Free Republic

A historic agreement on Iran's nuclear programme was made possible by months of unprecedented secret meetings between US and Iranian officials. The Obama administration asked journalists not to publish details they had uncovered of the secret diplomacy until the Geneva talks were over for fear of derailing them. The Associated Press and a Washington-based news website, Al-Monitor, finally did so on Sunday. The Associated Press said preliminary and secret talks were held in Oman and other locations. The US envoys for the meetings were the deputy secretary of state, William Burns, and Jake Sullivan, a foreign policy adviser to Joe...

For President Obama, whose popularity and second-term agenda have been ravaged by the chaotic rollout of the health care law, the preliminary nuclear deal reached with Iran on Sunday is more than a welcome change of subject. It is also a seminal moment — one that thrusts foreign policy to the forefront in a White House preoccupied by domestic woes, and one that presents Mr. Obama with the chance to chart a new American course in the Middle East for the first time in more than three decades. Much will depend, of course, on whether the United States and the...

My parents voted for Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. I had not yet developed a political worldview, but as a freshman at American University in Washington, D.C., I stayed up late to watch the election returns slowly trickle in before going to bed at 2 a.m. with the outcome still undecided. The following year I was hired as a copyboy at NBC News, delivering wire service "copy" to news reporters in the network's Washington bureau. White House correspondent Sander Vanocur invited me to accompany him to observe the swearing-in of Adlai Stevenson as the U.S. ambassador to...

<p>After just two months on the air, Al Jazeera America is losing ground in the US.</p> <p>The US offshoot of the Mideast news outfit managed fewer than half of the viewers who tuned in to its predecessor, Al Gore’s Current TV.</p>

At a Sarah Palin book signing on Thursday in Wausau, Wisconsin, reporters who arrived early were put into a back room at the store and prevented from leaving. According to a manager at the store who spoke with The Atlantic Wire, the confinement was at the request of the people organizing Palin's event. On Tuesday, we attended the initial event on Palin's tour, organized around her war-on-Christmas-themed book, Good Tidings and Great Joy. We were able to walk freely among those waiting to talk to the governor, asking whatever questions we wanted. The scene in Wausau, according to reporters on...

Just 106,000 Americans successfully signed up in October for health coverage through President Obama’s healthcare law, the administration announced Wednesday in a report that underscored damage from the botched launch of the law and gave critics new fuel in their effort to roll it back. Despite the relatively low enrollment numbers, administration officials stressed Wednesday that consumer interest in health insurance appears strong.

The Huffington Post reports that NBC's Chris Matthews, longtime host of MSNBC's "Hardball," took the opportunity at an event Thursday to publicly insult New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Responding to a question with a joke, Matthews said he felt bad for Christie's wife. The obvious insinuation is that the overweight governor crushes her during sex.

Here's what President Barack Obama should have said, "If you like your insurance plan you can keep it — if it's not a junk policy." He could have used more elegant language than that, but you get the idea. Sometimes he even added: "(P)eriod. No one will take it away. No matter what." I don't feel good about calling out the president's whopper, since I support most of his policies and programs. But in this instance, he would have to be delusional to think he was telling the truth.

A survey released Monday by the Commonwealth Fund, however, suggests that the site's problems haven't had much of an impact ... yet. It found that 5 out of 6 people who would be served by the exchanges had yet to shop there. Although 70% of those who visited the exchanges rated the experience as "fair" or "poor," only about 5% of those surveyed said the websites' technical problems were a factor in them not enrolling. So if the survey's sample is representative of the country as a whole, the real and serious technical problems at the exchanges' websites are affecting...

... Obama did not lie, but neither did he acknowledge the possibility that insurance companies might pull out the rug from under their own satisfied policyholders. Liberal criticism of the healthcare law as it was being written in 2009 centered on the fact that it left insurance companies as the powerful middlemen at the center of healthcare delivery in the United States. Obama and the authors of the law rejected the liberal critique because they saw no way to win passage of healthcare reform unless they could turn the insurance lobby into an ally, instead of an adversary. Obama made...

Audrey Hudson’s husband had just left for work on August 6 when suddenly, her dog began barking. The nationally-known journalist walked over to the curtains and peeked outside to discover her Chesapeake Bay home was surrounded by law enforcement officers wearing full body armor. The phone rang. It was her husband. “I’m in the driveway,” he said. “The police are here. Open the door.” And so began Hudson’s nightmare – held captive by armed agents of the U.S. Coast Guard, Maryland State Police and the Department of Homeland Security as they staged a pre-dawn raid in search of unregistered firearms...

Despite the intolerable failure of the Obama administration to warn the country that HealthCare.gov would not work at launch, there is still plenty of time for the government to make the required fixes. Even if it takes some weeks more to get the site in reasonable order, insurance buyers will probably have plenty of time to obtain coverage before running afoul of the penalty. The penalty against individuals lacking health-care coverage is a crucial tool in the effort to drive people into the new system. Delay it, and you’ll get fewer people signing up in the first part of next...

Families USA has received a $1 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which it will use to collect and distribute to the media personal stories of those who have benefited from the new health insurance exchange rolled out by the Obama Administration October 1. The announcement is good news for the President, who has been widely criticized for the horrible launch of the online marketplace healthcare.gov. “The purpose is to bridge the information gap for people who can significantly benefit from the Affordable Care Act,” Ron Pollack, the Executive Director of Families USA, tells TIME. “Too many people...

Federal officials did not fully test the online health insurance marketplace until two weeks before it opened to the public on Oct. 1, contractors told Congress on Thursday. While individual components of the system were tested earlier, they said, the government did not conduct “end-to-end testing” of the whole system from start to finish until late September. The White House said technology experts from government and industry were working together “to iron out kinks” that had provided insurers with incomplete and inaccurate information about people trying to enroll.

We don't know what kind of TV ratings the House Energy and Commerce Committee might have drummed up during its more than four hours on C-SPAN today, but we suspect they couldn't have been high. Surely, only a few minutes of testimony about the Obamacare website was all the average viewer could tolerate without leaving in disgust. In the meantime, the few Americans who might actually have watched this exercise can only conclude that Congress, or at least one House committee, is wholly incapable of conducting a fair and impartial oversight of Obamacare. Either one party is shutting down the...

The Columbia Journalism School has discovered something newspaper readers and television viewers have long been seeking—facts. “Journalism education can never be fully successful unless it succeeds in both the academic and professional realms,” NicholasLemann, former dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, said recently. “It must produce significant research and have curriculum with intellectual content, as well as training its students in the latest skills demanded by the job market.” Lemann and two other former journalism school deans completed a report for the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia entitled Educating Journalists: A New Plea for the University Tradition. At...

How about House Republicans who refused to appropriate the money the Department of Health and Human Services said it needed to properly implement Obamacare? How about Senate Republicans who tried to intimidate Sebelius out of using existing HHS funds to implement Obamacare? How about congressional Republicans who refuse to permit the packages of technical fixes and tweaks that laws of this size routinely require? How about the coordinated Republican effort to get the law declared unconstitutional? How about the dozens of Republican governors who refused to take federal dollars to expand Medicaid?

... The shopping experience, (CBS News business analyst) Jill Schlesinger said, is like booking a flight on a travel Web site like Travelocity. She explained, "What you need to know is if you go to one of these marketplaces at HealthCare.gov, you're going to be led to a question that says 'where do you live?' because each state has something different. When you get there, you're going to see different types of coverage for each -- say like covering 60 percent to 90 percent of your health care costs. You can choose it. As for the looming government shutdown, Schlesinger...

Even Democrats who support Obamacare suggest that parts may need to be postponed if changes aren't made quickly. Some call on President Obama to hold people accountable for the problems. WASHINGTON — The rocky rollout of the Affordable Care Act again came under sharp criticism Wednesday, two weeks into the launch, but this time some of the loudest voices were among top Democrats, including President Obama's closest allies.