Free Republic

And we will lose the war on terror. Marie Harf, the cretinous propagandist and campaign veteran installed by the Obama administration at the State Department — the misfit who plays Messy Marvin to Jen Psaki’s feckless Pippi Longstocking — has called down upon herself a Malibu mudslide of mockery and derision for suggesting that what’s really needed in the war against the Islamic State et al. is better employment opportunities — “jobs for jihadis,” as her critics put it. She later explained that her observations unfortunately were “too nuanced” for the simple minds of the dunderheads who twice elected her...

World War II was the most destructive war in history. What caused it? The panic from the ongoing and worldwide Depression in the 1930s had empowered extremist movements the world over. Like-minded, violent dictators of otherwise quite different Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan and Communist Soviet Union all wanted to attack their neighbors. Yet World War II could have been prevented had Western Europe united to deter Germany. Instead, France, Britain and the smaller European democracies appeased Hitler. The United States turned isolationist. The Soviet Union collaborated with the Third Reich. And Italy and Japan eventually joined it. The...

U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen of Texas has temporarily blocked President Obama's executive action on illegal immigration by granting a request from 26 states to allow the courts to look at its constitutionality before it is implemented. The lawsuit is being headed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. @GregAbbott_TX BREAKING: Federal Judge just granted my request to halt Obama's Executive Amnesty Order Nationwide. More later. #txlege #tcot @TexasGOP "This case examines complex issues relating to immigration which necessarily involve questions of federalism, separation of powers, and the ability and advisability, if any, of the Judiciary to hear and resolve such a...

Her team is famous for playing mean, and potential competitors are afraid to enter the ring. It seems everyone on the activist left of the Democratic party wants Elizabeth Warren to challenge Hillary Clinton. The New York Working Families Party, born out of the infamous and disbanded ACORN empire, has endorsed her. A new YouGov poll paid for by Warren backers purports to show that once voters are familiar with the stances of both women, Warren will beat Hillary in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Warren, who was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts only four years ago, has refused...

As we inch closer to the 2016 presidential election, many continue to question whether Democrats will put up a challenger against Hillary Clinton, who all but seems to have locked down her party's nomination. During an interview with former Obama White House advisor David Axelrod yesterday, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked if Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has a chance at defeating Clinton. The answer was a diplomatic "no." HH: Can Elizabeth Warren beat her? DA: I don’t think Elizabeth, I know Elizabeth Warren well, and my strong feeling is she’s not going to run. I think she’s trying to...

The NBC anchor’s lies are symptomatic of a culture in which truth has become relativized. NBC Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams frequently fabricated a dramatic story that he was under enemy attack while reporting from Iraq. NBC is now investigating whether Williams also embellished events in New Orleans during his reporting on Hurricane Katrina. Williams always plays the hero in his yarns, braving natural and hostile human enemies to deliver us the truth on the evening news. Former CBS anchorman Dan Rather tried to pass off fake memos as authentic evidence about former President George W. Bush’s supposedly checkered National...

When Speaker of the House John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress on Iran's nuclear weapons program, one might have thought that America's politicians could benefit from participating in a serious discussion about a menacing global threat from the leader of a gravely endangered U.S. ally. Instead, controversy erupted over the propriety of the speaker's invitation ...

The president’s comparison of Christianity to radical Islam defies logic. On Tuesday, the so-called Islamic State released a slickly produced video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a steel cage. On Wednesday, the United Nations issued a report detailing various “mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children, and burying children alive” at the hands of the Islamic State. And on Thursday, President Obama seized the opportunity of the National Prayer Breakfast to forthrightly criticize the “terrible deeds” . . . committed “in the name of Christ.” “Humanity has been grappling with these...

The president’s disastrous foreign policy is as much a product of his own vanity as anything else. Members of the Obama administration have insisted that the Taliban are not terrorists. Those responsible for the recent Paris killings are not radical Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. Jihad is a “legitimate tenet of Islam.” And “violent extremism,” “workplace violence,” or “man-caused disaster” better describe radical Islamic terrorism. Domestic terrorism is just as likely caused by returning U.S. combat veterans, according to one report by a federal agency. What is the point of such linguistic appeasement? The word “appeasement” long ago...

Cruz Control for America? Damned right. These times call for someone who does not fear the media, the Democrats, oor the Washington/New York Republican establishment. We need someone who will plant a flag and draw a line in the sand, and mean it. These times require someone who realizes that the biggest threat to the country today is Washington – a realization that for too long America has been held hostage to "how Washington works," when it's Washington that should operate in light of how America works. Ted Cruz fits the bill. Some others might as well – a certain...

Did the 2014 midterms really happen? Less than three months after a red tide rolled over the country, the Senate Republican Rollover Caucus is back to its default position in Washington, D.C.: Hands up, bow down. Last week, senior GOP supplicant Sen. Orrin Hatch announced that he will support the confirmation of President Obama's attorney general nominee, Loretta Lynch. He praised her "qualifications" and decried the Justice Department's previous leaders who "have facilitated executive abuses by this president rather than upholding the rule of law." Guffaw. A Utah Republican, Hatch was one of the biggest, fattest facilitators of that lawlessness...

Today President Obama will deliver his whopping $4 trillion budget to Congress. President Barack Obama sent Congress a record $4 trillion budget Monday that would boost taxes on higher-income Americans and corporations, pushing past tight federal spending caps to fund an ambitious public works program and provide middle-class tax relief. Obama's budget, which will set off months of wrangling in Congress, proposes spending $4 trillion — $3.999 trillion before rounding — in the 2016 budget year that begins Oct. 1. That's a 6.4 percent increase over estimated spending this year, projecting that the deficit will decline to $474 billion. POLITICO...

Late last week reporter Tim Steller of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson published a piece about alleged serious misconduct and intimidation from DOJ attorneys during the trial and lawsuit of former ATF agent and whistleblower Jay Dobyns against the government. One of the recently unsealed documents, a Dec. 1 opinion by Judge Allegra, finally explains why in October the judge voided his original decision, made in August, to award Dobyns $173,000. (He later reversed his decision to void the judgment, which still stands.) The reason: The judge believed that Justice Department attorneys had “committed fraud on the court.” One...

It is settled: The Paris terror attacks had almost nothing to do with Islam. If there is any doubt about this, consider that on the one hand, you have the chilling new tape of the Charlie Hebdo attackers declaring, “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad,” and on the other, you have the tortured reassurances of White House spokesman Josh Earnest. Which are you going to believe? The Obama administration’s mind-bogglingly determined refusal to say that we are at war with “radical Islam,” together with the left’s evasions about Islamic terrorism, means that there has been a haze of euphemism and...

Obama dispatched Valerie Jarrett in 2008 to woo the reverend. Near the end of 2007, Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett met with Al Sharpton in New York City and began to cement a relationship that would eventually make the inflammatory activist the president’s “go-to man” on race, according to multiple sources. The backdrop to the incipient Obama-Sharpton alliance was the then-senator’s 2008 presidential campaign, which still hadn’t locked away the black vote, and the political cross-currents created by two other controversial reverends, Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright. That tentative relationship has now grown into a full-blown partnership that has vastly increased...

A gentrified cocoon of progressive privilege has cost Democrats the middle class. Democrats for over a century were associated with the American middle class. Working-class voters once believed that Democratic-inspired intervention into the economy — minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, Social Security, Medicare, workers’ compensation — protected their interests better than unfettered free-market capitalism. Republicans often had trouble selling the argument that an unleashed economy and new technology would relegate poverty to a relative, not absolute, condition — something like suffering with a cheap, outdated iPhone 4 while the better-off could afford an iPhone 6. Why, then, have Democrats lost the...

Adam Baldwin linked to this MSNBC clip with a succinct tweet ”Spot the morons/cowards.”Video at link ... All due respect to Adam, but his understatement is almost a scandal. We’ve posted a lot of incredibly stupid sound bites from MSNBC and other places around here, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a dumber exchange. I don’t know who the guy is making the astoundingly obtuse comparison between Jerry Falwell and a bunch of cold-blooded murderers, but as incandescently stupid as that analogy is it’s eclipsed by Wagner’s smug, knowing nods as he talks. If I follow her response correctly...

Mike Huckabee’s “exploration” announcement is good news for the former Florida governor. Jeb Bush is starting the new year with a smile. Former Arkansas governor and, until last weekend, Fox News host Mike Huckabee announced he would “explore” running for president. By the way, these “exploration” announcements are yet another example of the government encouraging politicians to lie. Exploratory committees disguise the fact that a candidate is running about as well as glasses conceal Superman’s real identity. They require a willful suspension of disbelief on the part of everyone watching. Politicians like this loophole because it drags out the time...

Conservatives lament, and liberals brag, that Obama has fundamentally transformed America. Six years of slumber later, a surging America finally is transcending even the effects of hope and change. For the last few years, most Americans have tuned out their president’s no-time-to-profit rhetoric. They just kept slogging away at what they always did as the most productive people in the world, and waited for the natural up-bound of a moribund economy. Obama himself understands that America is prevailing despite his efforts, and the evidence comes from his own admissions. In a recent National Public Radio interview, Obama took credit for...

Today’s America is vastly different. It is not 1965. That is the implicit message of the new movie Selma, a stirring depiction of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights march told from the perspective of Martin Luther King Jr. The story is a familiar one, but never loses its power. King and his forces descend on a rural Alabama where it takes an act of courage for a black person even to attempt to register to vote. Through peaceful marches, they show for all the nation to see the desperate cruelty of the Alabama authorities, most infamously at Edmund Pettus Bridge when marchers...