Free Republic

Spencer Bachus is trying to dig out out of the hole he dug when he slammed Sarah Palin this weekend. Bachus is in line to chair the powerful Financial Services Committee, but is facing a challenge from Ed Royce of California, and now from pro-Palin Tea Partiers who will watch this decision by John Boehner for signs of old boy networks trumping the new politics of grass roots activism. Most of the focus of the Tea Party activists had been on the competition between Fred Upton and John Shimkus for chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but with...

Massachusetts has the most expensive family health insurance premiums in the country, according to a new analysis that highlights the state’s challenge in trying to rein in medical costs after passage of a landmark 2006 law that mandated coverage for nearly everyone... The report by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care foundation, showed that the average family premium for plans offered by employers in Massachusetts was $13,788 in 2008, 40 percent higher than in 2003. Over the same period, premiums nationwide rose an average of 33 percent... Last month, the commission suggested that private and public insurers scrap their...

Dumb yet fascinating. Obama’s birth certificate won’t be an issue in the primaries (let’s hope) so how the big three rank is unimportant — unless Birtherism is actually a proxy for other political dynamics, in which case this becomes an interesting little data point. But if it’s a proxy, what’s it a proxy for? Level of education? Regional identification? Something else? My hunch is that the further right you go, the more Birther-y you get, not because you’re any more credulous on the merits of the birth-certificate argument but because the more adamant your opposition to Obama’s agenda, the more...