Free Republic

According to the initial investigations of the NTSB, which include witnesses at the scene, the driver exited the vehicle on the tracks to inspect it being hit by a crossing gate: Reports so far show that 49-year-old Ellen Brody crossed onto the tracks, when the crossing gate slammed down on the back of her vehicle. Instead of pulling through the intersection though, she got out to inspect the back of her car. It was when she got back in her car and started to pull forward that she was struck by the passing train – going 58mph. The crash led...

A passenger train collided with a freight train Thursday in northwest Arkansas injuring 35, five critically, 5NewsOnline.com reported. The incident occurred at about 10:30 a.m. and involved four passenger cars carrying 44 people. Emergency responders were at the scene in Washington County and transported 31 to local hospitals, the report said.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A CSX Corp train carrying crude oil derailed and burst into flames in downtown Lynchburg, Virginia on Wednesday, spilling oil into the James River and forcing hundreds to evacuate. CSX said 15 cars on a train traveling from Chicago to Virginia derailed at 2:30 p.m. EDT. Fire erupted on three cars, the company said. Photos and video from the scene showed high flames and a plume of black smoke. It was the second oil-train accident this year for CSX. About two hours after the derailment, CSX said the fire had been extinguished. City officials said there...

When a locomotive crashes, it stops. Obamacare, on the other hand, just keeps on going like a cancer that’s ignored, perpetuating itself and destroying everything in its path. While we thought the health care act was a train wreck, it’s more like cancer. Discovering you’ve got a problem should be the first step on the road to recovery. You’re supposed to go in and confront it like you would if you found a tumor. You wouldn’t just leave it there, wondering what it was up to, hoping it would go away on its own. No, you’d enlist some help and...

For a candidate who owes her name recognition to a friendly media, Wendy Davis is having trouble not riling up the local press. Dave Mann of the Texas Observer writes that the extent to which her team is botching media relations is "the worst ... I've ever seen," an embarrassment weakening her candidacy.

Energy Policy: An oil-laden train collides with another and bursts into flames in a small American town, proving why pipelines are safer and why environmentalist opposition to a pipeline from Canada is misguided. Casselton, N.D., had a near brush with tragedy after a train of tank cars carrying crude oil derailed, resulting in fiery explosions and a call from the town's mayor for a re-examination of how such fuel is transported across the United States. The railroad runs right through the middle of Casselton, a town of 2,400 people about 25 miles west of Fargo, and Mayor Ed McConnell said...

CASSELTON, N.D. — A mile-long train carrying crude oil derailed just a mile before it would have cut through the heart of a small North Dakota town, shaking residents with a series of explosions that sent flame and black smoke skyward. No one was hurt, but officials were evacuating as many as 300 people as a precaution. Casselton Train Derailment

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - Oregon's troubled health insurance exchange has missed yet another deadline. Officials had said the online system would be ready to use Monday for insurance agents and community groups that have contracts with Cover Oregon. But the system still isn't fully functional for them. The missed deadline also calls into question whether the online exchange will be ready to use for the general public by Dec. 16, as officials had promised.

MANHATTAN — Investigators believe the motorman at the controls in the deadly Metro-North Railroad derailment in the Bronx Sunday dozed off for a few fateful moments and woke up too late to stop the speeding train from hurtling off the tracks, DNAinfo New York has learned. Veteran engineer William Rockefeller all but admitted he was falling asleep as the train came roaring to a curved section of track north of Spuyten Duyvil in statements made shortly after four people were killed and dozens were injured in the wreck, sources said. He apparently woke up just as the train, traveling at...

YONKERS, N.Y. (AP) — A commuter train that derailed over the weekend, killing four passengers, was hurtling at 82 mph as it entered a 30 mph curve, a federal investigator said Monday. But whether the wreck was the result of human error or brake trouble was still unclear, he said. Asked why the train was going so fast, National Transportation Safety Board member Earl Weener said: "That's the question we need to answer." Weener said the information on the locomotive's speed was preliminary and extracted from the Metro-North train's two data recorders, taken from the wreckage after the Sunday morning...

Where’s Bloomy? While Gov. Cuomo, NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly and FDNY commissioner Sal Cassano rushed to the deadly Metro-North crash in the Bronx, lame duck Mayor Bloomberg was nowhere to be found. It took five hours for Bloomberg’s office to tweet: “Thoughts and prayers with those impacted by today’s train derailment. If you are looking for a loved one who was onboard, call 311.” It’s not known where Bloomberg was on Sunday morning, and City Hall staffers declined to reveal their boss’ whereabouts.

Four people were killed and 63 injured when a Metro-North commuter train derailed Sunday morning in the Bronx, officials said. All of the train’s seven cars came off the curved track about 100 feet north of the Spuyten Duyvil station around 7:20 a.m., MTA officials said. One car came to rest feet from the water.

My dad emailed this to me. It's obviously a joke, but I really really REALLY think USPS should go for it!

President Barack Obama has gamely acknowledged that the HealthCare.gov disaster is “on me,” and surely this is one of the more accurate assertions he’s made related to his signature health care program. But no president could have pulled off HealthCare.gov alone. After all, as he put it, “I don’t write code.” It truly takes a team effort to come up with something so impressively catastrophic. Indeed, this serving of Pasta Fiasco was whipped up by a cadre of chefs, toiling together in spectacular incompetence, each doing their part to create one of the greatest flops in modern political history. Each...

The Obama administration's rollout of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been an "unacceptable" failure that's disappointed supporters and invigorated critics, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) charged Tuesday. "This was not done the way it should have been done. Period," he said during a news conference in the Capitol. Hoyer, the minority whip, emphasized that the ongoing problems with the ACA's federal insurance exchange website are technical, and warned that there's no substance to the GOP claims that those troubles are reflective of the underlying law. "But the implementation of that Act in terms of the web access and capabilities is...

The irony is rich. President Obama told Maryland college students just days before the launch of his healthcare "marketplace" that it would take just a few keystrokes to compare prices and policy details. "Don't take my word for it, go on the website," Obama told a crowd at Prince George's Community College in Largo, MD, five days before the launch. "See for yourself what the prices are. See for yourself what the choices are and then make up your own mind. That's all I'm asking." But the bureaucrats in his administration clearly weren't listening. They created a website that is...

WASHINGTON — As the battle over the health care law was grinding on — Republicans no closer to victory than when they forced the government shutdown — a different fight was rising on a recent Saturday from inside Sharkey's, a bar near the campus of Virginia Tech, 260 miles away. Lured by free beer, gift cards and the chance to win an iPad, 100 students heard a pitch from the young staffers of a group named Generation Opportunity: Obamacare is a bad deal and you should opt out. With enrollment in the insurance marketplaces under way, and tens of millions...

In March, Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the Obama administration’s new online insurance marketplace, told industry executives that he was deeply worried about the Web site’s debut. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience,” he told them. Two weeks after the rollout, few would say his hopes were realized. “These are not glitches,” said an insurance executive who has participated in many conference calls on the federal exchange. Like many people interviewed for this article, the executive spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not wish to alienate the federal officials with whom he...

House Republicans, now seeking a way out of the current fiscal impasse, fear that the government shutdown robbed them of a chance to highlight the problems in ObamaCare's rollout. Oct. 1 should have been a layup for Republican opponents of President Obama’s signature healthcare law, who watched as new insurance exchanges were beset by a slew of technical snafus. But in a harsh bit of irony for the GOP, that was also the first day of a government shutdown driven largely by their own efforts to defund ObamaCare – a standstill that has dominated headlines all month. To make matters...

On health care, the president's pile of broken promises keeps getting higher. Consider this gem from Aug. 20, 2009: “Let's be clear about the fact that nobody has proposed anything close to a government takeover of health care.” Well, yes, somebody did. President Obama is now well on his way to orchestrating the federal government's takeover of Americans' health care. Commandeering the resources of major federal departments, particularly the Department of Health and Human Services and the IRS, the administration and its allies in Congress have created numerous federal bureaus, commissions and programs and have issued thousands of pages of...