Free Republic

The Republican-run House of Representatives on Friday approved a bipartisan deal to spare doctors from a looming Medicare pay cut but included a provision to undermine Obamacare, which critics said was a non-starter in the Democratic-controlled Senate. The vote was 238-181, with most House Democrats refusing to swallow what they called an Obamacare “poison pill,” a provision to delay for five years the tax penalty that most Americans must pay under President Barack Obama’s healthcare law if they decline to sign up for insurance. **SNIP** Hundreds of thousands of doctors who participate in traditional Medicare face a 24 percent pay...

MIAMI — The donations kept pouring in: hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to President Obama and more than a dozen members of Congress, carefully routed through the families of two wealthy brothers in Florida. They had good reason to be generous. The two men, Roberto and William Isaias, are fugitives from Ecuador, which has angrily pressed Washington to turn them over, to no avail. A year after their relatives gave $90,000 to help re-elect Mr. Obama, the administration rejected Ecuador’s extradition request for the men, fueling accusations that such donations were helping to keep the brothers and...

A new campaign that seeks to pressure the Jewish campus group Hillel into partnering with anti-Israel organizations is being hailed as a way to “a “liberate young Jews from the vice grip of Zionism” by anti-Zionist activist Max Blumenthal. Blumenthal, who recently wrote a book that compared Israel with the Third Reich, praised the new campus movement “Open Hillel” during a speech at Brandeis University, according to video posted by a group called Safe Hillel. “There is a movement afoot, an organic movement on campuses now … which I consider to be a movement to liberate young Jews, from the...

Organizing for Action is revamping its fundraising practices and fired a fundraiser amid questions about whether the group was promising access to Obama administration officials in exchange for donations. Samantha Maltzman, a top fundraiser for the Democratic group with strong ties to President Obama, resigned from the organization after NBC News obtained emails between her and Dr. Munr Kazmir, a New Jersey businessman, explicitly listing prices to attend a summit last week with the president. The emails conflicted with a pledge by former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, who wrote in an op-ed last year that “we can't and we...

**SNIP** Senator Hagan released the following statement to ABC11: "When this law was written, we established a three-year transition period so that insurance companies had time to begin offering plans that met the requirements of the law for the 5 percent of people on the individual market. As I've made clear, I didn't know that some insurance companies would use that transition period to sell outdated plans without fully notifying consumers that they would no longer be available in 2014. But as soon as it came to my attention last fall when I heard from constituents who felt blindsided by...

Democrats are panicking. They are worried Republicans will win back the US Senate.The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) sent out this email today. Jim — This is bad: Six Democrats are now trailing in the polls after $28 million in Koch attacks — and if the Republicans win all six, the Senate is theirs.But we will turn this around and stop them: our Grassroots Victory Project will invest $60 million into 4,000 field staff in 10 states to reverse the GOP’s gains. To ensure the GVP is fully funded before the FEC deadline TOMORROW, we need you and 786 other...

Alison Lundergan Grimes won't be showing Southern hospitality to President Obama. The Kentucky Democrat says she doesn't need the President to help out in her bid for the U.S. Senate, as she tries to distance herself from his unpopular health care reform. “I speak for myself. I don't need any other surrogate to do that,” she announced Monday in a MSNBC interview with Kasie Hunt, when asked if the President would be joining her on the campaign trail.

For one of the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbents, Sen. Mary Landrieu’s campaign site is rather… sparse right now. **SNIP** In the 29 items listed on the “News & Press Releases” page, the words “Obamacare” “Affordable Care Act” “health care” and “health” never appear. “Insurance” gets mentioned six times… but only in the context of flood insurance.

Fortunately for Claire McCaskill, she doesn’t have to make that call in 2014, thanks to a narrow escape in Missouri’s 2012 Senate election. If she did have to campaign in the post-ObamaCare rollout environment, though, McCaskill would know better than to invite a deeply unpopular President to accompany her while making a pitch for another six years in office, she tells Morning Joe (via Mediaite):CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO MARK HALPERIN: Senator, Mark Halperin here. If you were running for re-election in Arkansas, Louisiana or North Carolina, would you invite the president and campaign side-by-side with him?CLAIRE MCCASKILL: You...

What is this about? New to me. Any more insight on it? PAW (which I despise) posts this without any explanation.

WASHINGTON — President Obama is offering to help Senate Democrats get re-elected — by staying as far away as possible. The president broached the sensitive topic of his political toxicity in some parts of the nation during a meeting with the Senate Democratic conference Wednesday. “He said he knew he is not popular in some of the states, so he would not be offended if he were not invited to visit them this year,” one senator later confided to The Washington Post.

The most robust defense of Obamacare on television right now lasts about three seconds and comes from a little-known Texas Democrat named Barbara Mallory Caraway, a former state lawmaker running for Congress. Her $20,000 spot says last year's government shutdown led by her home-state senator, Republican Ted Cruz, hurt "those people looking for health care insurance." A Democratic super PAC indirectly plugged the health care law in a December ad, boasting that Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina "forced insurance companies to cover cancer and other preexisting conditions." Before that, campaign ad trackers say the last exclusively positive message on...

Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer is launching a new campaign against proponents of Keystone XL, and one possible target is Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.). Steyer's green group NextGen Climate Action posted a list of candidates who are strong advocates of the controversial TransCanada oil pipeline on its website, asking people to pick which one it should target for its Keystone XL television ad. NextGen Climate Action is lining up Landrieu, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Reps. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Paul Broun (R-Ga.) as potential targets. Also on the list is former South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds, who is...

The Food and Drug Administration is launching a new campaign against youth tobacco use. "The Real Cost" advertisements graphically depict the health consequences of smoking, such as tooth loss and skin damage. Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of disease, death, and disability in the U.S. Every day, more than 3,200 Americans under age 18 try their first cigarette, and more than 700 become regular smokers. The FDA is targeting its efforts toward the 10 million Americans ages 12 to 17 who have never smoked a cigarette but are open to it. "We know that early intervention is critical,...

Barack Obama was in Wisconsin and Tennessee Thursday happy talking about "opportunity." He's for it, by the way. "It's good to be in Wisconsin," he told Wisconsin. Few hours later, "It's good to be in Nashville." In both places he talked about "opportunity"--the opportunity that comes with jobs and the opportunity that comes with education. As a word, "opportunity" polls well. Americans like the idea. Yet, these days whenever Obama has the opportunity to talk about his signature namesake "achievement," he rarely seizes the opportunity. It wasn't until two-thirds of the way through his 7,000-word State of the Union address...

WASHINGTON —Rep. Trey Radel, R-Fla., is resigning today after pleading guilty to cocaine possession, and not all of his campaign donors have buyer’s remorse — including a political action committee led by George P. Bush, a GOP candidate for Texas land commissioner.Bush — the nephew and grandson of presidents — co-chaired Maverick PAC at the time it donated $2,500 to the Radel campaign a week before Election Day in 2012. He stepped down after announcing his bid for land commissioner last Nov. 19, according to Jay Zeidman, who co-chaired the group with Bush and continues to lead it.“Obviously, it’s disappointing...

WASHINGTON -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he is encouraging vulnerable Senate Democrats running for re-election this fall to campaign with President Barack Obama, even if he's unpopular in their states. "Barack Obama is personally a very popular guy," Reid told CNN's Dana Bash Tuesday. "And people love this man. They love his family. Of course, with what the Republicans have been doing, trying to denigrate him with what's happened with the rollout of Obamacare, but things, even this week, his numbers are going up again." There was no immediate comment from Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who is in...

Two days ago, the Paulding County Republican Examiner (reported) on a new Obama scandal that was emerging over the weekend that the Obama campaign was accepting illegal overseas donations and that the report would be released by an unnamed tax payer watch group. This morning, the non-partisan group, (Government Accountability Institute) (GAI) released its 108 page report, the first ever analysis of election campaign donations issues called, “America the Vulnerable: Are Foreign and Fraudulent Online Campaign Contributions Influencing U.S. Elections?” raises indications the Obama campaign has potentially violated federal election law by failing to prevent the use of fraudulent or...

This is Rep. Charlie Rangel’s last hurrah. The 83-year-old Democrat is preparing to announce that this will be his last campaign for re-election, and that he will retire from Congress in 2016 as President Obama is leaving the White House, Harlem insiders told me. “Rangel is hoping that he will get more support for re-election by promising this will be his last term — and that party leaders will allow him to step down in dignity then, rather than backing a challenger now,” said one source.

The Wendy Davis campaign sent Greta Van Susteren a response tonight to a segment she did with Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott. During the segment Greg Abbott told Greta he was upset to be mocked by the Davis campaign for his disability. Davis campaign workers were caught on tape mocking Greg Abbott for his disability in a Project Veritas video by James O’Keefe last week. The Davis camp responded by apologizing to Abbott and then pointing out that James O’Keefe was once arrested for a misdemeanor in Louisiana.