Free Republic

Twenty-three million people unemployed or underemployed, a $16-trillion debt and repeated trillion-dollar deficits. Boo. The scariest thing this Halloween has nothing to do with witches and goblins or even the Munsters remake (ugh). The scariest thing in America right now is the continued awful economy. An incumbent president running for re-election in a down economy – we’ve heard that story before. Only when we heard it last time, George W. Bush was running for re-election in 2004 and the economy was in remarkably fine shape. That horror story hasn’t been told by the major media according to a soon-to-be-released report...

The domestic violence in Shepard’s past is both shocking and repulsive in detail. On February 15, 1998, police were called to then-Mrs. Shepard’s house (the couple had been separated since June of the previous year) by a girlfriend. According to the police report (.pdf file), Mrs. Shepard said of her husband: Read on. Joseph entered my home. I told him to leave. He came up to me looking angry. I put my hands up to protect my breasts as they are sore (cancer). He has hit me before in the breast. He grabbed my wrist and arm and pushed me...

Think about this: there have been three presidential/vice-presidential debates thus far, and not one question about Barack Obama's historic advocacy of gay marriage. That seems a rather curious omission given the gravity of the issue. No other issue among the candidates is as transformative as this one. Name another issue that involves completely redefining something as ancient as the Garden of Eden. You can't. The question ought to be asked in the next debate, and, even more intriguingly, within the context of how the two presidential candidates' faith relates to their stance-similar to how Martha Raddatz asked Joe Biden and...

For all intents and purposes, there have been two US Presidents thus far in the 21st century - George Bush (the younger) and Barack Obama. If we take Mr Bush’s two terms to cover fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2008, the total rise in official Treasury funded debt over that period was $US 4.350 TRILLION. If we take Mr Obama’s first term to cover fiscal 2009 to fiscal 2012, the rise over four years was $US 6.050 TRILLION. Add the two together and you get a grand total of $US 10.4 TRILLION. That’s almost two thirds (65 percent) of the total...

That might have been the campaign stump line according to Tom Mahnken had the Navy SEALs not shot first and asked questions later. After all, President Obama did have an alternate plan for bin Laden...one that involved executing his original plans for 9/11 mastermind, KSM: Showing the world and the terrorists what a great nation we are by putting Osama bin Laden on trial! “Osama Bin Laden is dead; and General Motors is alive!” - Vice President Joe Biden VP Joe "Malarkey" Biden in last night's VP debate, working in the "bin Laden is dead" campaign stump meme: When it...

"Now Governor Romney believes that with even bigger tax cuts for the wealthy, and fewer regulations on Wall Street, all of us will prosper. In other words, he'd double down on the same trickle-down policies that led to the crisis in the first place."--- President Obama in an ad released September 27. This is Obama’s core message. In one way or another, he says it all the time. It's his kicker on the stump. You cannot watch an interview with the president or one of his subalterns without hearing it.And yet, I don't think I've ever heard a TV...

On the 11th anniversary of 9/11, I blogged with the following: Vanity Fair contributing editor and former NYTimes reporter Kurt Eichenwald is out promoting a new Bush-Derangement Syndrome book, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars You can read an excerpt at Vanity Fair. To be clear, this is an anti-Bush book, putting the worst possible spin upon events described in the book. I loathe spending any money on this; but even partisan books can provide nuggets of useful information when you can cross-reference and wade through the bias filter that any actual facts had been transmuted and...

Yesterday's jobs report from the BLS had an interesting analogue in history. The month before the 2004 election --- also a contest for an incumbent President’s re-election --- the jobs report for September turned out to be rather weak. The BLS reported a net increase of only 96,000 jobs, weaker than the previous several months, and as it turned out only a short-term blip in a fairly strong recovery of jobs from a lingering recession. That's slightly weaker than yesterday's +114,000, and in September 2004 the jobless rate remained unchanged at 5.4%, but it's close enough to compare the media...

Here is an unofficial list of potential nominees for the Supreme Court if Mitt Romney is elected president in November. This list was compiled from a number of sources, including those serving as informal advisers to the Romney campaign. The Republican nominee has not specified publicly on favorites for the court. Many names mentioned are relatively young judges named to the federal bench by President George W. Bush. Paul Clement, former U.S. Solicitor General Born 1966. Considered by many as one of the best lawyers of his generation. The Wisconsin native went to Harvard Law School where he was a...

This article explains why Obama and democrats blaming president GW Bush for the inherited economic mess is a blatant lie.

We are all soooooo shocked On his first full day in office, President Barack Obama ordered federal officials to “usher in a new era of open government” and “act promptly” to make information public. As Obama nears the end of his term, his administration hasn’t met those goals, failing to follow the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, according to an analysis of open-government requests filed by Bloomberg News. Nineteen of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the disclosure of public information: The cost of travel by top officials. In all, just eight of the 57 federal agencies...

A favorite but of misinformation from the left is its assertion that Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy are one of the main causes of our federal government's fiscal woes. First off, the critics conveniently ignore that Bush's tax cuts were for all federal income tax payers, not just the wealthy, and second, federal tax revenues collected under the Bush economy were at all time highs. Don't take my word for it - check out The White House's web site. The problem wasn't Bush's tax cuts, it was his tax increases. Which tax increases? Take a look at that...

President Barack Obama’s administration is sharing credit for the 2009 auto bailout with the George W. Bush administration, as pieces of the Delphi salaried retirees pension scandal start to come under fire from three different House committees. “Current and former Treasury officials have explained in congressional testimony in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 that the previous administration provided temporary loans to General Motors and Chrysler to avoid uncontrolled liquidations of these companies at a time when our economy and financial system were already severely stressed,” Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Alastair Fitzpayne wrote in a Sept. 24 letter to House...

Betting on Dennis Ross By: Daniel Mandel FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, July 30, 2009 One of the small, but interesting, indeed significant, things to have emerged from the Alan Dershowitz – Melanie Phillips FrontPage Magazine debate over the Obama Administration’s policies towards Israel is the manner in which Dershowitz seeks a security blanket in the existence of individual Obama Administration figures deemed pro-Israeli.  Yet, his is a curious argument: it tacitly concedes that the President’s background and the record of at least some of his relevant advisers and appointees – and thus the auguries regarding the likely direction of policy under...

The U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan, which began in 2009, ended this week. As the Times aptly notes, the conclusion of one of Obama’s biggest military endeavors has come and gone with little fanfare. The president is doubtless happy about this, as the mission has been far from an unqualified success: The milestone, which still leaves 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan, went nearly unremarked here, with no statement from President Hamid Karzai or the United States military commander, Gen. John R. Allen, or even from the American ambassador. It was announced on the other side of the planet, by the...

- At 5:00 p.m. on September 11, 2001, an ashen-faced but composed President Al Gore stepped into the East Room of the White House to deliver a televised address to the nation. With him were former presidents Clinton and Bush, as well as Texas governor George W. Bush—flown to Washington from Dallas on a military jet, his first visit back to the capital after the close race that lost him the presidency just months before.

Madeleine Albright recently made headlines responding to a question about when Democrats might stop blaming President Bush for economic difficulties and other contemporary problems. She flippantly responded: "Never." Her comment was symptomatic of our pathological intellectual culture that has been locked now for decades in a mode of denial about the fault lying among anti-conservatives for the nation's ills. Among the most treasured rhetorical heirlooms in this dysfunctional history is the meme "It's Bush's fault." To be clear, the meme suggests that an array of problems all stem from the presidency of George W. Bush. Most principally, these problems include...

Please click link to see newspaper article. "Democrat Michael Dukakis, riding a wave of positive publicity from the convention that nominated him for president last week, led Vice-President Bush by 17 points in a Gallup poll released last Tuesday".

"CBS This Morning" co-host Norah O'Donnell said, "Then when a lot of people hear this, aren't they going to say, 'This is another example of where, not just the Bush administration, but our intelligence community dropped the ball. They failed to heed the warnings that were in a number of these (documents) that went all the way up to the president of the United States.'" Eichenwald replied, "Actually, the counterterrorist center of the CIA did a spectacular job, and that's what really comes down. You know, in the aftermath, the White House and others said, 'Well they didn't tell us...

It's been eleven years since terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, and the lessons have not been forgotten. In the intervening years, the United States' foreign and domestic security policy has been revamped and improved, and we have not suffered another attack on American soil. President George W. Bush's words to a joint session of Congress mere days after the atrocities echo with a message of vigilince, tolerance and thoughtfulness. I will excerpt them here, but highly recommend reading them in full. On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country....