Free Republic

The U.S. military has erected a 64,000-square-foot headquarters building on the dusty moonscape of southwestern Afghanistan that comes with all the tools to wage a modern war. A vast operations center with tiered seating. A briefing theater. Spacious offices. Fancy chairs. Powerful air conditioning. Everything, that is, except troops.

Days after delaying health insurance requirements for employers, the Obama administration has decided to roll back requirements for new state online insurance marketplaces to verify the income and health coverage status of people who apply for subsidized coverage. Until now, the administration had proposed that exchanges verify whether new applicants receive employer-sponsored insurance benefits through random checks. It also sought to require marketplaces to verify each enrollee's income status. But final regulations released quietly on Friday by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) give 16 states and the District of Columbia, which are setting up their own exchanges,...

The Obama administration delaying the start of the employer mandate part of ObamaCare this week is not the first snag in implementing the president’s signature health care law. Other parts of the 2010 law have already been delayed or discarded, including a requirement that businesses fill out an IRS form for any purchases over a year exceeding $600. Congress repealed that in June 2011. “It was extremely onerous (and) raised very little revenue,” says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director and chief economic policy adviser to Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign. Amanda Austin,...

Washington is riven by conflict and deep-seated division. It is rare indeed when both sides can agree on anything consequential. Therefore it is incredibly heartening that there is now bipartisan agreement that the implementation of Obamacare is a mess. Republicans have long maintained this, but now the Obama administration has lent its implicit assent with its astonishing decision to delay by a year the law’s employer mandate. This is what the administration calls, via a blog post by the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for tax policy that announced the decision, “Continuing to Implement the ACA in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner.”...

Well, it could be worse. Voters could take in all of the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House lately — IRS, NSA, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, State Department cover-ups and obstruction of IG probes, and so on — and assume that the issue is corruption rather than incompetency. In that sense, Josh Kraushaar’s analysis might be good news, relatively speaking: The administration is facing a crisis of competence. At a time when trust in government is already at an all-time low, the events of this past week illustrate the limits of this president’s power. The White House seems...

The embattled mayor of Pennsylvania's financially crippled capital of Harrisburg was ousted on Tuesday when she lost the Democratic primary to the owner of an independent bookstore. Mayor Linda Thompson's loss to Eric Papenfuse comes after a tumultuous term in which her outbursts and statements caused a loss of confidence in her administration. Papenfuse is likely to win the general election in this heavily Democratic city in November, but he must still face off against independent candidate Nevin Mindlin.

President Obama's Press Secretary Jay Carney bristled at the suggestion the Administration is embroiled in three major scandals. “What scandals?” Carney demanded to know. “The President has been giving his utmost to this country and now people are trying to package a run of bad luck into a series of scandals? It's unfair.” The “run of bad luck,” as Carney sees it, is “a media that is paying undue attention to relatively minor screw-ups by low level employees. Rather than being lauded for his efforts to employ a broader range of the 'differently- abled,' the President is now pilloried for...

Thomas Pickering - the former UN ambassador who along with former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen prepared the Accountability Review Board report on the State Department's handling of the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya - says he didn't think it was necessary to interview former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "because in fact we knew where the responsibility rested." BOB SCHIEFFER: And good morning again. Ambassador Thomas Pickering is the one who led the State Department's investigation into how those Benghazi attacks where handled. Mr. Ambassador, you and I have known one another as you had...

Obamacare is “working fine,” President Obama said yesterday in his press conference. It’s made health insurance “stronger, better, more secure than it was before.” There are just a few slight details left to be implemented, but we shouldn’t worry about those, according to the President. Right. There’s nothing to worry about, which is why Members of Congress are trying to exempt themselves and their staffs from Obamacare. In reality, health insurance premiums are rising, and states—meaning taxpayers—are staring down some astronomical expenses. A new study from the Government Accountability Office cites Obamacare and Medicaid costs as budget busters for states...

So, about that "we'll never come take your guns thing." From The Blaze: On April 1st, a legal gun owner in upstate New York reportedly received an official notice from the state ordering him to surrender any and all weapons to his local police department. The note said that the person’s permit to own a gun in New York was being suspended as well. The gun owner contacted attorney Jim Tresmond (a specialist in gun laws in New York) and the two visited the local police precinct. Mr. Tresmond reportedly went into the precinct and informed the officers that his...

Even Joe Klein is seeing the handwriting on the wall: ObamaCare is in big trouble! Klein is blaming it on incompetence but I have a couple of words for Joe and other startled liberals who can't believe what they are watching. ObamaCare is in trouble because it violated a couple of rules that a nice counselor taught me at a high school Junior Achievement class in Wisconsin. First, don't bite more than you can chew. In other words, who in their right mind thought that bureaucrats could take over 1/6 of the US economy competently? How arrogant are these people?...

The White House is facing pressure from House Republicans to defend President Obama's decision not to address the Knesset on his upcoming trip to Israel. A group of Republicans wrote to Obama to "commend" him for traveling to Israel but also questioning the choice not to address members of the Knesset, which they describe as "a customary and symbolic gesture that celebrates our shared democratic ideals and the special relationship between Israel and United States." The letter notes that both of Obama's most recent predecessors, President Clinton and President George W. Bush, addressed the Israeli legislative body, Bush doing so...

Obama lectures about peace, but the war intensifies. North Korea has cut the hotline with the south, after threatening war, and warns of imminent attack. The Saudis have once again warned Iran to stay away from Abu Musa island. What if they don’t? Meanwhile, a leading cleric warns of domestic unrest in the kingdom (h/t Drudge), where the Iranians have long incited the Shi’a minority to confront the Wahabbi royal family. Small and not-so-small armies are marching over and around Syria. It is said that we are training the Free Syrian Army at a base in Jordan. Cyberattacks against our...

President Obama urged compromise Monday as he pushed congressional Republicans to reach an agreement to avoid big spending cuts due to take effect at the end of the week. "There are always going to be some areas where we have genuine disagreement ... but there are more areas where we can do a lot more cooperating than we have seen in the past couple years," Obama told a meeting of the National Governors Association at the White House. "At some point, we've got to do some governing. And, certainly, we can't keep careening from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis." ....

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified at hearings before House and Senate committees recently. The hearings were largely tense affairs that had Clinton on the defensive for much of the time. In the aftermath of the attack on our consulate in Benghazi that left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, the Obama Administration and State Department stuck by an unlikely narrative that the obvious terrorist attack was the result of a spontaneous protest over a YouTube video that got out of hand. The pushing of this narrative in conjunction with the State Department’s unwillingness to act on requests...

When Republican fundraisers solicited the party’s big donors on behalf of Mitt Romney this year, the centerpiece of the pitch was a state-of-the-art campaign to identify the party’s likely voters and make sure they came to the polls on Election Day. Political pros call these county-by-county, block-by-block campaigns the ground game. And while most of the media attention focuses on candidate speeches, debates, and ad buys, it’s the ground game where elections are won and lost. On Tuesday, Republicans lost the election on the ground. As the Republican Party picks up the pieces from overwhelming defeat, the first fingers are...

"Fox military analyst Col. David Hunt checked in with us again after the revelation that there were multiple listening posts which heard the cries for help from the US Embassy in Libya and none of them did anything. The State Department says they still do not know what really happened in Libya."

Has the national media finally decided to react to the false narrative peddled to it by the Obama administration on the assassination of a US Ambassador and the sacking of a consulate in Benghazi? Last night, CNN began using the term "cover-up," and today's editorial in USA Today wonders whether anyone in this administration knows what's going on at all: Three weeks after an attack in Libya killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, we now know that it did not spring from a spontaneous protest, spurred by an anti-Muslim video, as the Obama administration originally described it. In...

A bumper sticker is making the rounds with Joe Biden's words: Osama is Dead; GM is Alive. Apparently, that resonates with democrat voters who want to believe Obama knows a thing or two about foreign relations. Not. Ambassador Stevens is Dead...Al Qaeda is Alive. Ambassador Stevens is Dead...The Muslim Brotherhood is Alive. The above are the real truth, and any chest thumping on the part of Obama is really misplaced self-congratulatory narcissism. We all know it was our special operations forces who took out Osama. We're pretty sure that Obama did not put on a black mask, take up a...

Despite repeated, self-serving claims by Obama officials that the Administration did everything it could to head off and then respond appropriately to the violence against American facilities in Libya and Egypt last week, their blunders in policy, intelligence and security illustrates an incompetence every bit as profound as exhibited by the administration of Jimmy Carter in Iran 33 years ago. It appears nothing has been learned in more than three decades; despite significant gains in technology available to the U.S. government during those intervening years. In 1979, the Carter Administration precipitously abandoned the Shah of Iran, Washington’s long-time and loyal...