Free Republic

Consumer penalties: Part of the controversy surrounding health care reform was that the law would mandate coverage for all Americans on pain of penalties. Those penalties will be tiered and rise over a three-year period that kicks off in 2014, according to the National Association of Consumer Protection: 2014: Families––$285 or 1 percent of total household income, whichever is greater. Individual adults––$95. 2015: Families––$975 or 2 percent of income, whichever is greater. Individual adults––$325. 2016: Families––$2,085 or 2.5 percent of income, whichever is greater. Individual adults––$695. Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-obamas-affordable-care-act-will-cost-consumers-2012-6#ixzz1zAA0EjcL

Eric Cantor has scheduled a "repeal Obamacare" vote for July 11th. Because the mandate was defined as a tax, can the House simply repeal the tax, as they have the power of taxation? Would this effectively cancel the mandate, causing the bill to implode on itself?

For all their ideological fervor, revolutions in practice tend to be fairly predictable affairs. More often than not, when the initial groundswell of popular discontent recedes, the best-organized and most ideologically cohesive political factions assume power and proceed to run the show according to their own preferences. This is what happened in Russia at the turn of the last century, when the Bolsheviks parlayed widespread hostility to czarist rule into a “workers’ revolution” that spawned the Soviet Union. It’s what took place in Iran in the late 1970s, when antipathy to the shah was harnessed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and...

On Thursday night, Italy and Spain plunged an EU summit into disarray by threatening to block “everything” unless Germany and other eurozone countries backed their demands for help. Mario Monti, the Italian Prime Minister, celebrated the agreement, reached in the early hours of Friday, as a “very important deal for the future of the EU and the eurozone”. He could not resist reminding Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, that Italy had also won on the football pitch, by defeating Germany two goals to one for a place in the finals of the European Championship.

Yak-130: New Russia’s Most Successful Aircraft Mikhail Barabanov The Yak 130 advanced jet trainer developed by the Yakovlev design bureau is Russia’s most successful new aircraft, both commercially and technologically, since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Of all the new aircraft developed by the former Soviet states since 1991, the Yak 130 has been mass-produced in the largest numbers. Its design has also been used in two very promising models in foreign countries. The only other project which comes close to the Yak 130 in terms of its commercial success is the Su-30MKI fighter, developed specifically for the Indian...

Presidential Statement Signing The Social Security Act. AUGUST 14, 1935 Today a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last. This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions...

“Roberts has no logic in what he said,” Savage asserted. “He said the law is a tax, but if the law wasn’t written as a tax, how can he say it’s taxation?”

Looking at the social sites today... there is just much more coverage of the SCOTUS ruling. IMO the contempt vote was ... well... more important. Am I wrong and why isn't it being covered as much?

Bishops Renew Plea To Congress And Administration To Repair Affordable Care Act June 28, 2012 Supreme Court decision does not address fundamental flaws in the law Legislation still needed to fix conscience, abortion funding, immigration problems WASHINGTON—Today the United States Supreme Court issued a decision upholding as a tax the provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that requires individuals to purchase a health plan—the so-called "individual mandate." For nearly a century, the Catholic bishops of the United States have been and continue to be consistent advocates for comprehensive health care reform to ensure access to life-affirming health care for...

There's only 92 votes thus far so we can turn this one around. What's your reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling upholding the health reform law?I'm happy. I support the law. 48 % I'm unhappy. I don't support the law. 43 % I can't decide; the ruling and law are complex and I'm not sure what this will mean for me. 9 % POLL HERE Scroll down on right.

A sentiment widely shared today, no doubt. Over at Ace’s place, DrewM issues a warning: Dear GOP, This is your last chance. If you blow this, I’m out and you need to be destroyed. What is it? Repeal ObamaCare on Day 1. Don’t worry about replace, don’t worry about anything else… [A]s soon as Mitt takes the oath of office, before his speech no one will care or remember, walk the bill up to him at the podium to sign. If this does not happen, the GOP must be destroyed and a new party built to replace it. We’ve tried...

On June 15, 2012, hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals living illegally in the United States turned on their television sets to hear that they had become eligible for (1) a renewable two-year deferral of removal from the country and (2) a work permit. While this may seem like a big change for those immigrants, the focus here will not be on what it might do for them, but how it was done, and why.

The Supreme Court’s stunning rejuvenation of the Obamacare mandate into a new tax didn’t leak to Washington D.C. insiders — but it appears that it may have leaked to yet-unknown Wall Street investors. In a brief 10-minute period starting at 9:32 a.m., the stock value of the nation’s largest hospital chain, HCA Holdings Inc., jumped from $26.81 per share to $27.53 as bidders bought several hundred thousand shares before the court made its announcement just after 10 a.m. The bidders who snatched up shares before the announcement made a gain of roughly $2 a share once the price rose again...

Casey Anthony was never guilty of murder, or even of lying to police, because she was mentally ill and unstable when she sent detectives chasing after her two-year-old daughter, a new book claims. Anthony's attorney, Jose Baez offers that stunning assessment in Presumed Guilty, Casey Anthony: The Inside Story, due out July 3.

Faced with a complex, hard-to-solve problem, there is a natural human tendency to solve a much simpler, easier one instead. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, dubs this cognitive process “substitution.” We know our political system is broken. The signs are everywhere: knee-jerk partisanship, massive debts and unfunded liabilities, widespread citizen dissatisfaction, trillion-dollar deficits, rampant public and private corruption, and a federal government that has less support than King George III at the time of the American Revolution. But fixing the system is a staggeringly complex undertaking. The causes of its dysfunction are deep and...

Democrats are going to move to the Right for Re-Election They of course will be Lying ... MSM will be willing and Enabling them, knowing that and Exposing their Voting History will be how we defeat them. Dumb People just got woke up today... we need to keep them awake TT PS IRS just attained Blue Helmet Status

Ann Coulter prophesied the coming split between Chief Justice Roberts and conservatives back in 2005, writing that "Stealth nominees have never turned out to be a pleasant surprise for conservatives." After pretending to consider various women and minorities for the Supreme Court these past few weeks, President Bush decided to disappoint all the groups he had just ginned up and nominate a white male. So all we know about him for sure is that he can't dance and he probably doesn't know who Jay-Z is. Other than that, he is a blank slate. Tabula rasa. Big zippo. Nada. Oh, yeah...

....But while Roberts may have saved Obama's signature domestic legislation — and perhaps his reelection campaign — by siding with the court's liberal wing, he actually did it in spite of Obama, not because of him. Roberts' opened his opinion today by declaring, unequivocally, that the individual mandate — which requires people to buy insurance or pay a penalty — is not constitutional under the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause. It's a direct shot at the Obama administration's defense of the law's constitutionality, which largely relied on those two clauses, which give Congress the power to regulate...