Free Republic

During an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday, President Obama was asked if he could understand why the American people are frustrated with the lack of economic recovery. Obama responded by saying he "doesn't control the weather." "No matter how well we're steering the ship, if the boat's rocking back and forth and people are getting sick and, you know, they're being buffeted by the winds and the rain ... if you're asking, 'Are you enjoying the ride right now?' folks are  going to say, 'No.' " Obama said. "People are  going to say, 'You know what? A good captain...

I usually write songs and this is my first attempt at writing an op-ed piece. It always amazes me how most political commentators beat around the bush. Well, that’s not how you write a song so let’s just cut to the chase and get to the chorus:My song, "Obama Budget Plan" can be seen on YouTube. It indicates that President Obama’s budget plan appears to be to spend as much of our money as he wants, on anything he wants and to pay for it by just printing more money. The fact is, President Obama doesn’t really seem to have...

(CNSNews.com) - Senate Democrats are calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate possible price-fixing of gasoline by U.S. refineries because “recent reports,” according to the senators, suggest the refiners are trimming supply to keep prices high. But a federal report from November shows that refinery stockpiles started to decline in 2008, if not earlier. At a press conference on Tuesday, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced that they had sent a letter that day to the FTC, “to request the Commission begin an investigation into potential price fixing of gasoline by U.S. refiners.” “Recent...

(CNSNews.com) - Back in 2008 then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) knew where she wanted to place the blame for high gas prices. “The price of oil is at the doorstep -- 4 dollars plus per gallon for oil, is attributed to two oil men in the White House,” Pelosi said in a CNN interview on July 17th, 2008. Now that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are out of the White House, Pelosi has been silent on the issue. She has made no public comments on gas prices over the past few months. President Barack Obama...

Your average poorly informed lefty (but I repeat myself) will reliably tell you that our current fiscal straits are the result of three things: 1. Bush’s wars; 2. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich; 3. Bush’s bank bailouts. That is not true, of course: The main bank bailouts (odious as they were) have been paid back, often at a profit. The money-losing parts (and the likely money-losing parts) are the ones insisted upon by Barack Obama and his Democratic colleagues: the foreclosure-prevention programs, the endless maintenance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, etc. The Iraq War, in its most expensive...

'Fair game' a box-office flop The movie Fair Game, about the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson affair, was in theaters and then it seemed to disappear. Any reason? Poor ticket sales, basically. Fair Game was a generally well-regarded movie (it got a good 79 percent favorable rating on the movie website Rotten Tomatoes) that starred big-name actors in Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. It was about CIA operative Valerie Plame (played by Watts) whose cover was blown in Bob Novak's widely read Washington Post political column. The information was allegedly leaked to Novak by White House officials to discredit her husband, Joseph...

While most normal Americans still reeled in shock in the wake of the Tucson shooting, liberals across the country were out in force blaming conservatives for it. Given how heart-rending the whole tragedy was, their reaction is truly mind-boggling. One can only wonder what kind of human beings would react in this way. To liberals' eternal shame, it turns out that the shooter was anything but a Tea Partyer and that his "conservative" credentials are rather thin indeed. In fact, the information that has emerged since then would appear to place him in the leftist camp, if anywhere in the...

While you’re reading all those HuffPo articles filled with hand-wringing sanctimony about the current state of Republican political discourse, keep in mind that according to New York Magazine, the founder of the Huffington Post filmed a role in a sci-fi fantasy film where the two heroes of the film attempt to rid the world of evil by assassinating President George W. Bush: The two soldiers’ relationship blossoms, and Butch begins to get to know his lover’s family. But after he inadvertently draws attention to their ancestral home, disaster strikes. This tragedy radicalizes the pair and they become convinced that the...

As the nation reeled from news that a gunman had shot a group of Arizona citizens including Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford, an all-too-predictable response emanated from some on the left. Despite news reports suggesting that the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was simply insane – a devotee of Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler, who believed in mind control and “conscience dreaming,” and who was convinced he would become the treasurer of a new currency – many left-wingers sought to attribute his despicable acts to a conservative political agenda. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, “We don’t have proof yet that this...

Our lefty friends have just come off a pretty a good century playing the blame game on conservatives for "violence." Whether it was corporate goons whacking union organizers at the Battle of the Overpass, or racist Southern cops turning the fire-hoses on civil-rights marchers, or Chicago cops attacking the "kids" in 1968, you knew who the good guys were. Somehow the story of union thugs attacking Tea Party folks, or Reverend Al Sharpton inciting anti-Korean riots, or anti-WTO anarchists vandalizing downtown Seattle didn't have quite the same resonance with the American people. So our lefty friends play the right-wing violence...

Unwilling to delay until tomorrow mistakes that could be made immediately, Democrats used 2010 to begin losing 2012. Trying to pre-emptively drain the election of its dangerous (to Democrats) meaning, all autumn Democrats described the electorate as suffering a brain cramp, an apoplexy of fear, rage, paranoia, cupidity -- something. Any explanation would suffice as long as it cast what voters were about to say as perhaps contemptible and too trivial to be taken seriously by the serious. It is amazing the ingenuity Democrats invest in concocting explanations of voter behavior that erase what voters always care about, and this...

Nancy Pelosi emerges from her bunker today to headline a New York fund raiser, a last-gasp stab at scaring up support for House Dems. And scare is in the script. Speaking in Pittsburgh yesterday, she fired up what's left of the Steelworkers' Union there by prophesizing calamity in the event of a GOP landslide. That, and laying blame -- at the feet of President Bush. And the Chamber of Commerce. "We have lost millions of jobs to outsourcing under President Bush," said Pelosi -- who then blamed her party's woes on foreign donations allegedly used to fund the pro-business chamber....

It is a ritual as predictable as the tides. With every election, we descend into sound-bite economics. Rhetorical claims grow more partisan and self-serving. We are now deep in this process. President Obama's policies either averted another Great Depression -- or have crippled the recovery. These debates confirm the dreary state of economic discourse. The right rejects the idea that sometimes government must rescue the economy from panic; the left sees salvation only in ever-larger government. The first is an invitation to anarchy; the second threatens long-term economic growth through higher taxes, regulations or budget deficits. When Obama took office...

Obama says Republicans holding recovery hostage By Caren Bohan and Alister Bull WASHINGTON | Fri Sep 10, 2010 5:07pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama accused Republicans on Friday of holding the middle class hostage and defended his efforts to stimulate the sluggish economy as he tries to reverse grim election prospects for his fellow Democrats in November. With opinion polls showing more Americans questioning his economic leadership, Obama used a rare news conference at the White House to hammer home a campaign-style message painting Republicans as obstructionist and the party for the rich. Obama has been on the...

When signs of a severe economic downfall emerged more than two years ago, then-candidate Barack Obama was quick to point a finger at the man he hoped to replace. Seventeen months into his administration, the message is often the same, and Republicans say it's time for him to drop the Bush bashing and take ownership of the problem. "Nothing makes a president look weaker than pointing the finger at past administrations," said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. "By blaming somebody, it looks like you are playing politics and people just want jobs. They don't care about whose fault it is. Playing...

Barack Obama is setting a record-setting number of records during his first year in office. Largest budget ever. Largest deficit ever. Largest number of broken promises ever. Most self-serving speeches ever. Largest number of agenda-setting failures ever. Fastest dive in popularity ever. Wow! Talk about change. Just one year ago. fresh from his inauguration celebrations. President Obama was flying high. After one of the nation's most inspiring political campaigns, the election of America's first black president had captured the hopes and dreams of millions. To his devout followers, it was inconceivable that a year later his administration would be gripped...

Please ignore his opinions. The guest begins talking at about the 2 minute mark. Sadly, this comports with much of the stories we are hearing about information suppression.

According to Gallup, "White single women, unmarried, widowed, divorced, and separated" voted "overwhelmingly" for Obama. On this Memorial Day, this crucial slice of Obama's base of support without whom he would have been elected owe this nation an apology. Blacks; Hispanics; and Moslems voted tribal politics. But this group was more than liberal, it included a large segment of conservatives and independents who had soured on Bush. Today with $13 trillion in debt- almost $12 trillion of it accumulated in the last six months alone, a burgeoning government; a foreign policy in tatters from Iran, to N. Korea to the...

Women suffer harassment by men on Cairo's streets while the authorities and society choose to look the other way. Sexual harassment is becoming an everyday battle for women. I have to face this increasing problem every time I leave for my downtown work," said 34-year-old Mona Hassan, part of Egypt's large working middle-class. Like most Egyptian women, Mona is used to being harassed and grabbed by men in the crowded streets of Cairo. For women in Egypt, sexual harassment is an annoying but all too common part of life. In 2008, the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights (ECWR) released shocking...

It is one of the most bi zarre searches since Bin Laden. Regulators are still looking for a Waldo (star, of course, of "Where's Waldo?") so they can pin the blame on someone -- and any old, fumbling fat-fingered trader will do -- for the near catastrophic decline in stock prices last Thursday. Now, in the latest apparent development in this case, The New York Times said the government is interrogating a trader -- probably at Gitmo -- about "heavy selling in the market for stock index futures." That's all well and good. Scapegoats are what makes America the land...

Senior administration officials say that Faisal Shahzad was put on the no fly list on Monday at 12:30 pm ET. So how was he able to board the Emirates Airlines flight to Dubai? “It takes a few hours for the airlines system to catch up,” a senior administration official tells ABC news. Another senior administration official adds that Emirates refreshes their system to update with US intelligence information periodically – but not frequently. In any case, the first official says that airlines were “within minutes” of Shahzad being put on the no-fly list told to “look at a web-board” and...

As appeals to bi-partisanship go, this could down as recent history's most contemptible and hypocritical . . . On this evening's Ed Show, bemoaning the lack of conservative support for Pres. Obama handling of the Times Square attempted bombing, Dem senator Patrick Leahy has accused Pres. Bush of having "dropped the ball" on 9-11, claiming "9-11 could have been avoided." View video here.

The more America huffs about the yuan, the less China will do about it It's always easier to blame someone else for your failings. By Liam Halligan Published: 6:19PM GMT 13 Mar 2010 Comments 22 | Comment on this article A test of true character, perhaps, is the extent to which one is prepared to blame oneself. As such, the Western world's response to this self-made "credit-crunch" has highlighted the hypocrisy of our so-called leaders, their refusal to face reality and, above all, their lack of character. When sub-prime first hit, Hank Paulson, then US Treasury Secretary, said "this financial...

President Obama continuously tries to portray himself as a friend to the little-man, middle class and small business. Hence his attacks on "fat cats" who "just don't get it," while labeling the extravagant bonuses as "obscene," and "the height of irresponsibility." Meanwhile, members of his administration, in defending a sweeping small-business aid program Obama announced in his State of the Union, give reason to wonder if they really understand how to help small business. Among the administration's proposals for small businesses are a $5,000 tax credit to hire new workers, elimination of capital gains taxes, and new incentives to invest...

Once again a Democrat leader demonstrates the incredible hypocrisy for which that party and their media wing, the crumbling mainstream media, have become well known. Charlie Rangel, in a demonstration of unethical behavior that can truly be called sorry, now rightly condemned by a House ethics committee chaired and controlled by his own party, for violations of House ethics rules, has thrown his staff under the bus in a blatant attempt to save his own, sorry, fat butt. That is the equivalent of a Navy captain blaming the sinking of his ship on his enlisted crew or an Army general's...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10, 2003— The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago. .. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing. ''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people...

President Obama: No more 'finger-pointing' By: Josh Gerstein and Carol E. Lee January 5, 2010 03:30 AM EST President Barack Obama will deliver a stern warning to his appointees at a meeting Tuesday afternoon that he won’t tolerate efforts by the CIA, the State Department and others to shift blame for the recent intelligence foul-up to other parts of the government, said spokesman Robert Gibbs. “We are going to move beyond agency finger-pointing,” Gibbs told reporters. “The president will not find acceptable a response where everybody gets in a circle and points at someone else. The American people won’t accept...

President Obama will deliver a stern warning to his appointees at a meeting Tuesday afternoon that he won’t tolerate efforts by the CIA, the State Department and others to shift blame for the recent intelligence foul-up to other parts of the government, said spokesman Robert Gibbs. “We are going to move beyond agency finger-pointing,” Gibbs told reporters. “The president will not find acceptable a response where everybody gets in a circle and points at someone else. The American people won’t accept that.”

On the last day of 2009, that awful year, I was listening to a report on National Public Radio (yes, I’m a listener). Reporter Tamara Keith presented a by-now-familiar recap of the worst financial and corporate scandals of the decade, from Enron and Martha Stewart to Tyco and Bernie Madoff. It was a depressing slog of greed, venality, and theft. When the report was over, Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep summarized the report with a tart: “The decade in capitalism.” I don’t want to single out Inskeep, since he was doing what pretty much the entire media establishment has done,...

As GOPers begin increasingly using the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner to score political points, 2 Dems are blaming the Bush admin for events that led directly to the failed attack. While many Dems stay silent and let the WH lead the way, DCCC chair Chris Van Hollen and Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) say the previous admin let down their guard. "In general, we are facing the consequences of the Bush administration's failures to deal with al Qaeda," Van Hollen told Hotline OnCall. "The Republicans have no business in pointing fingers at the Obama administration on terrorism and national...

The head of the Secret Service accepted full responsibility Thursday for last week's security breach at President Barack Obama's first state dinner, but he said that the president and Vice President Joe Biden were never in danger from a party-crashing couple who shook hands and posed for pictures with them. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan told the House Homeland Security Committee that his agents were at fault for allowing uninvited Washington socialites Tareq and Michaele Salahi into a lavish state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Sullivan told the committee that three uniformed agents had been put on administrative...

The Mayor of Chicago, whose our city is dealing day in and day out with violent crime, and not long ago lost the 2016 summer olympics bid, says that the recent Fort Hood masacre is to be blamed on guns. Does the Mayor honestly believe that a civilian ban on guns would have stopped this crazy Jihadist. Does the Mayor honestly think that a ban on possession would stop AQ from instructing and recruiting extremists to their cause in this country? It hasn’t stopped the drug lords from tearing up his city. Before you watch the video, read this from...

On Tuesday, Matt Drudge ran a headline about the weakening U.S. dollar on his website, Drudgereport.com. In and of itself, that would be unremarkable, except that it was the 18th time Drudge had posted a link to a story about the weak dollar this month. And October was only 20 days old. Clearly, Matt Drudge has developed a fascination with the declining U.S. dollar. “He’s fixated on it,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “There’s no question that Drudge can alter what people are paying attention to.” Market watchers say it’s unlikely...

For weeks, the United States Olympic Committee and the national sports governing bodies it oversees had settled into an uncomfortable truce. Despite a year of upheaval and conflict, the parties had agreed to set aside their differences in solidarity for Chicago’s bid to win the 2016 Summer Games. The truce ended as quickly as Chicago was dispatched from the race won by Rio de Janeiro. In surprisingly frank terms, a number of influential people in American Olympic sports questioned the performance of the U.S.O.C.’s new management team and said its two top executives were ill-equipped to navigate the insular world...

An array of powerful legislators from both parties want Gen. Stanley McChrystal to testify about the challenges confronting the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan and his plan for beating back the resurgent Taliban -- as the Pentagon pushes back.

TO listen to the White House and its supporters in and out of the media, you'd think that opposition to "ObamaCare" is the hobgoblin of a few small minds on the right. Racists, fascists, Neanderthals, the whole "Star Wars" cantina of bogeymen and cranks stand opposed to much-needed reform. Left out of this fairly naked effort to demonize many with the actions of a few is the simple fact that ObamaCare -- however defined -- has been tanking in the polls for weeks. President Obama's handling of health care is unpopular with a majority of Americans and a majority of...

...“It’s a job I gladly accept,” he said to applause. “I love these folks who helped get us in this mess. And then suddenly say, ‘Oh, this is Obama’s economy.’ That’s fine. Give it to me. My job is to solve problems -- not to stand on the sidelines and carp and gripe. So I welcome the job. I want the responsibility.”....

Alaska's lipstick-wearing pit-bull is a "Little Shop of Horrors." That's how one longtime friend and campaign trail companion of John McCain, the vanquished 2008 GOP presidential nominee, described veep nominee Sarah Palin. In an expansive story in the August edition of Vanity Fair, a slew of senior members of McCain's campaign team told reporter Todd S. Purdum that they suffer a kind of survivor's guilt following the 2008 presidential election.

Administration blames Bush for GM crisis By Mike Soraghan Posted: 06/07/09 11:24 AM [ET] The Obama administration has a familiar response to criticism of the General Motors bailout – they inherited this mess from George W. Bush. Austan Goolsbee, a senior economic adviser to President Obama, said the administration's options were sharply limited by President Bush's handling of the auto industry, and accused the prior administration of running out the clock. "They shook up the can. They opened the can and handed [it] to us in our laps," Goolsbee said on Fox News Sunday. "When George Bush put money into...

A report on the GQ magazine Web site is quoting unnamed former Bush administration official as blaming former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for many failures, including a delay in military assistance in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The report says "in speaking with the former Bush officials, it becomes evident that Rumsfeld impaired administration performance on a host of matters extending well beyond Iraq to impact America's relations with other nations, the safety of our troops, and the response to Hurricane Katrina. The Washington Monthly highlights more of Robert Draper's article in GQ: "[T]hree years later, when I asked a...

Der Spiegel - other nations helped Germany in Holocaust 20th May 2009 Poland, among other countries helped Hitler mastermind the mass murders, the German weekly says The Der Spiegel weekly claims that Germany would not have been able to prosecute its WWII mass-murder campaign against the Jews on its own and the country required the cooperation of other nations, including Poland. The magazine's front-page story, entitled "Partners. European associates in murdering Jews," cites the case of John Demjaniuk, a former Ukrainian SS-officer, who is currently awaiting trial in Munich, in its bid to prove that without the support of citizens...

The departure of Arlen Specter looks very bad for the GOP. You never want to lose anyone. But could Senate Republicans have stopped it? No, not once it became clear that he was going to be trounced in his primary. Specter's problem is not the party in the sense of its leadership or direction, but rather with the Republican voters in Pennsylvania. Arlen Specter switched from Democrat to Republican in 1965 so that he could win an election. He is now doing the reverse for precisely the same reason. If we take Arlen Specter's word for why he is leaving,...

More than $9 trillion -- in taxpayer dollars -- has been pledged, committed, lent or spent by the federal government in response to the economic crisis. Some say that if the economy continues to deteriorate, trillions more might be necessary to prevent another Great Depression. Yet no one has investigated how this crisis happened. That is irresponsible. A comprehensive investigation is essential to prevent this from happening again.

Just how close to the brink of executive tyranny did the United States come in the panic that swept George W. Bush's administration after 9/11? The answer, it now seems clear, is that we came far closer than even staunch critics of the White House believed. On Monday, the Obama administration released nine legal opinions produced for the Bush White House by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That heretofore obscure office essentially serves as the president's arbiter of what's legal and what isn't. Among other things,...

In the battle to shape the future of the Republican party, many have suggested a move to the center. In a recent interview, for example, John McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, said, “The Republican party wants to, needs to, be able to represent . . . not only conservatives, but centrists as well. And the party that controls the center is the party that controls the American electorate.” Also, David Frum wrote that the GOP must move away from its traditional positions on issues such as abortion and the environment, and adopt a style and tone that is “less overtly...

It's tempting right now to say President Bush will go down as one of the worst presidents ever to dis-grace the White House. But is that fair, or even accurate? Historian renderings of a legacy are often at odds with fluctuating public opinion polls that gauge the heat of the moment. Take Truman. The man had a 22 percent approval rating toward the end of his presidency--due in large part to a highly unpopular Korean War--yet he's among the most popular presidents in history. I'm going to play the devil's advocate and argue that it is at least in the...

Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I have friends and colleagues whom I respect deeply who are on all sides of this bailout issue. One of them just spoke. We all to want do what is right for America, and I believe those who have crafted this plan had pure and noble motives. They want this country to succeed. They want prosperity. I just do not believe that this bill gets the job done. In fact, in the long term, I am convinced it will do more harm than good. We are the Nation that has been called the bastion of freedom,...

CNBC just cut to Barack Obama talking extemporaneously following the failure of the Bailout Bill to pass congress. What a great example of the "empty suit"... I can only paraphrase "Let's remember how we got here! Greed... Failure of the regulators!"

Things are supposed to be looking rosy for Democrats this November. But in case Barack Obama loses the Presidency, an excuse is all ready to go: America's too racist to elect a black man. Not even, in his Vice Presidential pick Joe Biden's inimitable description, one so "articulate and bright and clean." This narrative has gained traction with the Democratic Presidential candidate's recent setbacks in the polls. We hear it from the convention crowd in Denver and liberals in the press. The older, poorer, white, often Hillary voter who sounds ambivalent about the Obama coronation is an enticing scapegoat. "Call...

There are several kinds of Washington memoirs: “I Reveal the Honest Truth,” a kiss-up-and-tell designed to settle scores (nod to honesty optional). “I Was There at the Start,” designed to make the author appear to be the linchpin of history. And, most tedious: “I Knew It Was a Terrible Mistake, but I Didn’t Mention It Until I Got a Book Contract.” Scott McClellan’s memoir is the latest entry in the latter genre. Among his far-too-late admissions, President Bush’s former spokesman reveals that he knew the war in Iraq was “a serious strategic blunder,” but the White House decided the best...