Free Republic

Finally. James O'Keefe interviews the gentleman that exposed Gruber and happens upon the true reason for ObamaCare. I've been thinking this for over a year. ObamaCare is nothing more than turning back the the provision of healthcare coverage paid for by employers that was brought about by FDR's wage & price controls implemented in the 1940s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942 There you have it. It's just about the money coming out of your pocket.

Most Americans don’t watch C-SPAN and I cannot blame them. More often than not, it seems as though the Senate is in a quorum call or a lone senator is debating something totally irrelevant to the issues that are important to most Americans. That changed a little bit on Saturday when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Utah Sen. Mike Lee forced the Senate to debate President Obama’s executive amnesty. I’ll save you the boring back-and-forth that occurred in our nation’s capital over the procedural stuff and cut right to the chase: Ted and Mike were attempting to carry out the...

Former Gov. Jesse Ventura filed suit Monday against HarperCollins, the New York publisher of the book that a federal jury in St. Paul said had defamed him. In July Ventura won $1.8 million from the estate of Chris Kyle, the late Navy SEAL who wrote the bestselling memoir “American Sniper,” which included a subchapter about an alleged California bar fight between him and a man he called “Scruff Face” and later identified as Ventura. Ventura, who is also a former member of a SEAL unit, successfully argued that the bar fight and disparaging remarks he made against Navy SEALs attributed...

Explanation: How do stars form? Images of the star forming region W5 like those in the infrared by NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite provide clear clues with indications that massive stars near the center of empty cavities are older than stars near the edges. A likely reason for this is that the older stars in the center are actually triggering the formation of the younger edge stars. The triggered star formation occurs when hot outflowing gas compresses cooler gas into knots dense enough to gravitationally contract into stars. In the featured scientifically-colored infrared image, spectacular pillars, left...

Atheism and Orthodoxy in Modern RussiaBy Metropolitan Hilarion AlfeyevMay 2001In this talk I propose to outline the history of atheism in Russia during the last hundred years. I will start by considering the kind of atheism present in Russia before the Revolution. Then I will say something about the development of atheism during the Soviet period. And finally I will conclude with some observations concerning the nature of Russian post-Soviet atheism.

I should like to begin with the following questions. How did it happen that the country known as ‘Holy Russia’, with such a long history of Orthodox Christianity, was in...

Gov. John Kasich’s Obamacare expansion has put 450,941 Ohioans on Medicaid, outpacing his administration’s projections by 24 percent. Instead of tempering leftist support for the expansion, budget-busting enrollment is portrayed as good news for Ohio; Obamacare sticks federal taxpayers with 100 percent of Medicaid expansion benefit costs through 2016. Kasich — who expanded Medicaid over the General Assembly’s express disapproval — told attendees at a Dec. 4 infant mortality summit to march in favor of more Obamacare expansion spending, but critics are encouraging legislative opponents to stand their ground. “Kasich is threatening to organize protests to ensure the state continues...

(Photo: CNS) The III Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops met for several weeks in October 2014 and issued the document, “Pastoral Challenges to the Family in the Context of Evangelization.” There has been much commentary about the ill-conceived interim report, Relatio post Disceptationem, which implied that homosexuality had inherent positive gifts and that divorced and remarried people who were in a state of perpetual adultery could somehow be accommodated to be able to receive communion. The scandalous nature of these ill-conceived paragraphs created great public confusion. Thankfully, in the final Relatio Synodi, the scandalous language was removed....

Ouch! Russian billionaires have lost more than $50 billion this year due to the country's unfolding economic nightmare. Western sanctions, low oil prices and the falling ruble have wiped billions off the wealth of Russia's 15 richest men, according to data from Bloomberg. The chairman of Russian gas producer Novatek has suffered the biggest losses, seeing his portfolio shrink by an estimated $8.7 billion. That's equivalent to a loss of nearly 50%.

I’ve been trying to come up with a list of nationalities or ethnic groups—even subgroups—about whom it is still safe to make a joke publicly, since political correctness is shrinking the domain down to the vanishing point. Before long you won’t be able to make jokes about “little green men” from Mars, for fear of offending illegal aliens “undocumented” immigrants. I’m not even sure you can joke about white people any more, like Martin Mull and Allen Rucker did 20 years ago in A History of White People in America. Not even Sony would risk publishing this right now. So...

BLOOMSBURG — Leaders in Bloomsburg have decided against going ahead with plans for a controversial law at a meeting Monday night. With a narrow vote of four to three, Bloomsburg town officials voted not to draft an ordinance that would make it illegal for businesses to discriminate against people based on sexual orientation. Council met with a packed room and heard hours of input on whether the town needed such an ordinance. “Lacks constitutional weight both federally and at a state level, being carried along more by emotion than reason,” said one speaker who opposed the ordinance. “Many members of...

I confess that I halfway looked forward to George Tsunis being confirmed as ambassador to Norway.  He could have made for a highly amusing storyline on Season 3 of Lilyhammer, the hilarious Netflix Original series that satirizes political correctness in Norway and the clash of cultures between American Mafiosi and Scandinavian self-righteous niceness.  But when Harry Reid failed to shove him through Senate confirmation in the back-door deal last weekend, the handwriting was on the wall for the spectacularly unqualified nominee.  No way would a GOP majority next year confirm such an ignorant putz. David Matosko of the U.K....

It was just a matter of time. After living in the spotlight for 22 years and inching toward another presidential bid, Hillary Clinton is finally the subject of a full-length novel.

Ted Cruz privately apologized to GOP senators Tuesday for interrupting their holiday schedules by his surprise tactics that effectively brought the Senate into session over the weekend. According to five senators who attended Tuesday’s caucus lunch, Cruz offered the apology in unsolicited remarks, saying that he regretted if any of his colleagues’ schedules were ruined by his maneuvering. He didn’t say whether he would do something similar again, senators said. And unlike a contentious lunch last year after GOP senators pointedly blamed Cruz for prompting the government shutdown, no sharp words were directed at the Texas freshman at Tuesday’s lunch,...

A video from 2011 is making the rounds again on social media just in time for the Christmas season. Lebanese-born cleric Abu Musaab Wajdi Akkari declares in the video posted on The Middle East Media Research Institute TV Monitor Project website that the “Merry Christmas” greeting is “worse than fornication, and drinking alcohol and killing someone.” “You cannot say Merry Christmas, not even if an alien came and he told you – you cannot even say it to him and say: ‘He’s just an alien,” Akkari says in the video, first posted on Nov. 6, 2011. "I’m never going to...

The Central Bank's midnight decision to hike Russia's key interest rate to 17 percent set off clashing waves of support and opprobrium Tuesday as Russia struggled to come to terms with its new economic reality. The regulator's decision to raise rates by 6.5 percent followed the ruble's 10 percent nosedive against the U.S. dollar on Monday, its steepest single-day decline since the financial crisis of 1998. Despite the measure, the Russian currency fell sharply on Tuesday, at one point weakening 20 percent to touch a new low of 80 rubles to the dollar. Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis, oil...

Do you recall that, last year, Card. Burke consoled a little boy who was crying because he couldn’t yet receive Communion?  HEREThis is somewhat beyond the ken of most catholics, I believe.  They might console a Questioning-status minor not yet able to vote more than once in the same pro-same-sex “marriage” referendum.   But, I digress.  This shouldn’t be polemic and… there I went and did it.  Sorry!  I am under the weather.So, last year Card. Burke consoled a boy who couldn’t receive Communion.  At that time His Eminence said that his time would come soon enough.The day came!Here is a piece from...

<p>Earlier Tuesday, a federal court in Pennsylvania declared aspects of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration policy unconstitutional.</p> <p>According to the opinion by Judge Arthur Schwab, the president’s policy goes “beyond prosecutorial discretion” in that it provides a relatively rigid framework for considering applications for deferred action, thus obviating any meaningful case-by-case determination as prosecutorial discretion requires, and provides substantive rights to applicable individuals. As a consequence, Schwab concluded, the action exceeds the scope of executive authority.</p>

MOSCOW, December 16 /TASS/. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said on Tuesday that he wanted to quit his high state post and leave for Ukraine’s Donbas region to help the local militias, the NTV channel reported on its website. Commenting on initiation of criminal proceedings against him in Ukraine and Kiev’s threats to put him on the international wanted list, Kadyrov told NTV’s “Bez Kupyur” (Without Banknotes) program that they could keep wagging their tongues for as long as they liked. “They can keep saying whatever they like. But I am going to ask the (Russian) president for permission to quit...

Bay Area protests over the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and scores of others may assuage white liberal guilt and provide a righteous reason to rail against the machine, but it would be nice to actually hear from some black folks. So far, it seems all I’ve seen and heard in three weeks of protest are some pretty vocal white folks screaming to have their way, or dismissing the actions of the wolves inside the flock as the ugly backside of democracy. Assault, vandalism and looting are not protected forms of free speech.

Only eight days prior to the horrendous slaughter of children and school staff in Pakistan, Barack Obama released Pakistani Taliban leader, the second in command of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). This is the exact group claiming responsibility for today’s massacre in Peshawar, leaving 141 dead.