Free Republic

Due to election day responsibilities, I leave you to your own devices today. Not that you’ll have any trouble finding topics to discuss, butt I’ve assembled a few that I think are worthy of your further analysis: 1. The  developing Obamacare credibility crisis. 3.5 million people received notice they can’t keep their healthcare plan, like it or not. And a new estimate says up to 129 million people will ultimately be cancelled. 129 million!?! That’s like…a third of us! That doesn’t sound like “a very small number” of people who will be impacted. That seems to be a pretty...

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A doctor shortage is threatening to make the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act even more difficult — and it could create lines for care and services. New Yorkers are notorious for wanting things immediately, and that includes medical care.

To think, we’ve spent two years believing it was Romney that had the nastiest, most relentless seek-and-destroy oppo operation on the GOP side. Now I feel like Frank Drebin discovering the missing evidence in the Kelner case. My god — he was innocent. If you believe the sources in “Double Down,” Team Huntsman feeding a mega-smear of Romney to Harry Reid was the tip of the iceberg. 1994, his wife Cheri left [Mitch] Daniels for a married man, but then the couple reconciled and remarried. “In the years since, she had never spoken publicly about the turmoil, and Mitch had...

Rep. Trey Gowdy says President Barack Obama’s latest comments about his health care law could earn him another Nobel Prize — for fiction. “The president already has a Nobel Prize for peace, I think he’s shooting for one in fiction,” Gowdy (R-S.C) said Monday on Fox News’s “The Kelly File.” ...

When she answered her front door the other day, East Oakland resident Cynthia Williams, who's been unemployed and without medical insurance for nine years, was greeted by a bubbly 25-year-old woman wondering if she'd heard about the new health care law. Williams said she had, but didn't know how it would affect her. So outreach worker Dominique Gipson asked her a few more questions and quickly determined that Williams now qualifies for When she answered her front door the other day, East Oakland resident Cynthia Williams, who's been unemployed and without medical insurance for nine years, was greeted by a...

The plight of Detroit has been told and re-told, and most everyone has an opinion. But an important voice has been missing from the conversation: small business owners. A three-part web-video series has been launched by the national group, Bankrupting America, a project of Public Notice, an independent non-profit group that focuses on how government policies affect America. The series is titled, "The Story of Business: Detroit." Each video focuses on a different business that is "trying to stay afloat and invest in their community, despite the financial uncertainty and shrinking population resulting from the city’s bankruptcy." The state of...

Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers. My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2 percent after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31. My choice is to get coverage through the...

Yesterday, President Barack Obama claimed that when he promised Americans that they if they liked their health care plan they could keep it, he also stated "if it hasn't changed since the law passed." The stunning video below amounts to a Groucho Marx "Who are you going to believe -- me or your lying eyes?" moment. The fact that video exists of at least 23 instances in which the president added no such limitation clause, and in some of which he added the emphatic "Period" after claiming you can keep your health plan seems to not register with him. See,...

A major Democratic Party benefactor and Obama campaign bundler helped pay for professional petition circulators responsible for getting Virginia Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Robert C. Sarvis on the ballot — a move that could split conservative votes in a tight race. Campaign finance records show the Libertarian Booster PAC has made the largest independent contribution to Sarvis’ campaign, helping to pay for professional petition circulators who collected signatures necessary to get Sarvis’ name on Tuesday’s statewide ballot.

There is a phenomenon that is rarely commented on but which is as common as it is significant. For at least two generations, countless conservative parents have seen their adult children reject their core values. I have met these parents throughout America. I have spoken with them in person and on my radio show. Many have confided to me -- usually with a resigned sadness -- that one or more of their children has adopted left-wing social, moral and political beliefs. A particularly dramatic recent example was a pastor who told me that he has three sons, all of whom...

Frankly, how could I, or any Catholic, forget. Today is the day when Britons still burn an effigy of the Pope - and do so, joyously, in public. [SNIP] What distinguished me from the great majority of Britons I met was my faith. Being a Catholic marked me out as the "odd one" (my rather obvious nickname at college). I couldn't believe the prejudice I encountered. My first boyfriend's mother warned him that if he married me I would send all his money to Rome, to line the Vatican coffers. The science teacher at school said he knew why I...

The systemwide defects in Obamacare mounted Monday, from compounding enrollment problems to soaring insurance cancellations to breaches of privacy, as the Obama administration struggled to contain the political damage and repair its laughingstock health care website. The number of people receiving cancellation notices from their insurers rose to more than 3.5 million, in spite of President Obama’s debunked pledge that Americans could keep their plans if they liked them. Mr. Obama’s subsequent reassurances that people who lose coverage can “just shop around” is increasingly a dead end for consumers who can’t access the government’s malfunctioning website or can’t get their...

Saturday’s Wall Street Journal unveiled the smoking howitzer in the Obamacare “keep your plan” caper. In addition to proving that the White House and Obama deliberately and constantly lied about Americans’ ability to keep their health insurance, the Journal also found Senate Democrats’ fingerprints all over Obama’s weapon of mass deception. Colleen McCain Nelson, Peter Nicholas, and Carol E. Lee interviewed more than a dozen Obama advisers who helped to prepare Obamacare, pitch it to the American people, and pound it through Congress. Even these committed Obamites — including several in the White House — worried that Obama’s now-pulverized promise...

A woman lay on the bed in a small house in the woods. An old woman, her sight was gone, she could no longer walk, she could not hear well, her world had shrunk to this small house and a few of her children and friends. She was 97 years old. She hurt, her bones ached, she was tired and yet, her mind was clear. For a time, she lived in the Caribbean, rode fast boats, knew heroes, defeat, and victory. This woman is my mother, and she knew some of the joy of life again as I read...

Yesterday, President Barack Obama claimed that when he promised Americans that they if they liked their health care plan they could keep it, he also stated "if it hasn't changed since the law passed." The stunning video below amounts to a Groucho Marx "Who are you going to believe -- me or your lying eyes?" moment. -snip- It appears to me that the president and Valerie Jarrett are so desperate and isolated that they have lost touch with reality. Democrats who threw their political future in with Obamacare are now on notice that they are thethered to a man no...

In polite society at least, questioning the fundamental claims that people make about themselves is rather frowned upon. If a person says that he is a Catholic, then one is expected to believe that he is a Catholic, even if there is no evidence for this whatsoever. If a person says he is a conservative when he clearly agrees with not a single conservative position, we are likewise expected to smile and nod grimly. “No, you’re not!” is not a socially acceptable response to erroneous self-description, alas. There is some virtue in this convention, I suppose, even if it is...

This past election season, I tried an experiment with the twelve 6th-graders in my history class: I challenged them to develop a fictional candidate and persuade the rest of us to vote for him by creating a commercial. My hidden agenda was to find out which of the kids' political positions were influenced by their parents and whether, if given the opportunity to evaluate their positions from scratch, they might choose differently. The students were ready -- dare I say waiting -- for it. See, our school happens to be in Hyde Park, that ivy-covered, venerated neighborhood otherwise known as...

Will firestorm surrounding launch die down?

ST. PETERSBURG, November 4 (RIA Novosti) – About 54,000 people joined a religious procession in the heart of Russia’s second largest city St. Petersburg on Monday, a city police spokesman said. “No violations of public order took place during the event,” the spokesman said. The procession began half an hour later than scheduled due to large number of believers willing to take part.

For the first time at Calabasas High School, a same-sex couple has been crowned as homecoming queen and queen. Lily Cohen and her partner, Greta Melendez, were nominated by their classmates for titles that historically have been awarded to a male and a female student. But times are changing. [Snip] “I was just shocked because it’s just amazing to see how much our school has changed in the past four years,” Melendez said. “When I was a freshman, we wouldn’t have gotten that reaction. I went through a lot of bullying.”