Free Republic

I don't seem to ever recall Democrats turning on their own like several "Republicans" have recently. I wonder how things would have turned out in the fight to defund, delay, alter ObamaCare if so-called Republicans would have listened to Reagan, when he underwent so many personal attacks during his 1966 campaign for governor, which led to the Eleventh Commandment: "Thou shatlt not speak ill of any Republican. Reagan said "It's a rule that I followed in that campaign and have ever since." McCain and others seem to like to evoke Reagan, but don't appear to follow what he said. In...

WASHINGTON — Senate leaders reached agreement Wednesday to avert a threatened Treasury default and reopen the government after a partial, 16-day shutdown, according to a Republican senator who also said the House might vote first on the plan to speed its approval.

Mark explains what President Obama is really doing - seizing the power of the purse from Congress and taking away their ability to control funding in the government. In essence, this has been a coup by the Executive to limit the power of all other branches so that there are no checks and balances. Obama will set spending levels and veto any bills that fall short of his demands as he threatens to single handedly push the nation into a default. Congressman Louie Gohmert calls in and gives an update on the inner fighting within the House, as nobody really...

Some tasks are occasionally necessary, though unpleasant. (Oops. My mind just drifted to that plastic bag you must carry with you when walking your dog.) Hunting down that roach your wife is just absolutely certain she saw scampering across the bedcovers would be one; talking to Harry Reid might be another. I’ll leave the roach to you. That’s what the Yellow Pages are for. Unfortunately the Yellow Pages are going to be of no help if you find yourself trying to make sense out of, or talk sense into, Harry Reid. Now Harry likes to throw around a lot of...

After a weekend of meetings, there is still no agreement on the debt ceiling or budget. debtceilgst The reaction? US credit default swaps rose this morning. But notice they are still lower than they were on October 10th. uscds101413 The US has the fastest rising CDS. Simply because the alleged default on US sovereign debt isn’t hurting any other country. sovcds101413 So, President Obama and Congress are digging in their heels on cutting spending and debt. Even though Germany is cutting back on its debt. debtdrop Germany was able to lower its debt-to-GDP ratio. Why can’t Congress and Obama agree...

Unless you’ve been bamboozled by the frantic fictions of the right wing, you know that the Affordable Care Act, familiarly known as Obamacare, has begun to accomplish its first goal: enrolling millions of uninsured Americans, many of whom have been living one medical emergency away from the poorhouse. You realize those computer failures that have hampered sign-ups in the early days — to the smug delight of the critics — confirm that there is enormous popular demand. You have probably figured out that the real mission of the Republican extortionists and their big-money backers was to scuttle the law before...

The news from Washington is all about President Obama’s impending triumph in the government shutdown/debt ceiling standoff. “Boehner Blinks,” declared a recent headline in The Washington Post. “Republicans,” explained ABC’s Jonathan Karl, “are working out the terms of their surrender.” If this is Republican surrender, I hope I never see Republican victory. To understand how upside down the current media analysis is, you need to go back a couple of years. In 2011, with Republicans threatening to provoke a debt default, President Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011, which cut government spending by $917 billion over 10 years....

As our divided government attempts to resolve the partial shutdown and debt ceiling fights, there is renewed talk of some type of “grand bargain” that could involve significant cuts to federal spending and entitlements. Resolving America’s fiscal crisis requires hard choices, but any “grand bargain” must ensure that we continue to fulfill our promises to the men and women who served. During the worst days of World War II, Winston Churchill famously said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Don’t these same words apply today to the “few” who...

Journalism icon Bob Woodward wrote in a new Washington Post op-ed first that the sequester was the "brain child" of the White House...

Bob Woodward said that sequestration was Obama's & Lew's idea. Why now is Obama againt it? Why was he for it before he was against it? Why does he flip-flop on his CORE beliefs (raising the debt ceiling, the individual mandate, sequestration, etc)? Not secondary or tertiary beliefs...core beliefs. And why is Lew fearmongering over the debt ceiling? What he has said about it recently has been debunked by Moody's.

President Obama, speaking in 2007 and 2008, explains why he was very much against an individual mandate... Time to give an opt-out for the individual mandate, and hold Congress to the same rules that they enact over others - as to ObamaCare.

House Republicans were furious with Senate Republicans and President Obama on Saturday for trying to cut a debt ceiling deal that leaves them out in the cold. Members emerged from a conference meeting saying Obama had double-crossed them by breaking off talks in order to shop for a better deal from the Senate GOP. “Clearly the president can't be trusted,” said Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.). “It is up to Senate Republicans to grow a backbone and stand with House Republicans like they said they were going to do.”

Last week I wrote a column accusing the president of having a vindictive streak — of deliberately trying to make the lives of average Americans worse just so he could score ideological and political points. We already knew from how he handled the budget sequester that Obama liked this approach. He ordered Cabinet secretaries not to do their jobs — i.e., to manage as best they could under spending restraints — but instead to find ways to make the cuts needlessly painful for innocents caught in the Beltway crossfire. They dusted off the same playbook for the shutdown. As one...

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced that she will travel to Washington, D.C. on Sunday to support and honor the veterans who will be arriving for the "Million Vet March" on the memorials. Speaking at a rally for New Jersey Republican Senate candidate Steve Lonegan along with Mark Levin on Saturday, Palin denounced the Obama administration for dishonoring veterans by barricading the World War II Memorial during the federal government shutdown. She said it was "heart-wrenching," "atrocious," and "not right."

The federal government wants to reduce the number of Americans diagnosed each year with cancer. But not by better preventive care or healthier living. Instead, the government wants to redefinethe term “cancer” so that fewer conditions qualify as a true cancer. What does this mean for ordinary Americans — and should we be concerned? On July 29, 2013, a working group for the National Cancer Institute (the main government agency for cancer research) published a paper proposing that the term “cancer” be reserved for lesions with a reasonable likelihood of killing the patient if left untreated. Slower growing tumors would...

Talks between House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama over the government shutdown and looming debt limit deadline have hit a brick wall. Boehner relayed the news to his Republican caucus during a Saturday morning meeting after a night of work where little progress was made. Republican Rep. Paul Labrador of Idaho emerged from the meeting, telling CNN that "the President rejected our deal." The standstill has decreased the possibility that the House would vote to reopen the government this weekend and while leadership would remain in Washington to work on a proposal, rank-and-file members might return to their...

NRO on Shutdown:Jonathan Strong �@j_strong 25m Cantor spokesman says Rep Joe Crowley engaged in physical altercation w GOP staffer Joseph Crowley NY-D-14th - Vice Chair of the Democrat Caucus

Let's just get into this NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that just totally turned Washington upside down yesterday....The poll that shows the Republicans literally getting killed over the government shutdown... Now, keep in mind just two days ago there was an AP poll that showed Obama at 37% and we're still hearing crickets over that poll. People have looked at the internals of the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, and it's 800 people. The spread of Democrat to Republican is 43 32. So 43% in the poll are Democrats, 32% are Republicans. That's an 11 point difference there. That's not representative at...

We are being told that the affordable care act fixes great injustices of insurance by allowing those with pre-existing conditions and those with catastrophic illness to have coverage. In the past, they say, insurance companies would only provide such coverage at great expense or not at all. Not so. When we finally read the law that "no one knew until we passed it" we found out about IPAB, the Independent Payment and Advisory Board. Howard Dean, no friend of conservatives opposing the ACA recently was quoted about the IPAB: "One major problem is the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board. The...

President Obama has rejected a proposed compromise from House Republicans that could have helped to end the congressional standoff that led to the now 11-day-old partial federal government shutdown. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) pitched a “clean” six-week increase with nothing in return to the community organizer in the White House and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). As Big Government’s Matthew Boyle reports, “Obama’s and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s decision to completely reject any offer of a compromise from House Republicans confirms what most conservatives already know: Obama will not negotiate on anything (he has said as much...

The FBI has been conducting a long-running investigation of Chaka Fattah and his finances. That's what his lawyer told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Just days ago, the FBI subpoenaed for his property tax records asking "for copies of checks used over the last five years to pay taxes on property the Democratic congressman and his wife, NBC10 news

“So, the President offered an off ramp, in which he said ‘I will accept any length of extension’... “So, Boehner has his offer, he goes in to see the president, you would expect that he would then have a six-week extension and discuss all of these issues. What seems to have happened is there are now demands from the president...

There was showdown on Capitol Hill yesterday when Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) ripped into Sarah Hall Ingram, the former head of the IRS division that targeted conservative groups and the current director of the Affordable Care Act Office at the IRS, for waiting five months to come before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. As TheBlaze reported earlier Wednesday, the Oversight Committee hearing focused on emails between Ingram and top
White House officials that allegedly contained confidential tax information, a violation of IRS code. Section 6103 of the IRS code prohibits federal employees from “disclos[ing] any return or return information...

Throw the bums out. That’s the message 60 percent of Americans are sending to Washington in a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, saying if they had the chance to vote to defeat and replace every single member of Congress, including their own representative, they would. Just 35 percent say they would not. The 60 percent figure is the highest-ever figure in that question recorded in the poll

According to liberal source "Politico", President Obama held a meeting on October 8, with "conservative journalists" Charles Krauthammer, Paul Gigot, Kathleen Parker, Byron York, and Robert Costa. The meeting was described as "off-the-record". When questioned about that meeting the next evening by Bret Baier of Fox News, Krauthammer gave no real information. This is worrisome news because Krauthammer graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1975 with his MD and was board certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1984. As recently as 2009, President Obama called upon Krauthammer's medical stature, inviting Krauthammer to a signing...

Last week the king declared it illegal for a large number of Catholic priests to enter upon HIS royal military bases and celebrate mass which is the central ritual of Catholicism. According to His Majesty’s edict, priests who have been hired as “Contract workers” to minister to the 25% of our military forces, who are Catholics, were declared non-essential workers the same as the goat herders who guide their hungry weed eating animals around some government lands. With this edict the king has again reminded us of just how over his head he is as he runs around our house...

WASHINGTON — The families of four soldiers killed in Afghanistan last weekend will not receive death benefits or the money to pay for their funerals because of the government shutdown. The bodies of Sgt. Patrick C. Hawkins, 25; Pfc. Cody J. Patterson, 24; Sgt. Joseph M. Peters, 24; and First Lt. Jennifer M. Moreno, 25, will arrive at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Wednesday. The four soldiers were killed Sunday in the Zhari district of Kandahar Province when enemy forces attacked their unit with explosives. But if their families want to meet the plane, they will have to...

Rep. Darrell Issa, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, recently informed the IRS that the committee's investigation has revealed that senior IRS officials were using their private emails to transmit confidential tax information. The investigation was sparked by the agency's alleged targeting of conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status. "[W]e have uncovered a troubling pattern of IRS officials sending official documents to non-official email accounts as well as the use of non-official email accounts to conduct official business," the September 30th letter to acting IRS Commissioner Dan Werfil reads. "In some instances, IRS officials have sent taxpayer protected information to non-official...

Is it a glimmer of hope, or more rhetoric as the deadline for possible government default gets closer? After weeks of near silence without any hint of a potential compromise between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans over raising the nation’s debt ceiling, the White House may be offering some conciliatory language that could help lead to a deal to prevent a potential default on October 17. As recently as Friday, White House officials declined to specify any demand for the length of a deal to increase the nation’s debt ceiling. Then on Monday, a White House official said it...

"We apologize for the inconvenience. The marketplace is currently undergoing regularly scheduled maintenance andf will be back up Monday, 10/7/3013." That's the message New Yorkers received this weekened when they attempted to sign up for health insurance via the new online health exchange or marketplace, a key componenet of ObamaCare. ...

Harry Reid: Furlough back pay is ‘paid vacation’ By: Burgess Everett October 5, 2013 12:44 PM EDT By passing a bill providing federal workers back pay while the government is closed, House Republicans are giving them a “paid vacation,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Saturday afternoon. Just a few minutes after the House passed its retroactive pay legislation for federal workers, Reid said the legislation is “uncontroversial” but said it is “cruel” to tell those employees they will get paid when the government reopens while at the same time refusing to open government.

The posturing politicians, pundits, and poobahs in Washington who participated in this latest partial government shutdown once more prove the wisdom of a couple of political tenets: All politics is local, and agents will act in their own best interests. Journalists credit the origin of the first principle to Associated Press reporter Byron Price, who headed the Office of Censorship during the Second World War. Politicians and the general public attribute it to former Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill. The second comes from economists Michael Jensen and William Meckling whose "Theory of the Firm" explains why managers do...

"The House of Representatives can not only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of Government. They, in a word, hold the purse; that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the People gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the Government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon, with which...

On Monday, some clever folks at seemingly all of the television news networks came up with the idea of an onscreen clock counting down to the federal government shutdown. As the clocks clicked down to zero at 12:00 am east coast time, the tension among the various commentators was palpable. It was as if, at the stroke of midnight, millions of Americans would be destitute in the streets while the United States Capitol crumbled into dust. But nothing much happened, so the clever TV folks started their clocks ticking upwards to remind listeners that as the hours and days accumulate...

What is your opinion of Pete King? Is he doing the attack conservatives first, then maybe one day he will get around to attacking Democrats? Is the House GOP on a kamikaze mission with the government shutdown? Is he blaming the GOP when he should be blaming the Democrats? Obama is the one acting like an autocrat who says that he gets to decide who is exempt and who isn't. Obama: 1.) Big Business is exempt 2.) Fat-cats in the Senate & House of Reps get taxpayer-funded subsidies for ObamaCare 3.) No defunding of ObamaCare. 4, 5, 6... Repubs, otoh:...

The Republican Party is broken. Its leadership has great difficulty doing anything beyond yielding to the Obama Machine. Can the party be fixed, or should it be put out of our misery.Here's the RINO view: It hasn't worked very well.Here's the Democrat view: It has worked. In a presentation shortly after the November election debacle, Bill Whittle explained that most Republicans do not stand for what they say are their basic principles. Before getting into that, some historical insights into basic concepts, "big ideas" and what most conservatives believe is necessary Part I -- Constrained vs. Unconstrained Visions of Humanity[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dwz_Z62e0s&w=640&h=390] Video linkPart II --...

Rut-rohhhh......Peter King gets some smack from his constituents. Shouting: "Peter King is a fraud!!!!" Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms44s3374p0 Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHi9N0laQzw Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJdbtFfQuCE Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Ks8PixqXo Part 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COhG8HPCVWM Part 8: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV1j0S51dew Part 9: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_bhIl8U0rc Part 10: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgp8ta69Hwg Part 11: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8z_chpBiYw Part 12: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7GZx-bzPwk

As the partial government shutdown headed into the weekend, Organizing for Action, Barack Obama’s permanent campaign operation, urged followers to use Twitter to send a message to House Speaker John Boehner: “Enough Already!” Under James Carville, Paul Begala & Co., Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign team had a series of mantras: Define your candidate before they do. While you’re at it, define their candidate, too. Let no allegation go unchallenged. If the other side needles you, slap them. If they slap you, punch them. If they punch you back, punch harder. If they use a knife, use a gun. And don’t...

A certain shutdown narrative has become all-too-familiar: It is holding us back from gazing at the National Zoo’s pandas throughout the day and perusing the halls and walkways of our national museums and parks. But for millions of the nations poor, the situation could soon be far more serious, and simply moving a gate or clicking on a link to another video won’t solve their problems. Though many of the programs that provide assistance to needy families and individuals like food stamps, Medicaid, and Medicare will continue running during the shutdown, the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children...

Dems say NO to an exemption from ObamaCare (for one-year) for average, hard-working Americans... Dems say NO to ending taxpayer-funded health care subsidies for fat-cats in the U.S. Senate and House of Reps... Dems say NO to ending the ObamaCare exemption for Big Business. Dems say NO to opening up national historic sites that are open 365 days a year - with no federal supervision to boot.

As House Republicans prepared to close down a large part of the government in their latest attempt to gut the 2010 Affordable Care Act, one of their own introduced the Pay Our Military Act (HR 3210) to allow military members to be paid through the shutdown. Congress quickly passed the bill from Rep. Mike Coffman, Colo., a Marine Corps Reserve retiree, and President Obama signed it into law. So military pay continues even as 400,000 defense civilian employees go on unpaid furlough. The shutdown is stinging military communities in other ways, and the hurt is enhanced by the tough budget...

The House voted unanimously Saturday morning to approve a bipartisan bill ensuring furloughed federal workers receive backpay once the government shutdown ends. The vote on the Federal Employee Retroactive Pay Fairness Act was 407-0. Twenty-five members didn't vote. The measure now moves to the Senate, where it is expected to pass. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) had introduced a Senate version of the bill earlier this week.

This is taking a beating.

House Democratic leaders believe they have hit on a new way to potentially force House Republican leaders into allowing a vote on a “clean CR” funding the government without any defunding of Obamacare attached. At last count, as many as two dozen House Republicans appear prepared to vote for a clean CR. With Democrats included, that means a majority of the House of Representatives would vote right now to reopen the government. But the House GOP leadership won’t allow such a vote. Dems have hit on a way to use a “discharge petition,” which forces a House vote if a...

President Barack Obama repeatedly complained on Thursday that the public is skeptical about his decision to shut down the government rather than accept the GOP’s Obamacare reform proposals. “When this gets reported on everybody kind of thinks, well, you know, both sides are just squabbling; Democrats and Republicans, they’re always arguing, so neither side is behaving properly,” he maintained. But “the only thing that is keeping the government shut down… is that [Republican] Speaker John Boehner won’t even let the bill get a yes-or-no vote, because he doesn’t want to anger the extremists in his party,” Obama said during a...

Due to Congress’s failure to pass legislation to fund the government, the information on this web site may not be up to date. Some submissions may not be processed, and we may not be able to respond to your inquiries. Barack H. (Hussein) Obama is the 44th President of the United States. His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others. With a father from Kenya...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday blocked a House bill providing funding to reopen national parks amid the government shutdown, saying he would not allow the GOP to pick and choose from among favored programs and insisting the only way out is to pass all spending at the same time. Republicans tried to get an agreement in the Senate to restore the parks money along with funding for the National Institutes of Health, the military reserves and National Guard, and veterans affairs, but Democrats objected to each of those agreements in turn. [snip] The debate on the Senate floor...

Ted Cruz's townhall meeting by telephone last night drew over 104,000 participants. The previous record was 67,000 people. The event was sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots and Cruz was joined by Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK). The meeting was on the continuing resolution. TPP Co-founder Jenny Beth Martin said no special efforts were taken and the only announcements were the standard Facebook post for two hours and a robocall earlier in the day. The meeting was to bring people up to date on the defunding of Obamacare through the CR. Just as 2010, the Tea Party patriots are leading the...

Cruz and Mark Levin discuss the situation and that Republicans need to Hold, Hold, Hold, as in the movie, Braveheart. 4 Videos on the page Here is the speech of William Wallace from “Braveheart”: “I am William Wallace. And I see a whole army of my countrymen, here in defiance of tyranny! You have come to fight as free men. And free man you are! What will you do without freedom? Will you fight?” “Two thousand against ten?” – the veteran shouted. “No! We will run – and live!” “Yes!” Wallace shouted back. “Fight and you may die. Run and...

After the vote in the House of Representatives to slash the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, I wrote a column against cutting food stamps. This column generated more than 5,200 online comments and hundreds of e-mails. Comments reflected, not surprisingly, the tone and tenor of the political debate: a lot of partisan passion, some mutual understanding, animosity based on stereotypes and a lot of misinformation. I would like to address some of the typical concerns that were expressed. For example, "Willis CurryFans" wrote, "These wealthy Republicans spend a lot of time RUNNING from the typical black person this affects. If they...