Free Republic

Politics is in the eye of the beholder. Post-mortems now gushing forth about why Ken Cuccinelli, conservative Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, lost to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a business-as-usual political retread from the Clinton crowd, tell us more about who produces this punditry than what reality actually might be. We’re hearing that the Tea Party killed Cuccinelli (according to the Wall Street Journal editorial page they “stabbed him in the back”) with the government shutdown and that, once again, a socially conservative Republican candidate has shown he can’t win the votes of women. What I see is very...

The president's passive-voice expression of vague regret was so half-assed and self-serving that conservatives can simply sit back and let the mainstream media tee off on its inadequacy. He's not sorry for lying repeatedly in furtherance of his political goals, and he's certainly not sorry that people are losing their coverage. His law required that outcome. His promise was an intentional lie. Let the MSM opprobrium flow: The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza: "The lowest low of the Obama presidency." National Journal's Ron Fournier: I'm sorry, too, Mr. President...I'm sorry you campaigned for reelection on the famous false promise: "If...

If you are inclined to believe Barack Obama's claim that people losing their insurance are giving up skimpy coverage for much better benefits, read the editorial in Monday's Wall Street Journal. Then read it again, and again, and again. Edie Sunby has a rare form of cancer that is almost always fatal. Yet she is alive, thanks to the efforts of doctors in San Diego, at Stanford University and in Texas. Over the past year, UnitedHealthcare has spent $1.2 million on her medical expenses. But she has just been informed that her insurance is being cancelled. Worse, in the new...

If Obamacare’s website, www.healthcare.gov, had an initial public offering, as Twitter did this week, how might its stock price be valued after its recent performance? In Colorado, nearly 250,000 people were notified that their health insurance will be cancelled because their plans fail Obamacare's requirements. In Washington State, nearly 200,000 people received similar notices. Coloradoans and Washingtonians may be losing their doctors and health insurance, but at least they have legalized marijuana to dull the pain. Delaware and North Carolina each boast one Obamacare enrollee. Winning. Beyond under-enrollment, the Obamacare-forced cancellations portend tragic consequences. The Wall Street Journal publicized the...

Don't you believe that President Obama's lies that people could keep their health insurance plans and doctors were his only lies about Obamacare or that these and the other lies were not demonstrably false when he uttered them. In my book "Crimes Against Liberty," I chronicled Obama's multitudinous lies about Obamacare and many other subjects, from earmarks to tax increases. Please allow me to revisit some of my reporting on the Obamacare lies in light of the recent furor over Obama's dissembling concerning health care. Let's start with the particularly galling declaration Obama made after Congress' partisan passage of Obamacare...

Everyone is focusing on Obamacare because it is such an obvious disaster, but in fact, it is but a microcosm of Barack Obama's entire presidency. Obamacare is Obama unmasked. Aren't some of you tired of making lame excuses for him that only serve to make things worse? He has made a mess of nearly everything his policies have touched, and he's mostly avoided the blame; but he owns Obamacare, and he has nowhere to hide. When someone with the influence Obama enjoyed upon first taking office sets out to fundamentally transform the nation -- and he has the unqualified support...

Why do a vast majority of the American public continue to fall for the constant lies coming out of Washington?What is it that they just don’t see?Time and time again the rug is pulled out from under them and they still fall for the same old “bait and switch”.Politicians know it and now they have no qualms about continuing the lies even after we know they are lies! I remember a time when at least they tried to cover it up, (Richard Nixon), or they came clean after they were caught, (Bill Clinton).Today however, they fabricate a lie in order...

http://media.townhall.com/townhall/reu/ha/2013/306/9e8d3e35-8272-4e54-9ca4-f1eb16faf5af.jpg> Let's suppose for a moment that you actually could buy health insurance through Obamacare's state and federal government-run exchanges. How high would your health care expenses have to be to really justify buying that kind of insurance? Previously, when we asked if you even need health insurance, we identified a number of situations where having health insurance would be most beneficial to you (Sean Parnell adds to that discussion here). All the scenarios came down to one basic reality: buying health insurance is most worth doing when you can reasonably expect to have high health care expenses in the...

As a civilized person, you know in your mind that you should not derive pleasure from the pain of others. But periodically it is simply appropriate to do so. That is why the word “schadenfreude” exists. That is what some of us feel about the spectacle of Obamacare unfolding before our eyes. So you don’t have to go running to a dictionary, scha•den•freu•de is a delicious word of German derivation. It technically means a feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people. But in reality it means so much more. And though some...

By 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was finally done in by his "credibility gap" -- the growing abyss between what he said about, and what was actually happening inside, Vietnam. "Modified limited hangout" and "inoperative" were infamous euphemisms that Nixon administration officials used to mask lies about the Watergate scandal. After a while, few believed any of the initial Reagan administration disavowals that it was not trading "arms for hostages" in the Iran-Contra scandal. George H.W. Bush thundered during his campaign to "read my lips: no new taxes," only to agree later to raise them. Bill Clinton's infamous assertion that...

President Obama's nominee to be the next Director of the National Economic Council, Jeffrey Zients, has promised that, "By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users." But with even Obama's own campaign tech team doubting that the job can be done in that time, Democrats are beginning to consider what happened if HealthCare.gov fails again. The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn writes: Nobody questions that a poorly functioning website would cause serious problems, particularly for people who need to find new insurance by January. But, according to experts and industry sources I consulted over...

When I wrote last week that Democrats eventually would come to Congress seeking to “fix” the mess that is Obamacare I never thought “eventually” would be a week later, but that’s where we find ourselves. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., was the first to put fingers to keyboard this week when she wrote President Obama saying, “Given the existing problems with the website, I urge you to consider extending open enrollment beyond the current end date of March 31, 2014. Allowing extra time for consumers is critically important so they have the opportunity to become familiar with the website, survey their...

Many reporters caught up in the bizarre world of official Washington have written extensively on political tactics and implications of the so-called government shutdown and disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov. Typical was a New York Times headline that blared "Republicans, Sensing Weakness in Health Law Rollout, Switch Tactics." But there's been precious little analysis about the underlying realities that led us to this point. Perhaps that's because neither political party wants to face up to those realities. So, instead of substance, D.C. journalists cover politics like junior high school students trying to keep up with who's in, who's out, and who...

Well they finished that pretty quickly. It took the White House practically no time to hunt down the offender/terrorist/extortionist/arsonist inside the Obama Compound who was outing the administration via snarky tweets. “President Obama's staff has unmasked and fired a national security official who tweeted critical comments under a pseudonym,” says USAToday. “Jofi Joseph, tweeting under the handle @natsecwonk, once wrote: ‘I'm a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me.’ Other Obama staff members and officials — including Secretary of State John Kerry and former National Security adviser Tom Donilon...

Why does the White House need a private-sector "tech surge" to repair its wretched Obamacare website failures? Weren't all of the president's myriad IT czars and their underlings supposed to ensure that taxpayers got the most effective, innovative, cutting-edge and secure technology for their money? Now is the perfect time for an update on Obama's top government titans of information technology. As usual, "screw up, move up" is standard bureaucratic operating procedure. Let's start with the "federal chief information officer." In 2009, Obama named then 34-year-old "whiz kid" Vivek Kundra to the post overseeing $80 billion in government IT spending....

The Obamacare recriminations are underway. Stuck with an unpopular law whose launch has been an unmitigated disaster, the Democratic Party has morphed from a ruthless, unified political machine to a frantic, zig-zagging tornado of blame. The White House would like you to know that the Department of Health and Human Services was chiefly responsible for the implementation process. HHS counters that the White House ultimately runs the show, and that Sec. Kathleen Sebelius' hands were effectively tied by her relative lack of power. Some Democrats are blaming the private sector contractors who were brought in to help craft healthcare.gov (conveniently...

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, the federal government’s procurement process was long beset by gross corruption and overspending. During the mid-1980s, investigations from watchdog groups such as the Project on Government Oversight (then called the "Project on Military Procurement") uncovered just how bad Washington’s spendthrift culture had become. These studies illustrated the extent of inbred and massive fraud in the procurement process, by drawing attention to the outrageous prices the government was paying for essentially everyday items such as toilet seats for government planes. The $640 toilet seat became a symbol of government inefficiency and waste. Today, that...

The president's remarkable speech in the Rose Garden yesterday, the high point of which was his claim regarding Obamacare --"It's really good!"-- sets the stage for another MSM fail, because the president made several specific, verifiable claims that ought to be the subject of real, deep and sustained reporting over the next few days. I had a lot of fun with the "It's really good!" exclamation by the president on yesterday show, mixing his remarks into a 1974 Pinto ad, and calling forth memories of New Coke, Rosanne Barr singing the Star Spangled banner, the launch of Microsoft's Zune, the...

At an event on Monday to boost the Affordable Care Act after its glitch-rich rollout, President Obama asserted that his signature health care plan is a hit because "prices have come down." That's the administration's big lie: that Washington can mandate universal health care with beefed-up benefits and somehow the plan will save everyone money. I've been hearing from healthy Californians who were kicked off their private plans because of Obamacare and were informed they would have to pay much higher premiums on Affordable Care Act exchanges. It could be that his family's boon spells a financial hit for healthy...

The constipated debut of Obamacare has reduced the president of the United States to the status of TV pitchman. "Act now" to get this great product, he exhorted listeners on Monday, offering testimonials from one of the rare successful purchasers, promising limitless benefits and low prices, and even an 800 number. His operators are standing by, he urged, and they speak 150 languages! (You could sign up in Min Bei and Kazakh, if you could sign up at all.) If Obama had thrown in a free tote bag for the first 100 callers, it wouldn't have seemed out of place....