Free Republic

With Rep. Henry Waxman's retirement announcement, many of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's top lieutenants are abandoning ship. Waxman joins his California colleague, Rep. George Miller, and Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia as close Pelosi allies to retire after this Congress. And after last year's 2012 elections, Pelosi's leading in-house strategist Jen Crider left her office, later announcing she was working for Microsoft. Their decisions are as strong a signal as any that veteran House Democrats hold little hope of taking the House in 2014, and they probably are pessimistic about their long-term prospects for a congressional majority. Miller and...

Abandoned cruise ship filled with cannibal rats headed for British shore The Lyubov Orlova has been detected off the coast of Scotland. Its only passengers are demented, disease-ridden rats feeding off each other. An abandoned cruise liner teeming with inbred cannibal rats is adrift in the Atlantic Ocean and possibly about to run aground on Britain’s coastline, according to a new report. The Lyubov Orlova has been drifting east from Canadian waters since last year. Newly detected beacons off the dilapidated vessel’s rescue boats indicate it is was recently off the west coast of Scotland, raising concerns it could run...

(CNN) - A group that backs House Democratic incumbents and candidates released a new ad Thursday that praises a Democratic congresswoman for blasting the "stunning ineptitude" of the Affordable Care Act rollout. "Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick blew the whistle on the disastrous healthcare website, called it 'stunning ineptitude,' and worked to fix it," the narrator says in the ad. The spot was released by House Majority PAC, a group that's trying to help Democrats retake control the House of Representatives.

**SNIP** But all of these last-minute policy shifts confuse people who were already struggling to understand a complex new system, and they force insurance companies to take on more work, which would be difficult even if everything were going right. The cumulative effect is that at least some people — we hope not many — will misunderstand their responsibilities under the law or be deterred from seeking coverage. The biggest danger is that the Obama administration is encouraging politicians to meddle in the health-care system every time a few vocal constituents get upset about its requirements. Ms. Sebelius’s Thursday announcement...

Above: Illegal aliens made out like banditos thanks to Harry Reid and Senate Democrats. Disabled vets? Not so much.- They actually did it. They are on the record. Senate Democrats, led by their filibuster-slaying dictator Harry Reid, actually put the interests of illegal aliens above those of our disabled military veterans.Let that sink in for a moment. Now the details: The two-year budget deal brokered by Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, would cut military pensions by $6 billion over ten years. Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, joined by several others in his party, tried...

In a study published in Brain, Behavior and Immunity, University of New South Wales researchers describe how lab rats rapidly began to show signs of serious memory decline after just six days on a sugar- and fat-laden diet of cakes, chips, and more. Specifically, the junk-food-eating rats had inflamed hippocampal regions, and they did poorly on spatial-memory tests long before they started gaining weight. "We were surprised at how fast it was," co-author Margaret Morris tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "Our preliminary data also suggests that the damage is not reversed when the rats are switched back to a healthy...

Ben Affleck is smart enough to know an actor taking up political causes can shatter the illusion movies are meant to conjure. Yet the Argo director and avowed liberal still sticks his foot in his mouth during a new interview with Playboy Magazine by insulting half of his audience. Seems he's not sure he can be friends with anyone who pulls the lever repeatedly for GOP politicians. The future Dark Knight (Affleck plays Batman in the upcoming Man of Steel sequel) said he can't help but consider an actor's politics while watching movies, and he takes that information to heart....

**SNIP** Remaining intra-party fights only concern how extreme the shift will be, as new militants push the Dems closer to pure socialism. Conviction politicians like Obama and de Blasio have no real interest in compromise. Look at the battle between Mass. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton. To most sane people, Clinton no longer qualifies as a centrist. Five years ago, her muscular talk on foreign policy made her allies with Robert Gates and John McCain. But her role as front lady for the Obama appease-niks turned her muscles into fat and her policy into mush. Yet Clinton is insufficiently...

The rule of law has been replaced in Washington by "yes we can." The events we witnessed Thursday in the Senate, that is Majority Leader Harry Reid's success at invoking the so-called 'nuclear option,' stripping the minority party of its primary power to block nominations, have become a stunning capstone to what has been already a steady erosion of a government of laws down to a sort of semi-political banana republic. We are now living in a republic in which politicians do what they want without regard to tradition or the best interests of our country. The rule of more...

SAN JOSE -- After listening Tuesday to more than 60 impassioned activists, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted to stick to the status quo on immigration, rejecting a proposal to turn over jailed illegal immigrants with a history of serious or violent crime to federal agents for possible deportation. The proposal by Supervisor Joe Simitian to change the current policy and hold "the worst of the worst" inmates for 24 hours past their release date failed on a 3-2 vote. Only Supervisor Mike Wasserman, who opposed the no-holds policy two years ago on the grounds that public safety...

**SNIP** Other Democrats now say they agree with Republicans that a delay of the individual mandate may be the only way to salvage the disaster and save face. "I think the administration is going to have to look at it [delay of the individual mandate]. and I'd encourage them to do so," said Rep. Gene Green (D-TX). Five Democrats have now asked for the Obama Administration to seek a refund from the contractors responsible for the Obamacare website fiasco. Reps. Ron Barber (D-AZ), William Enyart (D-IL), Pete Gallego (D-TX), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), and Filemon Vela (D-TX) wrote a letter to...

Today, Team Obama isn’t getting any support from its normally active cheering section at CNN. Bob Laszewski, an executive who provides consulting services to many major American insurance companies, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “The White House is exerting massive pressure on the industry, including the trade associations, to keep quiet.” Here’s what’s Bob is talking about: Insurers who expose Obamacare’s most sinister effects are told they can’t become authorized Obamacare insurance providers – that means they’d be denied access to the largest market in the country just for telling the truth about how many people are being forced off their...

"There's a mental health problem in Congress," says actor and liberal activist Sean Penn. The president could solve the problem "by committing them by executive order," Penn told CNN's Piers Morgan Monday night.Asked if Penn would have "people like Ted Cruz" committed, Penn said, "He is my American brother. I won't -- I think we should take care of him, he is in, he's the trouble.""Well, actually have him committed," Morgan followed up."Yeah, I think it's a good idea," Penn said.

Politico:President Obama held an off-the-record meeting with five conservative journalists on Tuesday afternoon. Present at the meeting were Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor; Paul Gigot, the Wall Street Journal editorial page editor; Robert Costa, the National Review’s Washington editor; syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker; and Washington Examiner columnist Byron York, according to a source with knowledge of the meeting. Of those, at least 4 have been vocal critics of the Cruz strategy — and Obama, who follows the news and monitors his detractors and defenders just as you’d expect a paranoid narcissist would, did not pick...

The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. That was after they barred the new World War II Memorial on the Mall to veterans of World War II. But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. The ladies bought it years ago to preserve it as a national memorial. The feds closed access to the parking lots this week, even though the lots...

As the government nears shutdown, the fundraising arm of the Democratic Party is having a budget crisis of its own. There's another budget crisis in Washington, and it's unfolding inside the Democratic party. The Democratic National Committee remains so deeply in the hole from spending in the last election that it is struggling to pay its own vendors. It is a highly unusual state of affairs for a national party -- especially one that can deploy the President as its fundraiser-in-chief -- and it speaks to the quiet but serious organizational problems the party has yet to address since the...

She’s learned from her mistakes. Three years before November 8, 2016, she’s working hard to be relaxed, calm, easy. But, all the while, the old Clinton gears are whirring.

Police in the Netherlands are hoping to save money by training rats to sniff out things like drugs and gunshot residue. The animals are cheaper and faster than traditional lab work -- and they're very accurate. "Derrick" is unbeatable. He's right in 98.8 percent of all cases, the kind of accuracy only machines can achieve. But Derrick is no machine. He's part of an elite group of sewer rats currently being trained in Rotterdam to sniff out drugs, gunpowder or traces of other substances that cling to someone after they've committed a crime. The rats have an average success rate...

WASHINGTON — For four years, President Obama counted on fellow Democrats to rally to his side in a series of epic battles with Republicans over the direction of the country. But now, deep in his fifth year in office, Mr. Obama finds himself frustrated by members of his own party weary of his leadership and increasingly willing to defy him. In recent weeks, disgruntled Democrats, particularly liberals, have bolted from the White House on issues like National Security Agency surveillance policies, a planned military strike on Syria and the potential choice of Lawrence H. Summers to lead the Federal Reserve....