Free Republic

Deja Vu: In a Carteresque speech Wednesday, the president said we should tax our way out of despondency and dependence on fossil fuels. The American dream isn't slipping away. It's being stolen by big government. It might as well have been President Carter addressing the audience of students and faculty at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. Instead it was President Obama who spoke of our dependence on fossil fuels and blamed everybody and everything, except for a lack of presidential leadership, for our current situation. On July 15, 1979, President James Earl Carter gave what has become known as the "malaise"...

"This is the worst," a Democratic friend exclaimed over the phone on Tuesday, the first day back at work after the Memorial Day weekend. I knew without asking what he meant -- the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico that dominated television coverage and was into its second month with no quick solution in sight. * They haven't built a popular new television program around it -- yet. No one has created a new media franchise for himself out of it. There isn't a name for it that has become part of popular culture. I was thinking back to...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich issued a sharp critique of President Barack Obama's speech before House Democrats in Williamsburg, Va. "It shrinks his presidency," said Gingrich Friday at the American Enterprise Institute. "I thought last night's speech in Williamsburg actually was a lot more like Carter and a long way from Reagan." The former Speaker's remarks referred to the more partisan tone adopted by Obama Thursday evening in addressing Republican objections to the stimulus package and to the President's assertion that critics want to return to "the same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and...