Free Republic

Has President Obama’s power gone to his head as he attempts to avoid lame duck status and promote his party for the upcoming elections? He announced to the press in January that “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” remarked glibly in February that “I can do whatever I want” an hour after the administration took controversial executive action on Obamacare, and is promoting a video that celebrates the executive orders of his “Year of Action” on his official website. “America doesn’t stand still and neither will I,” says Obama in the video highlighting his 2014 State of...

Not only has Obamacare raised the price of health insurance, it has become a behemoth imposing further restrictions on care that can, ultimately, amount to no care at all from your doctor. In my most recent column for Accuracy in Media, I detail how the “micro networks,” or “narrow networks,” used by many Obamacare plans are leading to inferior care for some Americans. Many doctors, quite frankly, don’t want to be in the new system. Last October, “A poll conducted by the New York State Medical Society [found] that 44 percent of MDs said they are not participating in the...

Politico, trying to find a juicy angle on the latest chapter in the Benghazi saga, asks the arrogant question “Could the New York Times have saved ’60 Minutes’?” They are referring, of course, to “60 Minutes’” infamous use of charlatan Dylan Davies as a source when he did not, in fact, scale the compound wall the night of the attacks, nor see Ambassador Chris Stevens’ body in a Libyan hospital. Davies was outed by Washington Post sleuthing, and then by the New York Times, which spoke with the FBI about Davies. The FBI confirmed that this bad source had told...

The “glitches” in the Healthcare.gov website are major, pervasive, and damaging to Americans’ ability to acquire health insurance under this law. And the President seems only willing to offer weak apologies for the problems, as evinced by his recent Rose Garden appearance. Now the media has become embroiled in the question of “how long” it might take for the website to become functional. And maybe how to keep it, and the state websites, from being hacked. The answer to this latest question appears to be the end of November. “By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the...

The National Bureau of Economic Research has come up with a great new idea: let’s tax calories to make people thinner! “Raising the price of a calorie for home consumption by 10 percent may lower the percentage of body fat in youths about 8 or 9 percent, according to new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research,” writes Peter Whoriskey for the Washington Post. This is just another example of how liberals, in an effort to make a better society, abhor, and often actively confute, market forces to promote their own social agendas. “The new research, which focused on...

In a cutting new article for the Wall Street Journal, two professors criticize the American Psychiatric Association for loosening the standards by which Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is diagnosed. This, they argue, will make such diagnoses more likely and increase the amphetamine usage of the general public. “Symptoms of ADHD remain the same in the new edition” of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but with some changes: “The difference is that in the previous version of the manual, the first symptoms of ADHD needed to be evident by age 7 for a diagnosis to be made....

CNN) -- I'm going to start with three data points. One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks. Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up. And three: Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director...

Three Congressional bills have been introduced to alter No Child Left Behind as the 2014 proficiency deadline approaches. Newsmax reported on June 7 that “House Education Committee Chairman John Kline introduced a bill Thursday that would gut the decade-old No Child Left Behind law, returning power to the states to craft their own curriculums without strings attached to qualify for federal school funds” (emphasis added). However, so many states have been granted waivers on No Child Left Behind that the law has been essentially gutted already. Currently, 37 states and the District of Columbia have received waivers which exempt them...

Remember all the stories about how a glut of cheap shale gas was killing off coal in the United States and slashing the country’s carbon-dioxide emissions? It’s time to revise those headlines slightly. According to the latest data from the Energy Information Administration, coal has been reclaiming some — though not all — of its market share in 2013: This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. As I’ve noted before, natural gas prices have been creeping up over the past year, thanks to a combination of a colder winter, higher demand for heating fuel, scaled-back drilling, and also new...

Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has condemned President Obama’s $3.77 trillion budget as “just another left-wing wish list.” It raises spending and offsets these increases with additional taxes, such as a proposed 94 cents per pack additional tax on cigarettes. It also proposes additional funding for “basic research.” “The administration’s 2014 spending plan includes a total of $33.2-billion for basic research, an increase of about 4 percent over fiscal-2012 levels,” reports Paul Basken for The Chronicle of Higher Education (emphasis added). “It proposes total research-and-development spending of $143-billion, about 1.3 percent more than the fiscal-2012 amount.” “The White House,...

Imagine for a moment that your professor had you write the name of Mohammed on a piece of paper. Then you were to place it on the floor and to stomp on it. Imagine the outrage the community would express at defacing the Islamic prophet in class. This is what Florida Atlantic University Professor Deandre J. Poole, did in intercultural communication class–but with the name of Jesus, not Mohammed. Student Ryan Rotela, a Mormon, complained to Professor Poole’s supervisor about the incident and for his pains got suspended, according to The Daily Caller. This is a blatant case of double...

The imposition of Islamic law in rebel territories in Syria has begun, a new article in the Washington Post shows. It apparently starts with strokes of a pipe for punishments rather than the more severe punishments of stoning or cutting off a hand. Liz Sly’s Washington Post article explores the changes that Jabhat Al Nusra is making in war-torn Syria: “During a demonstration against the Syrian regime, Wael Ibrahim, a veteran activist, had tossed aside a banner inscribed with the Muslim declaration of faith,” she writes. “And that, decreed the officers of the newly established Sharia Authority set up to...

Intelligent design is just another form of creationism, creationism is profoundly unscientific, and such unscientific views do not belong in public classrooms. This, in a nutshell, is the argument of activist Zack Kopplin, a student at Rice University who began his battle against a Louisiana academic freedom law (the Louisiana Science Education Act) while in high school. He is the 2012 winner of the “Troublemaker of the Year Award.” “Well, this law allows supplemental materials into our school biology classrooms to ‘critique controversial theories like evolution and climate change,’” said Kopplin in a March interview on the Bill Moyers show....

Democratic movements in the Middle East have the potential to mobilize a pan-Arab public both on local issues and transnational issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, argues Professor Marc Lynch in his book The Arab Uprising. Focusing largely on the events unfolding in 2011, Professor Lynch hails Al-Jazeera as a singular force pushing for mobilization across nation-state boundaries, while criticizing it as pushing, in the later stages, too much of Qatar’s foreign policy over its alleged reputation for unbiased news reporting. “Al-Jazeera has become a major weapon in Qatar’s arsenal, allowing that tiny state to play an outsized role in...

You know that intellectual diversity is lacking when it takes a special appointment to get a conservative into the University of Colorado at Boulder lineup. Oh wait, it’s only for one year. This is apparently newsworthy stuff. “Steven Hayward has been named the first ‘visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy’ at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a position created with the intent of broadening intellectual diversity among the flagship campus’s left-leaning faculty,” reported Sydni Dunn for The Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday. “Mr. Hayward, a fellow at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, in Ohio, will begin his...

If CNN’s coverage of the election of Pope Francis I on Wednesday afternoon is any indication, Jeff Zucker and his minions are not ready for prime time — or any time for that matter. I stopped counting the number of errors from CNN’s anchor team after three pages of notes. The following are only the most egregious: • The network reported Francis is the first non-European pontiff in the history of the church. Well, how about modern-day history? St. Peter, the first pope, came from near the Sea of Galilee. A number of early pontiffs came from Africa and Asia....

“I don’t think Obamacare is going to drive health insurance costs down.” These words, while common sense to the Right, prove startling when you consider where they were spoken today: at the liberal Center for American Progress, which has historically informed policies made by the Obama Administration. “All the evidence I can tell you as a business person who pays for health insurance is that it’s driving them way up,” continued Steven Brill, journalist and author of Time magazine’s February lead story, “Bitter Pill.” “It’s great, for example, to get rid of preexisting conditions, but it does mean that the...

On Tuesday, four Democrats in Congress unveiled a brand-new proposal for a carbon tax. The set-up is simple: The U.S. government would slap a fee on fossil-fuel emissions and refund the revenue back to the public. But there’s a twist: The precise details of the carbon tax have yet to be thrashed out. The four lawmakers are soliciting public comments for how big the tax should be and how best to rebate the money. The proposal is being put forward by Reps. Henry Waxman and Earl Blumenauer, as well as Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Brian Schatz. Here are the key...

A recent article by Brad Plumer at the Washington Post outlines the tension between climate change goals and the need to provide “energy impoverished” nations with access to electricity. “If we want to limit the amount of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere and hit that 2°C goal, we’ll have to replace about 80 percent of our current fossil-fuel use with carbon-free energy and then use only carbon-free energy to meet our future needs,” he writes. “That’s hard enough.” “But if we want everyone in the world to have as much energy as the average Bulgarian enjoys, then we’ll need twice as...

Both Egypt and Tunisia have looked to Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) as a model for the Arab Spring in their own states. In his recent book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, Andrew C. McCarthy condemns this outlook as “perverse.” “It is perverse to regard the Islamist AKP as a ‘model for the Arab Spring,’” he argues. “The main lesson of the Arab Spring is that the mirage of Islam as a moderating force hospitable to democratic transformation exists solely in our own minds, for our own consumption.” McCarthy goes into depth about the changes in Turkey...