Free Republic

Michelle and I warmly remember our meeting with the Holy Father in 2009, and I have appreciated our work together over these last four years.

In what the Obama Administration is characterizing as a “great surge in human freedom,” it was reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that there are 8.5 million fewer people in the labor force than when Obama took office in January of 2009. “The Great Emancipator himself only freed 4 million slaves,” said Press Secretary Jay Carney. “Without the bloodshed of a civil war, President Obama has enabled more than twice as many to escape from the drudgery of having to work for a living.” Carney boasted that “those in the GOP who try to cast this achievement as a...

The language used in President Barack Obama’s upcoming State of the Union speech may be vague regarding specific climate change regulations, but two media outlets have now confirmed that new coal regulations by the Administration are likely. “In trying to slow climate change, Obama is considering acting through the Environmental Protection Agency to issue new rules governing carbon emissions by existing power plants, according to three people familiar with White House discussions,” states the Washington Post today (emphasis added). According to the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Nicholas and Keith Johnson, “In the run-up to the speech, Mr. Obama has been...

Perhaps General Motors should have put more focus on competing in the largest segment of the auto market instead of focusing on being the market leader in the least popular, plug-in, electric vehicle (EV) field. A Detroit Free Press article reported that GM had to slash Chevy Malibu prices by hundreds of dollars to try and catch up with vehicles like the Toyota Camry, which is currently eating the Malibu's lunch. Chevy spokesman Michael Albino is quoted as admitting that, "The midsize segment is the largest and most competitive in the industry." Maybe GM should have realized that when they...

The courts would no more allow government to undermine the Second Amendment than the First. Could there be a better illustration of the cultural divide over firearms than the White House photograph of our skeet-shooting president? Clay pigeons are launched into the air, but the president's smoking shotgun is level with the ground. This is not a man who is comfortable around guns. And that goes a long way toward explaining his gun-control agenda. Lack of informed presidential leadership aside, there is a gulf between those Americans who view guns as invaluable tools for self-defense, both against private wrongdoers and...

Obama continues to push stricter gun laws President Barack Obama remained adamant in a speech on Jan. 4 summarizing simply his intentions to continue pushing the passing of stricter national gun laws. “We don’t have to agree on everything to agree it’s time to do something,” the president said before a crowd of law enforcement officers at the Minneapolis Police Department Special Operations Center in Minnesota. This sentiment is one that after months of heated debate, both sides of the gun control debate can agree with. Kentucky elected officials and citizens have continued to contribute to this nation-wide discussion ever...

Who would have guessed that one of the most warmongering presidents would be a liberal Democrat who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize? Obama has gotten away with a secret escalating drone war because the left and their fifth column in the media have mostly turned a blind eye, just like they have with Obama's expanded ground war in Afghanistan, not wanting to criticize a fellow leftist in power. Obama is not the pacifist he pretends to be. The executive branch's escalating drone strike program has been taking place in secret now for over 10 years, all ostensibly justified...

And Your Little Dog, Too By Deroy Murdock February 11, 2013 12:00 A.M. As Washington politicians aim to restrict the Second Amendment, they should look in the mirror. The time to control government’s guns is now. Overarmed federal officials increasingly employ military tactics as a first resort in routine law enforcement. From food-safety cases to mundane financial matters, battle-ready public employees are turning America into the United States of SWAT. FBI agents and U.S. marshals understandably are well fortified, given their frequent run-ins with ruthless bad guys. However — as my old friend and fellow columnist Quin Hillyer notes —...

This doesn’t mean it won’t be overlong, enervating, and instantly disposable like the last four were, just more peevish than usual. It’ll also be an occasion for O to “pivot to jobs” for the seventh or eighth time in his presidency, which I take it means 15-20 minutes about the middle class and the latest iteration of the Buffett Rule before he gets back to the stuff that really drives him, like banning assault weapons and creating an earned amnesty for illegals. Emboldened by electoral victory and convinced the GOP is unwilling to cut deals, Obama plans to use his...

Obama and the progressives seem to be more progressively immoral every day. Just a few days ago, he signed an order putting pregnant women in combat. He has substituted gay marriage for holy matrimony in the military (and don't think that won't invalidate State Constitution amendments and DOMA). He has made us all pay for Sterilizations, Contraceptive and don't forget Abortions. And he has even made our churches to pay for it and we are all supposed to keep silent. Will the Democratic party ever be able to pull out of this Progressive immorality? Will this Nation?

Can Whitey Bulger blame his own raging case of Obama Derangement Syndrome rather than a tabby cat for his 2011 capture? That’s the suggestion in a bombshell new biography, “Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss,” by veteran Boston reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill. When Whitey and moll Catherine Greig had been living in Santa Monica, Calif., as “Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Gasko,” Greig became close to Icelandic model Anna Bjornsdottir, bonding over the care of a stray cat. Whitey often joined them outside their apartment building. But, Lehr and O’Neill write, Bjornsdottir and Whitey never spoke...

The Navy SEAL Team Six "shooter" who put two rounds into Osama bin Laden's forehead May 2, 2011, is jobless, struggling to pay basic bills and has been offered no protection from the retaliation he anticipates from al Qaeda, according to his first interview. Only described as "the shooter" by Esquire, he also charges that the SEAL who recently wrote a book about the raid, celebrated in the new movie Zero Dark Thirty, wrongly took credit for killing the 9/11 mastermind. The shooter said that the other SEAL simply shot the corpse of bin Laden in the chest. The long...

Why is the government disarming us at the same time it is arming itself? Not wanting to sound paranoid, or like a conspiracy theorist, I think it is nonetheless fair to ask: What foe is the federal government arming itself against? And should the American people be concerned about a federal government that takes away their guns while simultaneously stockpiling hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition for its own domestic security use? As the president and Democratic politicians do their best to geld the Second Amendment, which was intended to protect the people against government oppression, the government they...

There were two extraordinary disclosures in Thursday's testimony of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey before the Senate Armed Services Committee. One is that there was no communication between them and Barack Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the seven hours of Sept. 11, 2012, when Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were attacked and murdered in Benghazi. This is a vivid contrast with those photos we've seen of the president and his leading advisers watching the video of the attack on Osama bin Laden. At a 5 p.m. meeting, when...

Turns out all the Cardinals were given Obama phones and are also on food stamps. Done Deal.

Peter Barker has written a column for the NY Times in which he compares Barack Obama to George Bush: Obama’s Turn in Bush’s Bind. For Times readers, that’s like comparing Obama to Hitler. It means that the Times is wondering if this White ...uh ... Authentically Black Knight is for real. He starts: Four years into his tenure, the onetime critic of President George W. Bush finds himself cast as a present-day Mr. Bush, justifying the muscular application of force in the defense of the nation while detractors complain that he has sacrificed the country’s core values in the name...

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom. There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, "Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don't watch out." These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within...

In the past several days, we’ve learned about how you too can gain a degree of public sympathy if you plan to embark on a killing spree and then go into hiding as you bide your time waiting to kill again: Write a “manifesto” dominated by anti-police rants, a “progressive” outlook towards Second Amendment freedoms and support for leftist politicians. That’s what former Los Angeles Police Department officer Christopher Dorner, who is accused of killing Monica Quan, Keith Lawrence, and an as yet unnamed LAPD officer while wounding two others, has done. His sympathy-by-manifesto strategy has been alarmingly successful. Dorner’s...

President Obama will use his State of the Union speech on Tuesday to reinvigorate one of his signature national security objectives — drastically reducing nuclear arsenals around the world — after securing agreement in recent months with the United States military that the American nuclear force can be cut in size by roughly a third. -snip But Mr. Obama, according to an official who was involved in the deliberations, “believes that we can make pretty radical reductions — and save a lot of money — without compromising American security in the second term. And the Joint Chiefs have signed off...

Most analysis of drone technology from libertarian futurists these days is pretty pessimistic. They’re generally treated as part of a larger techno-fascist scenario, like the U.S. global hegemony (enforced by orbital lasers and remote-controlled UN teletroopers) depicted in Ken Macleod’s Fall Revolution novels. That’s an understandable temptation. After all, drones (combined with mobile operations like the assassination of bin Laden in May 2011) seem to have given the United States an unprecedented ability to take out the leadership and many of the rank-and-file of networked resistance movements like al Qaeda, far more cheaply than the old model of counter-insurgency warfare....