Free Republic

Ghazala Hashmi (D) unseated Virginia state Sen. Glen Sturtevant (R) on Tuesday to become the first Muslim woman elected to the state senate, according to The Associated Press. Hashmi, a former community college professor, will represent the state’s 10th Senate District, which includes Powhatan County and parts of Chesterfield County and Richmond. She emigrated to the U.S. from India as a child and 2019 marked her first campaign for public office. Hashmi’s campaign hit heavily on issues such as gun violence and education, and she was a supporter of Gov. Ralph Northam’s (D) universal pre-kindergarten proposals. During the campaign, she...

Project Veritas’ newest video from the American Pravda: CNN series exposes Jimmy Carr, the Associate Producer for CNN’s New Day attacking President Donald Trump and admitting that CNN has a left-leaning bias. When asked by an undercover journalist if CNN is impartial, Carr plainly responded, “In theory.”

Academics often believe they are the smartest people around, and they like to tell others how best to live their lives. Add the government’s power to control people’s lives and you have a dangerous combination. Americans got a taste of this elitism when MIT’s Jonathan Gruber mocked "the stupidity of the American voter." But American voters aren’t the only ones who make mistakes. Time after time, the “architect" of ObamaCare underestimated costs and overestimated how many people would be covered. Like so many Ivory Tower academics, Gruber doesn’t understand how the real world operates. Could it be that those “stupid”...

They'd be better off with "less scope for choosing the wrong plan."In a 2009 paper, “Choice Inconsistencies Among the Elderly: Evidence from Plan Choice in the Medicare Part D Program,” Obamacare advisor Jonathan Gruber argued that there were too many Medicare Part D plans for seniors to choose from, which led them to make bad decisions when enrolling in a plan. In the paper, written for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Gruber wrote with Jason T. Abaluck that the privatization of the public Medicare program had resulted in dozens of private insurers offering a wide variety of insurance products...

According to government data, the nearly $6 million in confirmed taxpayer dollars that Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber was paid from 2009 to 2014—about $1 million per year—is roughly 24 times the average salary earned by full-time American workers in the same general time frame. The average annual full-time U.S. salary was about $41,600 in those years, which multiplied 24 times is $998,400, or nearly $1 million a year. Gruber, who became famous last week from a video in which he admitted Obamacare was passed due to a “lack of transparency” and “the stupidity of the American voter,” has received at...

Perhaps proving he does believe we are stupid, President Obama said he “just heard about” the controversy swirling around Jonathan Gruber, who is widely seen as the architect of Obamacare. A number of videos have surfaced of Gruber saying the Obama administration relied on the “stupidity of the American voter” to pass the Affordable Care Act. During a news conference Saturday in Brisbane, Australia, Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry referenced Gruber and asked the president if he misled Americans to pass the health care law. “No. I did not,” Obama said. “I just heard about this — I...

".....In the 2011 video shot by TrueNorthReports.com and sent to Watchdog.org on Thursday, Gruber appears before the Vermont House Health Care Committee to present recommendations for a universal, publicly financed health care program. The recommendations were part of the 2011 “Hsiao Report” submitted to the Legislature by economist William C. Hsiao and co-written by Gruber. As Gruber sits listening, the committee chair reads a comment from a Vermonter who expresses concern that the economist’s plan might lead to “ballooning costs, increased taxes and bureaucratic outrages,” among other things. After hearing the Vermonter’s worries, Gruber responds, “Was this written by my...

Earlier this week, the Daily Caller found videos of economist Jonathan Gruber, who helped write the Affordable Care Act, committing gaffes. Conservatives have responded with wild anger at what they take to be a confession that the hated law was designed to fool the public. Gruber “said that lack of transparency was a major part of getting ObamaCare passed, and that it was written in such a way as to take advantage of ‘the stupidity of the American voter,’” cries Fox News. The right-wing media is treating Gruber’s comments as a “scandal” and even proposing possible hearings in Congress. The...

A new analysis by a leading MIT economist provides new ammunition for Democrats as the Senate begins formally debating the historic health-reform bill being pushed by President Barack Obama. The report concludes that under the Senate’s health-reform bill, Americans buying individual coverage will pay less than they do for today's typical individual market coverage, and would be protected from high out-of-pocket costs. So Democrats will argue that under the Senate bill, Americans would pay less for more. The new document arms Democrats with a response to the contention of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that the bill would mean...

Washington(CNN)--As Congress voted on the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in 2010, one of the bill's architects, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, told a college audience that those pushing the legislation pitched it as a bill that would control spiraling health care costs even though most of the bill was focused on something else and there was no guarantee the bill would actually bend the cost curve.In recent days, the past comments of Gruber--who in this 2010 speech notes that he "helped write the federal bill" and "was a paid consultant to the Obama administration to help develop the technical details...

As Congress voted on the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in 2010, one of the bill's architects, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, told a college audience that those pushing the legislation pitched it as a bill that would control spiraling health care costs even though most of the bill was focused on something else and there was no guarantee the bill would actually bend the cost curve. In recent days, the past comments of Gruber -- who in this 2010 speech notes that he "helped write the federal bill" and "was a paid consultant to the Obama administration to help develop...

Gruber saves some special scorn for the Republican governors who have bravely said no to...Free Money! "What I don't get is these STUPID governors who are turning down the Medicaid expansion," he said. "This is preposterously STUPID. First of all, your low-income people get health-insurance, and you get billions and billions of dollars of stimulus in health-care spending. For example, there are one million uninsured Floridians who are below the poverty line. The federal government is saying we'll pay to insure them, and, in addition, we're sending billions of dollars to you. And Rick Scott says no. There is no...

Mr. Gruber has spent decades modeling the intricacies of the health care ecosystem, which involves making predictions about how new laws will play out based on past experience and economic theory. It is his research that convinced the Obama administration that health care reform could not work without requiring everyone to buy insurance. And it is his work that explains why President Obama has so much riding on the three days of United States Supreme Court hearings, which ended Wednesday, about the constitutionality of the mandate. Questioning by the court’s conservative justices has suggested deep skepticism about the mandate, setting...

Posted By Bryan Preston On November 13, 2014 @ 7:51 am In Obamacare | 4 Comments Jonathan Gruber’s “stupid” comments have sent the Obama White House into a spin.When this White House gets under fire, it naturally turns to the press outlets that it has used as tools for years, including Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo.The name ought to give that site away: It’s not about facts, it’s about spin. Talking points.So the under-fire Obama White House turns to the talking pointers to deliver some talking points on Gruber’s “stupid” remarks.To wit: We were transparent the whole time we were...

Professor Jonathan Gruber of MIT, who designed the Affordable Care Act, used to be the symbol of the Democrats’ technocratic bona fides, and an example of how big government with its “scientific” experts can solve social and economic problems from health care to a warming planet. Yet a recently publicized video of remarks he made at a panel in 2013, along with 2 other videos in the same vein, has now made him the poster child of the elitist progressives’ contempt for the American people, and their sacrifice of prudence and reason to raw political power. In the video Gruber...

On Monday your humble correspondent speculated how the New Republic or Politico or other liberal sources would spin the Jonathan Gruber video scandal story in which he boasted about perpetrating Obamacare deception in order to get it passed. I offered bonus points to whichever liberal site could dream up the most creative spin control to explain away the viral video. Well, congratulations to Politico for the most entertaining spin. How did they do it? Besides being rather late to the story, they finally got around to it today, they were careful to bury it with no reference to any of...

... It looks like a shocking instance of a onetime Obama adviser saying that the administration pulled the wool over America’s eyes in advancing major legislation. That is certainly how many conservatives are interpreting it after a video of the remarks started circulating this week. But here’s the dirty little secret: Mr. Gruber was exposing something sordid yet completely commonplace about how Congress makes policy of all types: Legislators frequently game policy to fit the sometimes arbitrary conventions by which the Congressional Budget Office evaluates laws and the public debates them. Essentially, Congress is obsessed with the government equivalent of...

<p>A new tape has surfaced showing Jonathan Gruber, once again, claiming the health care law's authors took advantage of the "stupid" American public.</p> <p>The tape, played on Fox News' "The Kelly File," showed Gruber speaking at an October 2013 event at Washington University in St. Louis.</p>

I took one for the team and listened to this guy on a new tape for 52 minutes. Another Gruber video. This guy did travel the Country, speaking about the Obamacare-sham and DID REPEATEDLY to many groups, that O'care was: complicated, political, that the STATES IF NO EXCHANGES are set up their citizens will pay the "tax" but NO tax credits, and blah blah blah, and some INTERESTING NUGGETS.

<p>ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber apparently doesn't think much of the intelligence of the American people.</p> <p>A new tape has surfaced showing Gruber, once again, claiming the health care law's authors took advantage of the "stupid" American public.</p> <p>The tape, played on Fox News' "The Kelly File," showed Gruber speaking at an October 2013 event at Washington University in St. Louis.</p>