Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will announce a new plan next week to help Americans who continue to struggle to find jobs even as the economy recovers from recession, his senior adviser, Dan Pfeiffer, said on Saturday. Obama's efforts to help the long-term unemployed are part of an economic strategy he will lay out in his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday and expound upon during a four-state tour, Pfeiffer said in a mass email from the White House. "With some action on all our parts, we can help more job seekers find work, and more working...

Let’s never forget: Millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules every day deserve a government and a financial system that does the same. It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: no bailouts, no handouts, and no cop-outs. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody. Except for me. - Paraphrase from president Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Prepare ye the way for Obama's next State of the Onion speech. By pulling out a TV guide. Radio host Mark Levin has called on the GOP to boycott the State of...

On CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, host Candy Crowley asked a question of Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wisc.) that should offend people on both sides of the aisle. “If I am an unemployed American…or if I am a minimum wage worker…why would I become a Republican?” (video at source with transcript and commentary):

President Obama ended his State of the Union speech on a warm and fuzzy note by calling for pre-K programs for almost all children. The best thing he could do for pre-kindergarten children is to make sure he doesn't hang trillions of dollars of debt around their necks, but that isn't the route he is taking. Instead, Obama wants to provide government daycare for all preschoolers who live in households where the income is below approximately $47,100. He doesn't call it daycare or babysitting (which is a more accurate term); he calls it early childhood education. Early childhood education means...

President Obama is said to have made the case for a liberal public policy agenda in his State of the Union speech the other night. But what is liberalism? The conventional view is that liberalism is an ideology. In fact it is a sociology. An ideology is a set of ideas that cohere. Socialism is an ideology. So is libertarianism. Suppose I told you that socialists believe the government should nationalize the steel industry and the auto industry. You would have no difficulty inferring what their position is on nationalizing the airline industry. Right? Suppose I told you that libertarians...

The grotesque spectacle of the State of the Union address, with its lengthy receiving line of adoring sycophants, demonstrates why the President is operating under the delusion that he is more than just our President. Like him, many people seem to fundamentally misunderstand his role. He’s not our “leader,” or our “ruler,” or our national “daddy,” no matter what his adoring fan, comic Chris Rock, thinks. Let’s clarify things for those folks with the unseemly desire to offer up their personal sovereignty to some government hack. Unlike Hollywood geniuses better known for exposing their breasts than exposing their brains, I'll...

Is America in decline? An honest review of the state of the union would show spiraling budget deficits, uncontrolled growth in government spending, and persistently high unemployment levels. The impression of a once-great nation in eclipse is all too plain. But it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s not that these problems aren’t real, or don’t pose serious challenges. They do. But those who insist that our best days are behind us don’t have history on their side. Though all kinds of setbacks, from civil wars to great depressions, the United States has always waged a valiant struggle and...

Where to begin with the screed in The New Republic, “Original Sin: Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people,” mislabeled “an historical investigation”? In his claim that racism is the original and irredeemable sin of Republicans, Tanenhaus sets up the contrast to “the civil rights pageantry of the [Obama second] inauguration—Abraham Lincoln’s Bible and Martin Luther King’s, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s swearing in of Joe Biden, Beyoncé’s slinky glamor [sic], the verses read by the gay Cuban poet Richard Blanco.” In his enthusiasm, Tanenhaus missed the irony of using the word “pageantry,” which the...

WASHINGTON -- President Obama's second term wish-list -- his ideas for jump-starting the job-starved economy -- looked a lot like his warmed-over, half-baked proposals of the past. With rare exceptions, Obama's fifth State of the Union address was a costly laundry list of more big government programs aimed at his party's political base. More job-training programs? There are 47 different federal job-training programs right now, costing $18 billion a year, according to the General Accountability Office. And 51 other programs offer job-training assistance. With the unemployment rate rising last month to nearly 8 percent and likely heading higher, and economic...

First, the good parts. They stood out. Indeed, the president's general tone Tuesday night, despite the reflexive class warfare here and there, was much less fast and furious than his re-inaugural address -- as if now he wanted to work with the opposition rather than just excoriate it. "We can do this," Mr. Obama assured the country. Just what we can do -- will it be for good or ill? -- may not always be clear, but at least Tuesday night he seemed interested in bringing us together instead of driving us further apart. The partisan boilerplate that issued forth...

The lesson from the State of the Union address is this: Barack Obama has no second term agenda. Oh, sure, he campaigned furiously for the job, starting in about January of 2011. But his campaign almost never outlined his plans for a second term, focusing instead on interest group payoffs and demonization of his rival. Late in October of 2012, as if recognizing that they'd forgotten to attend to it, the Obama campaign released a 20-page glossy handout called a "blueprint for America's future." It featured splashy photos of the president on nearly every page, along with generic promises like...

One of the great things about American politics is its capacity for punishing hubris. For the ancient Greeks, hubris didn't merely describe god-like arrogance. It was a crime, usually defined as taking too much pleasure in the humiliation of your foes. In its modern usage it usually means the pride that comes before the fall. In the wake of Barack Obama's State of the Union address, both connotations seem at least a little apt. We are well into our fourth month of epidemic thumb-suckery over the question, "Are the Republicans doomed?" The latest New York Times Magazine asks, "Can the...

President Obama’s State of the Union address recycled the same old tired rhetoric that he’s been peddling since 2009. Instead of addressing how to reduce the nation’s $16 trillion debt and lower the high unemployment rate, Obama proposed more reckless spending and regulations that will further stifle economic growth in this country. He started his speech with predictable statements on how the economy is allegedly growing stronger—despite the near eight percent unemployment rate calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That official rate does not even factor in the 3.25 million out of work Americans that are so hopelessly discouraged...

President Obama's approach to so-called "climate change" appears to include recycling old ideas. In his State of the Union address, the president recycled the idea of spending more on education, though we are still getting unsatisfactory results. A fact he inadvertently acknowledged by saying we're not keeping up with other countries in science and math. He maintained there are tens of thousands of jobs available but companies can't fill them because public schools aren't teaching students what they need to know. We spend huge sums on education already, so money and achievement must not be related. Infrastructure? We've heard that...

Our failure in chief gave us his annual blurred vision of America again Tuesday night. Based on his State of the Union message, Barack Obama’s eyesight is as ideologically impaired as ever. Despite four years of failure, he still sees only one road America can go down to regain its economic health. Not down the capitalist road of free enterprise and liberty that made us the richest country in history. He wants to continue down the socialist road to more federal government -- which means more Obama taxes, more Obama spending, more Obama debt and more Obama government programs to...

President Obama did not mention it in his State of the Union address last night, and there hasn’t been much attention devoted to it in the Congress of late; but, the fundamental right to privacy Americans have a right to expect from their own government, has suffered yet another body blow. On the surface, things seem to be in order. For example, at the beginning of February, the Federal Trade Commission released a staff report outlining consumer privacy recommendations for developers of mobile phone apps. FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz called the recommendations “best practices” intended to “safeguard consumer privacy,”...

Presidents' State of the Union addresses are delivered in the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol. The classical majesty of this building where laws are made symbolizes the idea that we live under the rule of law. Unfortunately, the 44th president is running an administration that too often seems to ignore the rule of law. "We can't wait," Barack Obama took to saying after the Republicans captured a majority in the House and refused to pass laws he wanted. He would act to get what he wanted regardless of law. One example: his recess appointments in January...

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin wrote Wednesday that America is a nation being bankrupt by a federal government led by "venal politicians" in her response to President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address.  "What is the true state of our union? Though this may sound harsh, I’ll speak the truth here," Palin wrote. "We are a country going bankrupt to fund a bloated, distant, and often corrupt federal government led by venal politicians more concerned with paying off their campaign cronies and consolidating their own power than in preserving the constitutional republic that so many have fought and died...

Sometimes in school exams are graded on a curve so that students who should've failed don't.Well, Bing graded Obama on a HUGE curve. Below is the partisan breakdown, but they did it on gender, and probably everything.See the original raw data chart here, and the full infographic from Bing here.Click the image to see a larger version.

Responding to a presidential State of the Union speech is often a thankless task. Following the president's act, which oozes prestige and historic significance, almost always makes the next guy seem small and trivial by comparison. As it goes, the designated member of the opposition party is typically holed up in a room somewhere with little more than a camera, some lights and a teleprompter.  The rejoinder he or she offers is almost always instantly forgotten; when it's not, it's usually for the wrong reasons.  Sen. Marco Rubio broke the mold last night.  He delivered a substantive, relatable and cheerful response,...