Free Republic

WASHINGTON - House Republican leaders seized the high ground this week in the furious battle to curb federal spending, forcing Senate Democrats to produce their first budget in nearly four years. It was a political high wire act, but House Speaker John Boehner pulled it off without a hitch. In one master stroke, he reunited most of his rebellious Republicans behind his budget strategy, and divided the Democrats. When the smoke cleared in the latest budgetary skirmish Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has dictatorially ignored previous House budgets, agreed to accept the GOP's limited debt ceiling suspension as...

The National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) Summary of Operations for fiscal year 2012, released last week, shows an agency that is significantly over-funded. In 2010, the Obama Administration increased the agency’s budget even though it previously operated with a fiscal year-end surplus. Now, the operating report reveals that the agency’s business continues to erode with the decline of unionization in the private sector making its increased appropriation even more unnecessary than it was in 2010. According to the report, issued by Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon, total case intake decreased by three percent; unfair labor practice case intake decreased by...

The Republican Party is picking up the pieces. Speaking of the ticket's loss for the first time since the election, Rep. Paul Ryan noted that many voters "don't think or know that we have good ideas" on fighting poverty and "helping people move up the ladder of life." It's not surprising that Ryan, who got his start working for Jack Kemp and William Bennett at Empower America, sees the world this way. Though it's a total secret to members of the press and the Democratic Party, conservative intellectuals have been grappling with the problems of poverty in America for several...

The re-election of Barack Obama hasn't done anything to make more jobs available to Americans, and there is no indication that it will. America now has 23 million people who want a full-time job but can't find one. Obama doesn't think American citizens or businessmen create jobs. His Jobs Czar, Jeffrey Immelt, recently said on a television interview referring to China, where he has outsourced General Electric's light bulb plants, "state-run Communism may not be your cup of tea, but their government works." In his first presidential debate last year, Obama claimed that passage of free trade agreements with...

WASHINGTON - If you thought President Obama's first term was one long, uninterrupted political brawl, the next four years will make that period look tame by comparison. If you need any evidence for this prediction, Obama's in-your-face, second inaugural address is Exhibit A. It was a speech tailored to make the hearts of liberal Democrats beat faster, cheering what some in the Washington news media called "Obama unbound." It was a speech that sent an unmistakable message to his party's base that this time around, it's no more Mr. Nice Guy. The gloves are off, these are my issues, and...

Thanks, California! Thanks for your monstrous spending and absurd regulatory overreach! America needs you. We need Connecticut and Illinois, too! We need you the way we needed the Soviet Union, as models of failure, to warn us what happens if we believe those who say, "Government can." Moving to California was once the dream for many Americans. Its population grew at almost triple the national average -- until 1990. Then big government, in the form of endless regulation and taxes, killed much of the dream. In the last decade, 2 million people left California. Many of them moved to Alaska,...

Rarely have second terms lived up to the hopes and expectations of presidents or their electorates. FDR's began with an attempt to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices and a second Depression of 1937. He was rescued only by the war in Europe in 1939 and the GOP's nomination of "the barefoot boy from Wall Street," Wendell Willkie. What can be called Harry Truman's second term was a disaster. In 1949, the Soviets exploded an atom bomb and China fell to Mao. In 1950, the Rosenbergs were convicted as atomic spies for Stalin and North Korea invaded the...

Although it certainly wasn’t Oscar material, I still love the 1989 film “Erik the Viking,” starring, among others, Tim Robbins, Mickey Rooney, Eartha Kitt and John Cleese. It’s a campy British comedy-fantasy about a band of misfit Vikings on a quest to reach Valhalla. In one scene, the motley mob finds its way to the island of Hy-Brasil, a happy, peaceful, sunlit land populated by white-robed, free-loving, uber-pacifist morons. You know, liberals. Through a series of immaterial events, the island begins to sink into the ocean. As it does, Erik and crew evacuate and re-board the ship while Hy-Brasil’s inhabitants...

“Land of the free.” It’s right there in our national anthem. As well it should be -- the personal liberties we enjoy are the envy of many around the world. But freedom is no accident. It requires constant vigilance. Takes economic liberty, an area where the United States has begun to slip quite a bit lately. How would you say the U.S. compares to other nations? No need to guess. We can pinpoint it exactly by using an annual guide known as the Index of Economic Freedom. Top three, you think? Top five? Nope. Last year at this time came...

WASHINGTON - President Obama's decision to name Jacob Lew, his chief of staff and former budget director, to be his Treasury secretary sent a depressing signal that the economy and jobs won't be his highest priority in a second term. With unemployment remaining stubbornly high in the fifth year of his presidency, the job of Treasury secretary cries out for a hard- driving, corporate chief executive with strong economic credentials. Instead, Obama intends to pick Lew who has reigned over his big spending budgets (and five consecutive trillion dollar deficits), and more recently has run the West Wing operation as...

Well, the Republicans caved and Barack Obama celebrated in Hawaii while planning his next step in creating an irreversible welfare state. Taxes will rise, spending will soar, and the media will cheer on Mr. Obama as he presses for even more as the debt ceiling deadline approaches. Instead of giving into despair or anger, conservatives need to plan for the long haul. Tea Party people, Christian conservatives, national security conservatives and fiscal conservatives (there’s a lot of overlap here) are already working to establish an actually conservative Republican Congress in 2014. It would be nice to have some conservative...

Matt Damon’s latest film “Promised Land” arrived in theaters nationwide yesterday with a focus on the controversial issue of fracking. Written by Matt Damon (who won an Oscar for co-writing “Good Will Hunting”) and John Krasinski (“The Office),” the story focuses on a small community that is asked to debate the merits of the process when a large corporation arrives in town wanting to buy much of the local land. In an article from the Wall Street Journal, reporter Daniel Gilbert described -- much more succinctly than the film does -- what the process of fracking entails. He noted that...

Half of recent college graduates can’t find employment. Those who find a job often settle for something less than a “college level job.” So what good is a college education, anyway, in our very unstable economy? As 2013 launches with more federal government debt and American businesses guessing when the next punitive regulatory show will drop, most Americans are ignoring an area of societal upheaval that is poised to get more intense. Increasingly, Americans are wondering how essential it is for one to possess a college degree. The upheaval transcends what you’ll read in the occasional “top paying” and...

I hate to break it to those deniers who believe that President Obama's tax-guzzling capacity has somehow been diminished by the fiscal cliff provision to fix "permanent" tax rates. You're dreaming. Several smart columnists and respected conservative editorial pieces tell us that a major silver lining in the crisis deal just concluded is that by agreeing not to reinstitute the Clinton tax rates (and leave the Bush rates in place) for all but the "wealthy" (income of $400,000 for single filers and $450,000 for marrieds), Obama and the Democrats made a major concession. They argue that if Democrats couldn't do...

Matt Damon, the actor who once gave $2,000 to Dennis Kucinich, is giving up on politics. He told Playboy, “It’s easier now more than ever in my life to feel the fix is in, the game is rigged and no matter how hard you work to change things, it just doesn’t matter.” Liberal Hollywood elites are not the only ones disappointed with failure of President Obama to deliver on his 2008 promise to change Washington. Heck, even left-leaning newspapers are blaming – albeit inadvertently – his Washington for the fiscal cliff fallout. When consumer confidence took a sharper than expected...

It might seem easy to say, “you get what you vote for,” to the millions of young voters who supported President Obama and now can’t find work. But, with a record number of young Americans becoming homeless, blaming the victim of President Obama’s well-crafted rhetoric doesn’t seem right. In one of his last campaign speeches, President Obama told a crowd of people at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, “We tried our ideas; they worked. The economy grew. We created jobs.” This sham President Obama cooked-up is nothing short of immoral for the millions of young Americans that have been living in...

The reason President Obama and Republicans can't come to an agreement on the fiscal cliff negotiations is that they don't share the same goals. This is also the key to understanding why President Obama appears far less worried about going over the cliff. Republicans are focused on restoring the nation's financial health by promoting economic growth and reducing our horrendous deficits and debt. President Obama's primary aim is to complete his project of fundamentally transforming America. I ask you loyal Democrats to please consider these things. Obama has demonstrated almost no concern for our crushing debt or deficits -- at...

You may recall that during the presidential election, the Treasury Department refused requests by General Motors to unload the government's stake in the giant automaker. Taxpayers had sunk $50 billion into a union bailout in 2009 and were now proud owners of 26.5 percent of the struggling company. Reportedly, GM had growing concerns that the stigma of "Government Motors" was hurting sales in the United States. At the time, any transaction would have come at a steep loss to taxpayers and undermined the president's questionable campaign assertions that the auto union rescue had been a huge success. Well, now...

WASHINGTON - Everything you ever wanted to know about the Obama economy is in a single sentence about the Federal Reserve Board's latest attempts this week to deal with unacceptably high unemployment. "Fed officials projected that the jobless rate, now at 7.7 percent, would not reach 6.5 percent until near the end of 2015 at the earliest," The Washington Post reported in its lead front page story Thursday morning. If there's anyone out there -- besides Barack Obama's top advisers and diehard allies in Congress -- who think his economic policies, or lack thereof, will restore a weak economy to...

While Washington pols pose and posture on whether to raise taxes next year, American businesses are busy taking action to avoid the hit their shareholders are likely to take come January. It's an old lesson that liberals never seem to learn. No matter how clever the tax hikers think they are, those who stand to be hurt by higher taxes usually figure out a way to protect themselves. The Obama administration hopes to raise more revenue by allowing the top tax rate to rise to 39 percent (or 43.4 percent if you include the new tax to pay for Obamacare)...