Free Republic

In the White House Rose Garden, where for four years Donald Trump raucously celebrated political wins with his allies, it was now the turn of Democrats to take a victory lap – masked and physically distanced, of course. Kamala Harris, the vice-president, heaped praise on Joe Biden for signing a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, the biggest expansion of the American welfare state in decades. “Your empathy has become a trademark of your presidency and can be found on each and every page of the American Rescue Plan,” Harris said. Democrats this week passed the plan into law; now they have...

President Joe Biden told Americans in his Inaugural Address last week: “We have learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.” But one would be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the Biden administration’s behavior on taking office. After a week of Biden, the United States is being run more like a Third World country than an advanced democracy. Here are nine of the most salient examples:

Malia Obama Just Made Windbreakers Cool Again The teen has officially mastered '90s style. Despite being born in 1998, Malia Obama has seamlessly mastered the art of '90s style since moving to New York. The former First Daughter has been spotted around the city for her internship in high-waisted denim, Timberlands and lace-up combat boots but over the weekend, she took her penchant for the '90s to a new level. Obama stepped out in one of the most memorable trends of the '90s: a bright color-blocked windbreaker. The 18-year-old styled the retro outerwear with a pair of vintage-cut dad jeans...

Live in Chicago

The chief White House spokesman said the arrest of a National Security Agency contractor for alleged code theft is a potential breach that President Obama and his administration are examining and taking "seriously." The FBI in late August secretly arrested an NSA contractor, who worked for the same cyberoperations firm as infamous leaker Edward Snowden, in connection with the theft of highly classified hacking codes, the Justice Department announced Wednesday. Presidential press secretary Josh Earnest said he was limited in what he could discuss about the case because it's an ongoing investigation. "Any time that we have information like this...

Full title: Obama's Executive Gun Control: No Minimum Threshold Before Private Gun Sales Require Background Checks On January 4, the White House released a fact sheet which previews the executive gun control Obama will announce Tuesday, and it reveals there is no numerical threshold of sales that a private seller has to cross before being considered "engaged in the business of dealing in firearms."In other words, previous hints that there would be a "trigger"--a certain number of guns that a private seller had to sell before being considered "engaged in the business"--are now out the window. Figures like those reported...

No, not that Executive Order - not the one he never signed about immigration. No, in this one he declares a day off for the Feds the day after Christmas. By his authority he orders all departments and agencies of the Federal Government closed the day after Christmas. For those wondering about the immigration Executive Order, it never happened. He signed two Presidential Memoranda that day, Nov. 21, in Las Vegas. Not an EO. You can read all his Memoranda at the White House Presidential Memoranda page. And all the Executive Orders are at the Executive Order page. These Memoranda...

President Barack Obama on Friday blamed dysfunction in Congress on a Republican Party he said is captive to an ideologically rigid, unproductive and cynical faction, urging like-minded Democrats to show up for November's midterm elections. Addressing Democratic donors at a fundraiser in Rhode Island and another in New York, Obama said Republicans had realized that blocking all progress led Americans to become cynical about government. Republicans consider that "a pretty good thing" because they don't believe in government to begin with, Obama said. "It doesn't have to be that way," Obama said during a barbecue in Purchase, New York. "There...

The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter. ... “This service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda [?], and assist in the preservation of open debate,” the grant said. ... “Truthy” claims to be non-partisan. However, the project’s lead investigator Filippo Menczer proclaims his support for numerous progressive advocacy groups, including President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, Moveon.org, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, and True Majority. ... The government-funded researchers hope that the public will use...

(snip) “What you’ve seen with our politics, partly because of gerrymandering, partly because of the Balkanization of media so people just watch what reinforces their deepest biases, partly because of big money in politics, is increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme, maximalist positions,” Obama told the liberal Times columnist. “Sooner or later, that catches up with you. You end up not being able to move forward on things we need to move forward on. We need to reform our immigration system. That would be good not just for our domestic economy but for our position in the...

It’s finally happening! Libs are starting to realize that the manufactured image of Barack Obama as a brilliant, capable executive is hooey, and that they have bought into an incompetent who threatens to sink them. Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post doesn’t quite put it in those terms, of course, but you don’t have to read between the lines too closely to come up with that interpretation of his piece entitled, “Americans are starting to doubt President Obama is a good boss.”

The Taliban prisoner swap for Bowe Bergdahl might do some good, but fear and anger are getting in the way of a realistic appraisal.Richard Hofstadter opened his 1968 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," with this line: "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds." He continues, "Behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." One wonders...

The White House, in damage control after a blistering memoir by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates went public, insisted that a full slate of events between President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden was not meant to prop up Biden. In a rare move, the White House opened up the weekly lunch between Obama and Biden to photographers Wednesday, prompting speculation that the administration was trying to gloss over a brutal 24 hours for Obama’s number two. “You can decide for yourself what you want to believe,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday, calling the timing of the...

On December 1,Twelve days from now, you have to wonder, Who Will Be Laughing At Liberals & Democrats Now?, Who will get the last laugh when the "Promised To Be Fixed" Health-Care Exchange will not be ready?,and today we find out it may only be 30% Fixed. Reid,Pelosi,Wasserman and the rest are going to either come up with a laughable excuse,maybe blame it on conservatives, or hide in their homes until the exchange sight actually works. And who can't wait to see liberal commentators try to spin it all over again!

The current troubles of the Obama presidency can be read back into its beginnings. Rule by personal charisma has met its proper fate. The spell has been broken, and the magician stands exposed. We need no pollsters to tell us of the loss of faith in Mr. Obama's policies—and, more significantly, in the man himself. If Barack Obama seems like a man alone, with nervous Democrats up for re-election next year running for cover, and away from him, this was the world he made. No advisers of stature can question his policies; the price of access in the Obama court...

Raising the debt ceiling doesn't increase the nation's debt, Pres. Obama declared in a speech today... Obama dismissed concerns about raising the debt ceiling by noting that it'd been done so many times in the past: ... Obama went on to suggest that "the average person" mistakenly thinks that raising the debt ceiling means the U.S. is racking up more debt:

While saying he sympathizes with current public distaste for more war, President Obama on Friday made the case that the U.S. must live up to its global responsibilities, and for the first time raised the possibility that additional military action — beyond what’s on the table now — may be necessary if Syrian President Bashar Assad uses chemical weapons again. Mr. Obama made the comments at a press conference in Saint Petersburg, Russia, just hours before he departs the G-20 Summit and returns to Washington without achieving the international consensus on Syria that he’d hoped. In blunt terms, the president...

President Obama is none too pleased with the cameramen who film his White House addresses. Just as he launched into an explanation Tuesday of how his deficit reduction plan stacks up to the Simpson-Bowles Commission, he was thrown off mid-sentence by the loud sound coming from one cameraman's radio. "Heh, what's up cameramen," the president said. "C'mon guys," he admonished, before complaining, "They're breaking my flow all the time."

Oh Lord, Oh Lord! What a sheer bloody joy it was to see Barack Obama, peace be upon him, exposed as the mediocre, media-inflated, self-important regional politician he so obviously is. The emperor was revealed as having no clothes at all, as being totally naked. In spite of the massive amounts of media spin and Hollywood slander, in spite of the pompous, smug, verbose and tendentious moderator, in spite of Obama’s blatant dishonesty, Mitt Romney looked the adult to the president’s child. A mature and responsible adult at that, to a petulant and angry child. Perhaps the most startling moment...

MICHELLE OBAMA ON The TOM JOYNER MORNING SHOW: Well, we’re understanding that, you know, you can have a president you love, but if you don’t have a congress that’s willing to work, you know, you wind up stalled in so many ways. And I think that Barack has done a phenomenal job working around a congress that has never been willing to help move the country forward on so many different issues. But I think he’s done everything humanly possible to get things passed around the margins. But, you know, just imagine where this country will be when we have...