Free Republic

Marilyn Tavenner testimony today. Began at 10:15AM EST

Forty-four employees of Taos Health Systems and its subsidiary, Holy Cross Hospital, will be laid off in a move administrators claim is necessary amid changing trends in the health care sector, though staff warn the cuts could imperil patients. ... Union organizers suggested the cuts could precede a change in status for Holy Cross from an acute-care hospital to a critical access hospital.

The thread that I posted yesterday was lively, energetic and, sadly, punctuated with a little too much Ad Hominem. For instance, and an example - I would never say that any topic is above another person's "pay grade," which was what was tossed at me. And in the asking, I never received any scripture(s) that show the dividing line - the place that unequivocally shows the total difference - between the one who was never saved & the one who had merely "fallen out of fellowship w/Christ," but was nonetheless still saved. I was asked why I didn't provide scriptures....

Chicago Blackhawks captain Jonathan Toews and a handful of his teammates, as well as one ex-teammate, now have more in common than just being Stanley Cup champions. They can say they were called out by the President of the United States at the White House. Not too shabby. President Barack Obama honored his hometown hockey team Monday for its 2013 Stanley Cup championship in front of a standing-room only crowd in the East Room. During his remarks, President Obama referenced Toews, Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith, Bryan Bickell, Dave Bolland, Andrew Shaw and Corey Crawford in various forms of praise and...

ounger, healthier Americans needed to make Obamacare financially viable are not signing up in sufficient numbers. Most enrollees have been people over 50, many with pre-existing medical conditions. The skew toward the older crowd raises concerns that there will not be enough payments from young people to offset the cost of providing coverage for the older ailing population, the Wall Street Journal reported. The early numbers, while statistically too small to draw conclusions, raise concerns about the practicality of the insurance marketplaces. "We need a broad range of people to make this work, and we're not seeing that right now,"...

"The fact of the matter is, the president went out and said, I think he said what he believed to be the fact and what was substantially was the fact, because 90, whatever, 95, 96, 97 percent of Americans are in the position where they can keep the insurance they have and they're going to see no changes," Axelrod explained to MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Monday night. Axelrod dismissed people currently losing their health plans as a "small group" of people who bought "substandard policies" in the individual market.

United States Senator David Vitter (R-LA) and Citizens United are rallying Americans in every city, town, and state around this common sense idea! Join Senator Vitter and Citizens United in demanding that Members of Congress not exempt themselves from Obamacare - the law they forced on the rest of us! Tell Washington to live by their laws!

Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center said Monday it is eliminating 58 positions and laying off 36 employees as part of a restructuring to meet the challenges of the federal Affordable Care Act. Hospital administrators said the layoffs will stretch across all departments, including 15 management positions. Christus St. Vincent President and CEO Bruce Tassin said the reductions will trim $4 million from the Santa Fe hospital’s payroll.

All of the potentially habitable planets found in their survey are around K stars, which are cooler and slightly smaller than the sun, Petigura said. But the team’s analysis shows that the result for K stars can be extrapolated to G stars like the sun. ... If the stars in the Kepler field are representative of stars in the solar neighborhood, then the nearest (Earth-size) planet is expected to orbit a star that is less than 12 light-years from Earth and can be seen by the unaided eye. Future instrumentation to image and take spectra of these Earths need only...

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez has given American businesses a short reprieve from a controversial proposed rule that, if promulgated, will restrict business’ ability to obtain legal counsel and other labor relations advice potentially leading to a dearth in labor counseling. Perez told an audience at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week that the new rule was “not going to happen” this November, as the Department of Labor had originally planned. While the Department has received over 9,000 comments on its proposal and considering the negative impact it will have on American businesses, it surprisingly hasn’t received much media...

The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum is not only home to human and cat mummies, a replica of an underground tomb and a planetarium; it's also home to exotic trees. There's the Bunya pine with its cones weighing 10 to 15 pounds; the giant taro plant with its massive leaves and edible roots; the Australian flaxleaf paperbark tree that produces medicinal tea tree oil; and, of course, papyrus, which the ancient Egyptians used for creating writing paper, boats, mattresses, mats, rope, sandals and baskets. These are just a few of the dozens of trees and plants to see on Our City Forest's...

William Potts burned with the desire to change the world. Nothing really turned out the way he planned... ... he returned to the United States and in 1984 he concealed a .25-caliber pistol in a plaster cast and hijacked a plane to Cuba, among the last in a flood of dozens of self-styled revolutionary hijackings. To Potts' surprise, Cuban authorities didn't offer him guerrilla training. He was convicted of air piracy and imprisoned for more than 13 years. Now, 29 years after he changed into a black beret and leather jacket in a plane bathroom and hijacked more than 100...

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — LA City Councilman Jose Huizar on Monday defended a project to build a streetcar line in Downtown Los Angeles even though the cost of the project could double. When property owners in downtown’s Broadway corridor voted overwhelmingly last year to tax themselves more than $62 million to build a streetcar line, it was estimated that the levy would cover half the entire cost of the project, estimated at about $125 million. But the price is going up, partly because of the cost of relocating utility lines. How much the project ultimately will cost is unknown, but...

Dear Dave, Do you have any tips for how a single person can stay on track with their finances? Debbie Dear Debbie, It’s really pretty simple. The first thing is the same advice I give to married couples, and that is to live on a monthly budget. Sit down at the end of each month and write down—on paper—all your expenses and income for the following month. When you think about it, budgeting really isn’t that difficult. Some of your expenses, like your rent or mortgage payment, will be the same. If you have a car payment (which I really...

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. Austin, Texas, software billionaire Joe Liemandt is the Libertarian Booster PAC’s major benefactor. He’s also a top bundler for President Barack Obama. This revelation...

A teenage gang of two girls and three boys have been accused of raping and beating a 16-year-old girl so badly she broke bones in her face and bled from her ear. The victim was allegedly set upon when she visited a friend's house in Hollywood on Friday night. Police claim she was raped by one of the accused, 19-year-old Jayvon Woolfork, while she was held down by Lanel Singleton, 18, and three minors - a 17-year-old male, 15-year-old female and a 14-year-old girl.

So the program debuts and it’s a resounding, famous, fantastical flop. The first weeks of the news coverage are about how the websites don’t work, can you believe we paid for this, do you believe they had more than three years and produced this public joke of a program, this embarrassment? But now it’s much more serious. No one’s thinking about the websites. They wish you were thinking about the websites! I bet America hopes the websites never work so they never have to enroll. They said if you liked your insurance you could keep your insurance—but that’s not true....

Bloomberg, link only: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-05/senate-democrats-pause-from-obamacare-to-push-labor-bills.html

President Barack Obama told his enthusiastic supporters Monday night that he never promised what video recordings show him promising at least 29 times. The videos show Obama promising 300 million Americans that “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan, period.” But that’s not what he really said, Obama announced Monday in a speech to about 200 Organizing for Action supporters, gathered at the St. Regis hotel in D.C. “What we said was you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed,” he told Obamacare’s political beneficiaries and contractors....

Being a glass-half-full kind of guy, I look for kernels of good news when examining economic policy around the world. I once even managed to find something to praise about French tax policy. And I can assure you that’s not a very easy task. I particularly try to find something positive to highlight when I’m a visitor. While in the Faroe Islands two days ago, for instance, I wrote about that jurisdiction’s new system of personal retirement accounts. And now that I’m in Iceland, I want to focus on spending restraint. As you can see from this chart, lawmakers in...