Free Republic

Dear Mr. Bertolini, With a deep sense of sadness, I must inform you that I will no longer serve as a physician for Aetna patients under the terms of our contractual agreement, which you most recently unilaterally changed. I have been privileged and honored to care for thousands of patients covered by Aetna policies since the 1990’s. I have devoted my life to providing the very best, state-of-the-art care to these individuals. We have formed a patient-doctor relationship, which I hope many will chose to continue in spite of my severing ties with Aetna. You see, health insurance has evolved...

She is an unabashed liberal. In a culture increasingly governed by Marxist Nomenklatura masking itself as “liberal”, conservatives should be bold enough to reclaim that much maligned political descriptor as one of our own. We are, after all, the ideological descendants of classical liberals, making the outspoken once Liberal Democrat, now Libertarian Camille Paglia the perfect match for contemporary politically conservative feminists. Can’t possibly imagine the lady who, even when she smiles, gives you a look that says, “I know you’re full of s**t,” could possibly fit in the ranks of the right wing? Here are 10 reasons why you...

The IRS got caught with their pants down last year. So now they are writing regulations that will allow them to do legally what they were doing illegally before. Every time you think these people can sink no lower, they go out of their way to prove you wrong. A cabal of leftist groups sued the IRS demanding they adopt these regulations, whereupon the IRS went out of its way to comply. This is a classic set up. It was probably agreed to in advance between the IRS and the plaintiffs. Now that they are complying, the leftists have magically...

Much of the political history of the extended twentieth century is that of massive extinctions of citizenries by their dictatorial governments.  Take the engineered mass starvations, torture chambers, firing squads, and gulags of Lenin and Stalin; Nazi gas chambers; Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge killing fields; the genocides of Mao's "Great Leap Forward"; and the tyrannical North Korean Sung dynasty, and one will find that over one hundred million people have been slaughtered.       Systematically murdering millions to create an imagined earthly Eden is clearly irrational.  In this sense, leftist ideology has the look of a religious inquisition.In his introduction to Eric Voegelin's The New...

In late October, continuing a four-year pattern of making such claims, MIT's Jonathan Gruber, who along with Ezekiel "Zeke the Bleak" Emanuel is considered one of the two "architects" of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, pointed to a study which claimed that "the Affordable Care Act is working even better than expected, producing more coverage for much less money." But, as Wingfield noted in his Friday column, Gruber sang a totally different tune when quoted in the Washington Post on Thursday. WaPo's Sarah Kliff failed to tag Gruber as an Obamacare architect, making it appear as if he's just...

Back in the seventies when I was a lefty and under the sway, like the new mayor of the city of New York, of various Central and South American marxists, we used to speak of “el enemigo principal,” the principal enemy. In fact, there was a rather graphic (and well made) Bolivian movie of that name by leftwing director Jorge Sanjines. (Clip here.) Not surprisingly in those days the principal enemies of Sanjines’ film were los yanquis and their dreaded CIA — a bit of a cliché, one must admit, but the idea of having a principal enemy in itself...

At this time of Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for the U.S. military — not just for the usual reason that it protects us from our foes but also because it has the potential to save us from ourselves. As I make my rounds each day in the capital, chronicling our leaders’ plentiful foibles, failings, screw-ups, inanities, outrages and overall dysfunction, I’m often asked if there’s anything that could clean up the mess. My usual answer is a shrug and an admission that there’s no silver bullet. There are many possibilities — campaign spending limits, term limits, nonpartisan primaries, nonpartisan redistricting, a...

In the eyes of some, the great hope for mankind has always been a sort of communal society. The thought behind this idea is that everyone could work towards a common end and share the fruits of their labor. As a matter of fact, Liberalism and social progressives teach this today. So, “in order to form a more perfect Union”, at all costs they foist their communal ideals upon society. In a perfect world, this type of social order would be heavenly. Unfortunately, we don’t live in paradise. That being the case, there are two things that war against this...

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D- Mo.) says Republicans are “misleading people” about ObamaCare, which she calls a “free market solution". McCaskill told MSNBC viewers on Nov. 14 that ObamaCare, which mandates that people buy only government-approved insurance and has resulted in the cancellations of millions of policies, is a “free market solution”.“I think we just want people to get the right information, instead of the misinformation that Republicans love to spread about this reform,” McCaskill said. “Scaring people, misleading people, this is a free market solution and we hope people take advantage of it.”(video at link)Earlier that same day, McCaskill was...

This year is the 96th anniversary of the Russian revolution, one of the most earthshaking events in human history. The terms "history" and "96th anniversary" are apt to cause the eyes of many if not most Americans to glaze over, but American life today is being molded directly by the ideas and events set in motion in Russia in 1917. Distilled down to the most important elements, the Russian revolution had three key ideological elements: first, the state as almighty, a replacement for God; secondly, a political elite to guide the "masses"; thirdly, the use of the state's police power...

<p>On the afternoon of July 12, 1974, House and Senate Democratic leaders were arriving early at the White House — well before their demoralized Republican counterparts. And were they ever pumped! As they trouped into the President’s office for their photo-op, it became clear they considered this a victory party. They almost literally pranced around the Oval Office giving each other the 1970s equivalent of high-fives and chest bumps.</p>

Two technology stories have filled the airwaves in recent days: the impending Twitter IPO, which is predicted to raise more than $1 billion; and the Obamacare online roll-out, which has crashed in a welter of locked-out applicants and frozen exchanges. The connections between the two events are deeper than you might think – and they represent the latest milestones along the diverging responses by industry and government to the birth of the technology revolution more than a century ago.

Leading climate scientists said on Friday they were more certain than ever before that mankind was the main culprit for global warming and warned the impact of greenhouse gas emissions would linger for centuries. A report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), played down the fact temperatures have risen more slowly in the past 15 years, saying there were substantial natural variations that masked a long-term warming trend. It said the Earth was set for further warming and more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels as greenhouse gases built up in the atmosphere. The oceans would become...

At a home-school community meeting deep in the woods of Baden-Württemberg, children kick around balls and parents grill sausages while chatting about their latest run-ins with the state. An American woman who just gives her name as “Teri” says she and her German husband started home-schooling their two daughters so they could learn both English and German. “We want them to be fluent in both languages, in both cultures and in both politics,” she says. But when local authorities discovered their daughters were not going to school, Teri and her husband received a letter demanding they enroll them. “The letter...

Nothing about the political battle between conservatives and liberals is new — not the passion, not the beliefs and not the absolute certainty on both sides that the country is doomed. You could go back to the nation’s founding, and you would find similar disputes such as we are engaged in today. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson waged a fierce fight over the notion of a central bank, for instance, and the same underlying themes were apparent then that are now being discussed regarding the need for federal oversight of health care, education, law enforcement, marriage and virtually every other...

Every so often the wonks of wishful thinking give us an article about how blacks are becoming Republicans, how Hispanics are supposedly a natural GOP constituency, or, as is the subject here today, how the millennial generation is turning "conservative." Perhaps pundits asserting the last thing recall Winston Churchill's observation, "If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain." And perhaps they overlook that it's possible to raise a brainless generation. Don't think, as one might, that this will be a typical analysis sneering at the proverbial...

A publication of the international socialist movement has explicitly stated it is promoting abortion and gay “marriage” as part of a multi-pronged campaign to “replace global capitalism” with Marxism. The admission came on Monday in an article entitled "How Can We Change the World?" by Todd Chretien in the Socialist Worker, which is published by the International Socialist Organization. The ISO proudly “stands in the tradition of revolutionary socialists Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, and Leon Trotsky.” The article was putatively about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. However, it hailed the socially liberal views of...

I love it when liberal progressives actually speak their true beliefs for us all to hear. However, you have to probe deeply and get them riled up enough to blow their cool in order to hear their unvarnished agenda. Liberals know that sane people do not agree with their policies or their goals, so they must always cloak them in a shadowy cloud of lies. It's always, "it's about the children!" or "where's your compassion?" with them in order to mask their true goals. Once you get under their skin, you can expose their lies and twisted words as they'll...

If you come from a broken or dysfunctional family, or bad neighborhood, how enticing and deceptive this indoctrination is… Via The Blaze: Fourth-grade students in Illinois are learning that “government is like a nation’s family” because it sets rules and takes care of needs such as health care and education. So says a worksheet for social studies homework that was distributed to students at East Prairie School in Skokie, Ill, complete with a drawing of Uncle Sam cradling a baby that represents the citizens. Students are then prompted to answer 10 questions comparing government and families, including how their family...

Good news. President Obama has vastly expanded the concept of “rights” in America by decree. He told a radio audience in his weekly address that health insurance is now a “right” that every American enjoys: Your health insurance isn’t something to play politics with. Our economy isn’t something to play politics with. This isn’t a game. This is about the economic security of millions of families. See, in the states where governors and legislatures and insurers are working together to implement this law properly – states like California, New York, Colorado and Maryland – competition and consumer choice are actually...