Free Republic

Corruption: The crash-prone government health-care site asks applicants if they want to register to vote as they try to sign up for ObamaCare. By sheer coincidence, a plurality of the uninsured are likely Democratic voters. Call it Motor Voter on steroids — the piggybacking of voter registration to an otherwise unrelated government function. Those trying to navigate Healthcare.gov, a website that looks and functions as if designed by the department of motor vehicles, are being asked if they want to register to vote just in time for crucial 2014 midterm elections that are likely to be a referendum on ObamaCare....

Regulation: From lost jobs to fewer hours to premium hikes that would make a loan shark drool, Barack Obama's home state is a case study in why the first rule in health care reform, as in medicine, should be to do no harm. The president and his cohorts in the media have long accused Republicans of being out of touch with ordinary people. Remember the concocted story about President Bush the elder being so out of touch he was unfamiliar with supermarket bar-code scanners? But it's President Obama who's out of touch with ordinary people and the damage his Affordable...

Health Care: In a stunning admission, our Health and Human Services secretary admits ObamaCare is part of the fundamental transformation of America away from a free market in anything to a nanny state on steroids. Maybe Kathleen Sebelius was being sarcastic, or maybe she thought it might be a good way to reach the "young invincibles" who feel they had better things to do with their money than enroll in ObamaCare. But her recent appearance on Jon Stewart's show on Comedy Central went about as well as ObamaCare's train wreck of a rollout. Stewart hammered her and ObamaCare, as we...

Defense: The firing of two nuclear commanders in a week adds to a body count that suggests we have either the most corrupt and incompetent general staff in history or our military is being reshaped for other purposes. The Obama administration, which has fired no one over scandals such as its Fast and Furious Mexican gun-running operation, its criminal negligence in the terrorist attack on our Benghazi diplomatic mission, or the use of the IRS to target and intimidate political foes, seems to have a curious obsession lately about ethics and competence in the U.S. military. Last week the Air...

Law: An Obama official at the heart of the Pigford reparations scheme sues the widow of the crusading conservative who exposed her and a multibillion-dollar redistribution scam to African-American farmers. Hell hath no fury like an Obama administration official exposed for corruption or racism. On Wednesday, news broke that Shirley Sherrod, the former USDA official whose speech before an NAACP group revealing her angst about helping a white farmer got her fired, has decided to amend her lawsuit against the late Andrew Breitbart to name Andrew's widow and mother of four, Susie Bean Breitbart. As Christian Adams recounts on PJ...

Scandal: The IRS official in charge of tax-exempt organizations when the unit targeted Tea Party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for enforcing ObamaCare and may have illegally shared confidential tax data. It's bad enough that no one at the Internal Revenue Service has been meaningfully punished for the targeting of conservative groups before the 2012 election. Now we learn that, for some, the unconstitutional and illegal action was a good career move. Sarah Hall Ingram, who served as commissioner of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division from 2009 to 2012, was so good at her job of...

Transparency: The Justice Department blocks a tell-all book by an ATF special agent on how Brian Terry, Jaime Zapata and hundreds of Mexican nationals were killed with weapons supplied by this administration. ATF Special Agent John Dodson is a national hero who in 2011 blew the whistle on Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration's gun-running operation to Mexico. Testifying before Congress, he disclosed that his supervisors had authorized the flow of semiautomatic weapons into Mexico instead of interdicting them, weapons that found their way into the hands of Mexican drug cartels with deadly results. Dodson has put his intimate...

Leadership: From the closing of national cemeteries to the blocking of public roads to deny access to scenic overlooks of Mount Rushmore, the list of federal shutdowns shows a president whose pettiness knows no bounds. We have witnessed the shameful spectacle of the administration placing barricades — "Barackades" and "Barrycades," as they've come to be called — around the World War II Memorial to prevent those who stormed the beaches of Normandy and Ronald Reagan's honored "boys of Pointe du Hoc" from seeing the monument built with public funds to honor their service and sacrifice. As the Associated Press reports,...

Global Warming: Temperatures have flat-lined for 15 years, the Arctic and Antarctic are gaining record amounts of ice, most computer models have been wrong, yet the networks are buying into the alarmists' narrative. Earth might not have a fever but the media do, judging by their hyperventilating about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's quite fraudulent report (Fifth Assessment Report or 5AR) released Sept. 27. One network — CBS— even turned a blind eye to the truth and claimed that temperatures "could have risen by more than 200 degrees." This fiction came from CBS' Ben Tracy, who said the carbon...

Energy Revolution: America's natural gas boom threatens Russia's economic strategy, an expert says, leaving it with few alternatives to rescue its economy while threatening to shatter its energy stranglehold on Europe. Russia's abundance of energy resources has long allowed it to use energy both as a foreign policy weapon and as the bedrock of the Russian economy. Whenever energy prices rose, Russia benefited and its neighbors often felt the restraining leash of dependence on Russian energy, particularly natural gas. Government-controlled energy giant Gazprom was in such a strong position it could demand decade-long contracts and link the price of gas...

Health Reform: Those icons of voter fraud have been tasked and paid to guide an unwilling public through the ObamaCare enrollment process — while getting access to confidential information on thousands of people seeking health insurance. Somehow it does not surprise us that among the conductors on the train wreck known as ObamaCare will be leftist agitators from President Obama's beloved Acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. They'll get up to $48 an hour as "navigators" to lead us through the dead-end ObamaCare maze. As Mathew Vadum reports on the American Spectator blog, United Labor Unions (ULU)...

Scandal: The truth about how and why Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata and hundreds of Mexican nationals were killed with weapons supplied by this administration may yet come out as a court lets a lawsuit proceed. The most transparent administration in history suffered a defeat Monday, when U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson turned down the Justice Department's request to dismiss a lawsuit seeking "Fast and Furious" documents hidden by Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department after President Obama invoked executive privilege. The lawsuit was brought by Rep. Darrell Issa's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee after...

Policing: The Dallas County Sheriff's Office gets an MRAP tactical military vehicle, used for counterinsurgency fighting in Iraq, as law enforcement becomes a collection of SWAT teams pursuing not-always-guilty Americans. In early August, a SWAT team broke through the gates of a 3.5-acre farm in Arlington, Texas, that promotes a sustainable lifestyle and did a 10-hour search of the property. Residents were handcuffed and held at gunpoint as police looked for nonexistent marijuana plants and various city code violations. As the owners watched, 10 tons of their private property was hauled off in trucks — dangerous items such as blackberry...

ObamaCare: A group of nuns dedicated to caring for the elderly poor is suing to prevent an uncaring administration from shutting down their compassionate order over their refusal to obey the contraception mandate. There is no clearer or sadder example of the Obama administration's war on the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty than the demand by the Department of Health and Human Services to violate their religious consciences or pay heavy fines. HHS has ruled that if the Sisters don't offer insurance policies to their employees that include free coverage for sterilization procedures, artificial contraceptives and abortifacients, these vowed-to-poverty...

Benghazi: The man blamed for the deaths of four Americans, including the first ambassador in 33 years, is now free. But no terrorist has been captured or official punished. Mark Basseley Youssef, the man responsible for the video President Obama apologized for six times before the United Nations, saying it had inflamed Islamic passions that led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, has been released from federal custody. Youssef, a 56-year-old Egyptian Coptic Christian and former gas station owner who had served time for a 2010 bank fraud conviction, was sent back to prison last year after admitting...

Second Amendment: The Senate is unlikely to ratify a United Nations arms treaty signed by John Kerry, but gun control zealots will use it as justification for "common sense" infringements on our constitutional right. The secretary of state signed the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty on Wednesday despite repeated indications that it would be dead on arrival in the U.S. Senate. One warning was a letter from Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., that said the treaty would be rejected just like "other U.N.-sponsored treaties which threaten our country's sovereignty." Inhofe reminded Kerry that the pact would "collect dust alongside the Law...

Junk Science: Earth has gained 19,000 Manhattans of sea ice since this date last year, the largest increase on record. There is more sea ice now than there was in mid-September 1990. Al Gore, call your office. A 2007 prediction that summer in the North Pole could be "ice-free by 2013" that was cited by former Vice President Al Gore in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech has proven to be off . .. by 920,000 square miles. But then Democrats have never been good at math — or climate science. In his Dec. 10, 2007, "Earth has a fever"...

Benghazi-gate: Democrats couldn't share the grief of a mom who was lied to in front of her son's casket or a grieving father who wonders why the general who could have mounted a rescue was relieved of his post. It was a shameful spectacle all around, starting with bizarre testimony by the authors of the State Department's Accountability Review Board (ARB) report and including real tears in a scandal branded as "phony" by the Obama administration and the repetition of lies agreed upon. The scene was Thursday's hearing on the Benghazi terrorist attack before Rep. Darrell Issa's House Oversight Committee....

Gun Crime: FBI statistics show Chicago, with one-third the population, passing New York City in the number of murders in 2012. Is it time for a national conversation about gang control vs. gun control? President Obama doesn't often mention his hometown when he talks about gun control. Then he'd have to explain, in arguably the most gun-restricted big city in America in the last state to allow concealed carry of firearms, why Chicago is now officially the murder capital of the United States. In new statistics released Monday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported 500 murders in Chicago in 2012,...

Energy: A new study shows that little methane, a strong greenhouse gas that occurs naturally in ground water, is released into the atmosphere during hydraulic fracturing. So it must be OK to frack now. In the first "Gasland" movie, environmental activist Josh Fox trumpeted flaming water taps in a Colorado town as evidence of fracking-induced water contamination. In fact, the areas in question had reported naturally occurring methane in their water for decades. Whether naturally occurring or not, environmentalists claim that fracking would release huge amounts of what they consider the most potent heat-trapping greenhouse gas, far outweighing the value...