Free Republic

The @#%& is about to hit the fan. No, not ISIS moving to attack the West, not Russia invading Ukraine, not Ebola coming to America, not the Middle East, not Libya (where al Qaeda — surprise — now rules), not even Ferguson. Health care costs are about to explode — again — and just in time for the 2014 midterm elections. When the supermajority of Democrats in the Senate passed the ironically named Affordable Care Act in 2009, one of the chief requirements of the bill was to force health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and health care centers to share...

If you want to know where a Democrat stands on the issue of immigration, all you need ask is if they have to face the voters in less than a deep blue state in November.

Late last year, vulnerable Democratic candidates worried that deep problems with the health care law could sink their chances of keeping a majority in the Senate. Now, suddenly, one red-state Democrat is praising the law in a new television ad — an indicator that public opinion of health care reform might have turned a corner. In the ad, Sen. Mark Pryor and his father, former Sen. David Pryor, recount Mark Pryor's own bout with cancer and his struggle finding health insurance that would cover it. "Mark's insurance company didn't want to pay for the treatment that ultimately saved his life," David Pryor says in the ad. "No one should be fighting...

Ask voters in North Carolina’s Research Triangle what November’s midterm elections are about and one will tell you drones. A second will say closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Yet another, the middle-class squeeze. At a Sunday school classroom in Ypsilanti, Mich., voters are concerned about deteriorating roads, teen sex parties, truancy in schools and violent crime. Six hundred miles west at a Republican campaign office in Urbandale, Iowa, people fear that America is on an irreversible decline — like Germany after World War I, as one man predicted. Across Colorado, voters are thinking about a whole other set...

More than a third of all respondents said they were worse off financially than five years ago. Another third said that they were doing about the same. Only 10% of respondents felt they were doing much better than they had been in 2008, highlighting the dual nature of the recovery. Twenty percent more said they were somewhat better off. Most households surveyed didn’t complain much about their finances. Sixty percent said they were either “doing okay” or “living comfortably” when asked how they were managing financially. Meanwhile, many respondents said credit was hard to come by. Nearly one-third of those...

Worth a watch, especially on this particular network even though Morning Joe offers much more reality than most of the rest of MSNBC’s schedule. Today’s reminder of reality comes from Wall Street Journal’s White House correspondent Carol Lee, who points out that the sunny rhetoric from Barack Obama and his administration has a “total disconnect” to the reality for most Americans, as seen in the latest NBC/WSJ poll. Time for another pivot? CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO “The President was campaigning, raising money in California a few weeks ago,” Lee notes, “and he was saying, ‘People feel better than...

House Republicans looked set to pass a bill on Thursday aimed at addressing the crisis on the southern border. After being revised repeatedly in order to appease conservative members who thought the bill did not go far enough, the leadership appeared to have settled on a final version which enjoyed broad support. The package even had the backing of moderate Democrats like Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX). “GOP leaders went to great lengths to secure passage by allowing a separate vote on a measure that would block Obama from any further executive action to stop the deportation of undocumented immigrants brought...

A new AP-GfK polls is all around bad news for President Obama, Democrats, and a mainstream media determined to push his amnesty agenda. Not only is public approval souring towards Obama's handling of the issue and the idea of a path to citizenship for illegals and the policy of offering asylum for this wave of Central American children, a plurality now see the Republican Party as better able to handle the issue of immigration. When asked about the President's handling of the immigration issue, only 31% said they approve while a whopping 68% disapprove. That's a 14 point shift against...

A study released by the Urban Institute on Tuesday found that more than 35 percent of Americans have unpaid bills and debt that has been reported to collection agencies.The debts surveyed include everything from gym memberships to auto loans. The study, which looked at records from September 2013, found that 35.1 percent of people with credit records had been reported to collection agencies. The average debt was $5,178.The Associated Press notes that while America has decreased its credit card debt, the percentage of Americans in collections has remained roughly the same. In 2004, a Federal Reserve study found that 36.5...

Republican Senate candidate Ed Gillespie said he thinks there is enough evidence to support climate change after being pressed on the issue during a debate with incumbent Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). "I believe there is ample scientific evidence that contributes to climate change but I'm not entirely dismissive of those who have a different point of view," Gillespie said. Gillespie added, "Norfolk is dealing with rising sea levels but people can debate what contributes to that or not." Still, Gillespie said he thinks the administration's new carbon pollution rules "go to far."

At first blush, a federal appeals court’s decision on Tuesday that dealt what many considered to be a near” fatal blow” to the Affordable Care Act could also appear to be a blow to Republicans’ hopes for retaking the Senate in November. Obamacare supporters are enraged. The decision in Halbig v. Burwell, which invalidated the federal government’s ability to provide subsidies for those Americans who purchased insurance through a federal health insurance exchange, could mean a major increase in premium rates for more than half of the 8 million who enrolled in ACA plans. The appeals court ruled that, as...

It is no accident that rhetoric about race has been ramping up at a time when racial politics can be the key determinant for control of the Senate this year.At least three states - North Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas - are red states with vulnerable Democrat senators up for re-election that have large black populations.Can racism really be as rampant in America as all the current rhetoric implies?A Google search for “racism” will produce a long list of articles from the most recent week's news claiming racism on issue after issue of national concern.We need to dig deeper and give...

Want to know what’s happening with Obamacare? Good luck finding out. The White House recently adopted a new approach for updating Americans on the country’s most consequential law. I call it the “needle in a haystack” method: Bury the announcement in hundreds of pages of regulations and hope no one finds it. The White House tried a test run several weeks ago. Hidden in the midst of a 436 page regulatory update, and written in pure bureaucratese, the Department of Health and Human Services asked that insurance companies limit the looming premium increases for 2015 health plans. But don’t worry,...

With Barack Obama's job approval well below water these days, perhaps it's no surprise that Democratic candidates for Congress this year aren't jumping at the chance to have the president come campaign for them. Dave Weigel at Slate points out how remarkable it was last week when Democratic senator Mark Udall of Colorado declined to appear with Obama, despite the fact that the president won Colorado twice. "Members of the White House political team will grit their teeth and ask low-level campaign staffers if, you know, it would be OK for the commander-in-chief to show up," Weigel writes. "They will...

It was a revealing convergence Monday when the five-member conservative Supreme Court majority delivered the Hobby Lobby contraception decision even as President Obama announced that House Republicans had officially shelved immigration reform. Both disputes reaffirmed the GOP's identity as the champion of the forces most resistant to the profound demographic and cultural dynamics reshaping American life—and Democrats as the voice of those who most welcome these changes. And both clashes captured a parallel shift: While Republicans took the offense on most cultural arguments through the late 20th century, now Democrats from Obama on down are mostly pressing these issues, confident...

Poll after poll shows President Obama’s approval rating dipping recently, and one new Quinnipiac University Poll finds that voters say Mitt Romney would have been a better choice in 2012. With Mr. Obama deploying military troops to Iraq, failing to find compromise with Congress and seeing major defeats in the Supreme Court, voters continue to sour on him. Quinnipiac found 45 percent of voters say the country would have been better off if Mr. Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, had been election, while just 38 percent say Mr. Obama remains a better choice. Even Democrats aren’t so sure — just...

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Rep. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) attacked both the Hobby Lobby U.S. Supreme Court decision and Republican Terri Lynn Land over the 5-4 vote that came down in favor of closely held businesses being able to decide whether they would offer contraceptive coverage to their employees under the Affordable Care Act.The Michigan Democratic Party took the opportunity to again blast Land, issuing several press releases July 1 attacking Land for what the state party described as her “radical agenda” on birth control and her initial silence on the Hobby Lobby ruling.“I support access to birth control, but...

Most Americans say their view of Obamacare will play a role in how they vote in upcoming congressional elections—but don't count on that guaranteeing that a particular political party is slam dunk winner this fall. A new Bankrate.com poll released Wednesday revealed that Obamacare-motivated voters are not necessarily heavily Republican or Democratic. It also revealed sharply decreasing support for outright repeal of the still-controversial health-care reform law. Most of those people, 44 percent of all respondents, said the health-care law would be a major factor in their decision, while 24 percent said it would play a minor role. Out of...

Incumbent Republican Senator Thad Cochran’s successful game plan, which drove his run-off victory over Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel for Mississippi’s Republican Senate nomination, was unconventional. But most incredible was the success of this game plan – to reach out to liberal black churches and get Democrat black voters to turn out and vote for Cochran – despite being executed in broad daylight. Soon after Cochran lost to McDaniel in the primary, necessitating a run-off because McDaniel fell short of getting 50 percent of the vote, papers reported the intent of Cochran’s team to turn out black Democrats to overcome...

Years ago, impeaching President Obama would’ve seemed like an impossibility, but with scandals and corruption leaking out of every nook and cranny of the White House, the likelihood of accomplishing such a Herculean feat has dramatically increased. Hot off the heels of a disastrous negotiation with terrorists, an Iraqi crisis, and several congressional investigations into the VA scandal, IRS targeting, and Benghazi cover up, the movement calling for Obama’s impeachment has gone mainstream. House Republicans claim the votes are there to move forward on impeachment, and to further prove the seriousness of all the fervor, Speaker Boehner is set to...