Free Republic

No one seems to want to sit next to Jonathan Gruber. The Obama administration is asking Rep. Darrell Issa not to put its senior Medicare official next to the now infamous Obamacare “architect” when both testify on Capitol Hill next Tuesday. But it’s very clear that Issa, in one of his last investigative hearings as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wants to put Obamacare in a harsh spotlight by pairing Gruber with Marilyn Tavenner of CMS. They’ll be speaking about separate Obamacare issues — and the administration wants Issa to seat them separately, too. “I am...

Ansar al Islam, which goes by the moniker Jamaat Ansar al Islam in Syria, has been coordinating its efforts with the Al Nusrah Front and Jaish al Muhajireen wal Ansar in a major battle for two Shiite villages north of Aleppo. The villages of Zahra and Nubl have been besieged by anti-regime elements since late November. Rebel forces have previously surrounded the villages and cut off electric and water services to the citizens. The two towns are located on a road to Turkey that is a key supply route into Aleppo. Ansar al Islam is an al Qaeda-affiliated group that...

The photo above isn't from the archives. It was taken this week in Oklahoma City, where the price of regular gas has fallen under $2 a gallon. The last time that happened anywhere in the U.S. was in July 2010. The OnCue filling station is the first in the country to drop its price below the $2/gallon threshold. While $1.99 is definitely an anomaly even in Oklahoma (Gasbuddy.com tells us the average for the state is $2.47), anyone who has filled up anytime in the past several weeks is aware of a pleasantly precipitous drop in pump prices. And fuel...

The European Central Bank has dashed hopes for quantitative easing this year and acknowledged for the first time that the institution’s elite board is split on plans for a €1 trillion liquidity blitz. Equity markets fell across southern Europe,with Italy’s MIB off 2.77pc, led by sharp falls in bank stocks. Spain’s IBEX dropped 2.35pc. The euro surged by more than 1pc to $1.2455 against the dollar in early trading as speculators rushed to cover short positions. Expectations for immediate stimulus had been riding high after the ECB’s president, Mario Draghi, pledged action “as fast as possible” last month. The bank...

Euro zone ministers are considering extending Greece's bailout by six months to mid-2015, according to a document obtained by Reuters, but Athens said it was only willing to consider an extension of a few weeks to the unpopular program. Extending the program beyond a few weeks into the new year would complicate Prime Minister Antonis Samaras' efforts to secure victory for his preferred candidate in a presidential vote in February. He had depended on exiting the EU/IMF bailout by the end of the year, when funding from the EU is due to end. "Greece has not received any written proposal...

The Vatican's economy minister has said hundreds of millions of euros were found "tucked away" in accounts of various Holy See departments without having appeared in the city-state's balance sheets. In an article for Britain's Catholic Herald Magazine to be published on Friday, Australian Cardinal George Pell wrote that the discovery meant overall Vatican finances were in better shape than previously believed. "In fact, we have discovered that the situation is much healthier than it seemed, because some hundreds of millions of euros were tucked away in particular sectional accounts and did not appear on the balance sheet," he wrote.

The Russian markets opened on December 1 to a catastrophe. The price of Brent crude oil fell below $70 a barrel, causing the ruble to drop heavily yet again. There had been some signs that the Russian currency was beginning to claw back some of the ground lost this year, but another step-down in the price of oil to below the psychologically important $70 level kicked the legs out from under the nascent rally. Against the dollar, the ruble exchange rate had dropped 9.3% by midday, taking it below the key RUB50/$ for the first time. You’d have to go...

NSIDC has announced the discovery and recovery of space footage of Earth’s polar icecaps, dating back to 1964. The recovered photographs have yielded some startling surprises, according to David Gallaher, technical services manager at NSIDC, bold mine: In the Arctic, sea ice extent was larger in the 1960s than it is these days, on average. “It was colder, so we expected that,” Gallaher said. What the researchers didn’t expect were “enormous holes” in the sea ice, currently under investigation. “We can’t explain them yet,” Gallaher said. “And the Antarctic blew us away,” he said. In 1964, sea ice extent in...

An ex-Guantanamo detainee based in northern Pakistan is leading an effort to recruit jihadists for the Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot that controls large portions of Iraq and Syria. Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, who was detained at Guantanamo for three years, has sworn allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. Dost's oath of allegiance was issued on July 1, just two days after Baghdadi named himself "Caliph Ibrahim I" and declared that his Islamic State was now a "caliphate." Pakistani officials have accused Dost of recruiting jihadists for Baghdadi's organization. He is thought to be behind a...

Last month Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov announced that Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil company, had requested 2 trillion roubles (then $49 billion) from the state’s National Wealth Fund (NWF) to help it meet its funding requirements. The request was refused but it left questions over how the oil company planned to meet its $30 billion in debt repayments due over the next year after the oil price collapse of recent months. We now have the answer — a large part of it will be paid by China. As part of the deal struck between China and Russia at the Asia-Pacific...

Audio ___ first 20 minutes John Batchelor interviews journalist w/ Long War Journal re our involvement in Syraq, Yemen, Algeria, Saudi Arabia

ObamaCare has become big business for an elite network of Washington lobbyists and consultants who helped shape the law from the inside. More than 30 former administration officials, lawmakers and congressional staffers who worked on the healthcare law have set up shop on K Street since 2010. ObamaCare has become big business for an elite network of Washington lobbyists and consultants who helped shape the law from the inside. More than 30 former administration officials, lawmakers and congressional staffers who worked on the healthcare law have set up shop on K Street since 2010.

John Batchelor interviews Tim Wu author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires audio 20:03

Remember the global financial crisis, triggered six years ago when billions of dollars of dodgy loans - doled out by banks to subprime borrowers and then resold numerous times on international debt markets - began to unravel and default? Stock markets plunged, banks collapsed and the entire global financial system teetered on the brink of catastrophe. Well a similarly chilling economic scenario could be set off by the current collapse in oil prices. Based on recent stress tests of subprime borrowers in the energy sector in the US produced by Deutsche Bank, should the price of US crude fall by...

More than a decade ago, David Gross was just your typical Bay Area dude. He worked as a technical writer for a software company and made around $100,000. Then the U.S. invaded Iraq, and Gross had what was probably a pretty typical Bay Area reaction: He didn’t agree with the war. But for Gross, who is now 44, this opposition turned visceral. Even though he was going to anti-war protests and speaking about his opposition to the war publicly, he couldn’t sleep. He had trouble looking at himself in the mirror. Rather than continue working, Gross embarked on a drastic...

Far more troubling, however, is the lack of disclosure on the part of the White House, the Senate, the DNC and other Democratic leaders who distributed Gruber’s work and cited it as independent validation of their proposals, orchestrating the appearance of broad consensus when in fact it was all part of the same effort. The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber’s “assumptions” to justify key portions of the Senate bill, which they allowed people to believe was independent verification. Now that we know that Gruber’s work was not that of an independent analyst but rather work...

Growing anger in Mexico at federal inaction after revelation that the missing teachers were burned in a huge funeral pyre ___ A demonstration sparked by the Mexican government’s announcement that 43 student teachers disappeared by police in the southern city of Iguala six weeks ago were probably massacred in a rubbish dump, ended at the weekend with masked protesters setting fire to the wooden door of the ceremonial presidential palace in Mexico City’s main Zócalo plaza. The protesters broke away from the otherwise peaceful demonstration as it drew to a close, tearing down the protective metal fences set up around...

Kim Kardashian is angry at a woman the piece refers to as “internet bottom sensation” Jen Selter. Selter has been posting photographs of her large buttocks on Instagram, an activity Kardashian apparently feels is an unacceptable infringement upon her very raison d’etre: one of the gangplanks of Kim Kardashian’s global celebrity being her nonpareil ability to take photographs of her own large buttocks with a cameraphone. “Kim thinks Jen copies all her poses … she is fuming as she feels her curvy bum is one of her most unique selling points and feels that Jen is just trying to cash...

Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing. Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as "massive criminal securities fraud" in the bank's mortgage operations. Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it's not exactly news that the country's biggest banks stole on...

Wendy Davis made herself a progressive champion by running as an outspoken progressive in a really conservative state, with the predictable result that she lost really, really badly. Salon’s Jenny Kutner, a strong Davis supporter, concedes that Davis did, in fact, lose. What Kutner refuses to concede is that Davis lost among women: The Tribune cited CNN exit polls to illustrate the landslide, saying Abbott “beat Davis by lopsided margins with white voters (72-27), men (65-34) and women (52-47). Davis beat Abbott among Latinos (57-42) and African-Americans (93-7).” Last time I checked, though, there were thousands upon thousands of women...