Free Republic

Apparently the media is growing tired of the White House selectively releasing ObamaCare data that gets to the heart of nothing but makes the program look like it is much more popular than it likely is. For instance, today the White House informed the media that between Sunday and Friday, Healthcare.gov enjoyed 3.7 million visits. We have also been told that the site's error rate was .077 percent, the response time averaged under a second, and a whopping (and improbable) 93% of consumers did come back later after they were asked to due to the site being too busy. As...

If I were going to write a dictionary, I might include this: vit·ri·ol·ic (adjective) 1.filled with bitter criticism or malice. 2. Example: read comments on YouTube. Unfortunately, YouTube does not have a corner on bitter criticism and malice. I can read it in the comments sections of almost every Internet blog and newspaper throughout this country. Sometimes it’s not easy to overlook some of the comments, but because of them, we need to thoughtfully consider our responses. We might give the most rational, well-constructed, evidence-filled line of reasoning. We might show from the evidence, from the premises, from the arguments,...

New York City Mayor and gun control advocate Michael Bloomberg sure knows how to get his way. This week the NFL, after featuring anti-gun ads during the last two Super Bowls, it decided that an ad offering the opposite point of view in the upcoming Super Bowl XLVIII on February 2 was just too much. The NFL turned down an ad from a company called "Daniel Defense" which sells guns and outdoor gear that discussed "personal protection and fundamental rights." It featured a former Marine talking his family's safety, noting that he is ultimately responsible for their protection. Unlike Bloomberg’s...

As the federal insurance website healthcare.gov puts its birth pangs behind it, critics of the Affordable Care Act may well need another attack point. One is already emerging: It's an assault on Medicaid, the federal-state health program that's a linchpin of the effort to expand access to coverage for the poorest Americans.

Get ready for the next line of attack from the GOP on Obamacare: Good luck keeping your doctor. Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the fourth-ranking Senate Republican, blasted Obama’s latest health care speech Tuesday as misguided — particularly as consumers nationwide are losing their access to insurance. “They don’t need another press conference — they need to be able to see their doctor and get affordable care,” Barrasso said in a statement. “He took no action to help people who will lose their coverage and their doctor, pay higher premiums and become victims of identity theft because of Obamacare.”

A new report released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Tuesday shows that more than 1.46 million people were determined in October to be eligible to enroll in Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program. Although the increase in applications was higher in states expanding Medicaid, the insurance requirement and coverage of the law in general has prompted a number of uninsured but eligible individuals to apply for Medicaid coverage.

Remember the terrible murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyo. in 1998 -- tortured, beaten and left hanging on a fence to die -- because he was gay? The American people were led from the outset to believe that Shepard was the victim of a hate crime, murdered because he was gay. And that is how virtually every American still views the story. In the words of Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), "Matthew Shepard is to gay rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement." A play based on Shepard's killing, "The Laramie Project" became, according to the...

President Barack Obama will try to sell the American people on the relaunch of his troubled healthcare program on Tuesday in a bid to restore confidence in his signature domestic policy initiative and, more broadly, in his presidency. "In his remarks, the President will discuss the ongoing work to strengthen the website and reach Americans seeking these new healthcare options," a White House official said. "He will also focus attention back on the core principles of reform that have been lost in the attention on the website, and invoke the successes that are already flowing from the law."

Two months after the disastrous launch, administration officials said on Sunday they had met their goal of getting the HealthCare.gov site running smoothly but warned that it needs more fixes. Officials also acknowledged that the site may not operate smoothly.

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Wikipedia’s Obamacare article continues to knowingly and deliberately include false information On October 15, 2013, I posted Wikipedia’s article on Obamacare is a heavily censored, utopian puff piece that ignores Obamacare’s real world problemsOn November 6, 2013, I followed that up with Wikipedia’s Obamacare article continues to be a heavily biased and censored puff pieceNow, on November 30, 2013, I am writing part 3 of this series. Wikipedia’s Obamacare article still includes a substantial amount of false information. Suggestions to correct this, with many reliable sources, have been repeatedly posted on the article’s talk page, but...

College Newspaper Editor Deems ‘Movember’ Activism ‘Sexist, Racist, Transphobic’ by Andrew Kirell | 11:39 am, November 29th, 2013 If you’re a man who grows a November mustache for “Movember” charities benefiting prostate cancer research, you might be engaging in a “sexist, racist, transphobic, and misinformed” campaign, says the editor of McGill University’s student newspaper. Health and Education Editor Ralph Haddad penned an op-ed “Movember as microaggression” in a recent issue of the school’s paper. As HyperVocal points out, McGill is Canada’s equivalent of Harvard, and so the content within is full of the sort of academic pretenses one might expect....

One of the oldest rules in psychology and economics is that if you reward a behavior, you can expect to see it more often. In America, we reward victimhood. That makes us feel good about ourselves and in some cases, it helps improve the lives of the people who've been victimized, but there's a dark side to it as well. It creates perverse incentives for people, it helps legitimize a victimhood mentality, and it also encourages people to fake hate crimes. Under normal circumstances, that would seldom happen. However, in a society where we celebrate victimhood and savagely attack people...

CARSON CITY — Nevadans who had their health insurance policies canceled because they don't meet new federal requirements cannot keep them for another year, the Division of Insurance determined Wednesday. The decision came after consultation with the attorney general's office, which concluded that the agency can't allow noncompliant plans to be renewed if they conflict with state and federal law. Nearly 25,000 Nevadans received cancellation or nonrenewal notices in October because their existing policies don't meet new requirements under the federal health reform law.

It's been a tough year for the liberal cable news outlets. Data released Tuesday show CNN shedding 48 percent of total viewers since last November and MSNBC dropping 45 percent. The numbers were even worse in the all important demographic of people aged 25 to 54 as CNN's ratings dropped 59 percent and MSNBC's 52 percent. In an off-election year, and with last November's numbers skewed higher as a result of the presidential election, it should be expected for ratings to decline. However, Fox News didn't see close to these losses. In total day, FNC is only down 18...

On Tuesday night's (Nov. 26) "The Voice" live show, the Top 8 contestants performed "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?," backed by Seattle's Starbucks Chorus, a vocal group that raises money for local charities. But after the performance, the Twitterverse erupted with complaints that the word "Lord" was dropped from the lyrics. Backstage, "Voice" coach Blake Shelton was still trying to get to the bottom of why it happened. "I don't know what, uh -- how it happened, or -- I'm learning about it just like you guys are," Shelton tells Zap2it. "I was sitting in my chair singing that song...

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...

President Obama’s lapdog media has finally realized that they are back in the USSR, so if you are curious about what is really going on in “Soviet” Obama’s White House then keep reading. Apparently the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) has had enough of Obama’s own personal White House media stomping all over them, keeping WHCA members from photographing what goes on in the White House and releasing only what Team Obama wants YOU to see. Here is a glimpse of the WHCA revolt that took place on October 29 as reported in the National Journal by Ron Founier in a piece headlined: Obama’s Image Machine: Monopolistic...

Actor Richard Dreyfuss: "The NRA is Not the Enemy, They Should Be Thought of as Heroes" Katie Pavlich | Nov 22, 2013 Appearing on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight earlier this week, actor Richard Dreyfuss made some refreshing comments about the National Rifle Association, saying that they are best group to turn to for solutions on gun violence while noting they are experts and were founded in order to education people about firearms. "I don't think the NRA is a villian," Dreyfuss said. "I think we should turn this over to the people who are expert at this and the original...

On Thursday, Fox News’ Ed Henry tweeted that MSNBC hosts Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell, as well as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post and Fox News’ Juan Williams, had been invited for a private off-the-record chat with President Obama. Obama’s signature program, Obamacare, has been flailing in the press for weeks, and Obama apparently believes that it is about time to reshift the narrative:

There were no tweets coming from Dallas 50 years ago today. No pictures from IPhones. No streaming video online. Most television broadcasts and all television network news broadcasts were normally colorless. It was a different world technology wise. Still and film photographers were taking pictures that day. Pictures that had to be developed before they could be seen. News reporters witnessing the commotion and the hearing the shots at Dealey Plaza had a sense of duty to find a phone and call the news in to their offices. For many this meant a trip into a nearby office or building...

"As the four left the Sheraton-Carlton to enter a taxi, they heard the unbelievable news blaring over the taxi's radio. President Kennedy and Governor John B. Connally had been shot and seriously wounded in the sun-drenched streets of Dallas. As the taxi drove off, the four listened in stunned silence. Tony Smith was the first to speak. 'My God,' he said, 'I'll bet one of those Birchers did it.'" The reaction of Barry Goldwater's press Secretary Tony Smith to news of the assassination as quoted from Robert A. Novak's book "The Agony Of The GOP 1964." The media template that...

John Edwards Revisits His Past, Hanging Law Shingle Again BY PETER LATTMAN AND KIM SEVERSON Before he served as a United States senator, before he made a run at the presidency and before his political career collapsed amid a sex scandal and fraud trial, John Edwards was a trial lawyer. Now, Mr. Edwards is returning to his roots and opening a new law practice. The plaintiffs’ firm, Edwards Kirby, reunites him with his former partner, David F. Kirby, and includes on its payroll his eldest daughter, Cate Edwards. “The reason we formed this firm is because we all believe in...

On Election Day this year, CBS4′s Shaun Boyd had a story detailing the true intentions of the national environmentalist groups pushing fracking bans in four northern Colorado towns. The article contained an admission from local fractivists that national groups seeking a total ban on fracking in Colorado were driving their campaign. But the fractivists were successful in getting their admissions and national connections stricken from the story by lobbying higher ups at CBS. Sources say Shaun Boyd is none too pleased with the edits. The current version of the story lacks a quote from Water Defense, a national environmental group...

"Liberal in their political philosophies, they have rarely, if ever, shied away from expressing their views out loud". "Television" Magazine describes the NBC anchor team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley in its January 1961 issue. At the time of the Kennedy Assassination, the leading news operations in terms of audience were the three television networks. In fact, they were the only national television news operations at the time. NBC's "Huntley-Brinkley Report" led the ratings with a lead they established in 1960. At CBS, Walter Cronkite was brought in to replace Douglas Edwards in 1962. Cronkite's mission was to take...

"Police in Dallas have mounted the biggest security operation in their history to prevent any repetition of the demonstrations which marked the visit of UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson last month." Robert MacNeil on NBC Radio at 10:04 am Eastern Time November 22, 1963 "It might be recalled that Dallas has been a hotbed of criticism of President Kennedy and his administration by outspoken rightist groups. Only two weeks ago Ambassador Adlai Stevenson of the United Nations was in an incident in Dallas when he was besieged by pickets, far right-wing pickets outside a speech he made there and he was...

Yesterday, the House Homeland Security Committee published a video on their Youtube page highlighting a portion of the committee questioning Roberta Stempfley, acting assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cyber-security and Communications, who confirmed at least 16 attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s portal Healthcare.gov website in 2013. Roberta Stempfley highlighted one successful attack that is designed to deny access to the website called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is designed to make a network unavailable to intended users, generally through a concerted effort to disrupt service such as repeatedly accessing...

(CNSNews.com) - At a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee event in Philadelphia on Thursday night, President Barack Obama ended his speech by bemoaning what he called “a level of polarization that seems unique”—citing as one cause to blame for this phenomenon “the Balkanization of the media.” “Obviously, this year and over the last three years, we’ve seen a level of polarization that seems unique,” said Obama. “But the truth is, is that as you travel around the country, the country--ordinary folks--aren’t as polarized as Washington would make us think.”

President Obama nominates Vivek Hallegere Murthy for surgeon general By JENNIFER HABERKORN | 11/14/13 6:16 PM EST The White House said Thursday that President Barack Obama intends to nominate Vivek Hallegere Murthy to be the next surgeon general. He is the co-founder and president of Doctors for America, which began as Doctors for Obama in 2008. He is a hospitalist attending physician and instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School. He would succeed Regina Benjamin, who announced her resignation from the post in July.

When it comes to correcting the record about a timeless speech, no retraction is too late. One-hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln passionately appealed for the preservation of the union in the Gettysburg Address, the Patriot-News of central Pennsylvania, known back then as the Patriot & Union, is retreating from its stance in 1863 that Abe’s Civil War speech was “silly.” “In an editorial about President Abraham Lincoln’s speech delivered Nov. 19, 1863, in Gettysburg, the Patriot & Union failed to recognize its momentous importance, timeless eloquence, and lasting significance,” the paper wrote on its editorial page Thursday. “The...

I was perusing through the news and saw many articles on the horrific destruction the storm in the Philippines had wrought. As I reading through the stories at Google, yahoo News, the term 'Climate Negotiator' kept on appearing in article after article. Well, I had no idea what a Climate Negotiator is, does. I mean, trying to negotiate with the climate seems a sissyphean task if not the most mentally stable thing to attempt. I tried searching Google, Yahoo for some precise meaning, job description for a Climate Negotiator but information was far and few between. It seems it is...

For years NewsBusters has reported on how the so-called "fact-checking" website PolitiFact is far harsher with its analysis of conservatives than it is with liberals. Back to back postings this week at the organization's new PunditFact once again boldly demonstrate this. On Thursday, PF analyzed a comment by MSNBC's Ed Schultz:  On his election day show, Schultz said Christie is far more conservative than the moderate image that swirls around him. Case in point? The governor’s education policy. "All of a sudden, he is the self-anointed expert on education in America, and he has all the answers," Schultz said. "Cut...

Poor Barack Obama. Ending his fifth year as the world’s most powerful man, he is running out of scapegoats and fairy tales. Blaming George W. Bush has lost its punch, and the ObamaCare debacle is shredding the myths he is competent and honest. Still, before he rides off into that sunset of self-pity and low poll ratings, he ought to invite his remaining friends over for a heart-to-heart. That way he can tell The New York Times that its fanatical support does him no favors. Instead, it feeds his arrogance and reinforces his belief that he can solve any problem...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Wikipedia’s Obamacare article continues to be a heavily biased and censored puff piece On October 15, 2013, I wrote this blog entry, titled “Wikipedia’s article on Obamacare is a heavily censored, utopian puff piece that ignores Obamacare’s real world problems.�Well it is now November 6, 2013, and I am writing this new blog entry on the same subject.As of November 6, 2013, more than a month after the Obamacare website went online, wikipedia’s Obamacare article still includes absolutely zero content on the problems of the Obamacare website, Obama’s false promise that people could keep their insurance,...

When lives are on the line, what saves lives -- not politics – should guide policy. Gun control advocates used to warn about blood in the streets if we didn’t tighten gun laws, but as concealed handgun permits in the U.S. have doubled from 2007 to now, murder rates have fallen by 18 percent. Enter a new strategy: playing the race card, along with claims that allowing people to defend themselves means that whites will hurt blacks. But this strategy ignores the crucial fact that blacks kill over 91 percent of blacks and that whites kill 84 percent of whites....

As the month of October has rolled on and stories regarding the train wreck that is Obamacare mount, one has to wonder when the President’s media allies will come to the rescue and skew reality on health care reporting. The answer may be … now. The Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) is once again teaming up with a private U.S. foundation known as the Commonwealth Fund. The Fund, a self-described ‘progressive’ organization, is currently led by David Blumenthal, former senior health adviser to the Obama campaign. The group makes little to no secret of their support for...

After watching this exchange between Candy Crowley and Sen. Kelly Ayotte on CNN’s State of the Union yesterday, I had to go back and read the transcript to be sure I heard it correctly. Perhaps Crowley intended to play devil’s advocate here by encapsulating the latest Democratic Party spin to push blame for ObamaCare on the political party that has opposed it all along, and had nothing to do with its implementation. Regardless of intent, this question made my jaw drop: ... CROWLEY: Now, he is saying in a sort of nuance way what other Democrats are saying right out...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This is Sunday's This Week with Stephanopoulos and the roundtable discussion. Stephanopoulos says, "This is kind of pile-on time now for the president. I want to show some magazine covers this week as well. You see the New Yorker cover right there. The president is trying to, with a huge cell phone, trying to get HealthCare.gov working. Bloomberg, BusinessWeek, 'Can Obama Reboot?' And Forbes -- this may be the most interesting one -- Vladimir Putin comes up on top of Obama as the most powerful leader in the world. What do we make of this," Jonathan Karl?...

Virginia Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam is the subject of nationwide condemnation today for refusing to shake hands with his pro-life black conservative Republican opponent, E.W. Jackson. Northam was caught on camera refusing to shake Jackson’s hand after supporting Obamacare and attacking conservative Christian voters. As a pro-life, conservative African-American, Jackson has been pegged with the typical “Uncle Tom” attacks throughout the campaign from liberals who claim he is selling out his ethnicity by taking principled conservative stances and opposing abortion. The incident comes after Jackson found that one of his campaign signs in Virginia’s Loudoun County had vandals smearing the...

<p>How Americans see President Obama changed in an important way this week. It’s because there is a huge difference between lies and bulls – - t.</p> <p>Obama says a lot of things that are not true, even nonsensical. But it’s easy to shrug off most of these, because they aren’t really lies. They’re just bulls – - t.</p>

If you believe a new study, whites who own guns do so because they harbor racist feelings towards blacks. Indeed, in the study, four Australian and British psychologists also claim that racism is associated with opposition to gun control. The lead paragraph on this study in Friday's New York Daily News summed up the claim this way: "Racism and guns go together." So how is racism measured? Well, you are apparently “racist” if you don't agree that the legacy of slavery still has a great impact on how blacks are faring today. After all, slavery was abolished 158 years ago....

Gutfeld nails nonsense in study linking gun ownership, racism

<p>Should children have the right to ask for their own deaths?</p> <p>In Belgium, where euthanasia is now legal for people over the age of 18, the government is considering extending it to children — something that no other country has done. The same bill would offer the right to die to adults with early dementia.</p>

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Mainstream media waited until after 2012 election to report on Obama’s July 2010 admission that Obamacare would cause people to lose their insurance On October 28, 2013, NBC News reported:Obama admin. knew millions could not keep their health insuranceBuried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given...

The Daily Currant is a satire site, but that didn't stop CNN primetime anchor Piers Morgan from gleefully tweeting out a Currant story attacking Sarah Palin...

One of the reasons for being glad to be as old as I am is that I may be spared living to see a race war in America. Race wars are often wars in which nobody wins and everybody ends up much worse off than they were before. Initial skirmishes in that race war have already begun, and have in fact been going on for some years. But public officials pretend that it is not happening, and the mainstream media seldom publish it at all, except in ways that conceal what is really taking place. For American society, a dangerous...

TYRANNY in D.C.: Man arrested for spent .270 round, holster, and a misfired 12 ga. shell October 24, 2013 Can you imagine a place in America where a law-abiding citizen with no criminal record would be arrested for possessing a spent .270 Winchester round and a misfired 12-ga. shotgun shell? Well, you don’t have to imagine. It is our nation’s capital, Washington D.C. It’s a place where scumbags commit all sorts of violent crimes and the low-information politicians there have enacted city ordinances only a tyrant could love. Including a ban on ammunition for most. Even spent cartridges. And misfired...

In my quest for sources of news that may or may not provide information you can't get through more mainstream channels, I ran across an analysis of a Fox News piece on Dianne Reidy, the House Steno who purportedly 'lost it' and committed career suicide. Leaving aside that the source of the information is from a conspiracy theory website, I sat through the above YouTube video. It analyzes Bret Baier's segment on it during his Special Report show. The woman in the YouTube video points out several things: 1. The audio in the piece had its audio dubbed. 2. The...

According to the BLS household survey, part-time jobs fell 594,000 in September while full-time workers were up 691,000. This was one hopeful nugget in an otherwise lackluster jobs report. Workers are considered to be "part time" if they work under 35 hours a week. Earlier this summer, when part-time numbers looked like they might be on the rise, some speculated that the shift was due to the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act.

CNN’s Jim Acosta called out one of his colleagues on the air Thursday for referring to members of the Tea Party as “radicals.” The admonishment came during a larger discussion about the partial government shutdown and who is to blame for the 16-day halt in federal activity. “The sort of Tea Party radicals, if you like, who kicked all of this off, they electorally are safe. They’re not going to lose their seats because of redistricting and the like,” CNN anchor Michael Holmes said. “They’re more about ideology than pragmatism or bipartisanship. What chance they’re going to change their minds...

Chris Matthews earlier this week told Ora.TV's Larry King that there's pressure at news outlets such as Fox and MSNBC to be openly partisan. Matthews chose to use Greta Van Susteren as an example of this. Van Susteren struck back Friday in a way that only she knows how: I am stunned because, while no one has ever told me in 11 1/2 years what to say (I would walk out and those who know me know that to be true.) I have also not been weak to some amorphous “group pressure.” I now read that it DOES HAPPEN at...