Free Republic

The unraveling of the Barack Obama's dysfunctional presidency started when it became clear his policies were not improving a jobless economy that is still on the Fed's temporary life- support system. Things went from bad to worse when he won a second term without offering a new agenda. The government was on auto-pilot and remains so today. It is still sinking deeper into debt (two-thirds of a trillion dollars this year), jobs are in short-supply, we've lost the respect of our allies, global terrorism is spreading, but at long last the national news media seems to be turning on him....

Often in error but never in doubt, Barack Obama could walk into the Rose Garden and step on a half-dozen rakes like Foghorn Leghorn in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and the official line would be, "He meant to do that." And the amazing thing is that so many people believe it. "Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He's smart, deft, elegant and subtle," proclaimed then-New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in 2009. It's an image of the president that his biggest fans, in and out of the press,...

Perhaps Obama was onto something when, as a young author, he zeroed in on the term "audacity" to (subconsciously) telegraph his ambitious designs to fundamentally transform our beloved America. What word could describe better than audacity Obama's refusal to accept responsibility for his dreadful policies; his standing before the American people -- even today -- in the face of the avalanche of evidence proving how terrible Obamacare is and continuing to lie about what it will do; his persistence in mislabeling his unaffordable monstrosity "the Affordable Care Act;" his failure to address the legitimate, undeniable complaints about Obamacare and his...

In 1984, Singapore instituted a revolutionary idea: a system of compulsory saving for medical expenses. That was the same year my colleagues and I at the National Center for Policy Analysis introduced the idea of Health Savings Accounts in this country.After almost three decades, Singapore has now come to the attention of a lot others, including a book by Brookings, and a whole slew of posts by bloggers.At the risk of disappointing you, Singapore does not have a free market for health care. What it does have is an alternative to the European/American welfare state, in which private saving and...