Free Republic

During her appearance on Fox News, Palin added that she expects presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to make good on his promise to repeal Obamacare if he elected in November. "First on the list of priorities must be repealing and replacing Obamacare with something that makes more sense," she said. Earlier that day Romney had slammed the Supreme Court ruling, re-affirming his promise to help repeal the health care law as president. "Obamacare raises taxes on the American people by approximately $500 billion. Obamacare cuts Medicare - cuts Medicare by approximately $500 billion. And even with those cuts and...

A defining moment in Mitt Romney's post-pro-life-conversion political career came in his third year as governor of Massachusetts, when he decided Catholic hospitals would be required under his interpretation of a new state law to give rape victims a drug that can induce abortions. Romney announced this decision — saying it was the "right thing for hospitals" to do — just two days after he had taken the opposite position. The story begins in 1975, when Massachusetts enacted a law that said, "No privately controlled hospital .. shall be required to permit any patient to have an abortion ... or...

Thousands of elderly people are dying unnecessarily early because ‘despicable’ age discrimination in the NHS is denying them treatment for cancer, a charity has warned. A lack of treatment or insufficient treatment is contributing to 14,000 deaths a year in people over the age of 75, Macmillan Cancer Support has found, in what it called an ‘unacceptable act of discrimination’. Deaths from cancer are reducing in most age groups but at a slower rate in those aged 74 to 84 and are increasing in people aged 85 and over, the report said. The report, The Age Old Excuse: the under...

Obamacare dominated the 2010 midterms, driving its Democratic authors to a historic electoral shellacking. But since then, the issue has slipped quietly underground. Now it’s back, summoned to the national stage by the confluence of three disparate events: the release of new Congressional Budget Office cost estimates, the approach of Supreme Court hearings on the law’s constitutionality, and the issuance of a compulsory contraception mandate. COST Obamacare was carefully constructed to manipulate the standard ten-year cost projections of the CBO. Because benefits would not fully kick in for four years, President Obama could trumpet ten-year gross costs of less than...

Rick Santorum backed Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in 2004. It was a tough race with Toomey mounting a credible, well-financed challenge. Toomey’s candidacy, by his own estimation, was one of the precursors to the Tea Party movement: The “battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party” between big spending moderates and committed conservatives that was evident in 2004 may have inspired subsequent Tea Party efforts, Toomey suggested. Despite losing out on key endorsements from leading Republican figures in 2004, Toomey believes his primary campaign created a strong foundation for conservative activism that translated into victory in 2010....

I have not been able to find the entire On The Record Bondi interview, either in video OR professional transcript, so I transcribed it myself. Hopefully the full segment video, with transcript, will become available, so any mistakes I may have made can be corrected. Below is the transcription of Greta's Pam Bondi interview, transcribed directly from the TV segment [the later rebroadcast]. (Note: In the rebroadcast, there was a second or two in which there was a loss of audio and a black screen; I have noted it in the transcript]Greta's 1-27-2012 interview On The Record with Pam Bondi...

Former Sen. Norm Coleman is advising Mitt Romney. He has also advised us not to get our hopes up about Obamacare repeal. "You will not repeal the act in its entirety, but you will see major changes, particularly if there is a Republican president," Coleman told BioCentury This Week television in an interview that aired on Sunday. "You can't whole-cloth throw it out. But you can substantially change what's been done."

Pffffft!! FUMR!! Big government liberal/progressive!!

NASHUA, NH -- Newt Gingrich plans to open up what could be a bitter new front in his fight with Mitt Romney with an ad accusing Romney of allowing taxpayer dollars to fund abortion in Massachusetts. The new ad will run in South Carolina "soon," according the Gingrich campaign. The topic of abortion has emerged as a particularly contentious issue between the Gingrich and Romney campaigns. Gingrich's accusation is that Romney's universal health care plan in Massachusetts explicitly provides for taxpayer funding of abortions. Romney responds by arguing that a longstanding Massachusetts supreme court decision, which as governor he had...

A dogged freshman lawmaker who refused to budge from the House chambers earlier this month until the Patrick administration came clean on how much taxpayers coughed up last year for free health care to illegal aliens finally got his answer yesterday: a whopping $93 million.

State officials refused to say yesterday how many families they’ve fined this year for buying too little health insurance under former Gov. Mitt Romney’s controversial health-care reform after blistering criticism from GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich thrust the issue into the national spotlight. “We are releasing the 2009 report at the end of the year,” Health Insurance Connector Authority spokesman Richard Powers said. He said officials haven’t sorted the data to identify why the 2010 and 2011 fines were handed out but said between 46,000 to 49,000 people were fined in 2009 for having no insurance or having less insurance...

Lauren and Nick Destito had a wonderful life in Plainville. They paid their bills and raised two sons in a lovely four-bedroom colonial that they were just eight years away from owning outright. But the economy collapsed in 2008 and soon crushed the small tree and landscaping business the couple had run since 1984. Now, the state of Massachusetts is grinding the Destitos into the dirt. The reason: the health insurance the Destitos bought, paid $750 monthly premiums on and repeatedly used at doctor visits apparently does not pass muster with the state’s mandatory universal health insurance law. Now the...

Sarah Palin warned of government “death panels” on her Facebook page and was nationally ridiculed. Politifact.com awarded Palin with the “Lie of the Year” for that statement. President Obama called her out during a joint session of Congress saying the claim is “a lie, plain and simple.” I thought of Sarah Palin when I heard the story of Helen Wagner. Helen is 91 years old and is the mother of my sister-in-law Peggy. Give Helen five minutes and she will list a dozen times she has held death at bay. But now she is up against a much greater force:...

After seven debates and many more missed opportunities, the other GOP candidates finally pressed Mitt Romney on his Massachusetts health-care record in a serious way on Tuesday night. Let's extend the scrutiny and try to sort the substance from the merely polemical, because the policy stakes ........(skip) The exchange began when Rick Santorum scored Mr. Romney for lacking health-care "credibility," since the 2006 Bay State reform "was the basis for ObamaCare." If the first claim is for primary voters to decide, no one who knows anything about health policy on the left or right would deny the second: When Democrats...

The Obama administration may have relied much more heavily on Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare legislation as a blueprint for Obamacare than was previously believed. White House visitor logs obtained by NBC News revealed that three of Romney’s healthcare advisers had up to a dozen meetings with senior administration officials, including one in the Oval Office presided over by President Barack Obama. “They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model,” MIT economist and Romney healthcare adviser Jon Gruber told NBC. What’s more, the records show Gruber was...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I'm gonna play you a couple sound bites from last night. Mitt Romney appeared with Ted Baxter on The O'Reilly Factor and he was asked about individual mandate as part of Romneycare, and the problem that he has with Romneycare being so close to Obamacare, and still sticking with Romneycare. The question was, "How are you gonna convince conservatives who are suspicious of you -- not all of them, but some of them -- because you did the individual mandate in Massachusetts about health care, conservatives, that drives 'em nuts, they say that the government, state and...

Did conservatives learn the wrong lesson from losing to Obama the first time? Recently Politico ran a piece by Alexander Burns titled “Mitt Romney’s Warning Signs.” Burns outlined three major reasons why Romney is a weak frontrunner and “remains extremely beatable.” The three reasons are: His fundraising quarter wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t a tour de force either. (Romney “only” raised $18.25 million)His polling is solid, but stalled. (20% to 30% range)His personal shortcomings haven’t disappeared. Now I agree with all of the above but would like to add one more extremely important reason that explains both the lackluster fundraising...

He’s a flip-flopper who can seem disconnected from average citizens, and wears health care reform as a political albatross around his neck. That’s the standard line of attack against Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But, the same critique could also apply to President Obama. That means if Romney gets past GOP doubters and wins his party’s nomination, the 2012 election could be a head-to-head between two men with similar vulnerabilities. On the surface, they have little in common. Romney and Obama represent dramatically different backgrounds and cultivate vastly different political images. But they share some interesting traits. With or without...

The fact is that Mitt Romney is an unprincipled chameleon with ZERO core beliefs... a synthetic, calculated opportunism has taken their place. Meanwhile, most of what he actually has said and done betrays a Big-Government social liberal. Other fun facts regarding this 'conservative' fraud'spast actions, positions, and failures: refused to endorse the 1994 GOP "Contract with America" distanced himself from the Reagan legacy: "I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush" lost GOP House seats in both Massachusetts elections of his tenure, 2004/2006 (leaving Republicans with the least # of seats there since the Civil War)   strongly supported gay rights...

In late spring 2005, Mitt Romney gathered with a dozen top policy and political advisers in a conference room near the governor’s suite on the third floor of the State House. For two years, they had grappled with the abstruse complexities of health care reform, sifting data, evaluating input from experts, and testing theories to craft a plan that would expand coverage to nearly everyone in the state and not break the bank. This was a bold move for a first-term Republican governor, some of whose more conservative advisers doubted the wisdom of a foray deep into policy turf long...