Free Republic

Foreign individuals and businesses long ago cut back on their purchases of U.S. bonds. Their place was taken by foreign central banks. The central banks simply created money in their own currency and used it to buy our bonds.The Federal Reserve always knew that we couldn’t rely on foreign central banks to buy our bonds forever. This may be the main reason it began the program called quantitative easing, in which the Fed created money out of thin air specifically to buy back U.S. debt.Quantitative easing may have been intended to be a kind of insurance policy. If foreign central...

The Illinois Medicaid program paid an estimated $12 million for medical services for people listed as deceased in other state records, according to an internal state government memo. The memo dated Friday, which The Associated Press obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, says the state auditor compared clients enrolled in the Medicaid database with state death records dating back to 1970. Auditors identified overpayments for services to roughly 2,900 people after the date of their deaths... Republicans have pressed for the state to use a private company to verify Medicaid eligibility. Maximus Health Services was hired to scrub...

A Utah businessman is rocking both state and national politics after claiming Utah Attorney General John Swallow helped him broker a deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to make a federal investigation into his company quietly disappear, the Salt Lake Tribune reports. Jeremy Johnson was allegedly told that the price would be $600,000, and claims to have made an initial payment of $250,000 when he was slapped with a federal lawsuit. Now he says he wants his money back. The Salt Lake Tribune points out that Johnson has no way of knowing whether the funds actually made it to...

PHOENIX (KSAZ) - Ruth Alvarez says breast cancer has been her personal prison; she is now facing the disease behind bars. Maricopa County Sheriff's deputies arrested Alvarez-- an undocumented immigrant-- in early April for working with a false identification. She says her arrest comes just a few weeks away from her planned mastectomy scheduled for April 23rd. Alvarez is asking to be release so she can undergo the surgery with her family by her side. "To go through breast cancer is already hard, it's so hard to go through treatments seeing how your whole body, your whole life kinda change,"...

Other than hitting the perfect tee shot, nothing is more gratifying than the sight of liberals hoisted on a petard fashioned by their own corruption. In May of 2011, anti-gun lunatic Garry McCarthy was named Chicago Police Superintendent by mayor and former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Though making all of the usual promises about reducing the city’s crime rate, during his first full year–2012–Chicago recorded 507 murders, the most since 2008 and more than in any year since 2003. Of course, more important than 507 dead was the fact that Emanuel’s approval rate seemed to decline another notch...

Millions may get “insured” through Obamacare, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to see a physician. Proponents of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) insist that the law will extend health insurance to millions, expand access to health care, and improve Americans’ overall health. But, as the New York Times recently reported, at least 20 percent of the new enrollees have not paid their premiums. They therefore do not really have insurance. But even for those enrollees paying premiums, having health insurance is not the same thing as getting good health care, or any health care. In fact, it doesn’t...

In contrast with the early stumbles in most of the country, New York State, almost from the start, has provided a textbook lesson in how to make the Affordable Care Act work. But it has done so by making some tough decisions. But New York also took some aggressive and unpopular steps that few other states have taken, by creating a highly centralized system limiting consumer choice, essentially giving insurance seekers little incentive to shop off the exchange. As a result, most New Yorkers who are not insured through an employer are effectively barred from choosing any doctors or hospitals...

Speaking at Al Sharpton's National Action Network convention on Friday in New York City, President Barack Obama revealed that he believes voter fraud does not exist, everyone who wants to should be able to vote, even if they cannot provide identifying documentation, and Republicans are plotting to take the franchise away from minorities. Obama, who hails from a city known for the Daley Machine and its "vote early and vote often" slogan, ripped Republicans for trying to preserve the integrity of the ballot by reducing voter fraud and requiring voter IDs. He made the accusation that there is a "well-organized...

NEW YORK (AP) — In an unsparing critique of Republicans, President Barack Obama on Friday accused the GOP of using voting restrictions to keep voters from the polls and of jeopardizing 50 years of expanded ballot box access for millions of black Americans and other minorities. "The stark, simple truth is this: The right to vote is threatened today in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago," Obama said in a fiery speech at civil rights activist and television talk host Al Sharpton's National Action Network conference. Obama waded...

Showing just how important a strong Democratic showing in Broward County is to Charlie Crist’s hope of returning to the Governor’s Mansion, the first field office for his campaign is set for Planation. The campaign plans to dedicate the office next week. What’s being described as the South Florida headquarters will be located at 320 South University Drive, Plantation. The grand opening is at 5 p.m. Tuesday. The only other Crist office so far is the state headquarters in St. Petersburg. Broward, which has more registered Democrats than any other Florida county is critical for the party’s hopes to win...

President Barack Obama reminisced about the conspiracy theories surrounding his birth certificate during a speech at the National Action Network convention in New York City Friday afternoon. Obama referenced the doubts about his citizenship that led him to release a copy of his birth certificate in 2011, while criticizing voter I.D. laws that require people to present documentation like passports and birth certificates to vote. "Just to be clear, I know where my birth certificate is," he added. Obama then began to laugh. "You remember that? That was crazy," said Obama. "Haven't thought about that in a while."

April 11, 2014, 04:52 pm Obama decries ‘bogus’ voter fraud complaints By Justin Sink President Obama labeled complaints about voter fraud “bogus” and accused Republicans of cynically trying to prevent Americans from accessing the polls in a fiery speech Friday at a civil rights forum hosted by Al Sharpton. Obama argued that attempts in some states to impose new voter identification restrictions were actually efforts by Republicans to make “it harder, not easier to vote.” And the president said that while voter fraud should be prevented, it rarely occurred. “So let's be clear, the real voter fraud is the people...

John Boehner was initially slated to attend the left-of-center Republican Mainstreet Partnership conference, but even he lost his nerve and backed out of an event run by a group funded by unions and George Soros that hates Tea Partiers. Apparently, the number two Republican in the House hates Tea Partiers even more than Boehner. Brent Bozell is calling him out on that — and I agree with what he’s saying. Conservative leaders were stunned to learn that you will be headlining a conference in Florida this weekend that is, purely and simply, a direct attack on Tea Party conservatives. Worse...

If you're poor, the only way you're likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you're tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every...

The top 1% of 825,000 individual medical providers accounted for 14% of the $77 billion in medicare billing in 2012, according to new federal data reported by the WSJ. The data shows a very small number of doctors and medical providers account for a huge amount of the costs for treating the elderly... One researcher summed it up, "There's all sorts of services that are low-value for patients, high-revenue to providers," and leaves us wondering, once again, how the government will manage as Obamacare's "success" washes ashore. A doctor who treats a degenerative eye disease in seniors was paid $21...

Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services auditing director Delrice Augustus has been formally charged fraud for allegedly buying personal items with a government purchasing card, U.S. Attorney Walt Green announced Wednesday. Augustus, 34, of Baton Rouge, is currently on leave as director of the bureau of auditing and compliance services for DCFS, an agency that receives over a billion dollars in federal funds, a U.S. Attorneys office press release says. A bill of information says that from 2010 though March 2014, Augustus used government purchasing cards for a dishwasher, televisions, I-Pads, hotel rooms gas and other personal items.

Scott Brown is on track to "Pease" the 2nd Amendment

MUCH ABOUT HISTORY Pharaoh's chariots found in Red Sea? 'Physical evidence' of ancient Exodus prompting new look at Old Testament -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: June 21, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Joe Kovacs © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com "And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided." (Exodus 14:21) One of the most famous stories of the Bible is God's parting of the Red Sea to save the Israelites from the Egyptian army and the subsequent...

An audit of voter registration rolls in North Carolina uncovered tens of thousands of duplicate voter registrations in which the first and last names as well as last four digits of Social Security numbers matched for voters registered in both North Carolina and elsewhere. The odds of randomly producing a single match using these three variables is infinitesimal. Nevertheless, the audit found more than 150,000 matches. In 35,000 cases, votes were cast both in North Carolina and in other states for the November 2012 election. US Attorney General Eric Holder rejected calls for a more comprehensive investigation, calling the findings...

<p>Attorney General Eric Holder said on Friday that gun tracking bracelets are something the Justice Department (DOJ) wants to "explore" as part of its gun control efforts.</p> <p>When discussing gun violence prevention programs within the DOJ, Holder told a House appropriations subcommittee that his agency is looking into technological innovations.</p>

Republican senator Mike Lee has an op-ed decrying cronyism. But first, he says, the Republicans must purge the unseemly activity from within its "own ranks." "[T]o fix what’s broken in Washington and our economy," Lee writes in National Review Online, "a still-distrusted GOP first must end cronyism in our own ranks. The GOP has to close its branch of the Beltway Favor Bank and truly embrace a free-enterprise economy of, by, and for the people." Lee continues: Impossible? That’s what they said about earmarks. Too radical a change? These are principles we already espouse. Imagine a reformed Republican party seizing...

A verified @Faith4Hillary Twitter account purporting to be the "Faith and Value Voters for Hillary Clinton 2016" appears to have purchased a large percentage of its 42.6k followers. The website Twitter Audit determined that more than half of the account's followers were obtained by "inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means," and the similar website StatusPeople calculated that only 18 percent of the account's followers were "good." Per StatusPeople, the rest of the followers were either fake accounts or accounts that are inactive. Additionally, the account has a comparatively small amount of interaction via retweets and favorites compared to the amount of...

Seeing With One’s Own Eyes : Evidence the Hawaii Medical Examiner turned a blind eye to the death of Loretta Fuddy by Linda Jordan The principal aim of an autopsy is to determine the cause of death when the cause of death is equivocal or unknown. It is a “strictly the facts ma’am” kind of procedure. A Medical Examiner or Coroner simply reports what is “seen with their own eyes” concerning the condition of the body and organs after an autopsy. A review of the deceased’s medical history is also included in their assessment. When all is said and done...

In the closing days of the open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) , the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was mailing out letters notifying certain Americans that they had already started a healthcare coverage application on their behalf. The HHS letter stated that the information they used to begin the application for individual Healthcare was obtain by the state agency in charge of implementing Obamacare. The next step for the individual would be visit Healthcare.gov and complete the already started application to see if they qualify for “Marketplace coverage.” News of the HHS letter...

How do you get from 5 million Obamacare enrollees to 7.1 million Obamacare enrollees in two weeks? You start the applications yourself. Health and Human Services was mailing out letters notifying certain Americans that they had already started a healthcare coverage application on their behalf. HHS had started the applications for them. The Shark Tank reported: News of the HHS letter was first mentioned by a listener of the popular “Daybreak with Drew Steele” Show on Fox 92.5, which is out of Fort Myers, Florida. After his radio show concluded, another listener emailed Steele telling him about receiving the same...

President Obama contended that the government did not "make a hard sell" for Obamacare, despite his administration spending nearly $700 million to promote the law. "We didn't make a hard sell," Obama said in the Rose Garden on Tuesday, praising the 7.1 million sign ups for the Affordable Care Act. "We didn't have billions of dollars of commercials like some critics did." However, last July the Associated Press reported that Obamacare's marketing campaign would cost at least $684 million. Taxpayer funding went to all 50 states in efforts to encourage people to enroll...

<p>The FBI has swooped into an elderly man’s Indiana home and seized thousands of artifacts he collected — he says legally — during his decades of travel to hundreds of destinations, including Haiti, Australia, New Guinea and Peru.</p> <p>Donald Miller, 91, accumulated the artifacts over the past 80 years, said FBI Special Agent Robert Jones, during a news conference.</p>

Today is March 31, 2014: in theory, the last day you can sign up for coverage under the subsidized Obamacare insurance exchanges. If you’ve been a regular reader of this space, you know that the numbers routinely paraded by the Obama administration regarding Obamacare website sign-ups don’t tell us much about the actual number of uninsured individuals who have gained coverage. A new study from the RAND Corporation indicates that only one-third of exchange sign-ups were previously uninsured. The RAND study hasn’t yet been published, but its contents were made available to Noam Levey of the Los Angeles Times. RAND...

President Barack Obama's home state of Hawaii's Obamacare exchange spent $35,749 per enrollee, a sum greater than the price of a new 2014 BMW 320i sedan (MSRP $32,750). "Just obscene amounts of money have disappeared into these state exchanges for very little actual performance," said American Commitment President Phil Kerpen. "You just have this huge duplication and waste in places like Hawaii and Oregon." A CNBC analysis ranking taxpayer-funded federal expenditures on Obamacare found that Hawaii enrolled just 5,744 people through its Obamacare exchange at a cost to taxpayers of $205,342,270. The second-worst performer was the District of Columbia which...

Call it Climate Change: The Musical! The National Science Foundation has spent nearly $700,000 on a climate change-themed theatrical production, leaving some in Congress questioning if the organization's grant funds could be put to better use. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, questioned White House science czar John Holdren in a hearing last Thursday about the way the NSF is using taxpayer money -- including on the grants for the play, a New York production called "The Great Immensity." “I support basic research, which can lead to discoveries that change our world, expand our horizons and save lives,” Smith, chairman of the...

Healthcare.gov, the troubled website set up to help Americans choose and enroll in a health care policy, crashed early Monday morning, on the final day to begin the process to apply for health insurance. According to a CNBC story, the website crashed around 3:20 a.m. (ET) Monday. It was  still down as of 7:40 a.m.Monday is the deadline to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act -- commonly called Obamacare -- before facing a fine.According to the White House, more than 6 million people have signed up since the enrollment period began on Oct. 1. According to...

A disturbing flyer began circulating through some neighborhoods in Eunice this weekend. The flyer showcases the phone numbers for two KKK groups, calling themselves the White Knights. The flyer states, "the law abiding citizens in your community can sleep in peace knowing the klan is awake." The flyers were distributed to the homes of African-American residents over the weekend, according to KATC-TV. The papers were reportedly in bags filled with rocks and tossed at the homes of residents KATC reported. Eunice Deputy Chief Varden Guillory said multiple people in Eunice made complaints to the police department about the incident. The...

MILLER: Witaschek surrenders to D.C. police ‘Gun Offenders Registry’ Businessman convicted of having unregistered muzzleloader bullets By Emily Miller The Washington Times Friday, March 28, 2014 Mark Witaschek never had a firearm in the District of Columbia, but he is now on the city’s Gun Offenders Registry. This bizarre case has drawn national attention because an upstanding citizen was tried and convicted of possessing unregistered ammunition for muzzleloader bullets, which are simply pieces of lead and copper. On Friday afternoon, I accompanied Mr. Witaschek and his wife, Bonnie, to Metropolitan Police Department headquarters to abide by the terms of his...

Fundraising emails frequently offer an amusing glimpse into the thinking and strategy of a political party. Remember earlier this month when Democrat senators took to the floor for an overnight session about “climate change”? The very concerned senators warned of grave consequences of human activity, painted pictures of global catastrophe, and chided critics and “deniers” of “settled science.” And then proposed exactly zero words of legislation in a chamber they control. **SNIP** Now comes a fundraising email from Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA): We must rise to the challenge, but too many people are standing in our way.

Matt Drudge loves him some "Noah". I can't link his twitter acct. with this tablet, but you can check it out if you have Twitter. "May 'the Creator bless @DarrenAronofsky for bringing movies back to showbusiness! Epic Noah!!"

Gov. Pat Quinn could be added as a defendant in a lawsuit brought by a whistleblower who claims he was fired in retaliation for calling attention to alleged financial misconduct by Chicago State President Wayne Watson. Glenn Meeks, who was vice president of administration and finance at the school, claims in the suit that he introduced himself to Quinn at a luncheon on March 25, 2013, and urged the governor to reappoint members of the university’s Board of Trustees who intended to replace Watson. Quinn did not reappoint the board members. And the next day, Watson fired Meeks. Meeks’ attorney,...

In the summer of 1999 I was unemployed, unmarried, and a bit depressed, living in the Pacific Northwest. I decided to just roam, and I set off on a meandering journey all over and across the United States to visit the East coast, then drive all the way back again. I know, crazy. So what. Gas cost a little more than a buck a gallon back then, and I had a small car and nothing else I particularly needed or wanted to do. Throughout my trip I would catch the news on whatever radio stations I could, as I blasted...

A federal data-sharing system meant to prevent healthcare providers banned from one state's Medicaid program from billing another state's program isn't working as intended, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General. Two years after its creation, the data-sharing system contained no records from 17 states or the District of Columbia of doctors, nurses or other healthcare providers who had been "terminated," or banned from billing Medicaid, for fraud or other offenses, the independent auditor said in a report to be released Thursday. Reuters reviewed a copy of the report in advance of...

UPDATE, 7PM: Now there is $5,000 more from 2012. Total now $31,000. And now Reid is playing the aggrieved grandfather. Chutzpah: “My granddaughter has been the target of harassing phone calls, strangers tracking her down and knocking on her door and negative, unwanted attention on the internet. This has gone too far and it needs to stop now. I deeply regret any role I had in creating this situation but now, as a grandparent, I say enough is enough. “As I have already said, I am reimbursing my campaign for the amount spent on thank-you gifts produced by my granddaughter,...

Excerpted: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 A federal judge last week upheld the right of states to require proof of citizenship before allowing someone to register to vote. Voters continue to overwhelmingly support such a requirement. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 78% of Likely U.S. Voters believe everyone should be required to prove his or her citizenship before being allowed to register to vote. That’s up from 71% a year ago. Just 19% oppose that requirement. (

Fred Phelps, a former street preacher who led a family ministry that raged against what he perceived as a morally bankrupt society, died Thursday. His legacy of picketing funerals of military veterans and disaster victims, promoting coarse language to condemn conduct he viewed as amoral, and waging legal battles that protected his actions under the First Amendment, earned him an international reputation of a man’s whose absolute conviction was never swayed in the face of widespread contempt. “The level of his vitriol, the savageness of his comments, were just unmatched anywhere. His rhetoric was such he united people both on...

Hillary Rodham Clinton says young people understand the significant threat of (climate change) and that she hopes there will be a mass movement that demands political change. The potential 2016 presidential candidate says at a Clinton Global Initiative University panel that young people are much more committed to doing something to address climate change. Clinton says it isn't "just some ancillary issue" but will determine the quality of life for many people. The former secretary of state cited global warming as a major issue that students could face in the future.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane (D) has decided to drop charges against four state legislators caught on tape accepting bribes in exchange for voting against a voter ID bill in 2012. According to the tapes, Rep. Ronald Waters got payments totaling $7,650, Rep. Vanessa Brown $4,000, Rep. Michelle Brownlee $3,500, and Rep. Louise Bishop $1,500. Kane called the investigation “poorly conceived. The notion that these individuals were influenced by the bribes is ludicrous. Every one of the individuals implicated was a Democrat. Democrats would be expected to vote against voter ID no matter whether they were bribed or not. In...

Cutting right to the chase: we don't think going short is a good idea yet. Just when you would think the situation with Mt. Gox couldn't get any stranger, it has. Apparently, the exchange "found" almost BTC 200,000 in one of its old wallets this month. The coins would be currently worth approximately $115 million. A statement published yesterday on the exchanges website reads: MtGox Co., Ltd. had certain old-format wallets which were used in the past and which, MtGox thought, no longer held any bitcoins. Following the application for commencement of a civil rehabilitation proceeding, these wallets were rescanned...

**SNIP** Initially Obama’s library was called the Barack H. Obama Foundation, but this week the non-profit dropped the “H” — that refers to Obama’s middle name Hussein. Obama’s half brother, Abon'go Malik Obama, operates a bare bones website for the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to remembering their late father. The Virginia based 501(c)3 organization only had $24,496 in total expenses, with the bulk of money going toward rent, according to the latest 990 form for 2010. “We were not very successful this year because of limited contributions,” Abon'go Malik Obama stated on the tax form.

One of the last remaining court battles over Barack Obama’s presidential eligibility has gone down in flames in a 7-2 decision by the Alabama Supreme Court to render “no opinion.” However, the dissenting minority of Justice Tom Parker and Chief Justice Roy Moore concluded the case has serious constitutional significance, warranting an investigation of the qualifications of 2012 presidential candidates by Alabama’s secretary of state. Moore wrote in his dissent that the circuit court should have granted the plaintiffs’ request to order the state secretary of state “to implement the natural-born-citizen requirement of the presidential-qualifications clause in future elections.” “Although...

Q: My fiancée and I attended a marriage-prep class in our diocese, and one of the speakers said something we didn’t fully understand. First he urged us to be open and honest with each other about our past lives, not hiding anything from one another, which made basic sense to us. But then he mentioned that we need to do this because otherwise our marriage could be null. We’ve known each other since childhood anyway, so it’s a moot point for us. Later on, though, we were wondering if telling your future spouse every single little thing about you is...

Michelle Obama and her daughters, Sasha and Malia, are in China to promote family, a U.S.-China diplomacy, and they are doing it in style. Obama wore a leather-and-suede patchwork Derek Lam dress. She paired it with thigh high boots, and seemed to be dressed for slightly chilly weather. Sasha and Malia were equally as chic. The sisters wore complementary outfits, as they are known to do. Sasha wore a velvet red skirt, a black top and tights. Malia wore a shiny silver pleated skirt and a brown shirt. The Obamas were invited by another stylish lady, Chinese First Lady Peng...

Gutierrez (D-4th), 60, a national advocate for immigration reform, is serving his 11th term in Congress. Gutierrez’s office issued a vague statement of its own, saying the matter before the Ethics Committee related to a “long-standing contract” that was “allowable under House rules” but that was canceled by Gutierrez last year. USA Today reported last year that Gutierrez paid an Illinois lobbyist more than $500,000 in taxpayer funds to work side-by-side with his congressional staff. The lobbyist, Doug Scofield, the lawmaker's former chief of staff, was paid as a contractor to train staff, review and draft news releases and help...

A former high-ranking EPA staffer convicted of stealing nearly $900,000 by pretending to be a CIA spy had virtually no experience, got his job with help from a college buddy, and went on to play a key role in sweeping environmental regulations, according to a report Senate Republicans released Wednesday. Those regulations remain in place despite John C. Beale’s lack of environmental expertise, Republican investigators said, adding that they want the Environmental Protection Agency to review the work in which Beale was involved during his 24-year tenure. The report said Beale led an “itinerant life” as a police officer and...