Free Republic

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said that Obama’s apology to people whose health insurance was dropped “wasn’t an apology”—it was like apologizing for someone’s dog dying “and you refuse to acknowledge the fact that you just ran over that dog with your car.” “It certainly wasn’t an apology. When I heard it, really the analogy I was thinking of was, you tell somebody, ‘Boy, I’m really sorry your dog died,’ and you refuse to acknowledge the fact that you just ran over that dog with your car. Those are your tire tracks on that dog,” Johnson said speaking with Charlie Sykes...

Nashville, TN – Today, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham introduced the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. The legislation currently has 33 cosponsors – but Senator Alexander is not one of them. Conservative Senate candidate Joe Carr called on Senator Alexander to change his stance and add himself as a co-sponsor. “I’m strongly pro-life and believe it’s imperative the Senate pass this important piece of legislation. When Senator Graham announced his co-sponsors and Senator Alexander’s name was missing, I was disappointed. I am hoping Senator Alexander will change his stance and add himself as a co-sponsor. This legislation is too...

Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) announced today that next week he will file legislation that will allow Americans to keep their previous health-insurance plans, as President Obama promised. The proposed bill, entitled the “If you Like Your Health Plan, You Can Keep It Act,” would, according to Johnson’s statement amend the Affordable Care Act “to make Obamacare live up to the promises of the politicians who sold the plan to the American public.” From the press release: One of the most important promises made by President Obama and Democrat congressional leadership to promote the Affordable Care Act was that Americans...

Kelly Ayotte was furious. One media account after another (as here) has the Republican and theoretically conservative New Hampshire senator angrily attacking Senator Ted Cruz in a recent closed-door Senate GOP Caucus. Behaving as follows, this much cited and notably un-refuted coming from the New York Times, bold print supplied here for emphasis: And on Wednesday at a private luncheon, several Senate Republicans — Dan Coats of Indiana, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Kelly Ayotte of... --snip-- NR was spot on here about Ayotte, and there’s one more thing to add about that Ayotte comment of seeking a “thoughtful, bipartisan...

Standing on conservative principle – such as opposing the spending that implements Obamacare – is silly, at least if you are an establishment Republican, like Tennessee's Senator Robert Corker. Corker is the latest in a long line of establishment Republicans to ridicule and oppose the efforts of Utah’s principled limited government constitutional conservative Senator Mike Lee and others to defeat the spending bills that implement Obamacare. In Corker's formulation such an effort is "silly" and those in favor of it "don't have the courage to roll up our sleeves and deal with real deficit reduction and spending decisions." So let’s...

A small group of Senate and House Republicans are meeting Monday night to discuss how to pass an immigration overhaul through Congress. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who has been hungry to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws this Congress, is attending the session. -snip- Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is involved in the planning, according to two sources.

JCPenney lost nearly a third of its customers in 2012. Now, in an unprecedented move, the company is admitting it totally screwed up. … Failed CEO Ron Johnson’s plan included ditching the company’s popular promotions program. Ideally, the strategy was meant to revamp JCPenney’s image and appeal to young people. In reality, it alienated long-time customers, while failing to draw in new ones. …

It’s official: Apple is out of fashion at JCPenney. Three top proteges of former Penney CEO Ron Johnson — all of whom boasted stints at Apple on their resumes — exited the retailer today, The Post has learned. Chief Operating Officer Mike Kramer, Chief Talent Officer Daniel Walker and Chief Creative Officer Mike Fisher kicked off an exodus of high-profile Johnson hires that is expected to continue in the wake of his ouster, sources said. Kramer — who said publicly earlier this year that he “hated the culture” at Penney — resigned as interim CEO Mike Ullman this week began...

NEW YORK — J.C. Penney's board of directors has ousted CEO Ron Johnson after only 16 months on the job as a risky turnaround strategy backfired and led to massive losses and steep sales drops. In a statement issued late Monday, the department store chain said that it has rehired Johnson's predecessor Mike Ullman, 66, who was CEO of the department store chain for seven years until November 2011. The announcement comes as a growing chorus of critics including a former Penney CEO Allen Questrom called for his resignation as they lost faith in turnaround strategy. Penney reported dismal fourth-quarter...

J.C. Penney Co. shares jumped 11% in after hours on Monday as CNBC, citing an unidentified source, said Chief Executive Ron Johnson is no longer head of the company.

The Cost of Excess Government The Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy estimates that it costs Americans $1.75 trillion to comply with federal regulations each year.  To put $1.75 trillion into perspective, that amount is larger than all but eight economies in the world.  It also means that over 10% of the U.S. economy is spent on trying to satisfy rules issued by Washington bureaucrats. That doesn't even include federal, state, and local taxes. This heavy regulatory burden diverts resources from innovation to compliance, discourages business investment, and chills job creation. It is no accident that as Washington adds new regulations,...

Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has launched a new campaign called "Victims of Government" that details how onerous government has destroyed people's lives. To launch the effort Senator Johnson posted a video yesterday in which he describes the plight of Stephen Lathrop from Granite City, Illinois. According to a letter from Senator Johnson and Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) to the Army Corps of Engineers, Mr. Lathrop's town has a severe flooding problem that the Army Corps of Engineers was ordered to fix in 1965 but never did. In light of this, Mr. Lathrop decided to buy a local dump, invest $100,000...

However you’re counting the numbers, they hurt. JCPenney revealed in a regulatory filing yesterday that it finished its fiscal year ended Feb. 2 with 116,000 employees — a whopping 43,000 less than a year earlier. That’s a slashing of 27 percent — even steeper than the company’s disastrous revenue decline of 24.8 percent for the same period. It’s also more than twice the figure of 19,000 job cuts that Chief Executive Ron Johnson testified to under oath earlier this month, when asked during the company’s trial with Macy’s and Martha Stewart how many Penney employees had lost their jobs on...

Raise your hand if you're surprised by any of this:   Senate Democrats are drafting a federal budget blueprint that would raise nearly $1 trillion in new taxes over the next decade and slice roughly $1 trillion more from projected spending, according to Democratic aides familiar with the document. But the framework would never bring the budget into balance, potentially putting Democrats on the defensive as Washington enters a new phase in the ongoing battle over the swollen national debt. This week, both parties are scheduled to unveil competing visions for the 10-year period that begins Oct. 1. House Republicans...

JCPenney, the storied if unglamorous retailer, is in trouble. Big trouble. Fourth-quarter earnings results came out on Wednesday and they were terrible. The bad news starts with a quarterly loss of $427 million, but it doesn’t end there. Comparable store sales—meaning stores that were open this past quarter and also open in the same quarter of the previous year—fell by a mind-boggling 32 percent. Henry Blodget says it may have been the worst quarter posted by any retailer ever.    It wasn’t supposed to be this way. JCPenney made a big splash in the retail world by hiring Ron Johnson,...

Sometimes a citizen lawmaker dares to exercise such candor that the inside-the-Beltway crowd recoils in horror at the blatant honesty. Such was the case with Wisconsin’s own Senator Ron Johnson (R) this past week. Johnson captured attention with his tough questioning of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to finally answer questions about the Benghazi disaster of last September. Clinton, demonstrating the cunning political acumen that propelled her and her husband so far on the national political stage, weaved a range of emotions into her carefully prepared opening statement. With her final months...

A lot of people in Washington apparently forgot how good Hillary Clinton is at not telling the truth. Wednesday, in her testimony before both the Senate and, later, the House, Clinton brilliantly fudged, dodged and filibustered. Of course, she's a pro. Clinton was slow-walking depositions, lawyering up and shifting blame when many of her questioners were still civilians down on the farm. Aided by a ridiculous format, she outfoxed most of the Republicans with ease. Meanwhile, the Democrats, almost uniformly, seemed singularly interested in celebrating Mrs. Clinton as a global diva who somehow manages to carry the burden of her...

(CNSNews.com) - In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, five State Department Diplomatic Security agents who were in Benghazi that day and survived the attack were evacuated from the country and taken to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. All five had suffered from smoke inhalation, and one was seriously wounded. Under questioning from Sen. Ron Johnson (R.-Wis.) in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed that she has spoken to only one of the American survivors who was evacuated from Libya after the...

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) lashed out at the upper chamber today as a symbol of government’s runaway power in Americans’ lives. “It’s an alternate universe. No, this — this place is a joke. I mean, bottom line, this is an absurd process,” Johnson said on CNBC. “It certainly proves the genius of our founding fathers that government should be limited. I mean, the fact that we have this place having such an enormous effect on our economy, on people’s livelihood, is wrong. It’s simply wrong.” “So, I’m the manufacturer. I’m always looking for the cause of problems. The cause of...

the poor turnaround that Ron Johnson has engineered at JCPenney Co. Inc. (NYSE: JCP). Our take is that this is the beginning of the end and is a prelude to Ron Johnson's termination. Shares have gone from $60 five years ago to under $25 again, and the 52-week range is $19.06 to $43.18. Johnson has been on the job now for just under a year ... Perhaps chimpanzees could have done as well. Howard Davidowitz, of the retail consulting firm Davidowitz & Associates, said on Bloomberg TV that Ron Johnson will "be a goner" in another nine months if this...