Free Republic

"....Obama shut down the federal government rather than delay UFA's individual mandate provision though he keeps exempting new favored blocs and delaying various provisions. Instead he's cranked up the propaganda machine, particularly the stuff aimed at the young. The efforts have been ridiculous, a clear sign, I suppose of how little regard he has for the intellectual capacity of those who voted disproportionately for him (a point on which he and I are in rare agreement}.By way of example, HHS named as a winner of their video propaganda outreach one entry which is titled "Forget About the Price Tag."In a...

The New Jersey waitress who received thousands of dollars in donations after claiming to receive an anti-gay message from a patron may be refunding the money. Dayna Morales, 22, received national attention after she said that a family she was serving at Gallop Asian Bistro in Bridgewater wrote a disturbing note on their credit card receipt which read, “I’m sorry but I cannot tip because I don’t agree with your lifestyle & how you live your life”. Outraged, Morales sent an email and a picture of the receipt, which showed that the family of four — a husband, wife and...

On the basis of information brought to light by NLPC, Nigerian-born physician Dorothy Ogundu was arrested yesterday. She is charged with multiple counts of grand larceny, forgery and falsifying business records by the New York state Attorney General. Ogundu ran a Queens, New York Health clinic for which Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) secured $380,500 in federal funds. She is a prominent Meeks supporter, and until yesterday, a fixture of the Queens political scene. After reviewing Meeks' earmarks in 2011, NLPC decided to take a closer look at Angeldocs, Inc., which operates the Aki Life Health Center located in Queens, New...

U.S. authorities have charged 49 Russian diplomats and their spouses with conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud, alleging that they stole $1.5 million from the American government via a years-long Medicaid scam. According to a criminal complaint made public today, the former and current diplomats lied about their income and citizenship status in order to qualify for the health benefits, which they used towards pregnancy care, births, and post-natal medical needs. They were also charged with conspiracy to steal government funds and make false statements relating to health care matters, reports the Associated Press. The complaint notes that medical costs associated...

Rep. Jim McDermott on Wednesday downplayed a report from a Treasury Department watchdog that warned the government subsides that are supposed to help Americans purchase health care under the Affordable Care Act are vulnerable to fraud. Speaking on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Mr. McDermott, Washington Democrat, said that he has not had time to read the audit, but said that it is no surprise that government programs are subject to fraud. “Medicare is subject to fraud. Taxpaying is subject to fraud. The IRS is subject to fraud, and what you do is as you discover things, you developed mechanisms to catch...

FITCHBURG – The mother of the former Lunenburg High football player whose home was spray-painted last month with racist graffiti is now the target of the investigation into the incident, according to court records. Andrea Brazier was questioned by Lunenburg police and an FBI agent on Nov. 25, according to a search warrant affidavit filed in Fitchburg District Court. During that interview, the FBI agent suggested to Brazier that Brazier was pushing for the investigation to end because she was the one who had scrawled the graffiti, the affidavit said. “Andrea stated ‘OK,’ ” according to the affidavit filed by...

On Tuesday afternoon, in yet another example of Barack Obama’s inability to start a presentation (much less a giant website) on time, the president defended the disastrous health care law that is colloquially named for him and asked for help to “spread the word” about the law’s purported benefits. Obama began with the usual liberal talking points: [SNIP] One wonders whether anybody but those who already kneel at the altar of Obama reacts to these platitudes other than with “Excuse me, but your ill-conceived law just…” (fill in the blank with any of the following): A. Caused my insurer to...

Unreal! Barack Obama opened up his Obamacare press conference today with this unbelievable line: “We believe we’re a better country than a country where we allow every day 14,000 Americans to lose their health care coverage.” From today’s latest O-Care speech:

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Rep. Mo Brooks (R., Ala.) is warning his constituents to not go on healthcare.gov, the Obamacare website, unless they’re “willing to accept the risk that their identities will be stolen.” The online health care exchange has been beset with glitches since its launch, with one particularly alarming issue being users having their personal information compromised. The Washington Free Beacon reported Tuesday that the marketplace is even more vulnerable to security breaches since the administration “fixed” Healthcare.gov, according to a cyber security expert. Brooks, therefore, bluntly said he would not recommend anyone from his district, Alabama’s 5th, go on the...

The Obamacare insurance marketplace is even more vulnerable to security breaches since the administration “fixed” Healthcare.gov, according to a cyber security expert. Health and Human Services (HHS) released a progress report on Sunday following its self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline to repair the website, saying that the “team has knocked more than 400 bug fixes and software improvements off the punch list.” The administration said that the “site capacity is stable at its intended level,” though the site continued to crash on Monday. The eight-page report made no mention of the website’s numerous security flaws, which experts say put Americans’ personal...

Cyber security experts told Congress today that the Obama administration should take Healthcare.gov offline until privacy vulnerabilities are addressed and detection capabilities are improved. David Kennedy, a so-called “white hat hacker” who tests security flaws by hacking online systems to help identify weaknesses, warned that there are critical flaws and exposures “currently on the website that hackers could use to extract sensitive information.” “The purpose of security isn’t to say, ‘Hey, we’re 100 percent impenetrable all the time,’ but can we detect the hackers in the very early stages of the life cycle of the attack, monitor that, and prevent...

ABC’s Barbara Walters did another in a series of sycophantic gushing and fawning interviews with the Obamas Friday. **SNIP** Well into the 20/20 interview, Mrs. Obama said, “He did talk about wanting to help people, and that inspires me and us to think about how we can keep having impact beyond ourselves.” The President responded, “I did promise her an interesting life.” This led the First Lady to say, “That he did. And, you know, he keeps his promises.”

Prosecutors estimate that from 2000 to 2013 Beale was absent from his EPA duties for a total of 2.5 years, claiming to be working for "Langley" or on a special EPA "research project." In 2008 he was gone for six months but never submitted a leave request. Around May 2011, Beale claimed to be retiring and celebrated with colleagues on a dinner cruise. An EPA manager admitted to not seeing Beale at the office after that, though not noticing until November 2012 that Beale was still on the payroll...

CARSON CITY — Nevadans who had their health insurance policies canceled because they don't meet new federal requirements cannot keep them for another year, the Division of Insurance determined Wednesday. The decision came after consultation with the attorney general's office, which concluded that the agency can't allow noncompliant plans to be renewed if they conflict with state and federal law. Nearly 25,000 Nevadans received cancellation or nonrenewal notices in October because their existing policies don't meet new requirements under the federal health reform law.

Right after a receipt and credit card statement suggested a NJ server's tale about bigoted customers was a hoax, a local newspaper from her hometown started digging into her past. And now the Journal News reports that Dayna Morales, "has a reputation for lying," according to former colleagues and friends. People were rallying around Morales and sending her tips after she shared a photograph of a receipt she got back at her work, NJ restaurant Asian Gallop Bistro. The receipt showed no tip, with the note, "I'm sorry but I cannot tip because I do not agree with your lifestyle...

Maurice Owens sued the D.C. transit authority for $15,000 after he claimed he slipped and fell on a banana peel in an elevator in the Potomac Ave. station. But new footage reveals that Owens is the one who put the peel on the floor in the first place and he's now been charged with second-degree fraud.

With the roll out of Obamacare being as disastrous as possible for the Obama administration, one group was given a $1 million grant to help lead a rebranding effort with hopes of salvaging the law in the eyes of the American people. Families USA (FUSA) — an organization that describes itself as a “national nonprofit, non-partisan organization dedicated to the achievement of high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans” — was given a $1.1 million grant by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on October 4, 2013, to gather “success stories” of Americans dealing with Obamacare and distribute them to the...

A gay server at a New Jersey restaurant who made headlines when she claimed a couple did not tip her because of her lesbian lifestyle may have some explaining to do. A couple came forward to say they were the ones who Danya Morales waited on at the Gallop Asian Bistro in Bridgewater, and they produced a receipt and credit card statement showing that they in fact did leave a tip – about 20 percent of their bill before taxes, New York’s WNBC-TV reported.

For two decades, the U.S. military has been unable to submit to an audit, flouting federal law and concealing waste and fraud totaling billions of dollarsLinda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts. Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square...

Permits for future U.S. home construction hit a near 5-1/2 year-high in October and prices for single-family homes notched big gains in September, suggesting a run-up in mortgage interest rates has not derailed the housing recovery. The data releases on Tuesday were the latest signs of strength in the economy, despite headwinds from rising mortgage rates and last month's partial government shutdown. "The reports reinforce the notion that the housing sector is successfully digesting the summer mortgage rate pop," said Mike Englund, chief economist at Action Economics in Boulder, Colorado. Building permits jumped 6.2 percent last month to an annual...

WASHINGTON — BY all outward indications, the U.S. Navy Veterans Association was a leader in the charitable community. Founded in 2002 to provide support to Navy veterans in need, the charity recorded astonishing financial success. In its first eight years, it raised around $100 million in charitable contributions, almost all of it through a direct marketing campaign. The organization, headed by Jack L. Nimitz, boasted of 41 state chapters and some 66,000 members. This would be a great story of charitable success, except for the fact that virtually everything about the association turned out to be false: no state chapters,...

PHOENIX — Attorneys for four Arizona groups involved with voter registration are trying to get a federal judge to kill a bid by Secretary of State Ken Bennett to require proof of citizenship from all who register to vote. Nina Perales of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that Arizona cannot enforce its documentation requirement on those who use a registration form from the federal Election Assistance Commission. Perales said  Bennett’s lawsuit “is essentially trying to make an end run around the U.S. Supreme Court decision.” But Bennett...

Minnesota’s expanded $15 million-a-year program to support homegrown solar panel manu­fac­turing will of­fer output-based in­cen­tives for the first time, ac­cord­ing to de­tails re­leased Fri­day. The program, fund­ed by ratepayers of the state’s four investor-owned utilities, will pay homeowners, businesses, nonprofits and governments from 13 cents per kilowatt-hour to 27 cents per kilowatt-hour over 10 years of output from solar arrays built by either of the state’s two panel makers. The retail electricity rate in Minnesota is about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. The payments are on top of what system owners get for selling power back to utilities, a signal that...

Fewer people in the United States have confidence in President Obama as leader of the federal government, with a majority saying he’s neither honest nor trustworthy. According to a CNN/ORC international poll released Monday, 40 percent said they believe Obama can manage the federal government effectively. That’s a 12-percentage-point-drop since June, and the worst score he received among nine personal characteristics measured in the poll. "A lot of attention has focused on the president's numbers on honesty in new polling the past three weeks, but it looks like the recent controversy over ObamaCare has had a bigger impact on his...

<p>DENVER — Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler has charged four individuals with misdemeanors after a lengthy voter fraud investigation of more than 40 people.</p> <p>The investigation started last summer after Secretary of State Scott Gessler informed Brauchler’s office of 41 people in the 18th Judicial District who appeared as thought they might have been voting illegally.</p>

Support among Democrats for ObamaCare sunk dramatically in the last month as the new insurance exchanges experienced serious technical problems, according to a new survey. A monthly tracking poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that 55 percent of Democrats now support the Affordable Care Act compared with 70 percent in October. The current level of support among Dems is only slightly higher than than the record low of 52 percent in late 2011. KFF has been tracking attitudes toward ObamaCare since April 2010. Women also expressed their least positive views to date about the law, with 48 percent...

World famous psychic Sylvia Browne is dead at the age of 77, according to her website. Browne, who made appearances on programs like "Larry King Live" and "Unsolved Mysteries," died Wednesday morning in San Jose, California, the site reported. Her son, Chris, confirmed her death to TMZ, saying she passed away while surrounded by family and friends. Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/psychic-sylvia-browne-dead-77-reports-article-1.1524107#ixzz2lFGsj590

The left-wing recipients of the medal of freedom.

James O'Keefe �@JamesOKeefeIII 5h Might want to cancel your plans tomorrow, @Sebelius. It's going to be a busy day. @Project_Veritas __________________________________ .@SenTedCruz praises @Project_Veritas... more to come soon... ___________________________________ James O'Keefe �@JamesOKeefeIII MSM: please do ignore it. That won't bode well for you. This screenplay's already written. My favorite part is still coming up.

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, Americans all over the country are enrolling in affordable health coverage. Many were unable to get insurance before and many others are signing up for new plans that offer better coverage than what they had before, often at lower costs.Here are some of the stories being reported around the country.Butch Matthews, a 61-year-old former small business owner from Little Rock, Arkansas, learned he will be able to buy a better plan that saves him nearly $13,000 ayear. [ThinkProgress, 10/2/13]Rakesh Rikhi of San Jose, California, pays $950 a month to insure himself, his wife and...

...“We’re talking about five percent of the population,” President Obama said to Chuck Todd in a rambling sentence during an interview with NBC this month. “Even though it only effects a small amount of the population, you know, it means a lot to them when they get this letter cancelled [sic] and, you know, I am deeply concerned about it and I’ve assigned my team to see what can we do to close some of the holes and gaps in the law, because my intention is to lift up and make sure the insurance that people buy is effective, that...

Just when you think things can't get much worse with Obamacare, another shoe drops. Correction: This thing has enough dropping shoes to fully fit a centipede. That Obama deliberately lied (please excuse the redundancy, but it is apparently necessary to clarify one's meaning in this postmodern age) in telling people they could keep their plans and doctors is now beyond dispute. He and his handlers have tried to obfuscate the issue with further deception but have fallen way short of passing the laugh test. Some liberals have taunted me on Twitter that all politicians lie. Well, that certainly ends the...

Attacks on the Affordable Care Act have stepped up over the last week or so. You'd think that the healthcare reform known as Obamacare is leading to the wholesale loss of affordable insurance by huge sectors of the American public, many of whom will be impoverished by being forced into low-quality health plans at exorbitant prices. You'd think the entire reform is on "life support," as the usually judicious National Journal put it today, speculating that Democrats may soon start calling for its repeal. Don't buy the hype. The numbers tell an entirely different story. What they also demonstrate is...

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated. And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

President Obama told supporters Monday night that he needed their help battling against “a lot of misinformation” spread by political opponents about his signature healthcare legislation. Speaking on a virtual conference call hosted by Organizing for Action — the political group born from his reelection campaign — the president admitted that problems with the ObamaCare website had put a damper on early enrollment efforts. “The good news is it’s getting better every single week,” Obama said. “I am confident that by the end of this month it is going to be functioning for the vast majority of folks.” The president...

Last week I was informed by the agent who handles my firm’s health-care insurance that, come 2014, our group plan will be cancelled and replaced with an ObamaCare plan. Never mind that President Obama, his spokespeople, and Democratic Congressional leaders all stated over and over that Americans happy with their health-care plans would be able to keep them. Never mind that none of that was true

"A State with No Republicans!" Very interesting...Note this. A US State with zero Republicans in office - The State of Illinois. Think about this. Some interesting data on the 'state' of Illinois ... There are more people on welfare in Illinois than there are people working. Chicago pays the highest wages to teachers than anywhere else in the U.S. averaging $110,000/year. Their pensions average 80-90% of their income. Wow, are Illinois and Chicago great or what? Be sure to read till the end. I've never heard it explained better. Perhaps the U.S. should pull out of Chicago ? Body count:...

Yesterday, the House Homeland Security Committee published a video on their Youtube page highlighting a portion of the committee questioning Roberta Stempfley, acting assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cyber-security and Communications, who confirmed at least 16 attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s portal Healthcare.gov website in 2013. Roberta Stempfley highlighted one successful attack that is designed to deny access to the website called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is designed to make a network unavailable to intended users, generally through a concerted effort to disrupt service such as repeatedly accessing...

It’s a scene from every good film about corrupt peace officers—the guys on-the-take offer an idealistic rookie a taste and that rookie brings down the whole party. Life imitated art as, according to The Washington Post, the Office of Special Counsel released a report in which it learned from seven whistleblowers that Department of Homeland Security officers have routinely abused the overtime system to pad their take-home pay by as much as 25 percent. They called it “the candy bowl.” It was overtime money set aside for special circumstances was routinely treated as a kind of “use it, or lose...

James O’ Keefe’s Project Veritas used hidden cameras to expose Health and Human Services employees urging individuals to commit fraud in order to get lower prices and subsidies from the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges. On video tape, one Obamacare Navigator is caught advising a prospective applicant for health insurance to conceal income in order to “qualify for more stuff as far as aid and stuff like that. You’re already hiding that cash income from the IRS so you don’t have to pay taxes on it. There’s no sense in reporting it on your insurance application. That by itself...

Per the Obamacare Web Disaster: Many of you know I develop websites just like this for a living. It's what I do.I am here to tell you, given three years that they were given, if I had the following team: One artistic Design person, One skilled DBA, one skilled Security guy, one Web/Data integration specialist, three skilled developers (2 on .NET and one on jQuery), one Business Analyst who knew the legislation, and one Policies and Procedures person (for the ATO and C&A certifications and documentation) and me as Architect, I could have had this thing deployable and humming along...

Several alternative news sites are now reporting that there are multiple copies of Barack Hussein Obama’s “real” birth certificate that have surfaced during the Alabama Supreme Court eligibility case. The multiple birth certificates appear to be a huge indicator of fraud. The Alabama Democrat Party has submitted an amicus brief in the McInnish Goode v Chapman Appeal case. In that brief, the Alabama Democrat Party submitted a completely different birth certificate than the one that was posted at the White House website in 2011. Larry Klayman, the plaintiff’s counsel submitted the now famous and proven forgery of Barack Hussein Obama’s...

The Obama administration has directly conceded for the first time that 'in many cases,' health insurance plans offered through government exchanges are more expensive than plans consumers bought before the Affordable Care Act became law – even when government subsidies are figured in. In a letter to state insurance commissioners, Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight director Gary Cohen wrote on Thursday that one reason for the new Obamacare measures the president announced Thursday is that millions of consumers receiving cancellation letters from their insurers are learning the Affordable Care Act options are in fact less affordable. 'Although affected...

New questions are being raised about the tax-exempt status of an Obamacare enrollment group tied to Kathleen Sebelius after it was implicated in James O’Keefe’s most recent investigative probe. O’Keefe captured an official for Enroll America, for which Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted to fundraising, being introduced at an event as “the official group for the DNC.” O’Keefe’s work also revealed that Enroll America might be working with the political action committee Battleground Texas, possibly sharing mined data between the two groups. O’Keefe’s footage was enough to prompt the legal advocacy group Cause of Action to...

Senior Navy civilians investigated in alleged scheme to defraud military for $1.6 million Federal authorities are investigating three senior Navy intelligence officials as part of a probe into an alleged contracting scheme that charged the military $1.6 million for homemade firearm silencers that cost only $8,000 to manufacture, court records show. The three civilian officials, who oversee highly classified programs, arranged for a hot-rod auto mechanic in California to build a specially ordered batch of unmarked and untraceable rifle silencers and sell them to the Navy at more than 200 times what they cost to manufacture, according to court...

Today Project Veritas released a second investigation exposing more Obamacare navigators counseling applicants to lie and cheat the health care system by erroneously reporting income status, health history, and more. Critics said the first video was an isolated incident so we decided to visit with even more navigators funded by your American tax dollars. What we found was disturbing and showed a clear pattern of fraud through the Obamacare navigator program. Obamacare navigators counseling undercover journalists saying, To get a lower premium, I wouldn't include it ... that's my money." "Don't put it on there." "You don't have to claim...

Fraud: President Obama's attempt to fix the insurance cancellation problem that his own law created isn't meant to help anyone. It's an attempt to shift blame for the mess onto the backs of insurance companies. Some fix. Even a cursory glance at Obama's "plan" shows that it won't solve anything. Obama says state insurance commissioners could, if they want, let insurance companies extend existing individual plans another year. But they don't have to. Obama would also leave it up to the insurance companies whether they'd extend these policies, while requiring them to send letters to millions who've already gotten cancellation...

Earlier this week, former President Bill Clinton advised President Obama to "honor the commitment" he made and to allow Americans to keep their health care plans, if they like them. That was a central promise Obama made when he sold Obamacare, but one that turned out not to be true when Obamacare began to be implemented last month. "So I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got," Clinton in an interview released Tuesday. Now President Obama...

WASHINGTON - President Obama will allow insurance companies to continue offering individual health plans that do not meet the standards of the Affordable Care Act through next year, according to a Democratic source on Capitol Hill familiar with the plans. The plan, which the president will announce Thursday morning, is intended to placate millions of consumers who have received cancellation notices from insurers in recent weeks. Obama had repeatedly promised that consumers would be able to keep plans that they liked. The president was under intense pressure from Democrats on Capitol Hill to find a fix. House Democrats have increasingly...

A live thread for the Clown's lies. See, his poll numbers are in the toilet, so Valerie sends him out.