Free Republic

President Barack Obama says Republicans want what's best for America, but just have bad ideas that they keep recycling. Obama is headlining a rally for Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn in Chicago. The Democrat is running for re-election in Obama's home state. Obama says voters this year have a choice to make between two visions of America. He says the election comes down to the question of who will fight for the middle class. Obama says Republicans always say no to ideas that would help the middle class. He's singling out fair pay, education and a proposed minimum wage hike.

Even as U.S. health authorities continue to tell Americans not to worry about the Ebola virus, their assurances are being undercut by the increasingly obvious deficiencies in domestic planning. The United States does not remotely have an Ebola crisis, but it is beginning to have a crisis of confidence in the Obama administration's handling of the matter. President Obama made the right move early on when he offered $1 billion worth of aid to West Africa. Substantial aid is not only a necessary humanitarian response, but the smartest way to prevent a global health problem. Now the administration also must...

The bidding process for the 2022 Olympics was a disaster for the International Olympic Committee. Democratic nations are no longer buying the argument that hosting the games is a wise investment. Every potential 2022 host city with a democratic government eventually pulled out of the bidding, many over economic concerns, leaving Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, as the IOC's only two options. Academics have been saying for years that hosting the Olympics doesn't make economic sense. The costs are typically larger than expected, the infrastructure needed for a big sporting event isn't the same as the infrastructure needed for daily life,...

<p>Louise Troh, whose fiance Thomas Eric Duncan,became the first person in the U.S. to be diagnosed with Ebola, says she and her family are showing no signs of the deadly disease after a 21-day quarantine.</p> <p>Duncan died on October 8.</p>

Given the pressure to act and apparent urgency to calm the public over the Ebola pandemic, it is likely no surprise to hear that President Obama decided to play a quick round of golf (for 5 hours) Saturday morning before arranging a late evening meeting convening "members of his national security and public health teams to update him on the response to the domestic Ebola cases," according to The Daily News. "The meeting concluded with a discussion of broader steps to increase the preparedness of our health sector nationwide," which one would imagine the newly appointed Ebola Czar would...

Kaiser Permanente and other health providers are putting pressure on the powerful California Nurses Association (CAN) in negotiations for reductions in medical staffing and compensation due to the implementation of California’s version of Obamacare. Union nurses on Friday tried to launch a new initiative by demanding an extra compensation supplement and more staffing to be prepared to fight the Ebola virus. But just three years after union nurses won huge contract gains by striking, Obamacare rules that cut patient access to care could now result in huge nurse layoffs. ... the California Nurses Association and other labor unions that campaigned...

FERGUSON, Missouri — It took seven University of Pennsylvania students piled into a rental van nearly 16 hours to drive to St. Louis. They had raised $600 in three days from a Go Fund Me account that was supposed to last them through the weekend. They slept wherever they could crash for free — the basement of a St. Louis couple’s home, or packed on the floor of a church at night. But once in Ferguson, it was nothing like the war zone they had seen splashed on their television screens exactly two months earlier. Instead of armored vehicles blocking...

AUSTIN, Texas -- The battle over Houston's non-discrimination ordinance has moved from the ballot box to the church pulpit, as a group of pastors fights efforts by the city to subpoena their sermons and private communications with church members. The law, passed last June, was criticized because it could be used to allow men to use women's bathrooms, among other objections. Opponents to the law had collected more than 50,000 signatures to place a repeal measure on the ballot this November, far more than the 17,269 required. However, the City of Houston moved to invalidate the majority of the signatures,...

There is no question that ObamaCare is driving this year's election. What analysts miss is that Obama has continued to demonstrate that the disastrous rollout of and subsequent problems with ObamaCare were not flukes. He could have put a tourniquet on his political problems if he had decided to govern in a centrist way and simply told voters, “I heard you. You think I went too far. I got the message.” Instead, he has continuously demonstrated that he did not get the message and that he is going to do what he wants anyway. He has been incredibly arrogant as...

Though his new collection of essays, “The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned” (Regnery), recounts many of the biggest political events of recent history, bestselling author Steyn says that’s not the real battleground. While everyone is focused on the 2014 midterms, the question about where our country is headed is being decided in our entertainment and our schools. Here, in an excerpt from the book, he explains how culture is king. Over the past few decades, I’ve seen enough next-presidents-of-the-United-States for several lifetimes: Phil Gramm, Pete Wilson, Bob Dornan, Bob Dole, Elizabeth Dole, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, Lamar...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Sunday dismissed President Obama’s newly appointed Ebola czar as a “political operative” without the medical background necessary for the job — and he urged Americans to ignore the judgment of government health officials because they “are repeating the administration’s talking points.” Cruz is one of a number of politicians calling for a more drastic response to the disease which, to date, has infected two Americans, both nurses who cared directly for Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who contracted the disease in his home country and fell ill in Texas. Cruz’ and other Republicans have...

(Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency has launched an internal review of a senior official’s part-time work for a private venture started by former NSA director Keith Alexander that raises questions over the blurring of lines between government and business. Under the arrangement, which was confirmed by Alexander and current intelligence officials, NSA's Chief Technical Officer, Patrick Dowd, is allowed to work up to 20 hours a week at IronNet Cybersecurity Inc, the private firm led by Alexander, a retired Army general and his former boss.

City officials in Coeur d'Alene Idaho have told a married couple who are both ordained ministers that they will go to jail if they refuse to perform wedding ceremonies for gay couples. The Alliance for Defending Freedom has filed suit against the city and asked for temporary restraining order to prevent officials from carrying out their threat. Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit and a motion for a temporary restraining order Friday to stop officials in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from forcing two ordained Christian ministers to perform wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples. City officials told Donald Knapp...

The first outbreak was in Kentucky. Then, through some transmission mechanism which remains unidentified, it spread to Georgia. Now, despite the best Democrat efforts to establish some sort of quarantine or containment, the affliction seems to have made the jump to the Mountain State. West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant can’t seem to choke out the name of the person she voted for in the last two presidential elections. Citing Grimes’s mishaps, the Charleston Daily Mail editorial board asked during a candidates’ forum whether the candidates would be willing to say whom they last supported for president. Republican...

Lawmakers blasted President Obama’s choice for Ebola czar Sunday, with Republicans accusing the commander-in-chief of prioritizing political loyalty over medical or emergency response experience. "Mr. Klain is not a doctor, he's not a health care professional, he doesn't have background in these issues," Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said on CNN’s “State of the Union” of Ron Klain, who Obama tapped Friday to lead the federal government’s response to the ongoing Ebola outbreak. "We don't need a White House political operative, which is what Mr. Klain has been. What we need is presidential leadership. The person who needs to be...

The governor of Connecticut is a tool. He ran one of our biggest cities (Stamford) into the ground, and now has managed to run this liberal paradise of a state into the ground as well. Aside from the personal attacks on the GOP candidate that is running against him that come from the so-called media here in Connecticut, all we keep hearing about this election season is "common sense solutions to gun violence." I live in Sandy Hook. On December 14, 2013 a young man who was pretty much insane murdered 26 people in an elementary school a few miles...

Reuters/Reuters - U.S. President Barack Obama waves as he arrives for a campaign rally for Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown (R) at a High School in Upper Marlboro, Maryland October 19, 2014. REUTERS/Kevin L …more UPPER MARLBORO Md. (Reuters) - President Barack Obama made a rare appearance on the campaign trail on Sunday with a rally to support the Democratic candidate for governor in Maryland, but early departures of crowd members while he spoke underscored his continuing unpopularity.With approval levels hovering around record lows, Obama has spent most of his campaign-related efforts this year raising money for struggling Democrats,...

Is Obama Planning to Flood the System With Foreign Ebola Patients? As if the last few weeks have not been crazy enough. First we learned that a Liberian national who landed in Dallas had tested positive for Ebola. We then witnessed a comedy of errors as workers and authorities tried to deal with "patient zero." Shortly after we learned that not just one, but two nurses who treated Thomas Duncan had also been stricken with Ebola. Now we are hearing from Judicial Watch that Barack Obama is planning to bring more Ebola patients to America… on purpose. Maybe that is...

Despite the president's low approval ratings, and the continuing cacophony of hate directed toward him by Republicans and racists, any reasonable assessment of Barack Obama's accomplishments to date would conclude that his presidency could well go down as a time of historic achievement. The Affordable Care Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the Dodd-Frank Financial Regulation Bill -- the largest since the New Deal -- and his economic policies bolstered by yeoman's work of the Federal Reserve, place Obama solidly in the company of presidents like FDR and LBJ. Despite widespread Republican disinformation about and unrelenting opposition to the Affordable Care...

In an obscure corner of the federal bureaucracy, there is an office that is 990,399 cases behind. That is Washington’s backlog of backlogs — a queue of waiting Americans larger than the populations of six different states. It is bigger even than the infamous backups at Veterans Affairs, where 526,000 people are waiting in line, and the patent office, where 606,000 applications are pending. All of these people are waiting on a single office at the Social Security Administration. Social Security is best-known for sending benefits to seniors. But it also pays out disability benefits to people who can’t work...