Free Republic

I was thinking about what the cost of Universal Health Care would be if Obama got his way. Analyzing Medicare might provide some answers. There are about 40 million people on Medicare. The Medicare budget is $420 billion, or about $10,500 per recipient. Persons on Medicare pay about $97 a month in premiums taken from their Social Security checks. The net Medicare budget is then $420 billion - $46 billion (from premiums) = $374 billion in Medicare taxes. In 2006 there were 138 million people who filed income tax. They each paid 2.9 percent of their earned income (1.45 x...

Dear Rev. Wright I started to write: “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.” But you know better. Being president isn’t fun and games like I hoped. And I really don’t wish you were here. I could use a friend, but I need the Wright stuff like I need Arlen Specter. This summer I’ve got enough grief. It turns out the crowds that shout my name aren’t always saying nice things. That gets old fast. I should have guessed it wasn’t going to be a picnic when the chief justice couldn’t even get the oath right. That mistake was...

Are there any more frightening words in all of football than “Rex Grossman is your starting quarterback”? I can’t think of any, except maybe, “Hi, I’m Michael Vick. Mind if I walk your dog?” Yes, the Texans are down to this, Rex Grossman, starting at QB. Matt “I’ve got a boo-boo” Schaub sat out the final preseason game, which in and of itself is not a big deal, but given Schaub’s history of missed games due to injury it leaves the mind to ponder the horror of watching Rex Grossman start four or five or six games for the Texans....

A conservative television and radio host who called President Barack Obama a racist will be performing at the State Theatre in Easton, despite an NAACP request the event be canceled. Merrill Fennell, president of the NAACP's Easton, PA branch, made the request in an Aug. 24 letter. He cited Glenn Beck's penchant for race baiting.

From David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.orgPROFILE: VAN JONES Became a Communist in the aftermath of the 1992 "Rodney King riots" in Los AngelesFounded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in 1996Was active in the anti-Iraq War demonstrations organized by International ANSWERServed as a board member of the Rainforest Action Network and Free PressIn March 2009, President Barack Obama named Jones to be his so-called "Green Jobs Czar." Born in 1968 in rural West Tennessee, Van Jones earned a B.A. degree from the University of Tennessee at Martin and then attended Yale Law School. During his years at Yale, Jones served as an intern...

John Stosel can always be counted on to make those on the left look silly without seeming to attack them. We should play this over and over for every idiot who wants Obama care.

Back-to-School with Obama:Some conservatives are under fire for claiming President Barack Obama’s back-to-school address is actually an indoctrination tactic intended to brainwash America’s school children with his political ideology as opposed to the White House’s stance that Obama’s address is a harmless Presidential reach-out to simply encourage kids. Are conservatives correct or going overboard? Let’s let Obama’s education record speak for itself. In 2007, then Senator Obama introduced education legislation which “systematically” “embeds” “positive behavior” into America’s kids to “achieve important social outcomes.” First, let’s look at Obama’s initial plans for America’s school children scheduled for September 8. According to...

Twitter, Facebook and the worldwide blogosphere have been flooded with alien conspiracy theories about the new Google UFO logo. The logo, showing a classic saucer-shaped spacecraft shining a light down on the search-engine's regular logo, has been the subject of much speculation. The world's internet voices want to now whether the all-powerful web giant is trying to tell us something....

Our ongoing debate about government's role in health care is proving worthwhile because it forces people to focus on the real tradeoffs in a system mandated - if not directly operated - by government, rather than one selected by individuals or their employers. Today, our system is a dysfunctional hybrid. To the extent that we cannot choose the health care coverage we want today, those restrictions are almost always the result of previous government interventions - tax incentives that make it easier for employers to buy insurance than for employees to purchase their own or laws requiring us to purchase...

...Such marginally attached workers include individuals who are unemployed but have not sought work over the 4 weeks prior to the survey and includes some 758,000 "discouraged' workers that have simply given up. The addition of such excluded groups caused the real unemployment rate to increase to 16.8%. Inside the Numbers A major cause of concern for within the economy is that a pattern has developed in which the real unemployment rate continues to rise at a faster pace than the adjusted unemployment rate. While the adjusted rate rose .3% last month, the real unemployment rate jumped .5%. As a...

"The battle for orthodoxy is literally ferocious in today's Church, and it will be the dividing point between the sheep and the goats." FRONT ROYAL, Virginia, September 4, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Human Life International president Rev. Tom Euteneuer has fired back at Politics Daily writer David Gibson for his column disparaging the pro-life leadership of Scranton's former bishop, Joseph Martino, following his retirement earlier this week.  Euteneuer said that Martino's insistence upon fidelity to the teachings of the Catholic Church, and his subsequent early retirement, symbolized if anything that "the battle for orthodoxy is literally ferocious in today's Church, and it will...

We have exciting news: The Americans For Fair Taxation Board has authorized the launch of a coordinated multimedia campaign for passage of the FairTax in the U. S. Congress. In announcing the campaign launch, FairTax Chairman Leo Linbeck declared that, “Never in our lifetimes has our country more badly needed the economic boom and the immediate and robust creation of private sector jobs up and down the American economy which the FairTax would create. Never have more Americans been convinced that federal taxation is unfair, corrupt and dominated by special interest lobbyists, politicians and power brokers. Never has hunger for...

Are you kidding me? Last night while watching TV, I was certain I saw a Che Guevara poster on the wall of a child's room in a Windex commercial. Anybody else seen it?

REX C. CURRY/Special ContributorLloyd Marcus sang for the crowd at the Tea Party Express tour's Dallas stop on Friday. Another performer, Ron Rivoli of the Rivoli Revue, estimated that 2,500 people attended the 13th stop of the tour, which ends next week in Washington. The mobile protest known as the Tea Party Express rolled into Dallas on Friday, drawing a large, sign-waving crowd for speeches decrying President Barack Obama, his health care reform effort and big government in general. "To boil it all down, it's a government takeover that we feel is happening," said Kurt Pflieger, a Rockwall pediatrician who...

A Facebook friend posted this five-minute YouTube video on why we need socialized, government-run health care. After watching it agape I realized this was a neat five-minute encapsulation of how so grossly misinformed leftists are with regard to basic economics, government, and human nature.

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An airstrike by US warplanes operating as part of the NATO occupation in northern Afghanistan killed more than 100 people early Friday morning, most of them civilians who were incinerated when two gasoline tankers, hit by bombs, exploded in flames. Large numbers of severely wounded have been taken to the local hospital in trucks and carts. The two tankers, hijacked by Taliban guerrillas, became stuck in the mud trying to cross the Kunduz River. The insurgents abandoned the tankers after opening the valves, and the local population of the village of Omar Kheil rushed from their homes to pour off...

Behind the tumult of ObamaCare and attempts to hold America’s children hostage to indoctrination at their first day back at school this year, history is being rewritten by Barack Hussein Obama and his Shadow Government of Czars. Will historians someday record September 2009 as “September’s Swan Song for America”? America and Free World patriots: This is what Obama and His Shadow Government have lined up for you: Timeline: Sept. 8: Back to School when tens of millions of children from pre-kindergarten and up will see pictures, not of Presidents Washington and Jefferson but ones of an anti-American, whose own...

On July 29, 1997, a representative philosophe of our abortion culture, retired Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, was lavishly eulogized in St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where the Requiem Mass for President Kennedy had been sung in 1963. Richard Cardinal Cushing was relatively constrained back then, because liturgical depredations had not yet switched into high gear. It was not thus when President Clinton, who vetoed the ban on partial-birth abortions, was permitted to announce to all corners of the cathedral for consumption in all corners of the world: "Brennan's America is America at its best." That is, internecine...

The terrorist release that has garnered headlines is Scotland's release of the Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi. On his return home, al-Megrahi was fêted as a hero by Libya's President Moammar Gadhafi. Such merriment is a sad capstone to events unleashed on December 21, 1988, when the flight, full of 259 unsuspecting people from 21 nations, was blown from the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland. We have no ability to assess what dreams died that day. The families of these innocent victims have the right to be outraged. We also heard outrage from Washington, but we cannot help...