Free Republic

HOWARD KURTZ, CNN: Bill Plante, you have been patrolling that building since Ronald Reagan. Does the White House press look self-involved and whiny, as I said earlier, complaining about this Tiger incident? BILL PLANTE, CBS NEWS: We have gotten used to being called whiny lap dogs. I've heard it for 30 years. But this is not about a picture of Tiger Woods. This is about access to the president. And access to the president has been cut and pushed and curtailed over every administration I've covered. Here's the nub of it, Howie, this administration has the tools to reach people...

President Obama has returned to Washington, from his solo vacation. He finally talked with the press on the ride back. Via the pool report: AF1 wheels down Andrews at 7:45pm. POTUS came back to have a 10-minute off the record talk with pool at the end of the flight. Reggie Love departed AF1 soon after POTUS, apparently a guest for the weekend. Marine One wheels up 7:55 pm

There were several articles which mentioned Reggie Love disembarking Air Force One after Obama upon his return to DC...yet all mention of such has now been scrubbed from the web (except for a few blog notes).I guess Obama decided the time wasn't right to "come out."

Barack Obama has kept the press well away this President’s Day (Washington's Birthday) weekend (hat tip: Drudge Report) as he golfs with Tiger Woods in Florida. As Politico’s Dylan Byers writes: Ed Henry, the Fox News correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents Association, released a statement Sunday evening in which he said the press corps had been given no access to the president, who was joined on his outing by star golfer Tiger Woods, and that the WHCA would fight for greater transparency in the days ahead. "Speaking on behalf of the White House Correspondents Association, I can...

The White House press corps is expressing frustration over its lack of access this weekend to President Obama, who was on a golfing vacation in Florida.

(starting on page 2) . . . The president is staying in Florida at the home of Jim Crane, who owns the golf club and also owns the Houston Astros baseball team. In 2012, Mr. Crane donated $35,800 to the Obama campaign and $30,800 to the Democratic National Committee. Fifteen years ago, a company owned by Mr. Crane, Eagle USA Airfreight, was criticized by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for its position on hiring blacks and women of child-bearing age. The EEOC said that Mr. Crane’s company conducted a practice of paying “female and minority employees less than white men...

PALM CITY, Fla. -- Faced with a long weekend in an empty White House, President Barack Obama figured he needed a getaway, too, so he put together a golf outing with some buddies. Not at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland or at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, two Washington-area military posts where he's a regular on their courses. Instead, he went south, to Florida, to spend the long Presidents Day weekend staying and playing at the Floridian, an exclusive and secluded yacht and golf club on the state's Treasure Coast. He arrived Friday night after a speech in Chicago and wasn't...

First Lady Michelle Obama plans to vacation in Aspen, Colorado this Presidents’ Day weekend, separately from her husband, who will land this evening in West Palm Beach for his own down time with the boys. According to Aspen newspapers, both Michelle and Vice President Biden are expected on the slopes. The White House has not yet announced the trip, and it’s not clear when she will be leaving, though she will presumably go today.

The Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is demanding an immediate explanation from the nation’s top intelligence official, James Clapper, for what the chairman says were inconsistent statements to Congress and to the public on who was behind changes to the CIA talking points on the Libya consulate attack in September. Critics say the Obama administration initially minimized the role of terrorism despite evidence of a coordinated attack on the consulate in Benghazi. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the assault. Testimony last week on Capitol Hill raised additional questions about the administration's changing story...

Reggie Love resurfaces on eve of Republican convention The former personal aide to Barack Obama known as the president’s “body man,” Reggie Love, resurfaced on the eve of the Republican National Convention to support his old boss. Hired as Obama’s “deputy political director,” the Duke University basketball and football star was the constant companion of the president for two years before resigning last November. The White House explained Love had decided to pursue further studies at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, but the Internet, at the time, was abuzz with speculation that Love was dismissed...

Youser! That was some game, no? The crowd did a bit of trash talking, too, booing the first couple after the first lady playfully rebuffed Obama’s advances when they were featured on the “Kiss Cam” on Verizon Center’s overhead scoreboard. The Obamas did share a couple of public kisses in the second half, the first of which elicited some cheers and chants of “four more years!” (Notably, the White House press pool, which had been moved from the arena to vans before the second kiss, was led back into the arena in time to witness the smooch, according to a...

President Obama is finally getting his wish: some peace and quiet at his old Chicago home. In the Windy City Friday for three fundraisers, Obama will spend the night at his South Side house. "It is good to be back home, I am sleeping in my bed tonight," Obama told supporters at one fundraiser. "I'm going to go to my kitchen, I might cook something. It's good to be home."

After the presidential campaign has been focusing on female reproductive rights and other women's issues, President Barack Obama is coming to the city Monday to deliver the commencement address at all-female Barnard College and attend two high-profile fundraisers. -snip- After the commencement, Obama is heading to the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea for a $5,000-a-ticket fundraiser co-hosted by the LGBT Leadership Council and openly gay singer Ricky Martin. The president will also attend a private, $35,800-a-plate fundraising dinner featuring the cooking of Manhattan chef Vikas Khanna before heading back to the White House. While in the city, Obama will...

Are you kidding me? I get that Andrew Sullivan is a man with an agenda and I completely support his right to make his opinions heard. I also understand that Newsweek – like any other publication – is in business to make a profit and that frequently involves pushing the envelope in terms of catching the public’s attention. But at what point is too much simply too much? When is the shark definitively jumped and the daily bread burned past any reasonable definition of being toast? Ladies and gentlemen, this would be that point. Politico “explains.” “‘Let the games begin,”...

President Obama’s seemingly-sudden decision to endorse same-sex marriage may have been far more orchestrated than previously believed. CNN reported today that President Obama was supposedly planning to announce his support for gay marriage next week on ABC’s The View before comments by Joe Biden caused him to accelerate his timetable. But there is another theory in the works. Biden’s comments on Sunday were clearly orchestrated; the notion that they were unplanned neglects the tape of the interview, which shows David Gregory consulting his notes as he asked a completely out-of-the-blue question on same-sex marriage. The very next day, Secretary of...

COMING OUT: Obama’s sudden support of gay marriage, after publicly opposing it throughout his entire political career, may be prompted by a desperate attempt to prevent impending damage from an ongoing criminal investigation which has already produced explosive evidence about his fraudulent identity. Now, based on his bizarre flip-flop, it is probable that irrefutable evidence has been discovered by the investigation…about his own homosexual past.

President Obama today announced that he now supports same-sex marriage, reversing his longstanding opposition amid growing pressure from the Democratic base and even his own vice president. In an interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts, the president described his thought process as an “evolution” that led him to this place, based on conversations with his own staff members, openly gay and lesbian service members, and conversations with his wife and own daughters. "I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of...

As a recent college graduate holding down his first job in the 1980s, Barack Obama did not make much of an impression on someone who knew the ways of the world: His girlfriend’s landlord. “I can honestly say that I do not remember him,” said Ralph Allen, who owned the brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Mr. Obama’s girlfriend at the time, Genevieve Cook, rented the top-floor apartment — an apartment Mr. Obama shared with her in late 1984. “Maybe we met while I was sitting out on the stoop one night. Who knows.”

Twenty-two years old, just graduated from Columbia University and about to enter his first meaningful romantic relationship, Barack Obama charmed a young Australian woman at a Christmas party in 1983. Sitting on an orange bean bag in the sixth-floor East Village apartment in New York City, Mr. Obama and Genevieve Cook, who was three years older, swapped stories about their overlapping stays in Jakarta, where he spent time as a boy. “They talked nonstop, moving from one subject to another, sharing an intense and immediate affinity, enthralled by the randomness of their meeting and how much they had in common.

Future prez had so much ‘sexual warmth’ – but was ‘out of reach’ She talked about how Obama walked around his bedroom bare-chested, dressed in a blue and white sarong while working on a New York Times crossword puzzle. “I open the door that Barack keeps closed to his room and enter in a warm, private space pervaded by a mixture of smells that so strongly speak of his presence, his liveliness, his habits — running sweat, Brut spray deodorant, smoking, eating raisins, sleeping, breathing,” Cook wrote. Obama and Cook would date for a year. He was 22 and she...