Free Republic

Obamacare program costs $50,000 in taxpayer money for every American who gets health insurance, says bombshell budget report It will cost the federal government – taxpayers, that is – $50,000 for every person who gets health insurance under the Obamacare law, the Congressional Budget Office revealed on Monday. The number comes from figures buried in a 15-page section of the nonpartisan organization's new ten-year budget outlook. The best-case scenario described by the CBO would result in 'between 24 million and 27 million' fewer Americans being uninsured in 2025, compared to the year before the Affordable Care Act took effect. Pulling...

HERSHEY, Pa. — A group of female GOP lawmakers is trying to pressure the Republican leadership team to make changes to a 20-week abortion ban the House is set to vote on next week. Led by Rep. Renee Ellmers of North Carolina, the lawmakers are protesting language that requires a rape victim to formally report her assault to police to qualify for an exemption from the legislation’s abortion restrictions. Ellmers raised the concerns during a closed-door meeting at the GOP retreat here, according to sources in the room. Her office did not have a comment on Friday on the discussions...

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is lamenting the end of “The Colbert Report,” saying it’s a “loss for ‘truthiness’ advocates across America.” The Comedy Central series ends its run Thursday night. Host Stephen Colbert is poised to take the reins at CBS’s “The Late Show,” when David Letterman retires next year. The House minority leader appeared in a sketch earlier this month with Colbert, who plays a faux cable news host on the show. Pelosi stretched her acting muscles as a wheelie-popping bike cop who preached safety to Colbert and Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.).

Somebody has to be the good guy. So says Peggy Noonan this week in the wake of the torture report, a 14 million page accounting of mostly standard, typical, usual, unremarkable methods of forcibly extracting information from an enemy. And isn’t that a word we seem to have forgotten: enemy. The concept of an enemy is one of the most basic, primitive understandings possible. It is obvious, and should require no explanation. And yet here we are. Because we don’t have them, anymore. There is no evil empire. The modern sensibility, informed heavily by pseudo-leftist pop culture and leftover hippie...

As CIA chief John Brennan defended the spy agency's interrogation program for terror suspects Thursday, a senior senator whose committee published a damning report on the practice contested his claims. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein's staff repeatedly used the hashtag #ReadTheReport on the senator's Twitter feed during Brennan's rare press conference broadcast live from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Brennan said it was "unknowable" whether key information from suspects subjected to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), which critics have equated to torture, could have been obtained through other methods. But Feinstein's staff responded: "Study shows it IS knowable: CIA...

Just thought if anyone wants a good skewering of the recent senate report heres the CIA's 135 page response released a few days ago. 1. I appreciate the opportunity for the Central Intelligence Agency to comment on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study of the Agency's long-terminated Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program (hereafter referred to as the "Study"). As I noted during my confirmation hearing and in subsequent discussions with you and with Committee members, the lengthy Study deserved careful review by the Agency in light of the significance and sensitivity of the subject matter and; of particular concern;...

Why did the Democrats release their "report" on enhanced interrogation? They feel the world needs to know about torture. I don't know. They delight in hurting the United States military and intelligence agencies

Of course. And those responsible for releasing it must have foreseen this, and allowing their desire for political gain to overwhelm any residual sense of responsibility they might still have felt to protect American citizens. “Senate Torture Report Is Propaganda Bonanza for Islamic Militants, Feds Say,” by Mike Levine, ABC News, December 9, 2014: The Senate’s newly-released report on alleged torture of terror detainees after the 9/11 attacks is “unlikely” to inspire near-term attacks inside the U.S. homeland, but it is “very likely” to be used by terrorist groups for their future propaganda, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security...

Parents groups are up in arms after a recent report found public schools in Newton, Massachusetts presented whitewashed versions of Hamas and Palestinian Authority (PA) charters, as well as other materials posing the destruction of Israel as acceptable. The findings were made through an investigation of classroom materials by the independent watchdog group Verity Educate, which discovered "repeated instances of bias against Israel, bias against the US and its actions in the Middle East, and bias that sanitizes the ideology and actions of terrorists." Parents for Excellence in Newton Schools (PENS), which took part in the research, on Sunday released...

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday criticized a recently released House Republican report that concludes no intelligence lapses in connection with the fatal Benghazi attacks, saying congressional investigators did a “lousy job.” “I think the report is full of crap,” Graham, a Republican, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The U.S. economy added 248,000 jobs in September as labor markets rediscovered the momentum gained earlier this year. The headline unemployment rate dropped unexpectedly to 5.9% from 6.1% The better-than-expected figures are certain to rekindle the debate over the timing and trajectory of interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, as the positive report will have many economists looking for rates to move higher sooner rather than later. In August the economy generated just 142,000 new jobs, well below expectations on weakness in major sectors including manufacturing, retail and transportation. That number was revised upward to 180,000 on Friday, according...

When the controversy surrounding Senator Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) use of taxpayer funds to pay for campaign travel first broke back in August, her Senate office spokesperson Matthew Lehner promised Landrieu would produce a full report of her travel activities "by the time" the Senate returned from its August recess and returned to session in September. By Thursday, the fourth day since the Senate's September session began, Landrieu has produced diddly squat. Efforts to contact Lehner, who made that promise on her behalf, resulted in an automatic email saying that, as of September 2, he no longer worked in her congressional...

Nearly two weeks after Michael Brown’s death, a police report on the shooting has finally been made public. But the glaring lack of detail is likely to increase widespread criticism that the law-enforcement community is closing ranks around Darren Wilson, the officer who fatally shot Brown on Aug. 9. The incident report, filed by the St. Louis County police department, contains no new information on the encounter between Brown and Wilson. There are no written details about the event. As a result, the officer’s account of what transpired when the two men met just after noon on Aug. 9 remains...

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has published hundreds and hundreds of rules — on how wheelchairs should be stowed aboard U.S. aircraft, how foreign trade zones should be regulated, how voting assistance should be provided for U.S. citizens overseas, and so on. There’s a problem, however: Technically speaking, these and some 1,800 other regulations shouldn’t be in effect because they weren’t reported to Congress as required. Yet there is little that lawmakers or the courts can do about it. The situation illustrates the obscure, Byzantine process used to create federal regulations — and how easily it can...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Declaring the Great Recession only partly to blame, White House economists say the increasing number of Americans dropping out of the labor force dampens economic growth and demands policy changes that create more job opportunities and add workers. In a new report released Thursday, President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers point to an aging population as the biggest single factor contributing to the lowest participation rate in 36 years. The report also says the elevated unemployment rate, which climbed to 10 percent in 2009, drove workers to put off looking for a job. But they say...

Detroit women are turning to abortion at a staggering rate as poverty and crime grip the city, with more than one-third of pregnancies being terminated. According to 2012 figures, the most recent year for which data are available, 31 percent of pregnancies among Detroit residents ended in abortion — compared to about 14 percent for all of Michigan, The Detroit News reported. (Snip) Dr. Susan Schooley, chairwoman of the Department of Family Medicine at Henry Ford Hospital, said the statistics make Detroit look “more like some Third-World country than someplace in the United States.”

Press conference coordinator of the group "Information soprotvilenie" D.Tymchuka

President likes to refer to us as grown children and is quick to boast that because of his ObamaCare plan we can stay on our parents’ health insurance plans until we’re 26. But this is a generation that remembers typing papers on word processors and tearing the edges off dot matrix paper. We weren’t the first on the information super highway but once we got a license, we took over the road. Facebook has tracked every day of our lives since college and Twitter turned us into citizen reporters. We also have degrees – some of us multiple degrees- but...

**SNIP** It said that the CBO summary instead showed that some who stay in low paid jobs or put off retirement to keep health insurance plans linked to employers would no longer have to under Obamacare and could chose to leave the work force or toil for fewer hours. "Claims that the Affordable Care Act hurts jobs are simply belied by the facts in the CBO report," White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement, which appeared just before the White House conducted a hurriedly organized call for reporters. "Since the Affordable Care Act passed into law in March...

Review of the terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi Libya , September 11-12 , 2012 , together with additional views . January 15th , 2014