Free Republic

Maritime Grab: Iran isn't the only nuclear threat to worry about. As its military and economy have grown, so too have China's dreams of dominating an island chain centered on Taiwan and including Japan's Senkakus. China's increased belligerence in the region is part of its plan to control the Yellow Sea, the South China Sea and the larger East China Sea. Its military doctrine refers to dominance over the "first island chain," which encompasses the East China Sea. The next step is dominance over what Beijing calls the second island chain extending from Japan to Indonesia. Some analysts have even...

ObamaCare: California's health insurance exchange has decided not to allow insurance plans that do not meet the law's standards, rejecting the president's attempt to rewrite the law through executive action. Recognizing the impracticality and illegality of President Obama's proposed "fix" for insurance policies canceled due to the Affordable Care Act's coverage mandates, the board of Covered California, the state's health insurance exchange, voted 5-0 against extending the 1 million California health care plans that were dropped under the law. The Golden State follows several other blue states — including New York, Washington, Rhode Island and Minnesota — that announced they...

Defense: Breaking yet another promise, this one to Congress, the administration jeopardizes our national security with plans to eliminate an entire squadron of intercontinental ballistic missiles and destroy its silos. Yet another example of what President Obama meant in 2012 when he promised Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea, that after his re-election he would have more "flexibility" on defense issues, comes on the news that an ICBM squadron would be scrapped to comply with the New START Treaty — even as both the Russians and Chinese deploy new ballistic missiles. A document...

Security: Computer security experts testify that the unfinished health care marketplace portal places the personal information of millions at risk on a poorly designed and built site that is a hacker's dream. Not only is the poorly designed and still only partially built ObamaCare website, Healthcare.gov, vulnerable to attack by computer hackers, it already may have been comprised, cybersecurity expert David Kennedy told a House Science, Space, & Technology Committee hearing on Tuesday. "Hackers are definitely after it," said Kennedy, CEO of data security firm Trusted SEC. "And if I had to guess, based on what I can see ......

Debacle: The woman who got a shoutout from President Obama last month for her fan letter for ObamaCare finds out her exchange quote was a computer mistake and she doesn't qualify for a tax credit after all. In one of his famous photo-ops in the Rose Garden last Oct. 21, with an array of touted beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act behind him, President Obama read a letter from Jessica Sanford of Federal Way, Wash., to explain why the Affordable Care Act, with all its rollout flaws, was still needed. The letter told a sad tale of a grateful single...

Schools: Opposition is rising to new national education standards pushed on public schools. They have turned schools into re-education camps for liberalism, with political statements masquerading as English lessons. If one had to include one speech by President Ronald Reagan as recommended reading in a national standardized curriculum it might be the one in which he stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" One might pick Reagan's first inaugural address when he said, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Or even his 1964 "A...

Fiscal Disaster: A major credit rating agency has just given Chicago, with more general obligation debt per capita than Detroit, its second triple-notch downgrade in six months. Its bonds are perilously close to junk status. Citing skyrocketing pension costs and a lack of meaningful solutions, Fitch Ratings lowered Chicago's debt to A- from AA- last week, making it the second serious downgrade since July. The move by Fitch follows a triple downgrade of Chicago's bond rating by Moody's Investors in mid-July. Moody's cited the city's "very large and growing" pension liabilities and "significant" debt service payments, among other factors. The...

After fomenting fears of fracking and fossil fuels, the administration's campaign to put food in our gas tanks has wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies. Ethanol was supposed to save the earth and pave the way to energy independence. It has done neither. We are getting closer to energy independence but it is thanks to the technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that has unleashed our vast reserves of oil and natural gas formerly trapped in shale formations underneath much of the U.S. Fracking was supposed to be environmentally dangerous, a...

Climate Fraud: The United Nations climate chief blames the Philippines devastation on climate change, ignoring the historical record that 33 of the 35 most devastating storms occurred with CO2 below current levels. One can appreciate the genuine grief felt by an emotional Naderev "Yeb" Sano as the delegate from a Philippines devastated by Typhoon Haiyan spoke at the start of two-week talks in Warsaw where more than 190 countries will try to lay the groundwork for a new pact to fight global warming. "We can fix this. We can stop this madness. Right now, right here," Sano told delegates in...

Military Superiority: As China does its own Pacific pivot, a new report reveals that Beijing's strategic bomber is equipped with a land-attack nuclear missile and an armed drone nearly identical to one of ours developed through cyberespionage. To the casual observer, the Chinese Hongzha-6 (H-6) bomber is not that impressive. The two-engine medium-range jet is a variant of the old Soviet Tu-16 Badger. That plane first flew in 1959 and versions have been deployed by the Chinese Air Force since 1968. A prototype H-6 was used to airdrop China's first three-stage thermonuclear device at the Lop Nor Nuclear Weapon Test...

Political Correctness: A healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian man has unfair advantages in the U.S. military over other soldiers, says a training manual approved by the Pentagon, warning in great detail about a so-called White Male Club. Those who thought the U.S. military was already the ultimate level playing field, a place where skill and fighting ability were what mattered, not gender, race or religious belief, were sadly mistaken, at least according to a 600-plus-page manual used by the military to train its Equal Opportunity officers. According to the manual, put together by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI), and...

Identity Theft: Kathleen Sebelius admits that convicted felons could be hired as ObamaCare "navigators," giving them access to the personal information of those signing up. Some might already be on the job. Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius made the admission Wednesday in an exchange with Sen. John Cornyn during a Senate Finance Committee hearing. The Texas Republican asked if it's true that there's no requirement for navigators to undergo a criminal background check and that felons, including those convicted of crimes such as identity theft, could be given access to our most private financial and medical information. "This is...

Meltdown: A health care scholar estimates that if ObamaCare is fully implemented, including the employer mandate, 129 million people will not be able to keep their plans. The train wreck has become a nuclear meltdown. The never-ending and ever-changing story line emanating from the damage control room at the White House has morphed from you can keep your plan, period, to we said you could keep the plan you liked at the rates agreed upon only if we decide it's not substandard. That, we were told, would only apply to some 5% of Americans. They would get a better plan...

First Amendment: A federal court has ruled that the ObamaCare contraception mandate violates the guarantee of free exercise of religion and forces some to choose between their religious conscience and bankruptcy. The Supreme Court's decision in June 2012 that ObamaCare was constitutional because its fines for not complying with its mandates made the law a tax within Congress' authority to impose did not end the constitutional or court challenges to this attempt at redistribution of health and wealth. On Friday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Gilardi v. HHS that ObamaCare's contraception mandate violates the constitutional rights of...

Global Power: Moscow launches four ICBMs in a large-scale nuclear drill as Chinese state media, brandishing detailed maps, show how Beijing's nuclear submarines can attack U.S. cities. We press "reset," they press "launch." In March 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a red "reset button" to symbolize improved ties. The era of confrontation when American presidents demanded the tearing down of walls was over. From now on, we would make nice. Fast-forward to 2012, when President Obama met with Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's then-president and now prime minister, at the Nuclear Security Summit in...

Scandal: The person who leaked the confidential data of a conservative group to its political foes has been identified by investigators. But he's protected by the very law he broke and an attorney general who doesn't care. In March 2012, someone at the Internal Revenue Service released the confidential donor lists of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which supports traditional marriage, to its political opponent, the liberal Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a supporter of gay marriage. At that time, Joe Solmonese, a left-wing activist and Huffington Post contributor, was the president of the HRC. Solmonese also became a 2012...

Regulation: More than 3,500 coal supporters descended on Washington Tuesday to protest environmental rules requiring technology that doesn't exist, designed to turn the Saudi Arabia of coal into the Bangladesh of energy. Members of Congress, union members, miners and their families stormed Capitol Hill to air their grievances about President Obama's policies that make it harder to burn or mine coal. They were protesting the government shutdown that hasn't ended — that of the coal industry in pursuit of environmental goals that ignore global temperatures that haven't budged in 17 years and greenhouse-gas emission declines that have occurred as a...

<p>Health Fail: Healthcare.gov's implosion may be due to one of its major developers being selected less for its technical competence than for cronyism. Perhaps the White House was hoping for a friends and family discount.</p> <p>Why pick a Canadian firm with a French name to help develop the official ObamaCare website? It certainly wasn't based on the track record in developing health care software of CGI Federal, the IT contractor that orchestrated most of the Healthcare.gov website.</p>

Government: "We won! We won!" cry Democrats on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, parroted by their media collaborators. The public haven't forgotten these "winners'" policies are an abject failure. So the Democrats won on the shutdown and the champagne corks are popping all over Washington. Does their victory change the fact that the national debt is over $17 trillion — having climbed $328 billion in one day last Thursday? Does their win change the fact that 11 million Americans are out of work and that the unemployment rate is well above 7% four years and nine months into the Obama...

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....