Free Republic

Election Day isn't until next week, but Senate Majority Leader-in-Waiting Mitch McConnell is already warning Republicans who would like to repeal Obamacare and roll back environmental regulations about two key numbers: 60 and 2. "It would take 60 votes in the Senate. No one thinks we're going to have 60 Republicans. And it would take a presidential signature. No one thinks we're going to get that," McConnell said during a campaign-stop interview with Fox News. "This is why nobody believes Mitch McConnell anymore," said Mary Vought, spokeswoman for the Senate Conservatives Fund, a group that has pushed Tea Party candidates...

Two House committees are demanding answers after learning that the Affordable Care Act makes foreign diplomats eligible for health care subsidies.Obamacare has a loophole that allows foreign diplomats to receive healthcare subsidies, the House Ways and Means and Foreign Affairs Committees revealed Wednesday as they announced a joint investigation. “According to the Department of Health and Human Services, foreign diplomats holding ‘A’ or ‘G’ visas are eligible to participate in an array of medical programs administered by the federal government, including participation in Health Insurance Marketplaces governed by the Affordable Care Act (ACA),” wrote chairmen Ed Royce and Dave Camp...

The new hybrid device might not need humans at all. In college, it wasn’t rare to hear a verbal battle regarding artificial intelligence erupt between my friends studying neuroscience and my friends studying computer science. One rather outrageous fellow would mention the possibility of a computer takeover, and off they went. The neuroscience-savvy would awe at the potential of such hybrid technology as the CS majors argued we have nothing to fear, as computers will always need a programmer to tell them what to do. Today’s news brings us to the Neural Turing Machine, a computer that will combine the...

The U.S. health care apparatus is so unprepared and short on resources to deal with the deadly Ebola virus that even small clusters of cases could overwhelm parts of the system, according to an Associated Press review of readiness at hospitals and other components of the emergency medical network. Experts broadly agree that a widespread outbreak across the country is extremely unlikely, but they also concur that it is impossible to predict with certainty, since previous Ebola epidemics have been confined to remote areas of Africa. And Ebola is not the only possible danger that causes concern; experts say other...

Three brothers alleged to have abused more than 50 girls in Rotherham remain at large - despite police being told about their activities more than a decade ago, it has been claimed. A former Rotherham Council researcher said mentions of the brothers, who are of Pakistani descent, featured ‘very heavily’ in a dossier she produced for police in 2001 on suspected abusers in the town. But the information was never acted upon - and the researcher has told MPs that the men have never been prosecuted for the alleged abuse, despite facing other charges on different criminal matters. In her...

Here's an interesting article thanks to Jed Kolko, Chief Economist at Trulia Trends via Washington Post Wonkblog: The most expensive housing markets in the U.S. are also the most liberal. The relationship between housing affordability and politics in the US is startlingly strong as these charts by Jed Kolko shows. Median asking price in dollars per square foot is on the vertical axis. Margin for Obama over Romney in the 2012 election is on the horizontal axis. With the exception of Orange County California, all of the high priced counties voted for Obama. The Washington Post notes .... Nine of...

In a 1993 decision upholding the involuntary hospitalization of a Newark man with tuberculosis, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Donald Goldman noted that "the claim of 'disease' in a domestic setting has the same kind of power as the claim of 'national security' in matters relating to foreign policy." Goldman's point is worth keeping in mind as states such as New York and New Jersey implement quarantine policies that most experts view as a panicky overreaction to the potential threat posed by medical workers returning from Africa after treating Ebola patients. Abuse of the authority to restrict liberty in the...

PARIS -- Some warped minds believe that when a nation suffers a terrorist attack, it somehow deserved it and should set about doing some soul searching. Implicit in this argument is the notion that the attacker was somehow justified in his heinous actions -- there was no other option but to lash out violently. Except that there is. Even the Islamic State could choose to exercise unofficial diplomacy through a sympathetic Persian Gulf country. But it doesn't, because the Islamic State isn't interested in diplomacy -- yet some critics expect Western democracies to suck it up whatever terrorism comes their...

(LiveActionNews) — The ethical problems with euthanasia have been detailed at Live Action News extensively. People with disabilities, people suffering from mental illness, people who were just lonely or old but otherwise healthy, even children — all can be euthanized in countries like Belgium and the Netherlands. That’s not good enough for the assisted suicide lobby though, which continues to campaign for the right to kill increasingly more people, from the disabled to the poor.This slippery slope is now headed for the United States, with cancer patient Brittany Maynard saying she will kill herself on November 1, and until then,...

So Planned Parenthood says that that only three percent of all Planned Parenthood health services are abortion services. Makes abortion seem pretty rare for Planned Parenthood doesn’t it?Here is Planned Parenthood’s Annual Report from 2012 to 2013. This pie chart represents every single service Planned Parenthood performed during that year, and this slice of the pie represents the number of abortion services they provided in comparison to all the procedures they performed.And this clearly shows that abortion services were only 3% of the total pie. Right?So then why are pro-life groups claiming that this 3% number is misleading? What’s their...

On Friday, city officials in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, informed Donald and Evelyn Knapp, ordained ministers and proprietors of the Hitching Post Wedding Chapel, that they would be required to perform gay weddings or face fines or possibly jail time under the city’s “public accommodations” statute. Their religious views are expected to adjust to the edicts of the state. So it’s official: a new religious orthodoxy is sweeping across the nation, imposed by government and backed by force. It’s a religious orthodoxy required by secular authorities for a secular purpose, but no matter. Heretics will be found out and forced...

The Navy said it will deploy enlisted female sailors in 2016 aboard submarines with female officers already assigned to them. In July, the Navy announced that enlisted female sailors will begin deploying on submarines in 2016. The enlisted women will be placed on ships with female officers where those naval officers can function as role-models and mentors, Connor said. "We will build upon the ships that have women officers to lead and bring in senior women at the chief petty officer level just like we did with the women supply officers," he explained. There are currently more than 100 female...

The left-wing National Journal ran a piece on Sunday making the argument that the Evangelical choice for 2016 has already been narrowed down to a choice between Sen. Ted Cruz and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. The National Journal is right. Evangelical and pro-family leaders realize that if America is to be reclaimed, conservatives cannot wait to let the filed sort itself out as we did in 2008 and 2012. It is close to midnight in America, and we simply do not have time to think about waiting until 2020. there may be little left of our country to save...

In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, environmentalist Naomi Klein advocates a ban on fossil fuels and a statist utopia where government “creates” a record number of jobs through “investment” in wind and solar energy. (Full disclosure: I have not read Klein’s book, nor do I intend to read it. However, I did read fawning reviews by Mark Bittman in New York Times and Drew Nelles in the Globe and Mail—more than enough time spent contemplating Klein and her reviewers’ dishonest claims.)

Strasbourg has denied a British man’s request to have public nudity declared a human right. The court has ruled that UK authorites have the power to repeatedly arrest "Naked Rambler" Stephen Gough. On Tuesday, Europe's high court in Strasbourg ruled that Stephen Gough's legal woes had come about as the result of conduct that could prove "alarming and morally and otherwise offensive" to others, rather than through repression by UK authorities. Gough, a 55-year-old former Royal Marine nicknamed the "Naked Rambler," has twice walked the length of Britain nude to protest laws requiring the wearing of clothes. His activism has...

SUAKOKO, Liberia — For days this month, the ambulances from this Ebola treatment unit went out in search of patients, only to return with just one or two suspected cases. And many times, those people ended up testing negative for the disease. “Where are the patients?” an aid worker wondered aloud as colleagues puzzled over the empty beds at the International Medical Corps treatment unit here in Bong County, Liberia, which opened in mid-September. Around the country, treatment centers, laboratory workers who test for Ebola, and international and national health officials trying to track the epidemic have noticed an unexpected...

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: This really is a Republican tide. I think the chances are very good, maybe 70% that Republicans retake the Senate and for good reason. The reason is this is essentially a referendum on Obama. In 2010, it was a referendum on his ideology, the overreach with Obamacare, the stimulus, cap and trade, and now, six years in, it's referendum on ideology, but now added on to that, it's on sheer competence. And when you are not only the party in government, you are the party of government, and you preach about the glories of government and in fact...

Kroger shareholders are conducting their annual meeting in Cincinnati today, and Moms Demand/Everytown has announced plans to “confront” them. The “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America” will raise their concerns and their voices at the Kroger investor’s meeting Wednesday morning.

Yesterday, Barack Obama scolded governors who imposed quarantines on people who recently traveled from western Africa. He may want to reconsider his lecture. According to a new CBS poll, eight in ten Americans think quarantine during a potential incubation period sounds like a pretty smart idea — and more than a quarter want a travel ban imposed on non-Americans in Ebola-impacted nations: A new CBS News poll finds that Americans overwhelmingly support quarantine for travelers arriving from West Africa. Eighty percent think U.S. citizens and legal residents returning from West Africa should be quarantined upon their arrival in the...

Wendy Russell Davis is on fire. And I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean it in a five-alarm, set-her-own-skirt-aflame, billowing-human-torch kind of way. To say that Davis is smokin’ hot is not a compliment. It’s a campaign incineration status update. The Democratic darling of the Hollywood Left and glamour gal of abortion thought her path to the Texas governor’s mansion would be a pink-sneakered walk in the park. Instead, her single-issue campaign has combusted. The high point of Davis’ career came last year when she flamboyantly opposed state restrictions on late-term abortions in the wake of Philadelphia...