Free Republic

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Thursday that Democrats have the votes to defeat a GOP-backed measure to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline. "The answer is yes," Reid said when asked if Democrats would kill the measure. "Everyone should just calm down on Keystone,” Reid added. “Just take a deep breath, folks.” Reid’s comments came just hours before the Senate is expected to vote on an amendment to transportation legislation that would force approval of the pipeline. The amendment requires 60 votes for passage. The majority leader stressed that President Obama opposes the GOP amendment, but does not...

A razor close vote is expected in the Senate Thursday on a Republican amendment to bypass the Obama administration's objections and approve the Keystone XL pipeline, Senate aides from both parties told CNN. Democratic aides, however, expressed some optimism the provision would be defeated. President Obama lobbied wavering Democrats by phone to shore up Democratic support for his position, a senior Democratic source told CNN. It could be embarrassing for the White House if a large number of Democrats voted to overturn the administration's Keystone policy, which has been hotly debated as gas prices continue to rise during this election...

Via PoliticoPresident Barack Obama is intervening in a Senate fight over the Keystone XL oil pipeline and personally lobbying Democrats to reject an amendment calling for its construction, according to several sources familiar with the talks.The White House lobbying effort, including phone calls from the president to Democrats, signals that the vote could be close when it heads to the floor Thursday. ..

American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard went before a Congressional hearing today and blasted President Obama’s double-speak on oil production. “It’s others who have called on the Saudis to produce more. Others, who have called on other sources such as the Brazilians and yet others who recognize that supply matters by calling for release from the strategic oil preserve.”

The track record of Barack Obama's pronouncements on a wide range of issues suggests that anything he says is a message written in sand, and easily blown away by the next political winds. Remember the "shovel-ready projects" that would spring into action and jump-start the economy, once the "stimulus" money was available? Obama himself laughed at this idea a year or so later, when it was clear to all that these projects were going nowhere.

In 1994, Barack Obama taught a course at the University of Chicago Law School entitled, "Current Issues in Racism and the Law." The reading list and syllabus for that class were made available by the New York Times in 2008, though there seems to have been little analysis of its content by Jodi Kantor, the Times’s Obama correspondent. Obama routinely assigned works by Bell as required reading, including Bell's racialist interpretations of seminal civil rights laws and cases. No other scholar’s work appears as often in the syllabus as Bell’s does.

The 1991 video shows a younger Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, speaking at a peaceful, racial equality rally led by professor Derrick Bell. The event was in support of Bell, who was angry over Harvard's failure to offer tenure to black professors. Obama is seen embracing Bell, described by Pollak as the "Jeremiah Wright of academia." What do you think of the video? It will hurt Obama and propels the notion that he's a radical. 22% What a joke. Nothing note-worthy happens in the video. 72% I don't know. 5%

Pardon me for just a moment....(Vanity) But if you have not watched the video of CNN this morning with Soledad O'Brien mocking Joel Pollack of Breitbart.com for the Obama Harvard video...then please...go view it. http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/03/08/The%20Vetting%20CNN%20Implodes%20Over%20Obama%20Bell%20Video After you are finished...send CNN a note at this link: http://www.cnn.com/feedback/show/?s=generalcomments&hdln=4 To demand that Soledad be removed from the air or that a disclaimer be shown that she is a member of the Democratic Party every single time her face appears on the screen. Her along with her panel today showed what true liberal media bias is and we should not let it go unnoticed....

From the moment that Barack Obama threw his hat into the ring for President, Democrats have been accusing those who disagree with him of being racists. They are of course being disingenuous, pernicious and at the end of the day, most importantly, wrong. But what if they weren’t? Let’s say somehow the entire universe of conservatives was made up of racists… so what? Does it change the veracity of their stated disagreements with President Obama? If it were in fact the case that conservatives hate him because he is black does that mean that their well thought out, reasonable...

Imagine if John McCain had whispered somewhere that he was willing to bankrupt a major industry? Would this declaration not immediately be front page news? Well, Barack Obama actually flat out told the San Francisco Chronicle (SF Gate) that he was willing to see the coal industry go bankrupt in a January 17, 2008 interview. The result? Nothing. This audio interview has been hidden from the public...until now. Here is the transcript of Obama's statement about bankrupting the coal industry (emphasis mine): Let me sort of describe my overall policy. What I've said is that we would put a cap...

President Obama is digging in on the Keystone XL pipeline. He is "personally lobbying Democrats to reject an amendment calling for its construction," Politico reports. The White House lobbying effort, including phone calls from the president to Democrats, signals that the vote could be close when it heads to the floor Thursday. The president is trying to defeat an amendment that would give election-year fodder to his Republican critics who have accused him of blocking a job-creating energy project at a time of high gas prices. The amendment, proposed by Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), states that Obama would have no...

A portion of an $11 million grant to help 400 low-income Detroit citizens purchase "business attire" for job interviews helped exactly two people, a city audit reveals...

America’s Most Biblically-Hostile U. S. President When one observes President Obama’s unwillingness to accommodate America’s four-century long religious conscience protection through his attempts to require Catholics to go against their own doctrines and beliefs, one is tempted to say that he is anti-Catholic. But that characterization would not be correct. Although he has recently singled out Catholics, he has equally targeted traditional Protestant beliefs over the past four years. So since he has attacked Catholics and Protestants, one is tempted to say that he is anti-Christian. But that, too, would be inaccurate. He has been equally disrespectful in his appalling...

The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 triggered an explosion in the number of militias and so-called patriot groups in the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in its annual tally of such anti-government organizations. There were 149 militias and patriot groups when Obama took office, compared to more than 1,200 today — an increase of 755 percent, the nonprofit civil rights organization reported. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The increase has just been astounding," said Mark Potok, editor-in-chief of the SPLC report. "The reality is that many of these groups are becoming more and more fearful that Barack Obama will...

When President Obama talks about today's sky-high gasoline prices, he almost always laments that there's little anyone can do in the short term to bring them down. "There is no silver bullet" is his common refrain, one he used again at his press conference on Tuesday. But as gasoline prices reach historic highs — they've shot up more than 28 cents a gallon in just the past month — the government could make a dent.

Heavily promoted on their front page, a new six-part video series "Remake America". Looks like a freebie series of Obama campaign ads to me. A steady stream of what Reagan used to call "the poor suckers from South Succotash someplace". Boy is there a need for a Conservative search engine!

The video “released” yesterday by FOX and Breitbart is NOT one of the videos for which Andrew Breitbart lost his life. The video played yesterday was already available as it was part of a program aired by Frontline back in 2008. Proof. There have to be other videos. Go back to Breitbart’s own statement that there are videos of Obama. This is not a slip of the tongue. He says videos, plural, multiple times. He further states that, “Barack Obama met a bunch of silver-haired, ponytails back in the 1980s like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn who, equally radical, said...

Kicking the can down the road. That's been the Obama administration's response on issues from Iran's nuclear weapons program to America's entitlement systems. Start with Iran. In a statement in the Oval Office before his meeting with President Obama on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu noted that Obama had "reiterated yesterday" the principle that "when it comes to Israel's security, Israel has the right, the sovereign right, to make its own decisions." That evening, speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Netanyahu said: "Israel has waited patiently for the international community to resolve this issue. We've waited for...

Wall Street Journal editor William McGurn, a former Bush White House speechwriter, argued in an article Tuesday that Mitt Romney is no worse off now than Ronald Reagan was at this stage of his historic 1980 campaign. He compared these two races and also tried to show that President Barack Obama is the heir to Jimmy Carter. The Romney camp would probably welcome these comparisons — but it’s more a theory in search of facts. There are indeed some similarities, but the differences are far more striking. Both Reagan and Romney did begin as frontrunners, both stumbled. Romney’s outcome is...

WASHINGTON, March 8 (LID) – The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday is expected Thursday to take up the bipartisan-supported Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. The legislation — outlined in H.R. 3606 — is aimed at helping fledgling companies to more easily raise capital, proponents said.