Free Republic

President Barack Obama turned up the heat on the GOP Saturday, sounding a now-familiar refrain about obstructionist tactics by congressional Republicans and holding up as an example a pledge by one senator to block presidential nominations until the president gives in to his demands. “We weren’t sent here to wage perpetual political campaigns against each other. We were sent here to serve the American people. And they deserve better than gridlock and games,” Obama said in his weekly address to the nation. “One senator gumming up the whole works for the entire country is certainly not what our founding fathers...

In what The Washington Post called "a bold act of political defiance," President Obama Wednesday announced the recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Cordray's nomination had been blocked by a Senate filibuster. There was no way he was going to win approval in 2012. Enraged Republicans denounced the appointment as an affront and a usurpation of power, for the Senate had not formally gone into recess. The White House airily dismissed the Republican rage, saying no Senate business is being conducted during the Christmas-New Year break, and to argue that the Senate is still...

(WASHINGTON) — President Barack Obama is pushing his economic message in Ohio, brandishing his presidential megaphone in a politically important state to make certain his appeal to the middle class is heard amid the boisterous start of the Republican campaign for the White House. Obama was traveling Wednesday to the most Democratic congressional district in Ohio, a Cleveland suburb, a day after Mitt Romney won Iowa's Republican presidential caucuses by just eight votes. Obama's trip signals the White House's intent to keep the president in the public eye even as the political world focuses on the GOP's selection process. The...

Republicans muscled a budget through the House of Representatives in April that they said would take an important step toward reducing the federal deficit. Introduced by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the plan kept Medicare intact for people 55 or older, but dramatically changed the program for everyone else by privatizing it and providing government subsidies. Democrats pounced. Just four days after the party-line vote, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released a Web ad that said seniors will have to pay $12,500 more for health care "because Republicans voted to end Medicare." Rep. Steve Israel of New York, head...

The New York Times reports an interesting dispatch from President Obama's re-election campaign: Newt Gingrich is a genuine threat that they plan to take seriously. “Look, for the longest time, Gingrich was not really a factor in this race, he was left for dead at the checkout counter at Tiffany’s,” said David Axelrod, a chief adviser to the president’s re-election bid. “Now he is resurgent and he could be the nominee.” According to the Times, the campaign plans to portray Gingrich as "a symbol of the past" and the “godfather of gridlock.”

Channeling his inner Teddy Roosevelt, President Obama on Tuesday gave a feisty speech in Osawatomie, Kansas that sought to rebut Republican arguments that he is waging class warfare...[Snip] We’ll leave the politics to others, but how accurate were some of his facts?  “I mean, understand, it's not as if we haven't tried this theory. Remember in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history. And what did they get us? The slowest job growth in half a century...[Snip] Inserting the words “for the wealthy” was interesting phrasing by...

White House Budget Director Jack Lew on Friday warned that the negotiations on the 2012 omnibus spending bill are going poorly and could soon lead to a “crisis” that shuts down the government. Appropriators are negotiating a nine-bill, $900 billion omnibus package, but the White House and Republicans are at odds over rider provisions attached to the spending bills, including ones related to abortion and the environment. Funding for the government runs out Dec. 16, leaving little time to resolve the disputes.  Lew said President Obama is prepared to veto an omnibus with ideological riders in it.  “I don’t think it is in...

Does Mediaite have an editor screening its content before it goes up online?  In a 24-hour period, that lefty news site published one story defending Vice President Joe Biden’s charge that Republicans want rape to increase if they don’t align with the President’s “jobs” plan, and another article claiming that Biden, in fact, never did use a rape reference.  First we have some dude named Nando Di Fino, whom I’ve never heard of before.  He argued that Biden’s assertion about rapes surging really isn’t that “crazy” after all.  “He was basically showing that as you cut police, crime goes up,”...

President Obama on Wednesday sought momentum for his $447 billion jobs package by emphasizing he would push the Senate to quickly take up the veteran employment component of the bill. Obama promised to keep fighting for the veterans and service members in the audience. He tied his commitment to another pledge to keep fighting to pass the jobs bill, even in bits and pieces. “These are tough times for America, but we’ve faced tough times before. And nobody’s tougher than America’s armed forces,” he said. Obama, concluding a three-day bus campaign promoting his job-growth ideas that has included stops in North...

One-third of the Obama re-election campaign's record-breaking second-quarter fundraising came from sources associated with the financial sector, the Washington Post reports. That percentage is up from the 20% of donations that came from Wall Street donors in 2008, and contradicts reports that a growing Wall Street animosity towards the Obama administration may jeopardize his re-election bid. Obama's $86 million haul set a record for incumbent fundraising at this point in an election campaign. While the campaign has downplayed the larger donations by emphasizing that the average donation was $69, it also released a list of contributions by "bundlers;" those who...

As the rest of the 2012 Republican presidential field ganged up on Texas Gov. Rick Perry during Thursday night’s GOP debate, illegal immigration was the evening’s hottest-button issue — particularly the granting of in-state tuition rates to children of illegal immigrants in Texas. Now Perry’s defense seems to have struck nerve with National Review columnist Mark Steyn. Filling in for Rush Limbaugh on his radio program Friday, Steyn, the author of “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon,” took issue with Perry’s response to those attacks. Rick Perry “has basically adopted the Democratic line now on the whole illegal immigration issue,”...

What If the Tea Party Wins? They Have a Plan for the Constitution, and It Isn’t Pretty Download this issue brief (pdf) Read the issue brief in your web browser (Scribd) In the Tea Party’s America, families must mortgage their home to pay for their mother’s end-of-life care. Higher education is a luxury reserved almost exclusively to the very rich. Rotten meat ships to supermarkets nationwide without a national agency to inspect it. Fathers compete with their adolescent children for sub-minimum wage jobs. And our national leaders are utterly powerless to do a thing. At least, that’s what would happen...

News reports suggest that on Thursday night, the president will tell Republicans in the House and Senate that they should put “country before party” and endorse his proposals for job creation. The “country before party” line has become Obama’s new theme in the wake of the debt crisis, and the passion with which he invokes it indicates it’s something he actually and truly believes in. And it’s utter nonsense. Offensive nonsense too. Obama isn’t truly asking Republicans to put country before party. He is asking them to elevate the interests and ideas of the Democratic party higher than their own...

The oddball media slander of the tea party, now routine, shows more than a little calculation along a rather perilous historical line. In the 1920s, in advance of the collectivization of private farms, Soviet leadership stigmatized as "class enemies" a productive set of landowners known as "kulaks." [Snip] In the beginning, the Soviets attempted to turn peasant farmers against the kulaks by denouncing them, in Mr. Lenin's illiberal words, as "bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten on famine." [Snip] Before he was through, Stalin and his progressive pals killed off at least 5 million of these...

Not knowing who the eventual Republican presidential nominee will be in the 2012 election, President Obama's supporters are taking the opportunity to blast all of the GOP candidates, using aggressive language to argue that the crop of contenders is either uninterested or incapable of helping Americans. Much of the criticism is focused on describing the candidates as lackeys to the Tea Party, which establishment Democrats have classified as right-wing zealots bent on destroying the U.S. snip "In a Republican field that has already pledged allegiance to the Tea Party and failed to present any plan that will benefit the middle...

Following the president’s veto threat this morning, senior White House officials launched a full-on assault against the Republican “Cut, Cap and Balance Act” this afternoon, describing it as “extreme, radical, and unprecedented.” On a conference call with reporters this afternoon, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said the legislation “essentially enshrines into the constitution the Ryan plan on steroids.” “Unless House Republicans are willing to raise revenues, significant revenues, something they have refused to do, it would require much deeper spending cuts than in the Ryan plan. This would result in even more devastating cuts to clean energy, education and...

...Demagoguery, at its best, requires good oratory and charisma — which is why Jimmy Carter was such a dismal failure at it, despite his half-hearted demonization of three-martini lunches and private yachts at a time of a record misery index that saw high unemployment, out-of-control inflation, and usurious interest rates, coupled with a neutralist foreign policy that had led to Russians in Afghanistan, Communist takeovers in Central America, and American hostages in Teheran. Carter’s mock-serious delivery was so droll, his presence so wooden, that his fist-pounding against “them” turned into caricature. Under a more skilled practitioner such as Barack Obama,...

Daley: D.C. 'dysfunction' hurts jobs By: Mike Allen July 10, 2011 10:23 AM EDT White House Chief of Staff William Daley told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour on “This Week” that questions about whether political leaders “have the guts to stand up and do the tough things” is “one of the wet blankets on this economy.” Daley, speaking after House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) pulled the plug on a $4 trillion bargain that would have reformed entitlements in conjunction with raising the debt ceiling, said President Barack Obama will continue to push for the biggest deal possible. “This president is committed to...

On Cavuto now, quoting Obama. Host is asking guests what they think. In related news, Obama calls people earning $250,000 "jet owners." "Calling DSM-IV; will DSM-IV please pick-up the red emergency phone..."

As voters around the country wince at rising gas prices, panicked Democrats, in a rush to cover the failure of their all-or-nothing bet on the alternative energy industry have started singing a familiar tune – blame the oil and gas industry.  Instead of facing the reality of his owned failed policies, President Obama is calling for an end to the "tax giveaways" he claims amount to $4 billion in “subsidies” to the energy industry.  This tactic isn’t surprising given the effect that rising gas prices have on the President’s approval ratings and his obsession with re-election.  But, less than truthful...