Free Republic

The most wrenching stories always begin the same way: it was just a normal day. Oct. 18 was just a normal day when Darnell Barton, a school bus driver in Buffalo, N.Y., was carrying a full load of high school students and approaching the Scajaquada Expressway overpass. There, he saw a woman on the opposite side of the rail, standing where no person ought to be, leaning out over the traffic below. Barton stopped the bus and, according to the Buffalo News, tried to assess the truth of what his eyes were telling him.

In April, Rafael Cruz, the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), spoke to the tea party of Hood County, which is southwest of Fort Worth, and made a bold declaration: The United States is a "Christian nation." The septuagenarian businessman turned evangelical pastor did not choose to use the more inclusive formulation "Judeo-Christian nation." Insisting that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution "were signed on the knees of the framers" and were a "divine revelation from God," he went on to say, "yet our president has the gall to tell us that this is not a Christian nation…The...

According to OECD, teen unemployment rates (under 25) in Europe continue to escalate, particularly in Greece and Spain. eurounemploy That is scary looking! It reminds me of The Who’s song “Teenage Wasteland.” But, the US is no slouch when it comes to teen unemployment. The 16-19 cohort is seeing an unemployment rate of 22.60% while to 20-24 cohort is experiencing 12.80% unemployment. For the sake of comparison, I also included Germany teenage (under 25) unemployment which is 7.70%. unemployteenusgerm For the entire population, here is a chart of labor force participation in Germany, Spain, USA and Mexico. lfp103113 Even beleaguered...

I’m a healthy 34-year-old with a taxable income hovering right around the Obamacare subsidy level who, for the last several years, has purchased a relatively inexpensive catastrophic health insurance plan from Blue Shield. I get to see the doctor four times a year for a $30 co-pay, and I won’t have to spend the rest of my life working off the debt if I get hit by a bus. .... When Obamacare comes fully online, it will do wonders to provide healthcare for people who were not eligible for Medicaid but still could not afford health insurance. If this system...

CARS and trucks powered by natural gas make up a significant portion of the vehicle fleet in many parts of the world. Iran has more than two million natural gas vehicles on the road. As of 2009, Argentina had more than 1.8 million in operation and almost 2,000 natural gas filling stations. Brazil was not far behind. Italy and Germany have substantial natural gas vehicle fleets. Is America next? With natural gas in plentiful supply at bargain prices in the United States, issues that have limited its use in cars are being rethought, and its market share could increase, perhaps...

... Obama did not lie, but neither did he acknowledge the possibility that insurance companies might pull out the rug from under their own satisfied policyholders. Liberal criticism of the healthcare law as it was being written in 2009 centered on the fact that it left insurance companies as the powerful middlemen at the center of healthcare delivery in the United States. Obama and the authors of the law rejected the liberal critique because they saw no way to win passage of healthcare reform unless they could turn the insurance lobby into an ally, instead of an adversary. Obama made...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - Money Flows Back to the Mullahs Thanks to ObamaPosted By Majid Rafizadeh On October 31, 2013 @ 12:15 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 1 Comment Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s government could not have possibly expected, or wished for, a better American government to work with than the Obama administration. The Iranians could not have imagined that an American administration could so easily buy their argument and image of a “moderate” government, allowing Iranian leaders to pursue their own Islamist and meddling foreign policies.The Obama administration is attempting to persuade Congress, the international community, and...

Two Tea Party groups recently declared war on Republicans who voted to end the government shutdown. The Tea Party Nation and the Tea Party Leadership Fund want to run Tea Party-approved candidates against sitting Republicans as punishment for being "traitors." One Tea Party favorite, debunked Christian historian David Barton, is rumored to possibly run against Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), notes Warren Throckmorton at Patheos.org. A "Draft David Barton for US Senate" Facebook page has been set up and currently boasts 1,445 members. One pro-Barton advocate claims on his blog that "last week a meeting occurred between Tea Party leaders and...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - WashingtonÂ’s Will Is Done: Bloody Terrorists FreedPosted By P. David Hornik On October 31, 2013 @ 12:49 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 11 Comments Just after midnight on Wednesday, Israel Hayom reports, 26 Palestinian security prisoners were set free by Israel. Twenty-one were sent to the West Bank, five to Gaza.All of these prisoners were convicted either of murder or attempted murder. They constitute the second of four groups of 26 prisoners who are being released periodically during the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. For Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, freeing them was an iron-clad...

The CEO of Serco, a British-based company whose North American division received one of the largest contracts to work on the Obamacare insurance exchanges,[1] resigned Friday amid allegations that the company had defrauded the British government of millions of pounds. Even as myriad other allegations emerged about its work around the globe, Serco spent heavily on lobbying in Washington, D.C., and secured a multi-year contract potentially worth $1.249 billion to handle paper applications for the Obamacare exchanges. Serco did not respond to e-mail and voice-mail requests for comment. Public records demonstrate Serco’s concentrated effort to woo the U.S. government. In...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - Sebelius’s Big Day of Big LiesPosted By Arnold Ahlert On October 31, 2013 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 3 Comments Those Americans who watched Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s testimony yesterday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee might be forgiven for thinking they were in an alternate universe. Despite her assertion that Americans should ”hold me accountable” for the ongoing debacle, Sebelius later claimed she was never warned by anyone that the scheduled roll out of the Healthcare.gov website would be the disaster it turned out to be. Furthermore, she stood...

The Obama administration is clearly in full-defense mode over the rolling disaster of ObamaCare, and it is making every effort to deflect criticism to others. In fact, it is the administration's fault. The health law says you can keep your health insurance policy only if it is "grandfathered" and you have kept the same plan with virtually no changes since March 23, 2010, when ObamaCare was enacted. These latest White House deflections will not hold. ObamaCare is taking on water, and people now are finding out for themselves why this law is so very wrong for America.

Hillary Clinton spoke at two separate Goldman Sachs events on the evenings of Thursday, October 24 and Tuesday, October 29. As both Politico and the New York Times report, Clinton’s fee is about $200,000 per speech, meaning she likely netted around $400,000 for her paid gigs at Goldman over the course of six days.

Where are Americans moving, and why? Timothy Noah, writing in the Washington Monthly, professes to be puzzled. He points out that people have been moving out of states with high per capita incomes -- Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland -- to states with lower income levels. “Why are Americans by and large moving away from economic opportunity rather than toward it?” he asks. Actually, it's not puzzling at all. The movement from high-tax, high-housing-cost states to low-tax, low-housing-cost states has been going on for more than 40 years, as I note in my new book Shaping Our Nation: How Surges...

This Week In Petroleum Recent decline in Gulf Coast crude oil imports mainly affects lighter grades Crude oil imports to the U.S. Gulf Coast (PADD 3) which averaged 3.7 million barrels per day (bbl/d) year-to-date through July, the latest month for which data are available, have dropped by more than a third since 2008. The decrease of more than 1.9 million bbl/d from the 2008 average of 5.6 million bbl/d has included almost all imports of light, sweet crude oil, a development that has significant implications for global crude oil price relationships. Nearly half of U.S. refining capacity is along...

A Saudi national, who is serving an eight-years-to-life sentence in Arapahoe County for repeatedly sexually assaulting his housekeeper, is seeking to spend the rest of his sentence in his native country. Homaidan al-Turki was convicted in 2006 of unlawful sexual contact by use of force, theft and extortion. Thursday, he is expected back in court for the continuation of a hearing that began last week. Defense attorneys say their client should have access to a sex offender treatment program that takes into account his religious and cultural beliefs and one that would be closer to his family. They say the...

A Republican congressman is calling on the Justice Department to investigate why state and federal law enforcement raided the home of a veteran investigative reporter and confiscated a stack of her confidential files in August. “This is unbelievable,” Republican Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert said during remarks on the floor of the House this week. “This is happening in America.”

British establishment mouthpiece BBC leads the way again. This time it is about the biggest threat to democracy today. No, it is not terrorists. No, it is not Islamism. And, no, it is not the Western-Installed Dictator Regimes around the world. No, no, no, no, no. The new enemy is the conspiracy theorists. It is those who question their governments. It is those who find facts and confront the mainstream lies and liars such as BBC. Basically, it is you … and me. Allow me to wade through all the fillers and present you with a few telling excerpts from...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - Obama Pays Mexican Male Prostitutes to Stay Disease-FreePosted By Daniel Greenfield On October 30, 2013 @ 9:11 pm In The Point | 6 Comments “There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a Mexican male brothel in Tijuana, good for you. But I want to be clear, you did it because the United States government paid Mexican male prostitutes to remain disease free. Your customers were able to return to your brothel without succumbing to AIDS because American taxpayers paid them not to get AIDS.“Now look you...

The word is "fraud." It is now clear that the American people and their representatives in Congress were lied to, in order to obtain passage of Obamacare. When someone is induced to undertake an action based on false representations, that constitutes fraud. Investor's Business Daily lays out the calculation that motivated the fraud.