Free Republic

Univision, the nation's largest Spanish-language television network, is airing half-hour specials about healthy living and educating viewers about how to sign up for coverage under President Obama's health law. And tax preparers at thousands of Jackson Hewitt and H&R Block offices are talking to their customers about how to enroll in the new insurance plans sold through the law's online marketplaces. As the law becomes embedded in American life, the Republican drive to dismantle Obamacare will almost certainly become more complicated.

Dave Brat is challenging Rep. Eric Cantor in a Republican primary — and giving the House majority leader a verbal thrashing on immigration. Dave Brat is challenging Rep. Eric Cantor in a Republican primary — and giving the House majority leader a verbal thrashing on immigration. “Cantor is following the agenda of the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce — pursuing policies that are good for big business, but come at the exclusion of the American people,” said Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College. Brat’s upstart bid against the second highest-ranking House Republican may seem quixotic. But it’s...

When CVS Caremark Corp. Chief Executive and President Larry Merlo announced that his drugstore chain would stop selling tobacco products , one of the first to respond was the president of the United States. The speed of the president’s statement indicates that CVS’s decision was likely coordinated with the White House. Every day, countless business decisions are made without any comment from the White House. Something unusual was going on. This is troubling. It gives the appearance of preference for those who curry favor with the powerful, and it squeezes out smaller entrants who can supply innovative products and services...

PARIS -- An environmentalist lies down alongside his fellow organic cucumber aficionados to block the construction of an oil pipeline and wakes up a member of a proxy army serving the billionaires who are fighting against America's economic and national security interests to line their own pockets. How did that happen? This phenomenon is on display in the battle against the Keystone XL pipeline project, the cornerstone of Canada-U.S. energy independence, set to run from Alberta, Canada, into Nebraska, then ultimately to the Gulf Coast of Texas where it can be exported. None of this pleases environmental activists, whose actions...

Americans for a Conservative Direction, an affiliate of the Silicon Valley-backed FWD.us advocacy group, on Friday launched a remarkable $750,000 ad campaign heaping praise on the House GOP for its new plan for immigration reform. President Barack Obama signaled Friday in a Google Hangout interview that he was open to the GOP terms, meaning reform is looking more likely than it did a week ago. The 10-day buy includes national broadcast TV and cable TV, plus talk radio. The ad, produced by FP1 Strategies, ends with type on the screen saying: “HOUSE REPUBLICANS WANT TO FIX IMMIGRATION – STRENGTHEN OUR...

Immigration is the zombie of political issues--even when it is dead, it is still alive. The combination of the Democratic Party, business interests, and a GOP operative class yearning for its promise of improved standing with Hispanic voters means that you can never really count it out. That said, it is hard to imagine Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) moving forward after yesterday's closed-door showdown. According to estimates from those who were in the room--both in favor of moving forward and against--the dozens of GOP lawmakers who spoke were at least 80-20 against bringing a bill to the floor this year....

The State Department is presenting a global webcast on February 4, titled "From the Street to Mainstream: The Evolution of Rap/Hip Hop Music." The host of the webcast, rapper and State Department Music Ambassador Toni Blackman, will be joined by Pras Michel, [snip] Some of Michel's more inflammatory comments in the past raise questions about the appropriateness of his appearance with the U.S.'s music ambassador on a government-sponsored webcast representing America to the world.

… The bill will cost nearly a trillion dollars over ten years. But, considering the bill itself is 702 pages long, the bill will cost about $1.4 billion per page. If that doesn’t garner the attention of taxpayers, there was something else that bothered at least one member of the House today—how settling on cutting $8 billion of waste could be a called “compromise” between a $40 billion House cut and a $4 billion Senate cut. …

House Speaker John Boehner’s ex-chief of staff Barry Jackson (pictured, right) is now working with the Chamber of Commerce to help its lobbying campaign for comprehensive immigration reform. “The former chief of staff to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is working as a consultant for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as the big business trade group pushes Congress to enact immigration reform,” Politico reported Monday afternoon. While his firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck publicly registered to lobby for the chamber on immigration reform in June, Jackson's involvement was not previously known because he is acting as a non-lobbying adviser. BHFS confirmed...

Pro-immigration business leaders ranging from strawberry growers and bulldozer makers to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are pressing Republicans in Congress to revive moves to reform the US immigration system. Barack Obama is expected to touch on immigration in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, but it is Republicans in the House of Representatives who will have the decisive influence on the fate of reform in the next few weeks. The most incendiary political issue is giving America’s 11m-plus undocumented immigrants legal rights to live and work in the country – a step wanted by many farmers, hoteliers and restaurants that see...

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said once again that conservatives were the "problem" when it came to passing immigration reform legislation with amnesty provisions. “The left has never been the problem on this,” Randel Johnson, the chamber’s senior vice president, said on Friday during an immigration summit in Washington. “The right is the problem.” As Breitbart News reported, that is why the Chamber is reportedly going to spend $50 million against the Tea Party, largely because the Tea Party opposes amnesty and comprehensive immigration reform. According to Bloomberg News, the Chamber of Commerce wants to "rewrite" the immigration laws because...

Opposition to the planned new trans-Atlantic free trade agreement is growing. So far, criticism has focused on the fact that the deal seems directed exclusively at economic interests. Now fears are growing that corporations will be given too much power. […] Some aspects to be negotiated make a lot of sense—ways of coming up with universal charger plugs for electric cars, for example. But other, more controversial issues, are also on the agenda, including whether the Americans will be allowed to sell genetically modified corn without labeling it as such in the EU. Or whether the US Food and Drug...

Giant corporations make common cause with leftist special interests to win government favors. he U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a politically entrenched synod of special interests. These fat cats do not represent the best interests of American entrepreneurs, American workers, American parents and students, or Americans of any race, class, or age who believe in low taxes and limited government. The chamber’s business is the big business of the Beltway, not the business of mainstream America. If you are a business owner who believes your country should strictly and consistently enforce its borders and deport illegal immigrants who violate the...

National Review published a rather overheated piece the other day that contained an entertaining line: “Russia has become the Soviet Union with a better suit”. The idea that Russia is fundamentally the same as the Soviet Union is a popular one, particularly on the political right where “Soviet” has for decades served as a synonym for “bad.” Barely a day goes by without someone bemoaning Putin’s “Soviet” character or the “neo-Soviet” policies that Russia pursues in its part of the world. However this idea is deeply mistaken and extremely misleading, and can only be held by deliberately ignoring a huge...

Canada bluntly told the United States on Thursday to settle the fate of TransCanada Corp's proposed Keystone XL pipeline, saying the drawn-out process on whether to approve the northern leg of the project was taking too long. The hard-line comments by Foreign Minister John Baird were the clearest sign yet that Canada's Conservative government has lost patience over what it sees as U.S. foot-dragging. Baird also conceded that Washington might veto the project, the first admission of its kind by a Canadian government minister. The 1,200-mile (1,930-km) pipeline would carry 830,000 barrels a day from the Alberta tar sands in...

Just a few months after Missouri’s Governor Jay Nixon vetoed a small but beneficial income tax cut, totaling $700 million over 10 years (barely larger than the one-year value of recent cuts in North Carolina), the Governor convened a special session to provide tax carve-outs for aircraft manufacturer, Boeing. That special session resulted in $1.7 billion in tax incentives to be paid out over 23 years, albeit with some job creation performance targets Boeing is required to hit in order to receive said tax benefits. The juxtaposition of these events provides an awkward contradiction. First, the suggestion that Boeing needs...

The chief executive of TransCanada said Wednesday if the Obama administration doesn’t approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline his company will look to the more dangerous alternative of building build rail terminals in Alberta and Oklahoma. President Barack Obama is expected to decide early this year on Keystone XL, which is under review at the State Department. The long-delayed pipeline would carry oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast. TransCanada CEO Russ Girling said pipelines are “by far a safer alternative” to oil trains but said if customers want him to build rail terminals he will. He said he’s in...

If popes and presidents have anything to do with it, 2014 looks set to be the “Year of Inequality.” Already the rehashing of old, old arguments has begun in earnest. Economists, for instance, are re-disputing the inequality statistics. Others are re-debating perennial philosophical questions such as what we mean by inequality and (depending on the meaning) whether it’s always a bad thing.You don’t, however, have to join most of the contemporary academy in worshiping at the altar of the prophet of modern liberal egalitarianism, the late John Rawls, to recognize that some seriously unjustifiable inequities do characterize virtually all modern...

If you brought back either of the Roosevelts—Teddy or Franklin—from the grave, the most astonishing thing they would find is that the “malefactors of great wealth” have become the benefactors of today’s liberalism, and Democrats have become the party of the rich. In the economic crisis of the 1930s, the rich hated FDR. Most of today’s rich love Barack Obama—so much so that Washington D.C. area airports ran out of space to handle all of the private jets flying in the well-heeled for both of his inaugurals. Forget the “limousine liberals” of the 1960s and 1970s, sending their own kids...

Some of Texas’ biggest business trade groups are moving to counter tea party and anti-government forces that have dominated recent Republican primaries. The movement mirrors the schism happening nationally between hard right and establishment Republicans. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently pledged $50 million to back pro-business Republicans in U.S. Senate primaries and fight tea party insurgents. Michael Quinn Sullivan, president of the fiscal-hawk group Empower Texans said the Texas Future Business Alliance is nothing but a group of big-money interests wanting taxpayer dollars to flow into their pockets. “This is what we’ve come to expect coming out of the...