Free Republic

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said after speaking with President Barack Obama on Tuesday that he is “very comfortable” that the administration will solve Obamacare’s problems. Reid wouldn’t say whether or not he will consider any legislation that alters Obamacare until top White House officials come to a Thursday Senate Democratic caucus lunch to explain progress on the law’s disastrous rollout and its troubled website.

I don’t get it. Sebelius claims that “the marketplace is working.” What is there to talk about? Actually, I can think of two items on the agenda. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Thursday will convene a special meeting of the Senate Democratic caucus and senior White Officials to discuss the troubled rollout of ObamaCare… The Senate leader said President Obama called him Tuesday evening to discuss healthcare and other issues. Several Democrats have signed onto a proposal sponsored by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) that would force insurance companies to let people keep their health plans if they like...

CHICAGO – A public university in President Abraham Lincoln’s home state of Illinois is adorned with a plaque that states Lincoln – arguably the most famous and influential president in American history – was a Democrat. Lincoln was a Republican. The plaque, located on a historic building that’s part of Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and installed in 1905, states: “This building is dedicated to public service honoring the memory of Abraham Lincoln Democrat.” When a picture of the memorial recently surfaced on social media sites, it quickly went viral, and prompted anger among many Republicans, who called the dedication...

Poor Matt Yglesias. The liberal economics blogger for Slate thinks he knows more than you. So when people began predicting that the Obamacare exchanges might not get off to such a great start, he was there to correct them. “I wanted to once again take the opportunity to lay down a marker and say once again that Obamacare implementation is going to be a huge political success,” he wrote in July on his blog. But so far, the implementation of Obamacare’s online exchanges have gone anything but swell

The old folks are showing the kids these days how it's done. That is, people over 50 are turning to drugs more so than their kids and grandkids. Drug use among people aged 50 to 64 has "doubled" over the past decade, according to the U.S. government. Of the 23.9 million Americans who are current drug users, 7.2 percent of people between 50 and 64 years old reported using illicit drugs -- which is still less than the nearly 10 percent of "children and teenagers" who use illegal drugs, according to an annual survey of drug use. The most-popular drug...

A recent study has found that global warming is causing apples to lose some of their crunch. The study which was published on Scientific Reports, analysed data gathered from 1970 to 2010 at two orchards in Japan and ...

Obama: Planet Will ‘Boil Over' If Africans Are Allowed Cars and Air-Conditioning July 1, 2013 - 4:22 PM By Ryan Kierman (CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama said at a town hall event in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Saturday that unless we find new way of producing energy "the planet will boil over" if people in Africa are allowed to attain air conditioning, automobiles and big houses. “Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got...

Lucky Charms won’t just be at the end of the rainbow anymore. It’ll be right up in front, toeing the line for gay activists and their agenda. According to The Huffington Post, General Mills just announced that Lucky Charms – with little rainbow marshmallows – will be the face for a new gay pride campaign, called #LuckyToBe.

EXCERPT “I don’t think we have a definitive on that yet,” Bachmann said. “I think there’s still a loophole that the speaker might allow himself — that he won’t hold himself to the Hastert rule. In the shorthand, this is what I think is going to happen — the very bad bill is going to be in the Senate. We’re going to have a Trojan Horse bill that will look very good. It will look like border security in the House. Conservatives will vote for it in the House. Both bills will go to conference committee. The guts will get...

Entertainment star Barbra Streisand is attacking Jewish religious practices in Israel that treat women differently from men. Short excerpt due to AP Copyright

No, he wasn’t, as the New York Times eventually made clear. But the point of a political fundraiser is to tell the audience what it wants to hear in exchange for cash, so here’s Biden earning some money for Ed Markey in Boston last night: “This man was elected president of the United States of America,” Biden said according to the pool report. “No, no, no. He was elected president of the United States of America. But for the good of the nation, when the bad decision in my view was made, he did the right thing for the nation.”...

Meet your new late-night CNN host George Stroumboulopoulos, who feels the Toronto Mayor's alleged use of a gay slur was worse than if he had a crack addiction, and thinks New York City Mayor Bloomberg is a "right-winger" whose soda ban revealed that his "heart's in the right place" and whose support for "marriage equality" was "fantastic." Stroumboulopoulos, currently a nightly CBC television host, will host a weekly talk show debuting on Sunday night June 9 and airing on Friday nights at 11 p.m. ET. CNN announced his show would focus on a variety of issues from sports to pop...

During his visit to the Jersey Shore with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie Tuesday, President Obama referred to the wrong city in Oklahoma devastated by a tornado last week. Even though Mr. Obama had just visited the city of Moore, Okla. Sunday and toured the path of destruction the tornado left, in remarks in Asbury Park, New Jersey Tuesday he sent a shout-out to the victims in Monroe, Okla., which is more than 200 miles to the east of Moore. “When you look out at the beach here, even in the rain it looks good,” he said. “You can count...

The Obama administration got some backing Sunday for the way in which it responded as terrorists attacked the US diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, last September – a night of violence and confusion during which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Republican who served in both the Bush and Obama administrations, said if he had been at the Pentagon at that time, "Frankly … I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were.” Republican critics have said a Special Forces team or overflights by fighter aircraft based in Italy...

Barack Obama held a campaign stop at Manor Technical High School in Austin, Texas today. He used the high school kids as props for his speech. Obama also told the high schoolers that he will need their help to push his agenda. “Every once in a while I’m going to need your help to lean on your elected representatives…” (VIDEO-AT-LINK) Here’s the transcript via the White House website: Now, there are three things that we’ve got to focus on to create more jobs and opportunity for the middle class. First of all, we’ve got to make America a magnet for...

The Miami Dolphins’ quest for public funding for an overhaul of Sun Life Stadium will go down to the wire in the Florida Legislature. After hopes appeared to be fading early Friday, the Senate version of the bill was scheduled for a second reading on Monday. There are five days remaining in the session, and the House version of the bill remains bogged down in committee.

On Thursday, just hours after the FBI released blurry pictures of the two suspected Boston Marathon bombers, CNN anchor Erin Burnett assumed the suspects were "stereotypically" white Americans and not linked to any foreign terror group. It turned out that the suspects--Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev--are technically "white" as they are ethnically Chechen (although Dzhokhar recently became a citizen). But what Burnett, like many in the mainstream media who instinctively assume such acts are committed by those who look like Timothy McVeigh, was implying was that the suspects in the photos were white Americans who were born in this country. "They...

Democrats, including Hoyer, today blamed the Boston Marathon bombings on the Republicans. According to them, the Republican Sequester so damaged our intelligence community that it caused the Marathon bombers to get away with it. Took then just 24 hours to blame conservatives for the lives and limbs lost. I am no fan of the Democrats, but this lowers the level of their loathsomeness to a new bottom.

Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday that President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush could have "conceivably been put in jail” for their drug use, ruining their lives and impacting their getting elected to office. "Look, the last two presidents could have conceivably been put in jail for their drug use and I really think - look what would've happened, it would've ruined their lives. They got lucky. But a lot of poor kids, particularly in the inner city, don't get lucky and they don't have good attorneys and they go to jail for some of these things and...

Graham Greene’s observation has lost none of its salience in 50 years: innocence remains “like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” The latest illustration comes from Wisconsin, where the state’s Department of Public Instruction website devotes a page to “Power and Privilege.” Caucasians who volunteer in the state’s AmeriCorps VISTA antipoverty programs are instructed to “set aside sections of the day to critically examine how privilege works”; “put a note on your mirror or computer screen as a reminder to think about privilege”; and, in order to underline white guilt, “find a...