Free Republic

We’ve reached the stage where Obamacare is the punchline to a bad joke. The law has been a disaster, both for the economy and for the Democratic Party. Not that we should be surprised. You don’t get better healthcare with a poisonous recipe of higher taxes, added government spending, and more intervention. With any luck, Obamacare will be a textbook example of why we should never again give power to a bunch of political hacks and dreamy-eyed central planners. Because when they try to buy votes and create more dependency with Rube Goldberg schemes, the results are…well, we seethe cluster-you-know-what...

Henry Waxman and George Miller are retiring from the House and not running for re-election after 40 years as congressmen from southern and northern California. Also retiring and not running for re-election is Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. Sen. Max Baucus of Montana will resign if, as expected, he is confirmed as ambassador to China. Both were first elected to the House in 1974 and were later elected to the Senate. These four are just about the last members serving in Congress of the 75 Democrats first elected to the House in the Watergate year of 1974. The only other...

A lot of political pundits make a lot of money talking to an every-shrinking audience. Most Americans these days simply can’t stand politics, and after watching Tuesday’s State of the Union speech and the Republican response, it’s easy to understand why. President Obama’s speech was empty calories, a greatest hits record from a local band that never had a hit. I had to check my DVR to make sure I hadn’t accidentally replayed a previous year’s speech. I hadn’t, but I still want to know where to go to get those two hours of my life back. The buzz leading...

Let me get this straight. For five years Barack Obama has been president. For five years he’s demonstrated -- with amazing consistency -- that he has no clue what we need to get out of the ditch and back on the road to real economic recovery. He’s repeatedly demonstrated that he can’t work with a divided Congress and he can’t, or just plain won’t, lean on Harry Reid to allow the Senate to vote on the stack of jobs bills that has been sent over by the House. The president clearly has learned nothing on the job. And now our...

How can we ever expect America's younger generations to preserve America's greatness when the president of this nation keeps preaching damaging economic myths and misguided moral lessons? It's one thing for our elected representatives to express compassion for those facing difficult financial circumstances. It's another for them to elevate the receipt of unemployment benefits and other forms of government dependency programs to a virtue. And it's yet another for them to justify these wrongheaded policies with false claims that they actually improve conditions when they make them worse. President Obama's policies of expanding the government and his practice of punishing...

Dear UNC Board of Governors: I appreciate very much the interest you have shown in meeting with me after my current case against UNC Wilmington heads to court in just a few months. I also appreciate the efforts of key members of the Senate to set up such a meeting now that Republicans control the NC Senate, State General Assembly, and the Governor's mansion. When we meet in the spring, I am going to present you with a specific proposal which will help start to reform the UNC system in three important ways: 1) It will cut administrative overhead. 2)...

Remember when the federal government took over student loans? That power grab was part of the Democrats’ push to make college ‘affordable.’ It didn’t work because it was never really designed to work, just to make people think they were ‘doing something’ to address the issue. But failure has never stopped our liberal/progressive friends from striving ‘forward.’ When it comes to soaring college costs, as President Reagan famously said, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Since the government isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, cost savings in higher education have to be found elsewhere....

Maybe someone can explain to me how, exactly, conservatives are the aggressors in the culture war? In the conventional narrative of American politics, conservatives are obsessed with social issues. They want to impose their values on everyone else. They want the government involved in your bedroom. Those mean right-wingers want to make "health care choices" for women. Now consider last week's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to consider two cases stemming from Obamacare: Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius and Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores. Democratic politicians and their fans on social media went ballistic almost instantly. That's hardly...

Hypocrisy about the nuclear option comes easily to today's Democrats.If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then calling Harry Reid, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden hypocrites for abandoning their previous “principled” defense of Senate filibusters is an insult to hypocrites. Hypocrites, after all, recognize the power of principles and try to squirm out of the vice of violating them, but today’s post-modern Democrats feel no shame in making contradictory “principled” arguments because they no longer pay any tribute whatsoever to the virtue of neutral, non-partisan principle.These Democrats are practicing the philosophy of post-modernism preached by liberal theorists...

How is it possible that Barack Obama did not know that his beloved healthcare.gov website was a botch? That's a question many thoughtful people (including thoughtful Democrats) are asking. We heard him say that he wouldn't have boasted that it would be as easy to use as amazon.com or obitz.com had he known that it wouldn't. I'm not "stupid enough," he said at his Nov. 14 press conference. Most Americans agree that's true. One thing we do know is that this is a chief executive who does not want to hear bad news, or at least effectively discourages his subordinates...

And the band played on. As the holiday season approaches, they are dancing on Wall Street with the Dow, S&P and NASDQ either at or approaching all-time highs. And while his popularity is rapidly joining his Health Care Reform Act near the bottom of the political trash heap, the tin-eared President Obama continues to glide on the dance floor of the White House celebrating the Democrats clampdown on filibusters and an ill-advised agreement on nukes in Iran. But as this year races to an end, there looms a huge set of problems, all interconnected, that could not only end any...

For Republicans, winning enough races next year to take control of the Senate and expand their current majority in the House is suddenly oh so easy. Democrats are already underwater because of a flood of clear and compelling evidence that Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster. And there’s no end in sight to the rising tide of bad news, which won’t begin to ebb until painfully close to Election Day 2014. Horrendous as the stories about the damage Obamacare has inflicted upon the individual market have been, certain to be even worse will be news yet-to-come about its damage to both...

By 1968, Walter Lippmann, the dean of liberal columnists, had concluded that liberalism had reached the end of its tether. In that liberal epoch, the 1960s, the Democratic Party had marched us into an endless war that was tearing America apart. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society had produced four "long, hot summers" of racial riots and a national crime rate that had doubled in a decade. The young were alienated, the campuses aflame. Lippmann endorsed Richard Nixon. For forty years, no unabashed liberal would be elected president. Jimmy Carter won one term by presenting himself as a born-again Christian from Georgia,...

What an awful coming down. “The problem is that I’m president of the United States; I’m not emperor,” he explained to us. From a Nobel Prize to a booby prize; From the smartest guy ever to hold the position of president of the United States to one of the most obtuse. “A few of us saw a backbencher from the Illinois state legislature,” wrote long-time Obama watcher, John Kass of the Chicago Tribune, “a guy who took orders, then rode to the White House on a personality cult, finally exposed.” We’ll not really “finally.” But more like “disastrously” exposed. “We...

COLORADO SPRINGS -- Author Malcolm Gladwell has a new bestseller that turns conventional wisdom about the Biblical David vs. Goliath battle on its head: "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants." In short, it's Goliath who really had the odds stacked against him from the get-go. The overconfident giant with poor eyesight, weighted down with heavy armor and multiple swords, never had a chance against lean, nimble, sharp-shooting expert David. The new Colorado gun-rights recall campaign against arrogant state Sen. Evie Hudak and myopic Democrats may well be a perfect update to Gladwell's book. Refresher: In...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Folks, I'm not gonna fall for it, and I don't want you to fall for it, either. This is one of the biggest attempted distractions. Don't get worked up over this today, it's not worth it. Dingy Harry's out there threatening to go do the nuclear option to end the filibuster as we know it. Don't be fooled for a minute about this. Nothing more than a desperate attempt by the Democrats to distract everybody away from Obamacare and the disaster. That's all it is. There's nothing even on the Senate docket, if you will, that will...

It took a government shutdown, but after four years the Democrats in the U.S. Senate (led by the Undertaker) finally agreed to an established process that has gone on for ages: sitting down with the House of Representatives and hashing out a budget. And in another bit of shocking news, they are demanding new “revenues” (they never say taxes) to come to a compromise. You may have heard that the feckless Democrats in the Senate have not passed a budget for three years. They standardized a rarely used way of operating a government – continuing resolution or the new in...

Why do a vast majority of the American public continue to fall for the constant lies coming out of Washington?What is it that they just don’t see?Time and time again the rug is pulled out from under them and they still fall for the same old “bait and switch”.Politicians know it and now they have no qualms about continuing the lies even after we know they are lies! I remember a time when at least they tried to cover it up, (Richard Nixon), or they came clean after they were caught, (Bill Clinton).Today however, they fabricate a lie in order...

When I wrote last week that Democrats eventually would come to Congress seeking to “fix” the mess that is Obamacare I never thought “eventually” would be a week later, but that’s where we find ourselves. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., was the first to put fingers to keyboard this week when she wrote President Obama saying, “Given the existing problems with the website, I urge you to consider extending open enrollment beyond the current end date of March 31, 2014. Allowing extra time for consumers is critically important so they have the opportunity to become familiar with the website, survey their...

Democrats have only one goal to accomplish between now and the 2014 elections: To paint Republicans as the bad guys. In doing so, they'll win the 2014 elections, gain control of the House of Representatives, and as President Reagan once said, the rest of us will be spending "our sunset years telling our children...what it once was like in America when men were free." Democrats are off to a good start; great, really. They, along with their willing accomplices in the media, propagated a lie by suggesting Republicans are responsible for the partial government shutdown. So far, it has worked...