Free Republic

President Barack Obama has struggled with sagging approval ratings over the last year, but the commander-in-chief's numbers may have dropped further among active-duty troops. Just 15% of active-duty servicemembers gave Obama a thumbs up in the annual Military Times survey and more than half -- 55% -- say they disapprove of Obama's job as commander-in-chief. Troop morale has slumped during the Obama administration, falling to 56% this year from 91% who were satisfied with their quality of life in 2009.

The cold-blooded murder of two New York City policemen as they sat in their car is not only an outrage but also a wake-up call. It shows, in the most painful way, the high cost of having demagogues, politicians, mobs and the media constantly taking cheap shots at the police. Those cheap shots are in fact very expensive shots, not only to the police themselves but to the whole society. Someone once said that civilization is a thin crust over a volcano. The police are part of that thin crust. We have seen before our own eyes, first in Ferguson,...

Cuba said Monday that it has a right to grant asylum to U.S. fugitives, the clearest sign to date that the communist government has no intention of extraditing America’s most-wanted woman despite the warming of bilateral relations. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has urged President Barack Obama to demand the return of fugitive Joanne Chesimard before restoring full relations under a historic détente announced by Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro last week. […] In a letter sent to the White House Friday and made public by his office Sunday, Christie said Cuba’s asylum for Chesimard, who has changed her...

Watch a rare peak into PJTV’s Member series, Hot Seat w/ Bill Whittle. Is freedom of speech a thing of the past, now that N. Korea shut down Sony’s movie?

For the last nine years, the Military Times newspaper has surveyed an average of 2,300 active-duty service members. Their latest poll has just been released and concludes that “Obama’s popularity — never high to begin with — has crumbled, falling from 35 percent in 2009 to just 15 percent this year, while his disapproval ratings have increased to 55 percent from 40 percent over that time.” Much of the opposition to Obama has come from military members who believe he has been an inconsistent and flawed leader in foreign policy — for example, his 2011 removal of all troops in...

Wickedness has darkened this season of lights in Brooklyn. It is no surprise or accident that a ghoul like Ismaaiyl Brinsley bathed himself in messages of hate, racial division and anger and then chose to destroy lives. But Brinsley wasn’t alone in his racially soaked hatred of the police. For starters, a mob has Brinsley’s back. This seemingly disconnected mob has been on the prowl in the months since America learned of Ferguson, Missouri. They’ve smashed up windows of banks in Berkeley, burned up bakeries in Ferguson, and looted, burned, shot, robbed and killed across the nation. But such mobs...

This article is simply nothing but journalistic pornography, a report on the state of the overwhelming profligacy extended by this once great nation of ours to a fraudulent, phony, illegitimate cipher play acting in his come-to-life fantasy as King of ZeroZeroland. Near towards the end of World War II, when the entire state of existence of Germany, the Werhmacht, were desperate to stave of the Nazi entity's collapse, Hitler could have easily channeled valuable resources away from the extermination of untermenschen to help Germany survive a bit longer against the Allied Forces. But as a matter of fact resources to...

When politics becomes personal it can lose perspective.In an interview that was broadcast last night on 60 Minutes, retiring Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn proclaimed, “I’m proud of our country for electing Barack Obama.” Senator Coburn is to be admired for his years as a watchdog on the spending habits of Congress and bureaucrats in the federal government. While I was certainly well aware of Coburn’s friendship with Obama, which developed when they were in the Senate, I am nevertheless disappointed to hear that he is proud this country elected Barack Obama to the White House. Senator Coburn might very...

Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer, author of The Last Line, and Ret. Col. David Hunt joined Bill O’Reilly to give an update on the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap. Lt. Colonel Shaffer told Bill the Obama administration paid $5 billion and released five top Taliban Gitmo detainees in exchange for deserter Bowe Bergdahl. Obama celebrated the release of deserter Bowe Bergdahl with a White House press conference in the Rose Garden in May 2014.Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, who was part of the negotiations, told Bill O’Reilly the US paid out $5 billion and traded five top Taliban detainees for Bergdahl. Bill O’Reilly:...

Cause and effect. The president, governor, mayor and Reverend Al all say that the cops are a bunch of racist bastards. Somebody, aggrieved by what these leaders have said, walks up and kills two cops in cold blood. Cause and effect. A leads to B leads to bagpipes and “Amazing Grace.” And when they’re trying to hose the blood out of a precinct car it’s a little late to distance yourself from it. The claims of Sharpton and his crew that they disavow any violence, and that this has nothing to do with their protests and speeches, are, well, just...

My youngest daughter just joined the ever-increasing number of Americans who have lost their health coverage due to Obamacare. She received a letter from her insurance carrier indicating that the individual policy with which she was eminently satisfied, and that she could more or less afford, would no longer be available after the end of the year. In its place, the insurer offered a plan whose premiums will be nearly double what she has been paying for the cancelled policy. Her monthly premium was $127. The premium for the replacement policy, if she can find no alternative, will be $243.

When Gabby Giffords was shot in Arizona, the left went into a frenzy blaming Sarah Palin. In fact, when I was on CNN, I went on TV with Cornell Belcher and he was livid when I suggested leftwing rhetoric could be as hostile and divisive as rightwing rhetoric, if not more so. John King was apologetic for using war metaphors for politics and promised to stop. Wolf Blitzer, at one point, did a profile of Democratic congress critters who’d had death threats against them. Mind you, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Jim DeMint, and other Republicans had had the same, but...

Yes they do for their tolerating and promoting cop hatred. Also Bloomberg has blood on his hands for his taxing cigarettes to the hilt.

For weeks after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict a white police officer in the chokehold death of a black man, civil rights rallies in New York City had gathered momentum and spurred dialogue among activists and city officials. But the conversation, in one shocking instant on Saturday, took an unexpected turn. One day after two police officers were fatally shot at point-blank range as they sat in their squad car in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, leaders of several groups who had been rallying for criminal justice reform scrambled to condemn the killings while still keeping the...

Rafael Ramos and Wenjin Liu died because of the campaign to vilify police. Even as the events of Ferguson begin to fade, the campaign it helped engender rolls on, with new reports of demonstrations and protests appearing almost daily. Last week Carol Jackson, a federal judge, restricted police tactics against protestors. (This is kind of odd in and of itself. The last thing people want to hear about during the holidays is some hood getting his comeuppance. The same can be said about Sen. Feinstein’s “torture report” -- waterboarding is not likely to play well during the sleigh bell season....

It's shameful that a company like Sony would go groveling to a deceitful, tyrannical, un-American thug, but this column is not about Sony’s sucking up to Al Sharpton. This column is about a tort system that is dedicated not to justice but to making lawyers richer, and it comes not only at the price of American prosperity but at the cost of our liberty as well. Certainly, Sony has a yellow streak as wide as Seth Rogen’s gut. Its creepy supplication to that race-hustling, MSNBC troll shows its true cowardly character, since Sharpton – unlike North Korea – doesn’t have...

President Obama did something remarkable on Friday. He held his last press conference of the year, and the only people in the entire press corps who were called on to ask questions were women. Yes, this was on purpose; it had to be.

tting North Korea back on its list of terrorism sponsors, after the hacking of Sony Pictures, reports the BBC. Speaking on CNN, Obama said a decision on the issue would be taken after a review, though he stressed that the attack was considered “an act of cyber-vandalism, not of war.” He said officials in Washington would examine all the evidence to determine whether North Korea should be put back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. "I'll wait to review what the finding are," Obama said, adding that he did not think the attack "was an act of war"....

Politics is predictably unpredictable. So it’s no surprise that President Obama, after a hellacious 11 months, is finishing his sixth year on an unpredictably strong note. The U.S. economy is sitting up and taking nourishment, recovering nicely. Vladimir Putin, whom Republicans like Rudy Giuliani were fawning over as a “real leader” in contrast to our pusillanimous president, is gasping for air as the Russian economy sinks under the weight of Obama-led sanctions and a U.S. energy surge. Having stuck a thumb in the eye of the GOP with his immigration initiative, Obama used another digit on the Grand Old Partisans...