Free Republic

Although President Obama supports setting a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants, his administration deported a record 1.5 million of them in his first term. In addition, the latest data released by the government in recent days show that an unprecedented 409,849 people were deported for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The increase from the previous year occurred despite policy changes ordered by Obama to reduce the deportations of otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants. Roughly 55 percent, or more than 225,000 people, deported in the past year were convicted of crimes such as drug offenses and driving under...

Today the National Journal reported that Obama is reconsidering his decision to appoint Chuck Hagel Secretary of Defense. As I wrote in my previous post, there is no chance that Obama will appoint a supporter of a strong Israel to any senior foreign policy post because he wouldn't appoint someone who doesn't share his basic animosity towards Israel. But in Hagel, he chose someone even more outspoken in his animus towards the Jewish state than Obama. Hagel's looming appointment provoked angry responses from many leading Jewish voices in the US. Whether this opposition made a difference in driving Obama to...

WHEN thinking about the state of the Republican Party, I defer to a point that the Democratic consultant James Carville made the other day: “When I hear people talking about the troubled state of today’s Republican Party, it calls to mind something Lester Maddox said one time back when he was governor of Georgia. He said the problem with Georgia prisons was ‘the quality of the inmates.’ The problem with the Republican Party is the quality of the people who vote in their primaries and caucuses. Everybody says they need a better candidate, or they need a better message but...

Budget: Plan Boehner — also known as Plan B — has failed in the House because the Republican speaker couldn't get the Republican members to follow him. So what should they do now? Wait until next year. [snip] Not that a vote would have mattered: Harry Reid's do-nothing Senate — it hasn't passed a budget in more than three years — would not have even taken up the bill. [snip] Let him send his budget to Congress in February, as required by law, and show his plans for escaping the cliff. {snip}After all, won't Obama be responsible for the tax...

Relations between Bahrain and the United States have come under increasing strain amid the Shi’ite revolt in the Gulf Cooperation Council kingdom, a report said. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy said that Bahraini leaders were expressing dismay over what they determined was Washington’s failure to support Manama in the campaign against Shi’ites backed by Iran. The institute cited veiled criticism of the administration of President Barack Obama during the Manama Dialogue in early December. The United States sees political reform as compatible with maintaining the historical security relationship, while the royal family views Shi’ite leaders with suspicion, believing...

While the shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School has prompted a national gun control debate, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder will still push to allow immigrants to purchase firearms more easily. Normally, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) requires legal aliens to live in a state for 90 days before buying a gun. The ATF does this through a rule attached to the Gun Control Act of 1968. In June, Holder’s DOJ proposed to eliminate that 90-day residency requirement rule. “This rule would finalize the interim final rule published on...

Politics 2012: It hasn´t been two months since Barack Obama won re-election, but already we´re finding out things that were kept from us during the campaign. Expect to hear more in the coming months. lElections are clarifying events, we´re told. But sometimes what they clarify is merely the gap between what we were told during the campaign and the reality on the ground. Often, the two don´t match. That´s certainly true with Obama. How often in recent weeks have we learned that what we heard on the campaign trail from the Obama camp, and which were echoed by

Some interesting news has broken in the wake of the latest push for gun control by President Obama and Senate Democrats: Obama sends his kids to a school where armed guards are used as a matter of fact. The school, Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, has 11 security officers and is seeking to hire a new police officer as we speak. If you dismiss this by saying, "Of course they have armed guards -- they get Secret Service protection," then you've missed the larger point. The larger point is that this is standard operating procedure for the school, period....

Gun control advocates' loudest voices are most heavily protected by guns. Andrew Cuomo, Michael Bloomberg, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel and other gun grabbing politicians are protected with secret service and/or security details that carry guns. If their argument is right, that guns kill people, it is more than appropriate that they disarm their security and themselves to demonstrate that they can live the way they are both proposing and legislating that the rest of the 99%, (not in the political 1% elite) live. If the Political 1%ers do not shed their armed protection for themselves and their own families then...

One of my favorite commentators on television is CNBC’s Rick Santelli. And today, he made a great point: when the Senate wanted to pass Obamacare, they met on Christmas eve, 2009. Somehow, the fiscal cliff isn’t that important to the Senate or House this time around. We know that President Obama is perfectly happy to let tax rates automatically increase on everyone (or at least those households earning $250,000 has above). And payroll taxes rise 2% regardless of the fiscal cliff or not. Then there are the 10+ Obamacare taxe, mostly hitting the top 2% of earners. But President Obama...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: When I was growing up, an older member of the family used to say, "What you don't know would make a big book." Now that I am an older member of the family, I would say to anyone, "What you don't know would fill more books than the Encyclopedia Britannica." At least half of our society's troubles come from know-it-alls, in a world where nobody knows even 10 percent of all. Some people seem to think that, if life is not fair, then the answer is to turn more of the nation's resources over...

News that the Treasury Department's Inspector General has opened an investigation to determine whether three solar companies inflated the cost of their work to increase the payments they would receive from the government should send shivers down the spine of the taxpayer-subsidized green energy industry.The Washington Post reports that SolarCity, SunRun and Sungevity have received subpoenas from the Treasury Department’s office of inspector general for financial records to justify more than $500 million in federal grants and tax credits the firms tapped for performing work. The probe seeks to determine whether the companies accurately reported the market value of...

President Barack Obama demands more stimulus spending to avoid the "fiscal cliff." Obama increased the national debt $6 trillion to $16 trillion. Yet the Democrats' 'cure for what ails ya' is even more spending. Obama demands around $75 billion in new spending to stimulate the economy in 2013. "Keynesian Economics" is the insane belief that the economy can be stimulated by government spending. It provides the excuse to depart from common sense that allows politicians to ignore the alarm bells. It is ludicrous mainly because our government doesn't have any money to spend. If the government had a surplus saved...

It’s already been discussed that Barack Obama’s eulogy at Senator Inouy’s memorial in Washington DC was a tribute to himself and not the late Hawaiian senator. Obama spoke for 10 minutes about himself and his life story, barely mentioning the life of Senator Inouye. But it’s worse than that. Barack Obama distorted his life story in order to include Senator Inouye in his talk. Jack Cashill at American Thinker reported:

Woo-Hoo! MOTUS already got her first-est and best-est Christmas present! The coveted Doug Ross Fab Fifty 2012 Medallion!!!! That’s right: MOTUS has now won the the prestigious award in the category “Best First Lady Blog” 4 big years in a row! As you can imagine, the competition was brutal in that category. Anyway, it’s a record! At least for me.(snip) So before MOTUS gets about her very busy day I just want say thanks to all of you in the only way I know possible: a picture of Lady M that doesn’t include either the face or the butt: Yet...

As we celebrate our narrow escape from the Mayan-Republican Apocalypse of December 21, 2012, the American media is living up to its reputation as the people's fearless truth-teller, by correctly attributing our miraculous collective salvation to Barack Obama. The consensus among the media experts and celebrities can be best expressed by this unbiased quote from CNN: "If you don't think Obama is god, you're just stupid." According to an ancient prophecy, the Mayan calendar would end on 12/21/2012 with a big comet (or other large-caliber assault weapon that the NRA protects from government control) falling off a physical cliff and...

Early in his first term, Barack Obama raised a lot of eyebrows by his (now-infamous) action of returning to the British a bust of Winston Churchill. This error was compounded by giving as a gift to the British Prime minister a gift of DVDs of classic American movies, in a format incompatible with British DVD players. A lot of time was spent either rationalizing this behaviour away, or analyzing it, but the consensus, after a time, was Officially DeclaredTM to be a mixture of "SQUIRREL!" and "Anti-Imperialist" together with references to the Brit treatment of the Mau-Maus in Africa, hints...

Maria Bartiromo challenges Maryland Democratic Senator Ben Cardin to offer specifics on what spending cuts he would be willing to support, accusing both sides of talking generally about a "balanced approach" but failing ot reach an agreement to avert the fiscal cliff.

A Wall Street Journal report detailing the broken-down status of talks between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner on the year-end “fiscal cliff” reveals that Obama threatened to use both his inaugural and State of the Union speeches to blame Republicans if there’s no deal. Negotiations reportedly came to a standstill after Boehner proposed increasing the tax rate on top earners: Mr. Obama repeatedly lost patience with the speaker as negotiations faltered. In an Oval Office meeting last week, he told Mr. Boehner that if the sides didn’t reach agreement, he would use his inaugural address and his...

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