Free Republic

It's getting difficult and slinking toward impossible to defend the Affordable Care Act. The latest blow to Democratic candidates, liberal activists, and naïve columnists like me came Monday from the White House, which announced yet another delay in the Obamacare implementation. For the second time in a year, certain businesses were given more time before being forced to offer health insurance to most of their full-time workers. Employers with 50 to 99 workers were given until 2016 to comply, two years longer than required by law. During a yearlong grace period, larger companies will be required to insure fewer employees...

Remember when John McAfee warned us in November that anybody who signed up to the Obamacare site might have their bank account cleaned-out by hackers? The eccentric genius and former fugitive called the government website 'a hacker's wet dream', adding that there were 'NO safeguards' that would stop someone from starting a fake Obamacare website 'for a couple hundred dollars' that could 'empty your bank account' in hours.  McAfee added unambiguously that 'It's going to happen, and it's going to happen soon... nothing in the Obamacare system safeguards against this.'  And I thought he was just trying to sell...

“We’ve got to take ownership that we messed up,” former White House adviser Lanny Davis told Megyn Kelly last night, “and Nancy Pelosi should say that — we messed up.” Bill Clinton’s former aide and counsel in the impeachment fight joked at the beginning of this clip that he’d hoped for a fun segment with Kelly, but that Pelosi’s refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of the bill she shoved down the throats of Americans “is painful.” Was it ever: “Nancy Pelosi should say that — we messed up…We have to take ownership,” Davis said, indicating that admitting fault...

According to the NVRA, government offices that provide public assistance of any kind are also deemed voter registration agencies, and must provide a host of voter registration services.Two liberal voter rights advocacy groups sent a letter to the White House on Wednesday saying the voter registration services provided under the Affordable Care Act are “grossly inadequate” and violate the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Demos and Project Vote contend that the application process through the federal exchanges don’t provide sufficient voter registration services, and that the “several million” people who have sought coverage under ObamaCare “did not receive an...

David Remnick of The New Yorker showed up on PBS’s Charlie Rose Monday night to discuss his long, mostly sympathetic profile of Barack Obama from the January 27 issue of the magazine. Near the end of the interview, Rose focused in on the president’s reported desire to be “big.” The host wondered, “[W]hat's his definition of 'big,' and does he believe in his deep recesses of his own mind that the chance of that has slipped away?” Remnick replied that no, Obama does not think his chance of being “big” has slipped away. The editor then rattled off a laundry...

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is using the memory of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to encourage Americans to sign up for the troubled Obamacare system. “As we celebrate the inspirational life of Dr. King, please join us in this historic effort by helping your friends, neighbors, and loved ones get covered through the Marketplace,” Sebelius said of the observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Sebelius explained that King’s civil rights leadership extended to advocacy for the poor, and that he was concerned about health care inequality. “Dr. King memorably described inequality in health care as...

"..............The AP says the translations on so poor that many users feel they were computer-generated. The name of the site, CuidadoDeSalud.gov, can be litterally read as “for the caution of health.” One health navigator who works in Miami told the wire service that, if anything, the site is written in “Spanglish.”....

Pelosi to Reporter: It’s Not Obamacare, It’s The Affordable Care Act BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff January 9, 2014 4:45 pm House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) retorted to a reporter’s question about slipping support for Obamacare at her Thursday press conference that it was called the “Affordable Care Act.”Pelosi has referred to the law previously as Obamacare, although she also told Meet the Press host David Gregory she’d “always” called it the Affordable Care Act during a contentious November interview.Full exchange:Q: The three “Obamacare” bills on the floor tomorrow in the House, some Democrats have indicated they might...

On Thursday night, MSNBC host Chris Matthews will sit down with President Barack Obama for an interview which will, in part, focus on the problematic roll-out of the Affordable Care Act. Matthews said that he intends to grill the president on this failure and contended that this incident was akin to “a brilliant writer” who, despite a “great theme,” turns in an essay full of technical flaws. “I’ll be talking about executive accountability and the strange way of this roll out, as it has occurred,” Matthews told MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell. “I think I would compare it, Andrea, to a

The new and improved Obamacare website struggled under heavy traffic loads on Monday, but still appeared to operate pretty much as the Obama administration has promised: Okay, but not perfect. After a weekend of final, intensive fixes, officials unveiled a somewhat repaired HealthCare.gov on Sunday and promised that it will work well enough to serve the Americans who want insurance exchange coverage by New Year’s.

House Democrats are blocking their Republican colleagues from using Obamacare in letters mailed on the taxpayer's dime to voters, but who made up the term in the first place? Lots of people are asking this question, getting answers like "Certainly a republican, potentially Glenn Beck" and "I am about 80% sure it was Rush Limbaugh" and "Hillary Clinton's campaign coined Obamacare." Iowa Rep. Steve King claimed President Obama himself made it up. Free Republic posters want to claim credit. Lots of liberals suspect an insidious plot by Fox News. But the answer appears to be: a lobbyist.

The Obama administration claimed victory Sunday for making HealthCare.gov workable for the vast majority of users, a standard that will be tested as millions of people flood the site in the next three weeks. Sunday marked the passage of the administration's self-imposed deadline for fixing the broken ObamaCare enrollment website, which serves consumers in 36 states. The agency that oversees HealthCare.gov said "we believe we have met the goal" of making the system navigable for most people, but cautioned that more fixes lie ahead. "Dramatic progress has been made," the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) stated in a...

The Obama administration promised the healthcare.gov website would be fixed by today. The Obamacare reboot began with 11-hour website shutdown. That’s not all… Unfortunately there are still bugs and glitches. CNN reported this morning the website crashes during the signup process. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59VTIDjKDZ4

In an ongoing trend, unrelated to Obamacare, companies have been passing on more and more healthcare costs to employees. However, an ACA gotcha has impacted the way costs are passed on, with families taking a bigger hit than individuals at many companies. Please consider Companies Prepare to Pass More Health Costs to Workers. Many employers are betting that the Affordable Care Act's requirement that all Americans have health insurance starting in 2014 will bring more people into their plans who have previously opted out. That, along with other rising expenses, is prompting companies to raise workers' premium contributions, steer them...

Democratic leaders in counties across the state say they don’t think problems with the health care law will hurt their party or Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan’s re-election efforts next year – even as they work on a post-holiday game plan to change the conversation. **SNIP** Local Democrats haven’t done a lot to get their message out yet, but Campbell said it will be along these lines: “Why wouldn’t we want health care for everyone? Isn’t that a good thing? Yes, it’s complicated and yes it’s having problems launching. We hate that, and I’m ever hopeful it will start working better...

At the risk of being accused of “racism” for not falling in line behind the first half-black but wholly unqualified man ever to run for president, allow me to introduce the useful idiots at the core of Obamamania. Barack Hussein Obama, the Jim (Farrakhan) Jones of the 2008 race for the White House, and chosen Messiah of America’s loony leftist dingbats, is leading the race for the most powerful office on earth. The “How?” is the interesting part of the story…

Iraq's Defense Ministry has announced the arrest of the most wanted man in Iraq: Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a deputy to Saddam Hussein. Other officials say at least 70 people were killed in the operation. Defense ministry officials say Iraq's National Guard backed by U.S. forces made the arrest on the outskirts of Tikrit - Saddam Hussein's home town and a stronghold of support. Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri was the most senior aide to Saddam Hussein and the most senior official to escape capture, until now. Interior Ministry officials say clashes surrounding the arrest left at least 70 dead. Another 80 supporters...

This isLONDON23/07/03 - News and city sectionWild celebrations in BaghdadBy Colin Freeman in Baghdad, Evening StandardBaghdad's curfew was broken by the crackle of gunfire as word spread last night that Saddam's hated sons had been killed. "It's a celebration, people have heard about what happened," a US military spokesman said. On the streets, many Iraqis were prepared to speak out for the first time about Uday and Qusay. But while some celebrated their deaths, others wished they had been captured alive. Alaa Hamed, regularly beaten with clubs while he worked as a producer for Uday's television station, said: "I don't...

My prediction is that after last nights speech, the likelihood of any Hussein surviving until the beginning of hostilities went way down Using the 48 hours set last night as the dividing line, I'll say "over", but not by much - maybe a day and a half. Fellow FReepers?

"It was a hard book to write. Parts of the book were very painful to write. If there was a fury, it was a fury at all the lies that are used to justify war, all the myths of war -- all of the things we're told about war that I had to find out the hard way and very painfully are not true. And if there's a fury at that, it's the mendacity of the entire enterprise." - C. Hedges This book is not about military war, as it pretends. It's about political war, and is the opening salvo...