Free Republic

Sarah Palin's break up with Fox News should not have been, well, breaking news, as she had publicly complained in August on Facebook that the network had canceled her appearances at the Republican National Convention. And going back even further, Palin didn't give Fox the scoop in October 2011 when she announced she wasn't going to run for president. Still, the news of the Fox split overtook Twitter and the news cycle by storm. One thing I've learned in my years covering Palin, which began on Aug. 29, 2008, when Sen. John McCain stunned the country by selecting her as...

Drones over sovereign countries killing innocentsGoing to war without Congressional approval. Assassinating American citizens. And now Gitmo to remain open for business. The State Department on Monday reassigned Daniel Fried, the special envoy for closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and will not replace him, according to an internal personnel announcement. Mr. Fried’s office is being closed, and his former responsibilities will be “assumed” by the office of the department’s legal adviser, the notice said. The announcement that no senior official in President Obama’s second term will succeed Mr. Fried in working primarily on diplomatic issues pertaining to repatriating...

So argues Ralph Benko at Forbes, in a column yesterday that takes a (ahem) different view of the strategies employed by the House Republican caucus and the Speaker over the last few weeks. Benko may score on a few of his points, too: In retrospect, at the Battle at Fiscal Cliff, Boehner took President Obama to the cleaners. He did it suavely, without histrionics. While Obama churlishly, and in a politically amateurish manner, publicly strutted about having forced the Republicans to raise tax rates on “the wealthiest Americans” Boehner, quietly, was pocketing his winnings. Dazzled by Obama’s Ozymandias-scale sneer most...

While the title says it all, I thought a goodbye was in order. While I've been a FReeper for well over a decade, I must declare that it is time to part ways. While I have the greatest respect for a great many of you, the days where I can in good conscience remain silent about the issues that set me apart from the rest of FReeperdom have past. For clarity, or perhaps catharsis, I'm not entirely certain which, I'll lay them out on the table an call the ZOT™ down upon myself. The racism: I just can't handle it...

While American taxpayers bail out failing companies via the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), behind the scenes the Obama Treasury Department is awarding their top executives with millions of dollars in raises even though Congress passed a law forbidding it. It’s an inconceivable scheme that rewards bad behavior with big bucks from taxpayers who have no say in the matter. In fact, the U.S. Treasury was forced by Congress to create rules against it yet a new federal audit reveals the agency repeatedly violates them to enrich the very people responsible for the companies’ failures (and need for...

I hate to criticize a fellow pilot, but when one engages in such sky-high hypocrisy, well . . . On Morning Joe today, former Obama car czar Steve Rattner, a very successful hedge fund manager, decried "climate-change denier[s]." This is the same Rattner who, at last report, owned a "15,000-square-foot mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, to which [he] flies regularly on a Dassault Falcon 2000 jet [see file photo] he pilots himself." Rattner wrung his hands over the fact that we're "putting millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every day." But just earlier this week, the New York Times...

President Barack Obama is set to reject the key compromise at the heart of a bipartisan deal on immigration reform announced by eight Senators yesterday. The president, who will deliver an address later today in Las Vegas, NV outlining his own immigration ideas, is reported to oppose linking a “path to citizenship” for illegal immigrants, a Democrat demand, to stronger law enforcement and better border security, a Republican demand. The president will apparently argue that the administration has met reasonable goals on enforcing current immigration legislation, and that additional security will merely create new obstacles to legalizing the roughly 12...

Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein, Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, and their cohorts followed Rahm Emanuel's advice to "never let a good crisis go to waste" when they used the Sandy Hook shooting to renew their assault on the Bill of Rights. Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell added, in effect, that one should never let a dead child go to waste if one can exploit him or her for political gain. "...the GOOD THING about Newtown is, it was so HORRIFIC that I think it galvanized Americans to a point where the intensity on our side is going to match the intensity...

Breaking... Obama is tripling-down on gun control via executive orders. Sounds like the Class 03 FFL/C&R will be limited or abolished. Will seek to erase the limit on the EPA's regulating lead bullets. Here it comes, unless the Repubs do something.

Hours before President Obama is set to deliver a major immigration speech, a key Republican senator blasted the president for reportedly opposing a requirement to shore up border security before legalizing up to 11 million illegal immigrants. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., one of four Republican senators involved in a bipartisan effort to craft immigration reform legislation, warned the president Tuesday against taking such a position. It was the first sign since the senators unveiled their guidelines a day earlier of friction between the two efforts. "I think that would be a terrible mistake," Rubio told Fox News. "We have a...

A key figure in Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi's government called the Holocaust a hoax cooked up by U.S. intelligence operatives and claimed the 6 million Jews who were killed by Nazis simply moved to the U.S. The outrageous claims, by Fathi Shihab-Eddim, a senior figure close to President Morsi who is now responsible for appointing the editors of all state-run Egyptian newspapers, came as the world marked Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, and also as the U.S. continues to assess its relationship with the increasingly radical Arab state. “The myth of the Holocaust is an industry that America invented,”...

All those Americans who hoped that in victory a magnanimous President would move toward reconciliation of a divided people were bitterly disappointed by Barack Obama’s inaugural speech. In yet another partisan campaign speech, Mr. Obama suggested that he holds all those who disagree with his views to be malevolent saboteurs who must be run over. Did he characterize the profound differences of opinion on the role of government as inspired by love of country? No. He essentially told America that he holds nearly half of the nation’s citizens in utter contempt. Such arrogance is not leadership; it is so...

Farrakhan: Right To Bear Arms An Outdated Concept January 28, 2013 10:37 AM Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan released a sermon ridiculing The Second Amendment in modern society, and Americans’ distaste for their government. WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – In the third installment of his 52-week sermon series, Nation of Islam leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan, ridiculed the “volatile” American right to own weapons. On Sunday, Farrakhan continued “The Time and What Must Be Done” sermon series by stating that Americans are increasingly angry at the government, and are simultaneously preparing themselves for war. Farrakhan went on to say that the...

It's about time for some bipartisan...skeet shooting? Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, joined a chorus of skeptics who questioned President Barack Obama's recent comments about his hobby of skeet shooting, a sport where participants fire shotguns to break airborne clay disks. "If he is a skeet shooter, why have we not heard of this? Why have we not seen photos? Why hasn't he referenced this at any point in time?" Blackburn said Monday on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront." "I tell you what I do think," she later added. "I think he should invite me to Camp David, and I'll go skeet...

Somewhere in our president's short inaugural address last week (it only seemed long), our newly re-elected chief executive paused to deliver a pious little sermon on the evils of name-calling -- and for good measure, the evils of delay, spectacle and absolutism, too. The Rev. Obama crammed all those sins into a couple of sentences that might have passed for a mini-homily from some less-gifted televangelist: "For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate." Well said, at least for an...

To understand leftism, the most dynamic religion of the last hundred years, you have to understand how the left thinks. The 2013 inaugural address of President Barack Obama provides one such opportunity. --"What makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'" What American does not resonate to a...

President Barack Obama will fly over 9 hours tomorrow, round-trip from Washington, D.C. to Las Vegas, Nevada, just to deliver a speech on immigration, according to the president's White House schedule. With Air Force One estimated to cost $182,000 per hour in flight, Obama's trip--that is, only his travel to and from Vegas--will cost taxpayers over $1.6 million. Obama has no other public events scheduled in Las Vegas but his immigration speech. "In the morning, the President will depart the White House en route Las Vegas, Nevada. The departure from the South Lawn and the arrival at McCarran International Airport...

The Hill has bad news for businessmen as the second term of Barack Obama begins, and … more bad news. First, businesses foresee a flood of regulations as Obama uses the executive branch to push an agenda that has no chance of getting through Congress: President Obama has begun to wield the power of the executive to press forward with a second-term agenda that delights the left and terrifies the right.When he said "we must act" in his inaugural address last week, liberals cheered him on, and conservatives saw that the electoral earthquake of November is likely to be followed...

Political trends come and go in response to events. Gun control was the rage during the Clinton administration, but over the past decade or so it became an obsolete cause. After the horrific crimes in Newtown and Aurora, though, it's staging a comeback. One thing hasn't changed: The agenda includes mostly measures that will have little or no effect on the problems they are supposed to address. They are Potemkin remedies—presentable facades with empty space behind them. This is something that supporters as well as opponents labor to conceal. Treating them as serious allows them both to posture for their...

Start immediate investigation of Barack Obama's use of forged IDs and a CT SSN which was never assigned to him according to e-verify -- 19,362 Letters and Emails Sent So Far. On April 15, 2010 Obama posted his 2009 tax returns on line. He forgot to flatten the PDF file and his full unredacted Social Security number xxx-xx-4425 became known to the public. This number immediately raised suspicions of Attorney Orly Taitz, as it started with 042, a digit combination which was assigned to the state of CT and Obama was never a resident of CT. E-verify and SSNVS showed...