Free Republic

... Some of [Obamacare's] approaches have turned out to be ineffective, poorly targeted, or not ambitious enough to address deeply rooted problems. - Healthcare experts Timothy Jost and Harold Pollack These are inevitable occurrences with any major legislation, though they don't have much to do with the real issue conservatives have with the ACA. In the view of John E. McDonough of Harvard's School of Public Health, it's that Obamacare raises taxes on the wealthy while giving them "bupkis" in direct benefits. A lot can be done to correct the real flaws in the ACA, and Timothy S. Jost, emeritus...

Six-year-old Ivanka Trump was furious: She’d gotten a Barbie for Christmas while her two brothers got Legos and an Erector Set. So she grabbed some super glue, locked the bedroom door and built an unbreakable Lego model of Trump Tower. “My father, in scolding me, was never so proud,” she recounted years later. That headstrong little girl is now a trusted political adviser to her father, and a willowy walking advertisement for her own line of jewelry, clothing, shoes and more, as well as a power player in the Trump real estate empire. She’s the rare executive vice president whose...

SNIP Of her dad’s feud with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, Ivanka called the war of words “sensationalized” and “very much for TV.” Shrugging it off further, she said in what sounded a bit like channeling the Donald, “Truthfully, it didn’t interest me that much.”

One of the more bizarre spectacles of U.S. government in the modern age is the sight of political leaders complaining that a public program is actually working. In many states that expanded Medicaid and even some that rejected expansion under the Affordable Care Act, enrollment has significantly exceeded projections. To some political leaders, for some reason, this is supposed to be a bad thing. Some Republican governors are in effect calling it "an 'I told you so' moment". In Michigan, for instance, first-year enrollment was projected at 323,000, but enrollment topped out at 605,000. Illinois expected 199,000, and has ended...

As surely as the hot, dry Santa Ana winds bring blue skies to the coast and wildfires to the hills, severe California droughts bring calls to build desalination plants up and down the seashore. All that ocean water, begging to be converted to fresh and pumped into our pipelines, would solve our water supply problems instantly and permanently, boosters say. In the coming months, the drumbeat will only get louder. That's not only because the current drought is the longest and most severe in memory, but because a $1-billion desalination project scheduled to start operating in Carlsbad this fall will...

In its decision Monday in the Hobby Lobby case, the conservative Supreme Court majority that upheld corporations' religious objections to birth control spends an inordinate amount of time defending itself from the reasoning and wrath of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent. Justice Samuel Alito, whose name is on the decision, alludes no fewer than 24 times to the "principal dissent," which Ginsburg wrote for the four-member minority. Plainly, he felt Ginsburg's powerful intellect breathing down his neck as he tried to find a path to upholding the Hobby Lobby parties' attack on women's rights without expanding corporate "personhood" too much....

If there's been one inexorable trend coming out of the HR departments of major employers, it's been the steady erosion of worker pay and benefits. Razor-thin raises, defined benefit pensions replaced by 401(k) plans, shrinking healthcare--if you've been on a big company's payroll, you know the drill. Expect the trend to continue or even pick up steam, because employers have an ideal scapegoat right now: the Affordable Care Act. It looks like the blame-Obamacare game is having some effect. According to an AP poll released over the weekend, three-quarters of those with private or employer-based insurance think the Affordable Care...

LA Times Discontinues Reporter's Column 40 minutes ago The Los Angeles Times said Sunday it is discontinuing the column and Internet blog of a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter because he posted items online using assumed names. The decision, reported in an editor's note on the Times' Web site, came a week after the paper suspended Michael Hiltzik's Golden State blog. It said Hiltzik would be reassigned after serving a suspension. "Hiltzik did not commit any ethical violations in his newspaper column, and an internal inquiry found no inaccurate reporting in his postings in his blog or on the Web," the editor's...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Los Angeles Times has suspended the blog of a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who posed as an Internet reader to defend his own column and attack his conservative foes. The Times apparently learned of Michael Hiltzik's multiple identities from another blogger, Patrick Frey, who was slammed by the columnist under a pseudonym. Frey, author of a blog called Patterico's Pontifications (www.patterico.com), traced the writer back to Hiltzik's computer. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060421/wr_nm/media_latimes_dc_3

Is an L.A. Times columnist leaving comments on the Internet under assumed “sock puppet” identities — identities which he pretends is someone other than himself? Read on and judge for yourself. As for me, I’ve made up my mind, and the answer is “yes.” In an early post on his L.A. Times-sponsored Golden State blog, Times columnist Michael Hiltzik was criticized by a couple of commenters calling themselves “Chad” and “Booker.” These commenters left juvenile comments mocking Hiltzik for explaining blogs to his readers. A commenter named “Mikekoshi” rose to Hiltzik’s defense, scolding the commenters for criticizing Hiltzik’s column:

Illegal immigration is one of California's most contentious and frustrating public policy issues, but it does have one positive feature: It continues to be an exciting laboratory for experimentation in the new math. The latest example comes courtesy of state Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), who readers may remember from his having guarded the conservative flank as a candidate in last year's recall election. A few weeks ago Sen. McClintock wrote an editorial column built around the following irony: "This year, nearly 7,500 qualified California residents — who would otherwise be entering California state universities as incoming freshmen — are...