Free Republic

President Barack Obama is not as optimistic as his Secretary of State regarding the possibility of peace between Israel and the Arabs. Obama, who gave an interview to the New Yorker magazine on Sunday, said that he believed the odds of reaching a peace agreement were less than 50%. The President told the magazine’s editor David Remnick that these odds were true in all three of his main initiatives in the region—with Iran, with Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) and with Syria. “On the other hand,” he said, “in all three circumstances we may be able to push the...

January 19, 2014, 10:10 am Obama: Danger of concussions in NFL ‘no longer a secret’ By Justin Sink President Obama said that he believed NFL players “know what they’re doing” and understood the impact that concussions could have on their long-term health in an interview with The New Yorker published on Sunday, adding that he would not let his son play pro football. “At this point, there’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” Obama said. “These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret. It’s sort of the feeling I...

A football career would be out of bounds for any son of President Obama, who compared the game to smoking in an interview with The New Yorker. “I would not let my son play pro football,” the First Fan said in a POTUS profile for the magazine’s Jan. 27 issue. The president’s love of sports is well documented, and his favorite NFL team is the Pittsburgh Steelers. And while football’s escalating head-injury crisis is reason enough to keep a kid he doesn’t have off the field, it’s no reason to stop watching, he told Remnick.

January 19, 2014, 10:26 am Obama: Pot laws 'important to society' By Justin Sink President Obama said in an interview published Sunday he does not believe marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol and that it was “important” that the legalization of the drug in some states to “go forward” because it would prevent unfair penalties for some users. "As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my...

Obama: Presidents ‘don’t start with a clean slate’ By: Reid J. Epstein January 19, 2014 12:41 PM EST President Barack Obama believes his presidency can be successful even if none of his policy goals are accomplished during his term in office, Obama told New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick. “One of the things that I’ve learned to appreciate more as president is you are essentially a relay swimmer in a river full of rapids, and that river is history,” Obama told Remnick. “You don’t start with a clean slate, and the things you start may not come to full fruition on...

Obama blamed his sinking popularity on racism in his latest interview with the >New Yorker. It couldn’t possibly be his failed economic policies, the fact that he lied to Americans for years about Obamacare or his destructive foreign policy. No, it’s racism. Bloomberg reported: President Barack Obama said that racial tensions may have softened his popularity among white voters within the last two years, according to a story posted on the New Yorker magazine’s website today. “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president,” Obama said...

Speaking to New Yorker editor David Remnick, Obama said he still viewed pot smoking negatively – but that on the whole, the drug wasn’t the social ill that it’s been viewed as in the past. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol,” Obama told the weekly magazine. The president said pot was actually less...

President Obama in an interview released Sunday said that using marijuana was not that different from smoking cigarettes nor any more dangerous than drinking alcohol. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life,” Obama said as part of an extensive profile published by the New Yorker on Sunday. “I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Some serious fur flew on the Morning Joe set today, as Joe Scarborough clashed with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. Setting Scarborough off was the magazine's endorsement of Barack Obama that lauded the president for relieving the "national shame inflicted by the Bush administration." Scarborough saracastically asked Remnick "who got paid the bonus for being able to squeeze in, quote, 'the shame of the Bush years?'" Scarborough went on to scald Remnick for the left's hypocrisy in giving President Obama a pass for pursuing many of the same policies that it had accused Bush-Cheney of undermining the Constitution...

In April of this year, I wrote an article for American Thinker about David Remnick's new book, The Bridge, and titled it, "New Obama Bio Strengthens 
Case for Dreams Fraud." "It surprised me to learn that David Remnick had dedicated three pages of his comprehensive new Obama biography, The Bridge, to my thesis that Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father," I wrote at the time. "It will surprise Remnick even more to learn that he has unwittingly reinforced a thesis that he set out to discredit." That night, Milt Rosenberg of Chicago's dominant...

At the beginning of March 2004, almost nobody outside the narrow world of Chicago politics had heard of Barack Hussein Obama. He was 42, a state legislator and the author of a well-received but by no means bestselling memoir, Dreams from My Father. Then he won the Democratic primary for the safe senatorial seat of Illinois. Four months later, he delivered his galvanising keynote address to the Democratic national convention (“there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America”). That November he was duly elected senator: the only African-American in Congress’s upper...

David Remnick on CSPAN-2 David Remnick, author of "The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama" Q&A should follow soon.

Reviewed by Steve Weinberg Barack Hussein Obama is the 44th President of the United States because he: A. Has exhibited overweening ambition since his college years B. Possesses an impressive intellect C. Exudes charisma in person and on television D. Chose Chicago as the place to try out his seemingly delusional career plan E. Married a remarkable woman who hoped he would not enter electoral politics but supported him anyway F. Benefitted from a series of circumstances beyond his control, including the demise or retirement of politicians who would have blocked his way to the White House G. Discovered a...

At age 51, Bill Ayers called himself a "radical" and a "communist." As recently as 2001, Ayers let himself be photographed for a magazine story trampling an American flag. But that's not good enough for the Associated Press. In an article today, AP describes Ayers as a "former radical." AP's de-radicalization of Ayers appeared in an article about a forthcoming biography of Barack Obama, entitled The Bridge, by New Yorker editor David Remnick. Here's the line [emphasis added]:

We can get a sneak preview of the MSM worship of Al Gore sure to follow his testimony before Congress tomorrow on the subject of global warming by reading David Remnick's glowing commentary about the former veep in the March 5 edition of the New Yorker. If you suffer at all from tooth decay, I advise you to skip over the rest because Remnick's idolatrous saccharine coated praise for Gore is sure to exacerbate your condition. Without a trace of ironic awareness that a Saturday Night Live skit is mocking people such as himself who believe that a Gore win...

I once saw a really interesting documentary on the tube about Joe Stalin. What I found most fascinating about this documentary was the part about a young woman factory worker who would stand up in the audience at a lot of Stalin's speeches in the 1930s and, with face glowing in absolute worshipful ecstasy, shout out all sorts of over the top praises for the Soviet dictator. The documentarians tracked down this same woman a few years ago and I figured she would claim that she was forced to shout outlandish praise of Stalin or be sent to the...

Seymour M. Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter now writing for The New Yorker magazine, was asked Tuesday at the University of Michigan why Sen. John Kerry isn't easily leading the presidential race over George W. Bush when the war in Iraq is going so badly. "I think one thing you have to face up to is the fact there are roughly 70 million people in America who do not believe in evolution - and those are Bush supporters," said Hersh, who is up front about his support for Kerry. Hersh's observations about the presidential campaign, the war in Iraq...

In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge. The crowd I joined in Franken’s living room was comprised of: Al Franken and his wife Franni; Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for the New Yorker; David Remnick, editor for the New Yorker; Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Magazine; Howard...

NEW YORK -- Magazines aren't just for reading any more. They are the centrepiece of brand identities, core products that can be extended into every avenue of life. Maxim recently loaned its name to a line of hair-colour products aimed at the randy twentysomething men comprising its primary demographic. Last June, Seventeen magazine opened a salon and spa in a Dallas mall, where overstressed teenaged gals could relax with a massage and pedicure on their daddy's credit card. The challenge for brand extension is perhaps a little more acute for the publisher of The New Yorker, an institution that remains...