Free Republic

On a recent visit to Moab, Utah, I saw a T-shirt with a picture of a Jeep stuck in a gap between two rock formations and a caption: "Confidence is the feeling you have before you fully understand the situation." If you still brim with self-assurance despite hopelessly stranding your vehicle, you may have to repeat the mistake a few times before confidence yields to comprehension. That's also the case with members of Congress and other fans of intervention who call on the Obama administration to use force in Syria or Iran. They always make such ventures sound quick, low-risk...

In recent months Washington has been rocked by scandals such the IRS's manipulation of tax exempt status for political groups opposing the Democratic Party. This is just the most recent example of how federal public sector unions have been clandestinely involved in public policy. Looking back, it can be seen that the involvement of Federal public unions in the American political system began in January, 1962 when President Kennedy established collective bargaining powers for Federal workers, by Executive Order 10988. * * * How public sector unions obtained this power is a little-discussed phenomenon, since the media are largely supportive...

A Washington Post analysis of the latest census data shows that more than a third of Zip codes in the D.C. metro area rank in the top 5 percent nationally for income and education. But what makes the region truly unusual is that so many of the high-end Zip codes are contiguous. They form a vast land mass that bounds across 717 square miles. It stretches 60 miles from its northern tip in Woodstock, Md., to the southern end in Fairfax Station, and runs 30 miles wide from Haymarket in Prince William County to the heart of the District up...

"He was just kind of left by himself," a friend of Richard Shoop commented to reporters. I never met Shoop, but I nearly ran into him a few nights ago at a Nordstrom in Paramus, N.J. He had just shot a rifle in the air there, starting a mass panic and police lockdown that ended in Shoop committing suicide. Like every other customer and worker in the mall at the time of the incident, I'm unharmed -- Shoop evidently wasn't prepared to hurt anyone but himself. I just can't get Shoop off my mind. Based on the media testimony...

There is no mystery here. We know why the healthcare.gov website has failed, and why the emerging problems inherent in “ObamaCare” are bound to lead to even greater failure. Hubris. Pride. Incompetence. The “incompetence” so far shown, and the lies that so often follow incompetence like so many ducklings following a quacking momma duck, both precede and follow from the pride. What is that pride? The pride of a “community organizer” who thinks that, because he has a Harvard Law degree, he can run a country. The pride of progressives in general, who think that going to college gives them...

If you are a health policy reporter for the Washington Post and take upon yourself the role of cheerleader for Obamacare, the task can be quite challenging. Therefore one must admire the effort that Sarah Kliff displays into putting a positive spin on this bit of pathetically sad news: The District of Columbia's insurance marketplace has enrolled exactly five people in health plans, according to documents released by the Senate Finance Committee on Friday.

Here’s another victim of President Lucifer’s Obamacare. Bill Elliott has cancer. He had a healthcare plan that had paid for “just about everything” of his cancer treatment, including pharmaceuticals and medical devices like MRI. He had doctors whom he “loved” and his premium was $180 a month. But Elliott, like hundreds of thousands of Americans, got a cancellation notice from his medical insurance BECAUSE OF OBAMACARE. So Elliott tried to find a new health plan that would take him. But his insurance premium will be $1,500 a month — an increase of 833% from his old premium. An MRI...

A New Jersey man who won a $338 million Powerball jackpot, among the largest lottery winnings, is embroiled in a court fight with his former girlfriend over the money. Pedro Quezada of Passaic was the sole winner of the Powerball drawing last spring, worth about $152 million after taxes. His lawyer argues that Inez Sanchez has no claim to the money because the couple were never married.

**SNIP** To function as intended, the marketplaces need a broad, healthy risk pool to keep staggering rate increases from occurring. The premiums of healthy, cheap-to-insure people cover the big bills for the relatively small number of sick people. So if the exchanges do not “enroll enough young, healthy people, insurers will have to raise everyone’s premiums,” wrote the New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn in May. “In the worst case, this could create what actuaries call a ‘death spiral’: Rising premiums prompt people to drop out, causing premiums to increase even more.” Because the reform was aimed at bringing coverage to most...

The push to nationalize industries during the Obama era marches on. Banks are under siege with JP Morgan Chase choking on regulation and penalties that extract existing profits for government coffers. Health insurance companies are dictated as to what they can charge and what their profit margins can be. And now the official onslaught against pharmaceutical companies has been launched by the mouthpiece of the left – The New York Times. In what they billed as a special report sent out in an exclusive email the Times launched its frontal attack on drug companies using typical left-wing tactics. The...

POLITICS Obama courting CEOs on immigration widens conservative split, raises issue of corporate motives Published November 10, 2013 FoxNews.com President Obama's courting of top U.S. executives this week to help get the Republican-controlled House to pass immigration reform is furthering the divide among conservatives, with a top GOP senator and others suggesting corporate America is lending its support with hopes of getting more access to low-cost immigrant labor. The president said before the White House meeting Tuesday that he and others who support comprehensive immigration reform passed in the Senate know the “politics are challenging” in the House and that...

Republican operatives want to help establishment candidates fend off tea party challenges with a new weapon: unlimited cash. Consultants and attorneys — including the co-founder of the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC — are laying the groundwork or have already filed paperwork for dozens of super PACs organized to support individual candidates running next year. -spies- Single-candidate super PACs also is a sign party leaders believe donors are unhappy with the results of big money groups in recent years — and are willing to take their checkbooks elsewhere. Rove’s Crossroads groups budgeted more than $300 million on a plan to defeat...

If self-preservation is our natural inclination, and mind and body our natural tools, then having control of the use of those tools is the minimum requirement of living fully in accordance with our nature. The desire to have such control is therefore coextensive with the innate desire for self-preservation. And, therefore, the feeling of having such control is the proper object of what I am calling the freedom sense. This conscious awareness of practical self-determination is thus our most direct experience of ourselves as rational animals. While other experiences fulfill our nature in other ways, this is the one that...

<p>President Obama on Friday night continued throwing his entire second-term agenda against the wall to see what sticks, challenging Republicans to join him and support more federal spending, pass immigration reform and tackle other challenges.</p> <p>But should the GOP stand in the way, the president indicated he’s willing to use executive orders to accomplish his aims.</p>

Don’t count Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus among those who believe comprehensive immigration reform is dead this Congress. Despite exasperation among reform advocates that the House has refused to vote on any major immigration bill — particularly the Senate-passed legislation — Priebus said that his “gut” feeling is that the House will indeed pass an immigration overhaul in the next 14 months. “Something significant is going to happen because obviously mass deportation is not an option. I don’t think doing nothing is an option. And I believe most people would agree that something significant needs to take place. Now...

China: For the record. The third plenary session of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party convened on 8 November. In its report announcing the opening of the four-day meeting in Beijing, state news agency Xinhua said it would discuss "major issues concerning comprehensively deepening reforms". Comment: Senior Chinese officials have hinted that this meeting will discuss and decide significant social and economic reforms, such as more liberal market conditions and more measures to reduce official corruption. In the past two weeks, authorities also have made clear that political reform is not on the agenda. Syria-al Qaida: Al-Qaida...

p>The Talk Shows November 10th, 2013 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Christie; Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Bob Corker, R-Tenn.; Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md.FACE THE NATION (CBS): Christie; Leon Panetta, former defense secretary and CIA director.THIS WEEK (ABC): Christie; Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas; Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J.STATE OF THE UNION (CNN): Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan.; Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla.; Reince Priebus, Republican National Committee chairman.

BURLEY • Billboards are popping up in Mini-Cassia exclaiming, “They didn’t need to implement ObamaCare.” “They,” whose names are listed on the billboards are District 27 legislators, Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, House Speaker Scott Bedke, R-Oakley, and Rep. Fred Wood, R-Burley. **SNIP** All the names of legislators who voted for the state insurance exchange will not make their way onto a billboard because there is “not enough room” on a billboard, Hoffman wrote in an email to the Times-News.

ObamaCare isn't the only policy train wreck in progress. Like Mao urging peasants to melt down their pots, pans and farm tools to turn China into a steel-producing superpower overnight, Germany dished out subsidies to encourage homeowners and farmers to install solar panels and windmills and sell energy back to the power company at inflated prices. Success—Germany now gets 25% of its power from renewables—has turned out to be a disaster. As Germans rush to grab this easy money, carbon dioxide output has risen, not fallen, because money-strapped utilities have switched to burning cheap American coal to provide the necessary...

On 22 October 2013, we described how the dysfunctional Healthcare.gov web site could be fixed within a very short period of time. It turns out that three of our code-developer colleagues have put the shopping portion of our solution into effect: Meet the Health Sherpa, the website HealthCare.gov probably should have been. George Kalogeropoulos, Ning Liang and Michael Wasser saw the troubled launch and decided they could do a better health care enrolment website better than the government and, by golly, they succeeded. The Health Sherpa makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to compare health care plans covered under Obamacare...