper, foreign ones under the H-1B visa program.

German candymaker Haribo, famous for its fruit-flavored gummy bears, plans to build its first production facility in the United States and start making confectionery there from 2020. Family-owned Haribo, which employs 7,000 people worldwide at 16 sites in ten countries, said on Thursday it has decided to acquire property in Wisconsin for the factory. Haribo, a model of Germany's successful "Mittelstand" firms which make up the backbone of Europe's largest economy, was founded in 1920. It gave Germany one of its most famous advertising slogans, promising to make kids and adults happy.

Supreme Court: After Judge Neil Gorsuch spent 20 hours demonstrating that he is abundantly qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice, Democrats announced plans to filibuster his nomination. Good luck with that. By all accounts, Gorsuch put in a stellar performance in his confirmation hearing. Even the New York Times conceded that "if Democrats harbored any hope of raising doubts about Judge Gorsuch among Republicans, they came nowhere close." But as soon as the hearing ended, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that he was going to filibuster the nomination anyway. Gorsuch, Schumer said, "was groomed by the Federalist Society...

Danish conglomerate A. P. Møller-Mærsk’s shipping arm, Maersk Line, has been issued with a summons by antitrust authorities in the US. The company is subject of an investigation into suspected price fixing along with a number of other large container shipping companies, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The summons were handed out during a raid on a San Francisco meeting attended by 20 bosses of the industry’s biggest companies, says the report. …

A growing gap between rich and poor in Germany could sap social cohesion in Europe’s largest economy and most populous country, a government report warned on Thursday. “If the differences between poor and rich are felt to be too big in a society, and wealth seems mostly to be acquired without rewarding work, then acceptance of the economic and social order can shrink,” the labor ministry study said. […] In Germany, the richest 10 percent of households own more than half of all the wealth in the country, while the poorest 50 percent hold around 1.0 percent, Labor Minister Andrea...

Labor unions have been known to do many despicable things to grab dues money from workers who don’t want anything to do with them. A current Minnesota case is about as bad as you’ll ever find. In 2013, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) got one of its favored politicians, Minnesota governor Mark Dayton, to sign an order declaring that home healthcare providers who receive Medicaid money to care for disabled family members were government employees. But they were “employees” only because that made them eligible for unionization. The SEIU figured that it had a good shot at finagling a...

Published on Mar 21, 2017 I am very sorry to say, that after 13 years on the show, I am leaving Wheeler Dealers. Wheeler Dealers is a great car show, reportedly the biggest on the planet at the moment. It is broadcast in about 220 territories around the globe and apparently has several hundred million viewers worldwide. This success would not have been possible without the huge collaborative effort put in by the production team over the years but most of all because of the loyalty and appreciation of our fans who have kept watching, in ever increasing numbers around...

Cook County lost more population than any other county in the United States from July 2015 to July 2016, according to a new data release from the U.S. Census Bureau. Cook County shrank by 21,324 people. The county had more births than deaths and gained 18,434 people from international immigration. However, Cook County had a net loss of 66,244 people to other parts of the United States, which more than offset the components of population growth.