Free Republic

Exactly two years ago this week, the Obama administration announced it had issued more than 100 waivers en masse to a select group of companies, unions and other health insurance providers seeking relief from the onerous federal health care law. The Obamacare waiver winner's club now totals 2,000. Where are they now? Answer: In the same miserable boat as every other unlucky business struggling with the crushing costs and burdens of the mandate. Among the first and most prominent recipients of the Obamacare waivers for favors were large restaurant chains that provide low-wage, seasonal and part-time workers with low-cost health...

At first, the numbers seemed too absurd to be true: did Mitt Romney really receive zero votes in 59 Philadelphia voting districts? Did Barack Obama really outpoll him by a combined 19,605 to 0 votes cast in these 59 districts. .......Obama was producing nearly comparable numbers in inner-cities throughout America, especially those in contested states. Worse than fraud is the process that turned nearly 20,000 black Philadelphians -- and millions of inner-city dwellers throughout the country -- into automatons. Hope does not produce this kind of regimentation. Fear does. In looking at these numbers, in fact, one can begin to...

Why was the American Revolution, of all great revolutions, the only successful one, resulting in two centuries and more of unexampled freedom and prosperity? The French Revolution, by contrast, illuminated by AmericaÂ’s example and Enlightenment thought, began in blissful optimism but collapsed into a blood-soaked tyranny much worse than the monarchy it deposed. It spawned a military dictatorship that convulsed Europe and roiled half the globe for over a decade with wars of grandiose imperial aggression that slew at least 3 million. And the result of 25 years of turmoil? The Bourbon monarchy, minus the Enlightenment of its earlier incarnation,...

With regards to the David Petraeus scandal, as you dig through the very human details of a powerful man's dalliance with an attractive woman, an important question should occur to anybody with more than a National Enquirer-level interest in the matter: Wait ... The FBI did all of this digging over some bed-hopping? Yes. Yes, it did. And over at The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald wants to know why more people aren't concerned. Writes Greenwald: As is now widely reported, the FBI investigation began when Jill Kelley - a Tampa socialite friendly with Petraeus (and apparently very friendly with Gen....

The NRA has been saying all along that Barack Obama would unleash an assault on our Second Amendment freedoms if he won a second term. It sure didnÂ’t take long for him to prove us right. Just hours after Obama won re-election last Tuesday, his administration endorsed a new effort by the global gun grabbers at the United Nations to draft a gun ban treaty early next year. The official starting point for the new talks is last yearÂ’s failed draft, which contains provisions that threaten our sovereign right to keep and bear arms through an international gun registration scheme.And...

The resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus over an extramarital affair has raised and will continue to raise a number of questions. First among them (OK, maybe not first, national security being more important, but stay with me) is why should he have resigned? I am always amused when journalists use the words "sex scandal" when writing about such things. Having abandoned most standards for what used to be called "upright behavior," culture now "tsk-tsks" when someone is caught in a compromising position. Bill Clinton didn't have to resign after the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He lied about their assignations under...

In June, the Washington Post celebrated the 40th anniversary of the biggest scoop in journalistic history — Watergate. Looking back on it, the Post has every right to crow. The story was so huge that every political scandal since has been labeled with the word “gate” tagged onto the end of it. However, the Post should also consider the adage, “You’re only as good as your last story,” because there’s a bigger one out there for the taking, if it only had the courage to pursue it. That story is, of course, the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi,...

Democrats have been blaming George W. Bush for the last four years. Now I think it's time for Republicans to start blaming George W. for the next four years. For a week we've been pinning last week's debacle on everything from Mitt Romney's moderation to low Republican turnout. But the most important Republican who didn't turn out to support Romney this fall was George W. Bush. You can make an honest argument that G.W. was as much to blame as anyone else for our being unable to defeat an incompetent incumbent of historic proportions. For four years Barack Obama has...

Hope - it appears - peaked at the start of the year in the US, following the global coordinated central bank pump which ramped it from lows to highs within a few months. All that hope - and then some - has now apparently faded. The General Business Conditions expected six months forward dropped to its lowest level since March 2009. What is perhaps worse, given the focus on jobs jobs jobs, is that for the first time since April 2009, the employment outlook for employment turned negative - suggesting firms are looking to reduce employees at the fastest rate...

OK, perhaps doom is too strong a word, but then again, perhaps it is not.  In either event, 2013 is not shaping up to be a banner year for the economy. And it’s not just or even mostly because of the fiscal cliff. Our financial system is not stronger now than it was in 2008 when it finally collapsed under the weight of crashing real estate prices that fell all the harder because they were ballasted by plenty of government guaranteed debt. In fact, prepare right now for the Next Great Bailout. Because this time around, the federal government, via...

Barack Obama attended more than 200 fundraisers for his presidential campaign, but he refrained from raising money for congressional Democrats. That proved to be a wise move for him, as were his strategists' decisions to run heavy ad campaigns against Mitt Romney and to build an even more effective turnout machine in target states. But it proved to be less than helpful to his party. Democrats did gain two Senate seats thanks to clueless Republican candidates and Republicans' failure to produce better turnout. But Democrats got beaten badly in races for the U.S. House and state legislatures. That's clear when...

In 13 wards in Philadelphia, reports the Inquirer, President Barack Obama received 99 percent of the vote! A local Democratic ward leader outlined the strategy: "In this election, you had to point out to people what was at stake. And in many cases, they felt that the Romney doctrine was not going to favor the working man." Obama appears to have held on to most of his percentage of the black vote from 2008 -- even though the black unemployment rate in October reached 14.3 percent. Emmanuel Cleaver, the head of the Congressional Black Caucus, admitted: "If (former President) Bill...

The Congressional Budget Office released their analysis of the group of deficit-fighting policies known as the "fiscal cliff." The big takeaway: completely averting the contraction that would occur in 2013 and 2014 would cost $1.16 trillion - entirely deficit-financed. There would certainly be some economic benefits to all of this, however. The CBO has a wide range of estimates for the positives - between 0.8% and 5% growth in real GDP, and between 1.1 million and 5.8 million new jobs. There are a lot of caveats here, as it's an incredibly wide range of estimates, but there would certainly be...

***SNIP*** [L]et's be honest. We had little reason to believe that Romney was truly dedicated to improving our social and cultural conditions -- indeed, that all-important thing called the human condition -- because he talked endlessly about his business experience. Most Americans don't like their bosses and have trouble with landlords and creditors. Talking about one's business experience is not usually a good way to win them over. On election day, it became clear to me that the Republican Party had been led into Purgatory by the Laodicean wing. In case you aren't familiar with Revelation 3:14-17, here is what...

What's the difference between attacking from a zeal for the public good, and just being nasty? The primary concept behind this video was borrowed from Emanuel Swedenborg.

Liberals brag about having won the hearts and minds of America, as if, through logic and argument, they've persuaded people to accept their bankrupt European socialist ideas. Democrats haven't changed anyone's mind. They changed the people. More white people voted for Mitt Romney this year than voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Barack Obama lost white voters by 20 points -- the widest margin since 1984. But in 1980, whites were 88 percent of the electorate. In 2012, they were 72 percent of the electorate. Not only that, but the non-white electorate is far more Democratic than it was in...

Any change requires pain. Whatever we are doing now is easy (we think) compared to change, whatever it may be. Changing is hard. It requires us to think anew, to change our habits, our processes, our language. It's venturing out into the unknown. Without a compelling reason, people will stay the same and not change. People begin to change only when the pain of what they are doing becomes more painful than the pain of change. Republicans -- it is time for change. The election last week was painful -- at least for me, a lifetime conservative. It was an...

Believe me: This isn’t the first time our vaunted Senate Majority Leader has made baseless accusations with little or no evidence (via The Daily Caller): Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday he was “very comfortable” with the prospect of defending an open seat in his chamber should Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry be tapped for a Cabinet position, and slammed outgoing Republican Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, who would likely run to replace Kerry. “I saw during the campaign his plea for bipartisanship,” Reid said of Brown, who ran as a moderate and independent Republican willing to work across the aisle...

.....Who would have thought that it would fall to us, some of us in our so-called declining years (unless 60 is the new 40) to rescue the Republic? In our lifetimes, we have had the war in Vietnam, and the Reagan revival, and now we find the left has been tunneling under us all along. Last Tuesday, the platform we thought was solid collapsed as if its underpinnings had been eaten by termites, which they had. ...it is very surprising that Romney would garner fewer votes than McCain. Virtually all Republicans and conservatives regarded this election as the most important...

Operation Demoralize, the attempt to convince you that conservatism is dead, that you live in a media cocoon, that you are incapable of learning, and that your pundits lied to you, is dominating the media. But are the quick and easy answers — just say Yes to illegal immigration, higher taxes, creeping socialism — based on the reality of why the election was lost? Someone clearly outside the supposed “conservative media complex” suggests that the reasons being peddled for the loss are not accurate, or at least not the full story. Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, writes...