Free Republic

This past weekend on his HBO show, host Bill Maher suggested that conservatives were fine with the federal government until five years ago after Barack Obama was elected to the presidency. The headline of a video clip on the Real Clear Politics website of Maher's statements stated, "Why Were Conservatives Okay With Government Up Until Five Years Ago?" While Maher never actually posed that question verbatim, some of his other statements and questions lead to the summary contained in the headline. The video clip can be found here. For those who cannot handle the video, here are a couple of...

In his latest White House teleprompter reading on Tuesday, President Barack Obama railed against the alleged problem of pay inequality between male and female workers. He stated assertively at one point, "Equal pay for equal work, it's not that complicated." Obama also signed two more executive orders that are tangental to the issue. So assuming that Obama is a man of his word, it is fair to say that he is about to embark on his own latest 'war on women' and declare that female members of the U.S. Army should be paid less than their male counterparts. How can...

Two Sundays ago on her self-titled MSNBC show, Melissa Harris-Perry and a panel of guest contributors made derogatory comments about a photo of former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, his wife and their grandchildren. Included in the photo was the Romney’s adopted grandson, Kieran Romney, who happens to be African-American. During that broadcast, Harris-Perry laughed and giggled at the derogatory comments of her guests which included one guest singing a Sesame Street song and another comparing the photo to the current demographics of the Republican Party. Following the episode, Harris-Perry sent out a series of tweets via Twitter expressing her sorrow...

First Barack Obama lied multiple times over a three-year span by telling people over and over again that if they liked their health care plan then they could keep their health care plan. That lie has now been widely reported and Obama's credibility has been widely, well, discredited. However, now people are starting to realize that the 'keep your health plan' lie from Obama was just the first of many. For example, Obama, his press secretary Jay Carney, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emanuel and numerous other Obama surrogates have been repeatedly saying for the past few...

Today President Barack Obama unveiled a so-called 'fix' for his 'Lie of the Millennium' about people being able to keep the health plans that they liked. But as with many other aspects of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, the fix raises more questions than it offers answers. For example, imagine a situation in which your home was completely robbed by a professional thief. After going through various stages of grief and feelings of loss, the thief suddenly shows up on your doorstep one day and says that he will give you back everything he stole from you. But then...

Yesterday Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius triumphantly declared that “The marketplace is working” as she announced that just over 106,000 people had enrolled in a health care plan using the new online marketplaces during the month of October. Given that the Obama administration had previously set goals of around 500,000 enrollees in the first month of open enrollment, it is curious to ponder how few people could have signed before Sebelius declared that the marketplace was not working. In addition to the enrollee figures, Sebelius also revealed that there were 975,407 who had applied for enrollment but had...

After four and a half years of stating that he would work around Congress anytime and in any way that he could in order to achieve his objectives, last weekend Barack Obama finally found religion in what he refers to as an 'inconvenient document', and which everyone else refers to as The Constitution, and stated that he would seek Congressional approval before taking military action in Syria. Now Republicans in Congress should give Obama approval only to make a decision himself and not the approval that Obama wants in order to save face from his 'red line' comments in August...

It is looking more and more like Washington politicians are once again going to kick the can down the road to show any level of fiscal responsibility by passing another short-term solution to avert the so-called fiscal cliff. This is the economic disaster which is supposedly going to hit the nation if tax rates are allowed to return to the levels in place during the Clinton era (when the economy was pretty good) and federal spending levels are forced to be cut by approximately 3% per year over the next decade. That second part of the equation was part of...

During the debate over the so-called fiscal cliff and how politicians in Washington are hoping to avert the cliff and instead just steer the economy toward its continuing downward slope, there has been a plethora of rhetoric spewing from both sides of the debate. But yesterday Barack Obama took the honor for most irrelevant and most heartless rhetoric when he invoked the tragedies of Superstorm Sandy and the Sandy Hook elementary school killings to try to shame Republicans into caving to his proposals.

Congressional Republicans seem to be tying themselves up in knots in their negotiations with Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats regarding ways to avoid the so-called ‘fiscal cliff.’ The fiscal cliff is of course the dramatic drop in economic and job growth that is supposedly going to occur if the country faces a combination of tax rate increases and government spending cuts. Whether anyone believes the fiscal cliff will actually occur is a moot point. What the Republicans should do at this point is give Obama and the Democrats everything they want in any fiscal cliff deal. That is right...

Before the cable news network called MSNBC moved to the sexually suggestive tagline of 'Lean Forward', it used to be the known as 'The Place for Politics.' But in the election cycles beginning with the 2008 presidential race, the channel's slogan has clearly 'evolved' to one that solidifies itself as 'The Place for Master Race Baiting.' There are race baiters out there in the media world, but clearly the masters of it primarily reside at MSNBC. They include the likes of Toure Neblett, Melissa Harris-Perry, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Lawrence O'Donnell and of course the queen bee of the master...

Often times it has been said that truth is stranger than fiction. And sometimes it could be said that facts follow fiction. That latter point is exactly what seems to be happening in this country right now in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. In one of the final scenes of the Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a group of strikers including John Galt are flying west over New York City when suddenly all the lights in the city go out - as has been foretold by Galt as the signal that he has finally 'stopped the engine of the world.’ In...

This past weekend Barack Obama once again displayed his ignorance of how the national economy and businesses operating within it work. This article explains how private industry drives the government rather than the government promoting private industry.

Since the news that Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the majority in ruling that the Obamacare individual mandate is constitutional, there has been tremendous debate and analysis about the opinion that he offered. Liberals predictability praised the ruling and gloated that they knew it was constitutional all along - even though most of them never admitted or even implied that the mandate was tantamount to a tax (which is what Roberts determined). Conservatives praised other parts of the opinion which basically limited significantly the use of the commerce clause in any future legislation, and it also helps them promote...

Baron Hill has represented the 9th District of Indiana in the U.S. House of Representatives for 10 of the last 12 years. During that time, Hill has been a part of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of Democrats who consider themselves to be moderate-to-conservatives on many issues, especially fiscal ones. While Hill may have had Blue Dog credentials in the past, over the last couple of years he has revealed his true colors. Along with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, Hill has voted for the failed stimulus package, the healthcare reform act and the cap-and-trade energy bill....

In the most predictable act in an otherwise completely unpredictable election cycle, the liberal editors of Louisville's The Courier-Journal (CJ) newspaper have decided to "enthusiastically endorse" (to use their words) Jack Conway for election to the U.S. Senate. Conway is running against Republican candidate Dr. Rand Paul for the Senate seat currently held by the retiring Jim Bunning. The CJ editors concluded their enthusiastic endorsement for Conway with these closing statements: "Kentuckians should not gamble on a candidate far out of the political mainstream. The should send Mr. Conway to the Senate." From those statements it is clear that the...

In an interview on MSNBC this week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) discussed the issue of jobs with commentator Ed Schultz. After first taking credit for preventing a worldwide depression, Reid then explains what he does whenever Nevada voters ask what else he can do them in stating: "They want to know what I have done for them, and that's why it's important to me, any chance I get, to say that my number one job is to create jobs, and [Sharron Angle] says that it's not her job to create jobs." So if creating jobs is Reid's self-declared...

On Wednesday evening NPR (National Public Radio) fired Juan Williams for making the following statements while appearing on the Fox News Channel's program "The O'Reilly Factor": I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous. The firing of Williams follows other high-profile firings/forced retirements...

For the past couple of weeks Barack Obama and other liberal democrats in his administration, Congress and on MSNBC have continued to claim that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is using foreign funds to pay for campaign ads in this year's election cycle. If the Chamber was indeed doing that then it would be a violation of U.S. election laws, so these claims by Obama and his liberal cohorts are very serious, and potentially slanderous if they are found to be untrue. Of course, they are also completely unsubstantiated. And when Obama advisor, David Axelrod, suggested that the burden of...

Yesterday marked the six-month anniversary since the passage of the Democrats' healthcare reform package and just over six months since Nancy Pelosi pronounced to a leery public that "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." Hearing those remarks from Pelosi conjures up memories of the scene from the movie "National Lampoon's Vacation" in which the title character Clark W. Griswald goes to pick up the new car that he has bought to take his family on a cross-country vacation. When Griswald arrives at the dealership, rather than getting the sports wagon...