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...

"If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what." --Dr. Ob, June 15, 2009 The impact of Obamacare is starting to hit the DUmmies. And not all of them are pleased. Employers are canceling health insurance for their workers. People are having to pay higher premiums. People are having to meet higher deductibles. And this is not going over well with all the denizens of the DUmp. My gosh, who could have predicted that these things would be happening???? Who could have...

The man was allegedly harassing other passengers, and was ordered off the bus by the driverSan Diego police are working to identify a man accused of pepper spraying a bus driver in the face after the driver ordered him off the bus. According to investigators, the incident happened on Oct. 23 just before 5 p.m. aboard San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) bus #2915. An unknown man boarded the bus at 1900 Cable Street in Ocean Beach. Officials said the man sat in the back of the bus and allegedly began harassing passengers seated nearby. When the bus stopped at...

Just are the ways of God, And justifiable to men. – John Milton I saw an atheist's cartoon in which God is saying, "Now I will torture you forever for breaking some rules I made up – because I love you." As wrong as he is about Christian doctrine, I have to applaud the cartoonist for getting one thing right: He's holding God (or our beliefs about God) to account. Christians should do the same. When one of the pagan Gnostics invented a "good" god to replace the cranky, judgmental Hebrew deity, Christians pointed out that a god who's not...

October 31, 2013 Spoiled, greedy, indifferent boomers infest Obama’s self-indulgent White House Wesley Pruden The Obama White House suffers from “the ‘60s disease.” The affliction seems to be terminal. The president’s men — and women — are mostly boomers, spoiled, greedy and self-centered, nurtured and indulged in the decade of the 1960s, when the culture first began to rot. The boomers taught each other many things, how to turn up the volume on their “music,” where to find the best pot and where to crash to smoke themselves into mellow stupefaction, how to avoid taking responsibility for their blunders, and...

November 1, 2013 Solemnity of All Saints    Reading 1 Rv 7:2-4, 9-14 I, John, saw another angel come up from the East,holding the seal of the living God.He cried out in a loud voice to the four angelswho were given power to damage the land and the sea,“Do not damage the land or the sea or the treesuntil we put the seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.”I heard the number of those who had been marked with the seal,one hundred and forty-four thousand markedfrom every tribe of the children of Israel. After this I had...

It’s become increasingly clear that the Right has become a serious impediment to the smooth operation of the Federal government. Responsible Democrats in Washington, along with established members of the press agree: Conservatives, Tea Party members, and Republicans who oppose the Obama administration’s political agenda can be best described as, terrorists, hostage takers, and right-wing extremists. In order to clear the way for the fundamental changes that the Obama Administration is trying to implement, some federal lawmakers are recommending that Washington take stern measures to stem the damage coming from the Right. One of the more comprehensive plans being suggested...

Car break-ins and thefts happen on a regular basis. But they turn heads when the victim is the police chief of San Francisco. Greg Suhr told residents at a Marina District town hall meeting on Wednesday evening that his car was broken into and his jacket stolen a few weeks ago. He was actually there to discuss a police shooting this month in the neighborhood that injured an armed robbery suspect awaiting trial on charges that he robbed victims who offered cash for iPhones on Craigslist. Eventually, the topic of his own theft came up. “I’m not immune,” Suhr told...

KUALA LUMPUR: The man who claimed to be a Malaysian and was arrested by the Philippine authorities in Zamboanga City on Oct 4, has admitted to being a member of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF). Wisma Putra which was informed of the 55-year-old man's arrest was also told by the Philippine authorities of his admission to being an MNLF member. "However, this matter is still under investigation by the Philippine authorities," it said in a statement. Wisma Putra said the man was arrested for illegal entry into the Philippines as he had no valid travel documents with him. The...

Alabama Republicans Bradley Byrne and Dean Young are running neck and neck ahead of next week’s special runoff primary election in Alabama’s First Congressional District, according to a new survey. The poll, conducted by the GOP consulting firm Cygnal, shows Young, a tea party-aligned real estate investor, with a 43.2 percent to 40.2 percent lead over Byrne, a former state senator and unsuccessful 2010 gubernatorial candidate. The results are within the survey’s 3.03 percent margin of error. The poll of 1,027 likely voters was conducted Wednesday. A Byrne loss would come as a shock to the business community and Washington...

The mystery of how a racist epithet came to be scrawled on a receipt handed to a Tennessee Red Lobster waitress has only become more muddled, as the man accused of writing the offensive word now says he plans to sue the waitress and the Red Lobster chain — and the waitress now says she believes that someone else wrote the racist word on the receipt. The background is this: in September, Toni Christina Jenkins, a 19-year-old server at a Red Lobster franchise in Franklin, Tenn., served a $44.53 order to a 20-year-old customer named Devin Barnes and his wife....

I walked into the gubernatorial campaign rally for Ken Cuccinelli in Fairfax, VA on Monday and I found a room full of freedom-loving Virginians. Before their current attorney general took the stage to encourage his supporters eight days out from the gubernatorial election, I asked them one simple question, “Why are you voting for Cuccinelli?” Their answers were varied, revealing – and sincere.

Thirty-three miles into the Arctic Circle, in the village of Kotzebue, Alaska, where more than 70 percent of the people are Eskimo, the local elementary school had guests one day: two Chabad shluchim (emissaries) from Anchorage, some 550 miles away. The children showed them Eskimo dances from the Inupiat tribe. The shluchim danced chasidic dances. Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz asked, “Did any of you ever meet a Jew?” One girl raised her hand, yes, and she pointed to her mother, the fifth grade teacher. The mother had intermarried with a native man. The mother asked if the visitors could tell something...

San Jose man charged with felony child endangermentA father from San Jose is accused of leaving his two children alone in a car overnight for more than 14 hours until they were discovered by police in Milpitas. Police say they received a call from a resident in the 200 block of North Hillview Drive reporting a suspicious vehicle just before 1 p.m. Wednesday. Neighbors say one of the children was using a foot to honk the SUV’s horn. When they arrived at the scene, officers found an 8-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl inside the unlocked SUV. The kids were...

CBS Evening News reported Thursday that Iran had been caught in its longstanding lie about having no involvement in the Syrian civil war, showing photographic proof of the Iranian elite revolutionary guard alongside Bashar al-Assad’s forces. Correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reported Iran’s “decisive” involvement had helped turn the tide of fighting in Assad’s favor in several key battles and, this year alone, had lent Syria more than $3.5 billion to buy oil, without which the country would likely have collapsed.

ATTKISSON: Early enrollment figures are contained in notes from twice a day war room meetings from the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid services after the web site failed on October 1st. They were turned over in response to a document request from the House Oversight Committee. The web site launched on Tuesday. Publicly, the government said there were 4.7 million unique visits in the first 24 hours, but at a meeting Wednesday morning, the war room notes say 6 enrollments have occurred so far. They were with Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, CareSource, and Health Care Service Corporation....

Nearly 1,000 people were injured in Russia today when a meteor exploded somewhere over the Ural Mountains. But crazy cosmic phenomena are nothing new in the Ural range: 54 years ago this month, the northern part of the Urals played host to one of the most fascinating unsolved mysteries in the modern age. On the surface, what's become known as the Dyatlov Pass incident seems fairly explicable: Of a party of ten skiiers, nine perished in the middle of a high-difficulty trek in conditions that reached -30 degrees Celsius. But the details, which are mostly based on diaries of those...

An 11-year-old boy was convicted on Friday of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in a fifth-grade plot against a female classmate. Judge Allen Nielsen of Stevens County Superior Court said on Friday that “simple anger” had fueled the plot, which the boy devised this year with a 10-year-old classmate at Fort Colville Elementary School in northeast Washington. Staff members seized a handgun and a knife that the boys took to school on Feb. 7. The judge, who called the trial “the most serious of my career,” rejected defense efforts to portray the boy as unable to separate fact from fiction.

A federal appeals court on Thursday halted a sweeping set of changes to the New York Police Department’s practice of stopping and frisking people on the street, and, in strikingly personal terms, criticized the trial judge’s conduct and removed her from the case. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, “ran afoul” of the judiciary’s code of conduct by compromising the “appearance of impartiality surrounding this litigation.” The panel criticized how she had steered the lawsuit to her courtroom when it was filed nearly six years ago. The ruling effectively puts off...

Israeli military forces destroyed a cache of Russian missiles that the Syrian government was reportedly prepared to deliver to the militant group Hezbollah, U.S. officials confirmed Thursday. The officials stressed that the surface-to-surface Russian-made missiles were under Syrian military control in a stockpile at a port near the Russian naval base at Latakia. The officials said this attack is expected to follow the usual pattern of several other Israeli strikes against Syrian missiles that were apparently on their way to Hezbollah – neither the Israelis, Syrians nor Hezbollah are likely to acknowledge the missiles ever existed or the strike ever...