Free Republic

The New York Times reported this weekend, even the words “affordable” and “care” have turned out to be untrue as well. The sharp rise in premiums has garnered the most headlines in the first three open-enrollment seasons of Obamacare, but equally if not more pernicious has been the increase in deductibles. As Eric Pianin explained for The Fiscal Times on Monday, deductibles have increased an average of 11 percent on Bronze level plans for 2016, intended to be the most affordable of all options, and now average over $5700. For Silver level, deductibles rose 6 percent and now average over...

Ever since Hillary Clinton announced her run for the presidency concerns have been raised in many quarters, by people of all political persuasions, that she was simply too old to hold the office if she was elected. Hillary, if elected, would be the second oldest person to win the office after Ronald Reagan. But where Reagan was very active throughout his life, Hillary is a different story.    Hillary never participated in athletics when she was younger, something about being too ugly to participate. And now, as she approaches the BIG SEVEN-ZERO she is very out of shape. It is a safe...

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas argued Monday that one line from President Barack Obama encapsulated both Obama's foreign policy and that of his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.Cruz, a Republican presidential candidate, told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that Obama's statement was a "stunning indictment" of the president's policies after last week's terrorist attacks in Paris.Obama made the remark at a news conference in Turkey earlier in the day:What I'm not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of 'American leadership' or 'America winning,' or whatever other slogans they come up with that has no relationship to...

Sen. Ted Cruz asserted Saturday that Christians are under assault, both by the government and in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris. Cruz has been assiduously courting evangelical Christian voters, and held a religious liberty rally at Bob Jones University here the day after his main rival for that bloc, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, appeared at the school. The Texas Republican spent more than an hour describing how he believes people of faith and their ideals are under siege — by the media, Democrats, the government and "radical Islamic terrorism" that is "a malevolent force that right now,...

Donald Trump's days of roaming freely about town are over ... because the Secret Service has now stepped in and his security team is no joke. Trump was leaving the Fox News building Monday morning in New York City and his security team left nothing to chance ... barricading off fans just so he could make the short walk to his car. Speaking of the car ... Trump usually travels around town in a limo, but that's been replaced with a blacked-out SUV. Welcome to the big leagues, Donald.

The talking points immediately after the Paris attacks - and I've seen multiple Fox News commentators repeat it - is that this hurts "outsider candidates." Candidates with "experience" are helped. I agree with Coulter. It helps Trump. He was calling for the wall and end to Syrian 'refugees' before the attack. He was ahead of the curve on this. The politicians (except Cruz) were for opening borders and saying it wasn't "possible" to deport people.

It's hard to keep up with the twists and turns in this presidential race. Hillary Clinton under fire on Benghazi! Ben Carson has a theory about the pyramids! Bernie Sanders wrote about rape fantasies! Donald Trump . . . well, Donald Trump! Figuring out which headline will have the biggest impact on the general election is a bit of a parlor game. But what if they have no impact at all? After the 2012 election, political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck wrote a book called"The Gamble"that looked at the cause of President Obama's victory over Mitt Romney. They sifted...

Why are so many conservative voters attracted to Donald Trump? Pundits have been scratching their heads trying to figure out why people on the right would back someone who is conservative on neither economic nor social issues, someone who addresses the concerns of neither the low-tax crowd nor the moral traditionalists. What they overlook is the third – and most important – leg of the conservative stool: robust American nationalism. Few voters really care that much about small government or free-market economics, as compelling as the case for them is. More important are moral issues like abortion and natural marriage...

Mike Murphy finds it all very funny that people think Jeb Bush is in trouble. The head of Bush’s $100 million super PAC, Right to Rise, considers most political punditry this cycle to be stupid. Conceded. But both the stupid and occasional non-stupid pundits all agree on one thing: Things aren’t going well for Bush, and one cannot assume that the old rules governing Republican presidential nominating contests will inevitably save him. Murphy outlined his thinking in a rare extended interview with Bloomberg Politics. Why? Most practically, to signal Right to Rise’s thinking to the official Bush campaign and leery...

Kevin McCarthy was factually right -- if grammatically and politically wrong -- when he told Sean Hannity that the House's Benghazi committee demonstrated Hillary Clinton was "untrustable." The Clinton-pleasers in the media like NBC's Andrea Mitchell almost glowed as they proclaimed McCarthy had offered a "political lifeline" to Clinton by admitting to a political agenda to get at her, using that tragedy. The Democrats have pushed heavily on the narrative that the House probe is transparently political -- as if everything they say about Clinton is transparently ... nonpartisan? So much of the Clinton spin from the media-Democrat complex simply...

You may not have noticed, but Lincoln Chafee, the erstwhile Republican U.S. senator and Independent-turned-Democratic governor, had one penetrating comment at the Democrats' debate Tuesday night. "But let me just say this about income inequality," he said toward the end. "We've had a lot of talk over the last few minutes, hours or tens of minutes, but no one is saying how we're going to fix it." Chafee offered no solution himself and showed his confusion about the issue by saying that inequality "all started with the Bush tax cuts that favored the wealthy." Actually, as my Washington Examiner colleague...

As conservatives scratch their collective heads on how to win over young people, a millennial whose online audience is center-left explains why Bernie Sanders is appealing to youth. Devin Foley, the thoughtful President of Intellectual Takeout and Better Ed, explains Sanders is growing in popularity among young people because he gives voice to those who can’t find jobs, who see unfair disparities and who suffer from massive debt. Besides that, Foley says conservatives refuse to reach out to youth in ways that resonate or make sense of the fallen world to them, a world that once promised going to college...

For over two hours five democrat politicians rambled on about how bad republicans are and how much money they wanted to give away to illegal aliens. How great they all would be for "women's health" care, national security and blah, blah, blah. Imagine the worthless moderator, who should have excused himself because he sits on the Clinton Foundation board, NEVER ONCE mentioning the biggest story in the United States over the last month, the selling of baby parts for profit by Planned Parenthood. Not one word asked of the candidates how they felt about this or why they think it's...

The Democrat Party is going to lose the 2016 elections in a landslide, and they can thank their radical anti-gun agenda for that loss. Bernie Sanders has boldly stated that “semi-automatic assault weapons” should be banned, along with standard-capacity magazines. The completely arbitrary definition of “assault weapons” defined by anti-gun politicians is always based upon superficial cosmetic features—flash hiders, barrel shrouds, bayonet lugs, telescoping stocks and/or pistol grips—that have nothing at all to due with the rate of fire, accuracy, or lethality of a given firearm. If he really wants to ban “semi-automatic assault weapons,” he’s going to have to...

Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in the general election the Republican Party needed to focus on the economy and national security and avoid the social issues, which he argued would cost the party politically.

You win the presidency, Richard Nixon supposedly observed, by tacking to the right in the primaries and to the center in the general election. Hillary Clinton seems to be following that strategy except, as a Democrat, she is tacking to the left. This strategy has risks, as Nixon, who lost the presidency once and won it once by narrow margins, understood. Your right- or left-wing stances in the primaries can hurt in the general. As happened to George McGovern, the leftward-tacking Democratic nominee in 1972, whom Nixon beat with 61 percent of the vote. In the four decades since only...

Monday at a Town Hall in Manchester, NH, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton urged “responsible gun owners,” to form a new gun rights advocacy group, separate from the National Rifle Association (NRA) to “take back the Second Amendment from these extremists.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Obama took the same attitude towards executive amnesty. Either Congress could give him what he wanted by legalizing illegals or he’d give himself what he wanted by legalizing illegals unilaterally. The president no longer loses in our system of (giggle) separation of powers, at least if he has a complacent caucus from his own party in Congress that’s willing to defend him on every power grab at their branch’s expense. Hillary’s building on that precedent now, in the middle of a surprisingly tough primary campaign, to stroke one of the few political erogenous zones...

FUll Title: Hillary Clinton Al Sharpton Interview: Black Vote Courted As Presidential Candidate To Appear On Civil Rights Leader's New MSNBC Program Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton this weekend is expected to make yet another attempt to court the black vote when she becomes the first guest of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s all-new weekly “PoliticsNation” talk show on MSNBC. The show is scheduled to premiere Sunday, Oct. 4, at 8 a.m. EDT.

This is a HTML LIST version of full text of TAX REFORM THAT WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN [Full text of Trump's Tax plan]. Personally I find it easier to get information when the entire document is in a kind of outline format. Hover underlined words for definitions.