Free Republic

After beating back the repeated Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Democrats, for the first time in years, are taking the offense on health care. While the flashiest proposal—for an entirely government-run system—remains a distant aspiration, Democrats are again looking for new ways to expand Washington’s role in shaping the health-care system. Their ideas include new plans to expand coverage, restrain drug prices, and create a public competitor to private health-insurance companies. Encouraging all of these efforts are polls showing that support for the ACA clearly increased during the long legislative struggle over its future. “People are increasingly...

At an event at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., that was closed to the press, agency head Scott Pruitt touted the new policy as a way to increase transparency and enable the public to double-check research underpinning environmental regulations. The rule would require the agency to use only studies in which the underlying data are available for public scrutiny when formulating new “significant” regulations, which typically are regulations estimated to impose costs of $100 million or more. Specifically, the proposed rule says that EPA is seeking transparency for “the dose response data and models that underlie what we are calling...

A curious dualism emerges in New York Times reporter Amy Chozick’s book Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling. As I noted yesterday, Chozick makes it clear that she was rooting for Clinton. But she also thinks Clinton hates her. Chozick shouldn’t take things so personally: Clinton hates everyone. You can’t relate to people you despise. Her inability to master the basics of being a politician inspired one of the great underreported witticisms of the 2016 campaign, when Donald Trump was asked about his comparatively loose debate preparations. “I don’t need to rehearse being human,”...

Newbie retirees may need to lower their expectations when it comes to their Social Security checks. According to a new survey released by the National Retirement Institute, more than a quarter (27%) of new retirees say their monthly checks are less than they expected. What’s more, nearly two in three of soon-to-be retirees (63%) admit that they are not confident in their overall knowledge of how Social Security works. That number is alarming because nearly one in four (26%) future retirees believe they can live comfortably on Social Security alone. “It’s problematic that so many people are planning to rely...

The America Firsters are on the rise. That’s the lesson some people in President Trump’s world are drawing from recent personnel moves. In this telling, the populists and nationalists who powered Trump’s election are regaining a foothold as more establishment-friendly figures are marginalized. But even as those developments please some of Trump’s most enthusiastic backers, they unnerve critics who fear what the president might do in the absence of more measured advice. High-profile names have exited in recent months, including former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. And now, two less-famous names are causing...

Hank Azaria says his "eyes have been opened" and he's willing to "step aside" from playing his controversial "Simpsons" character. The actor appeared on Tuesday's episode of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" and talked about the fallout surrounding the character he voices, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Comedian Hari Kondabolu's documentary "The Problem with Apu" debuted last November and looked at the character as a negative, stereotypical representation of South Asians. Nahasapeemapetilon, a Indian-American character with a thick accent, operates the Kwik-E-Mart convenience store in the fictional town of Springfield. The show recently aired a response to complaints about him.

During the “Overtime” segment on Real Time, the panel had a lengthy discussion about the political divisions in the country. In reaction to Stormy Daniels lawyer Michael Avenatti dishing about his case against President Trump, professor and author Jordan B. Peterson kicked off the conversation by asking what would happen to the millions of people that support the president if the opposition got their way and had him impeached. “It looks to me, from an outsider’s perspective, your country is polarizing in a way that’s not good and that, you know, people are going after Trump and I understand that,”...

“It looks to me, from an outsider’s perspective, your country is polarizing in a way that’s not good and that, you know, people are going after Trump and I understand that,” Peterson elaborated, “but there’s all these people that elected him and identify with him and they’re not taking this well… You might not think they’re very bright and all of that… but you know, you need to have respect for the rest of your citizens and if your country is going to pull itself apart and as you really see this happening from an outsider’s perspective.”

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article.

Anyone else watch nova this evening? It did seem to make a somewhat good case though at the same time seemed to duck confronting skeptic arguments directly or at least so it seemed to me. I am not following this at a level of detail that I feel competent to debate one way or another so I am curious for others' reactions.

Matt Bevin, the conservative Republican governor of Kentucky, lost it a few days ago. Thousands of his state’s teachers had walked off their jobs, forcing many schools to close for a day, to protest his opposition to increased education funding. And Bevin lashed out with a bizarre accusation: “I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them.” He later apologized. But his hysterical outburst had deep roots: At the state and local levels, the conservative obsession with tax cuts has forced the G.O.P. into...

Here is all you need to know about the Donald Trump-hating Washington/New York media establishment. While the press was hysterically fixated on porn star Stormy Daniels and her alleged one-nighter with the president a decade ago, it missed the biggest story to come down the pike in months. And that was CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s secret visit to North Korea over the Easter weekend to meet in Pyongyang with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un

Hillary Clinton launched into a “f***-laced fusillade” during a practice session for her televised debate with Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election, according to a journalist who followed her 2016 presidential bid. In her new book, Chasing Hillary, New York Times journalist Amy Chozick, who covered Clinton’s political career for a decade, sheds light on the inner workings of a campaign which ended in shocking defeat. In one passage, she describes a practice debate in which Clinton reportedly cried “You want authentic, here it is!”, followed by “a f***-laced fusillade about what a ‘disgusting’ human being Trump...

I was interviewed by a mainstream media reporter yesterday. I thought he wanted to talk tech issues, but we actually spent almost the entire conversation discussing the feeling that many conservatives have that America has gone off the tracks and is headed toward dissolution or alternately, a civil war one day. Obviously, this would be a terrible thing and ironically, twenty years ago, it would have been laughable. Today, the joke isn’t so funny because we are a deeply unhealthy society with a dysfunctional government and for all our money, success and storied history, we seem to be on an...

The company [Chick-fil-A] invests in Christian growth and ministry through its WinShape Foundation (WinShape.com).  The name comes from the idea of shaping people to be winners[.] ... As has been well documented, the left is hating on Chick-fil-A...again.  No one should be surprised by this, least of all Chick-fil-A.  Back in 2012, Chick-fil-A became a prime target of the left when its then-president and chief operating officer, Dan Cathy – son of founder Truett Cathy and now the chairman and CEO of Chick-fil-A – gave a benign interview to Baptist Press (the Cathys are longtime members of New Hope Baptist Church in Fayetteville, Ga.). The following...

President Donald Trump's trade policies are confounding Republicans as rural voters — his strongest supporters — stand to get the short end of the stick just months away from the midterms. From his dairy farm in southeastern Nebraska, lifelong Republican Ben Steffen believed Donald Trump meant what he said on the campaign trail about ripping up U.S. trade agreements. So Steffen, who produces milk, beef, soybeans, corn and wheat, wasn't shocked when Trump pulled America out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership pact, began renegotiating NAFTA or announced his intent to impose aluminum and steel tariffs on China that have drawn the...

A Gallup poll shows a very mixed reaction by Americans to the GOP tax cut, creating another November problem for the establishment wing of the GOP. “Republicans have been increasingly more positive about their federal income taxes since [President Donald] Trump took office last year … [but] independents’ and Democrats’ views have not changed much,” Gallup reported April 16 about its survey of 1,015 adults, which was conducted early April. That’s bad news for the GOP leadership, which is hoping that the tax benefits will spike turnout by GOP voters, help with independents and mute Democratic opposition. Without strong voter...

President Trump and his supporters made headway in accusing the Federal government of violating or endangering attorney-client privilege. They’re not wrong. The attorney-client privilege is recognized by our Supreme Court as one of the oldest recognized privileges for confidential communications. See Hunt v. Blackburn, 128 U. S. 464 (1888). The privilege is intended to encourage "full and frank communication between attorneys and their clients and thereby promote broader public interests in the observance of law and the administration of justice,” the Supreme Court explained in 1982. And, in 1998, the Supreme Court confirmed that attorney-client confidentiality is so important to...

Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) Hey, let’s do that with Obamacare, too! – Chuckie Schumer announced on Friday that he’s introducing a bill that would essentially rescind federal marijuana laws because, he claims, he is such a huge believer in the concept of federalism that he thinks we should just let the states decide on whether pot should be legal or not. This marks the first issue in his long political career on which the old collectivist expressed a fealty to federalism. Talking Points Parrot for Senate! – Just minutes after Schumer had held his press conference,...

The Nation's sports editor Dave Zirin is livid that the man who occupies the White House, courtesy of the slave-holders who devised the electoral college, is getting the credit for pardoning Jack Johnson. The African-American Johnson was an early 20th century boxing champion who also served prison time for a criminal charge. Johnson (shown in photograph) was the first African-American world heavyweight boxing champion, from 1908-1915, the era of Jim Crow. He had dated and married white women, and in 1912, he was arrested for violating the Mann Act forbidding a person from transporting a woman across state lines for...