Free Republic

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...

President Barack Obama made it no secret he was a proponent of a single payer health care system in America when he first came on to the national scene. However, he explained to his supporters over the years that a "potential transition" would be necessary to break away from the current system. Interestingly, as the implementation of the Obamacare exchanges face problems and millions begin to lose coverage from their private insurers, something President Obama promised would not happen, Democrats and their liberal allies are now beginning to suggest a single payer system as a solution to the rickety exchanges....

I can't believe I'm writing this sentence, but Obamacare's exchanges appear to somehow be more deeply corrupted and broken than previously known. If there were words more impactful than "meltdown" and "trainwreck," I'd use them. Instead, I'll simply present the facts as they continue to come to light. USA Today: The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY....Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the...

You know things are really bad when the mainstream press corps trashes the Obama administration—on the record!—for its secrecy, aggressive efforts to control information and hostility towards the media when it exposes information viewed as unfavorable to the president. This includes an unprecedented number of prosecutions of government sources, seizures of journalists’ records and even criminal investigations of reporters. As a result government sources are afraid to speak to journalists, even if it doesn’t involve sensitive national security issues but rather routine stories that help keep elected officials and government accountable. “There’s no question that sources are looking over their...

A brutal report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) blasted the Obama administration, calling the White House’s efforts to control information the harshest since the Nixon administration. The report is something of a first for CPJ, which typically focuses on oppressed journalists in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Written by Leonard Downie Jr., the former editor of The Washington Post, the report contradicts the Obama administration’s insistence that it is “the most transparent administration in history.” “The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” he...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. government's aggressive prosecution of leaks and efforts to control information are having a chilling effect on journalists and government whistle-blowers, according to a report released Thursday on U.S. press freedoms under the Obama administration. The Committee to Protect Journalists conducted its first examination of U.S. press freedoms amid the Obama administration's unprecedented number of prosecutions of government sources and seizures of journalists' records. Usually the group focuses on advocating for press freedoms abroad. Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, wrote the 30-page analysis entitled "The Obama Administration and the Press."...

The city of Westland is charging an illegal fee to people seeking public information, according to a lawsuit filed today by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. In June, Michigan Capitol Confidential, which is the news service of the Mackinac Center, sent Freedom of Information Act requests seeking financial information from every municipality in the state that operates a golf course. Westland responded that the city requires a $5 fee before it will provide any information. Westland also said it would cost $1 per page for copying costs and $45.61 per hour for the person gathering the information. According to...

White House Celebrates Bisexual Visibility Day with an Official Closed-Door Event Did you know that today is Bisexual Visibility Day? You may not be aware, but they are at the White House and will be celebrating with an official event. Seriously, this is not a joke. Today, in honor of Bisexual Visibility Day there will be a White House roundtable discussion “about issues facing the bisexual community” attracting bisexual activists from around the nation

Stung by public unease about new details of spying by the National Security Agency, President Barack Obama selected a panel of advisers he described as independent experts to scrutinize the NSA’s surveillance programs to be sure they weren’t violating civil liberties and to restore Americans’ trust. But with just weeks remaining before its first deadline to report back to the White House, the review panel has effectively been operating as an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA and all other U.S. spy efforts.The panel’s advisers work in offices on loan from the...

Harry Alford, the president of the Black Chamber of Commerce, says that he failed to properly vet Obama before he voted for him in 2008. Alford says that his growing disappointment and growing suspicion of President Obama is based on his secretiveness and placing politics over policy. “I didn’t analyze him. I read his book and he’s talking about using cocaine and all the drugs he could find and I kind of brushed through that. That should have caught my eye.”

President Obama and his successors in the Oval Office are not obligated to make public the names of individuals visiting the White House, according to a decision of the federal Circuit Court for the District of Columbia made public Friday. The case was brought by Judicial Watch, the government watchdog nonprofit that has been fighting a long legal battle seeking to force release of the White House visitor logs as public records under the Freedom of Information Act. But in a decision that is drawing intense criticism from across the ideological spectrum, the circuit court said the president has a...

Politicians often say they’re committed to opening up the community checkbook so taxpayers can see how their money is spent. And they promise it will be easy for the public to see how decisions are made and why. In practice, however, it doesn’t often happen that way. The excuses are endless: “We don’t have the money to do that.” “We don’t have the expertise to do that.” “We don’t have the technology to make that happen.” Terry Gonser “The legal department said we can’t talk about that.” Of course there are exceptions and there are legislators and local politicians who...

In a sign her troubles have undergone a significant expansion, the Washington Free Beaconreported last week that formerEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has hired a lawyer as new details of her use of private email accounts to conduct official government business were revealed. The agency and its previous head have still breathed easy despite months of inquiries andFreedom of Information Act requests fromChris Horner of theCompetitive Enterprise Institute and American Tradition Institute. Jackson and enviro-crats have been shielded by colleagues’ efforts to block access to records, delay their delivery, or conceal damning information with redactions. Nevertheless the indefatigable Horner has continued...

New York’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE) exempted NARAL Pro-Choice New York from requiring non-profit groups disclose names...

Speaking to State Department personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil, on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that "this little thing called the Internet ... makes it much harder to govern." He also said that "ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators." "I’m a student of history, and I love to go back and read a particularly great book like [Henry] Kissinger’s book about diplomacy where you think about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the balance of power and how difficult it was...

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner sent official documents from her government e-mail address to a personal account, according to House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa and his colleague, Ohio congressman Jim Jordan. “This raises some serious questions concerning your use of a non-official e-mail account to conduct official business,” the GOP lawmakers wrote in a letter to Lerner demanding all documents from her non-official account for the period between January 2008 and the present. “Additional documents related to the Committee’s investigation may exist in these non-official accounts over which you have some control, and the lack of access...

Several of President Obama’s political appointees are using secret government email accounts, The Associated Press reported Tuesday. The administration officials contend the separate addresses used by the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and other departments are necessary to keep their primary inboxes from overflowing. But the practice invites concerns that federal agencies are conducting official business through accounts that go undetected in public records requests. It brings worries that government officials are hiding information and decisions. "What happens when that person doesn't work there anymore? He leaves and someone makes a request (to review emails) in two years,"...

On a number of occasions I've noted that the Obama administration has taken a schizophrenic approach to the raid that led to the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. On the one hand, the administration refuses to release the bin Laden death photos and the details of the reportedly honorific burial the terrorist mastermind received at sea. Why? Because the information might harm our nation's security by getting al Qaeda terrorists upset. On the other hand, administration officials have improperly leaked information to two Hollywood filmmakers behind the film Zero Dark Thirty because the film was initially timed to...

Change.gov, the website created by the Obama transition team in 2008, has effectively disappeared sometime over the last month. While the front splash page for Change.gov has linked to the main White House website for years, until recently, you could still continue on to see the materials and agenda laid out by the administration. This was a particularly helpful resource for those looking to compare Obama's performance in office against his vision for reform, laid out in detail on Change.gov. According to the Internet Archive, the last time that content (beyond the splash page) was available was June 8th --...

Secret courts. Secret emails. Phone surveillance. Drones. The list of cloak-and-dagger tactics employed by the Obama administration -- and those that preceded it -- keeps growing, as NSA leaker Ed Snowden feeds classified materials to the media and other reports show the extent of the U.S. government's more opaque dealings. The latest was a report by The Associated Press that said the administration had military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Usama bin Laden’s hideout transferred to the CIA, where they would be harder to uncover by the press and public. If this were any other administration, perhaps the...