Free Republic

John F. Kennedy believed that being passed over for vice president by the Democratic convention in 1956 saved his political career. That year, Adlai Stevenson, the presidential nominee, had left the selection of his running mate to the convention delegates—the last time a nominee did so. The choice came down to Kennedy and his Senate colleague Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who had lined up too much early support even for the attractive young war hero to overcome. In the end, Kennedy had it both ways. He benefited from the television exposure and was spared the blame—which as a Catholic, he...

America's mayor calls it as he sees it. That just about sums it up. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani tells Neil Cavuto that moving KSM and his other 9-11 buddies to New York for trial is an unnecessary risk and for that reason he does not hold back. Please make special note of Rudy’s facial expression at the beginning of the interview.

The President of leisure has a pretty slow day Monday, highlighting the point that no pressing business kept him from celebrating the fall of communism 20 years after the Berlin Wall fell. Jim Gerraghty of The Campaign Spot on National Review goes over the official schedule for our leader yesterday: Just look at the man's schedule: He had a 10 a.m. daily briefing from the intelligence community, a 10:30 a.m. economic daily briefing, an 11 a.m. meeting with senior advisers . . . and then, right after that, at 6:45 in the evening, he had to sign an executive...

In the hours following the shooting at Ft. Hood, President Obama demonstrated resolute apathy to the greatest issue of our time. His callous and apathetic beliefs caused some rather unbecoming behavior for a United States President. And worse yet the American people are the one's who will suffer... And they noticed. Roughly two and a half hours after the shooting that took the lives of American service personnel, on American soil, President Obama was scheduled to deliver a speech to a Tribal Nations Conference being sponsored by the U.S. Government. Once the President was told of the Ft. Hood shooting,...

A year after his historic election, President Barack Obama sought to remind Americans on Wednesday the biggest problems he is grappling with -- from the economy to the war in Afghanistan -- are the legacy of his predecessor, George W. Bush....he said his administration was also confronted with a "financial crisis that threatened to plunge our economy into a Great Depression, the worst that we've seen in generations.""We had record deficits, two wars, frayed alliances around the world," Obama added.He said his administration had acted swiftly to save the economy from "imminent collapse." -(http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-43692420091104?sp=true) It seems the Manchild-in-Chief is...

Robert George says Obama didn't wait long after Tuesday's devastating elections to give critics another reason to question his leadership, but this time the subject matter was more grim than a pair of governorships. After news broke out of the shooting at the Fort Hood Army post in Texas, the nation watched in horror as the toll of dead and injured climbed. The White House was notified immediately and by late afternoon, word went out that Obama would speak about the incident prior to a previously scheduled appearance. At about 5 p.m., cable stations went to Obama. The situation called...

More than a third of American youth of military age are unfit for service, mainly because they are too fat or sickly, the Army Times reports, quoting the latest Pentagon figures. Most of the rest are too dumb or have used too many drugs to qualify, the study shows. The report says 35% of the 31 million Americans aged 17 to 24 are unqualified because of physical and medical issues. "The major component of this is obesity," Curt Gilroy, the Pentagon's director of accessions, tells the Times. "We have an obesity crisis in the country. There's no question about it."...

WATCH OBAMA ON YOUTUBE AND HIS SICKENING PERFORMANCE The very first thing he should have done is asked the audience to join him in a moment of silence for the Ft. Hood victims. He went through 2:24 of crap before getting to the most important part.

Wednesday night, October 21, former Vice President Dick Cheney received the Center's Keeper of the Flame Award. He was introduced by Senator Jon Kyl and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld....

WHY LIBERALS ARE INCAPABLE OF DEFENDING AMERICA Behind The Lines By Dr. Jack Wheeler Friday, October 14, 2005 [This is the text of a speech I gave yesterday, October 16, at the Accuracy in Media luncheon in Washington DC. It was taped by C-Span and will be nationally broadcast at various times over the C-Span network – check www.c-span.org for schedules. Video/DVD copies of the speech may be ordered via the C-Span website. I began the speech by holding up an actual shrunken head.] I’d like to show you a concrete example of why liberals cannot defend their country. This...

I’m sorry, there’s a lot I admire about Barack Obama, but he doesn’t deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Not while he’s waging a war in Afghanistan, which he’s already escalated, and may be about to escalate again. Not while he still hasn’t pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq, nor while he’s going to keep tens of thousands of private military contractors there indefinitely. Not while he endorses Bush’s heinous policy of “extraordinary renditions.” Not while asserts the right to indefinitely detain people without habeas corpus rights at Bagram Air Base. Not while he fails to successfully prod Israel to give...

President Barack Obama is still just a lost boy at his age, and he searches for a world he wished existed. His insistence upon living in his world, though attractive to the uneducated, neglected, and naive, is dangerously heaping hot coals of consequence on the heads of those who know better... ...President Obama believes his good press far too often, trusts his advisors' agreement as a sign of genuine critical analysis, and believes the American people are too unenlightened to truly understand his methods. All three realities push the President further into an altered state of worldview that are having...

Omitted from the “not done” checklist here: Stopping Iran, resisting the urge to nationalize giant car companies, and keeping deficit projections for the next decade under a trillion dollars annually. But those are all concerns of the right and, needless to say, that’s not where this skit is coming from, a point worth bearing in mind amid the grim enjoyment you’ll feel at seeing The One spoofed on national TV. Mainstream comedy has actually reached the point where their big goof on Barack Obama is that he’s not liberal enough.Memo to Lorne Michaels: This impersonation, if it can even be...

The latest Fox News/Opinion Dymanic poll is chock-full of bad news for the president. But on foreign policy, the results are nothing short of stunning. On who they trust more to decide the next steps in Afghanistan. 66 percent say military commanders, while only 20 percent say the president. Even Democrats have more faith in the military commanders (by a 45 to 37 percent margin). On Iran, 69 percent say Obama has not been tough enough, including 55 percent of Democrats. Sixty-one percent favor a U.S. military action, if needed, to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Fifty-one percent think...

There has been a growing narrative taking hold about Barack Obama’s presidency in recent weeks: that he is loved by many, but feared by none; that he is full of lofty vision, but is actually achieving nothing with his grandiloquence. Chicago’s dismal showing today, after Mr Obama’s personal, impassioned last-minute pitch, is a stunning humiliation for this President. It cannot be emphasised enough how this will feed the perception that on the world stage he looks good — but carries no heft.

After Russia invaded the Nation of Georgia last year, Senator John McCain quickly condemned the action by the Russians, and declared that we are all "Georgians" today. Considering we have had at least two freedom movements in the past eight months which have been ignored by Obama, that should have been reason enough to support McCain in the Presidential election. Obama at first blamed both the Russians and the Georgians in an utter disregard for the Nation of Georgia, a small yet staunch ally of the United States, after several days of being called out by John McCain, Obama quickly...

During his appearance at the United Nations, Barack Obama envisioned a world without nuclear weapons. We think we found this imaginary world and where it came from, as shown in the animation (http://www.stentorian.com/cartoons/2008/obama_movie.gif, Barack Obama's Amazing Acid Trip to a World Without Nuclear Weapons). Meanwhile, with due credit to Jefferson Airplane for the original, The red pill makes you larger And the blue pill makes you small And the pain pill that Barry will give you Won’t do anything at all Go ask Barry When he’s ten feet tall And if you want nuclear disarmament And you know anything at...

We now know that Barack Obama has sat for almost a year on the information regarding Iran's "secret" nuclear plant. His hand was forced yesterday by the Iranians who were the ones that went public with the information when it appeared to them that their security had been breached. This led to Barack Obama disclosing the previously withheld information regarding the plant. The Iranians kept the plant secret and Obama aided them by his silence. So much for the transparency promise.

Czechs are used to betrayal by their Western allies. It was at Munich in 1938 that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sealed their doom in exchange for a piece of paper promising "peace in our time." The fact that this further gutting of missile defense came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, is an eerie coincidence. "Just after midnight I was informed in a telephone call by President Barack Obama that (his) administration had decided to pull out from the planned missile defense shield installations" in the Czech Republic and Poland, the...

On Sept. 16, ex-president Jimmy Carter excoriated opponents of President Barack Obama as racists. "I think people who [attack] Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African-American," Carter blathered. Obama's spokespeople quickly backed away from Carter's statements; Obama went so far as to remind David Letterman that he was black before the presidential election, and that the American public had elected him anyway. The fact is this: the American public is not racist. In fact, we're downright evenhanded -- we elect incompetents of all color...

Vicenza, Italy. President Obama’s decision to cancel our European ground-based missile defense system will prove to be very costly and his public rationale -- changed intelligence and improved technologies -- is far from the whole truth. This is a geopolitical disaster and risks our security as well. Last year, President Bush said “Iran is pursuing technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles of increasing range that could deliver them.” His administration successfully negotiated with Poland and the Czech Republic to install a ground-based anti-missile defense system in those countries to counter the accelerating Iranian threat.

Strategic Defense: With Iran on the verge of a deliverable nuke, the administration tells our allies in the dead of night that we will scuttle missile defense plans in Eastern Europe to please the Russians.Czechs are used to betrayal by their Western allies. It was at Munich in 1938 that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sealed their doom in exchange for a piece of paper promising "peace in our time." The fact that this further gutting of missile defense came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, is an eerie coincidence. "Just after...

It is lovely to feature in other people's dreams. The problem comes when they wake up. Barack Obama is an eloquent, brainy and likeable man with a fascinating biography. He is not George Bush. Those are great qualities. But they are not enough to lead America, let alone the world.

It is lovely to feature in other people's dreams. The problem comes when they wake up. Barack Obama is an eloquent, brainy and likeable man with a fascinating biography. He is not George Bush. Those are great qualities. But they are not enough to lead America, let alone the world. snip . . . The grizzled veterans of the Democratic leadership in Congress have found Mr Obama and his team of bright young advisers a pushover.

President George W. Bush's former speechwriter Matt Latimer reveals that Bush considered Barack Obama unfit for the White House and predicted that vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin would be a disaster for the GOP. "After one of Obama's blistering speeches against the administration, the president had a very human reaction: He was ticked off," Latimer writes in his forthcoming book, "Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor," which has been excerpted in the October issue of GQ. "He came in one day to rehearse a speech, fuming. 'This is a dangerous world,' he said for no apparent reason, 'and this...

"Choice, competition, reducing costs -- those are the things that I want to see accomplished in this health reform bill," President Obama told talk-show host Michael Smerconish last week. Choice and competition would be good. They would indeed reduce costs. If only the president meant it. Or understood it. In a free market, a business that is complacent about costs learns that its prices are too high when it sees lower-cost competitors winning over its customers. The market -- actually, the consumer -- holds businesses accountable and keeps them honest. No "public option" is needed. So the hope for reducing...

Cheney: new doubts about Obama By: Mike Allen August 25, 2009 07:51 AM EST Former Vice President Dick Cheney said in a statement Tuesday that the Obama administration's decision to name a prosecutor to look into Bush-era interrogations of suspected terrorists should foster "doubts about this administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.” "The people involved deserve our gratitude," Cheney said. "They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions." Cheney maintains that records released this week show that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques "provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al...

More than 45,000 NHS workers call in sick each day — one and a half times the rate of absence seen in the private sector. The first national audit of staff habits has found that high rates of obesity, smoking, absenteeism and poor mental health are having a direct impact on the quality of patient care. Dr Steve Boorman, a leading occupational health expert, was asked by the Government to assess links between staff habits and NHS productivity. He will present his interim review today. His findings are drawn from six months of staff surveys, workshops, data reviews and responses...

Yes there is political significance of a girly pitch

Legal scholar and former U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork tells Newsmax he doesn't believe court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's assertion that she is "entirely governed by law," as he believes she should be. In an exclusive interview, he also said Sotomayor, who's going through confirmation hearings before a Senate panel, should be disqualified from consideration because of a statement she made. And Bork stated that the Roe v. Wade decision has been the "most dangerous" the Supreme Court has ever made because it has "embittered our politics." See Video: Judge Robert Bork discusses Sonia Sotomayor and the Senate hearings -...

Okay it's official. Obama's completely distasterous start, disregard for the Constitution and American people, non-citizenship, cluelessness on the economy, foreign policy, healthcare, taxes, gun rights, civil liberities, traditional marriage, bailouts, industry take overs, ethic corruptions, lavish personal spending, general love and appeasement of socialist dictators, complete reinvention of Jimney "Cricket" Carter and now plummeting aproval numbers have finally convinced me he's not ready to be president.

Files New Motion in Lawsuit on Behalf of State Department Foreign Service Officer Contact Information: Press Office 202-646-5172, ext 305 Washington, DC -- July 8, 2009 Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that on July 2 it filed a motion with a special panel of three federal judges in the District of Columbia asking the court to declare Hillary Clinton ineligible to serve as Secretary of State. The Judicial Watch lawsuit, filed on behalf of a U.S. Foreign Service Officer and State Department employee David C. Rodearmel, maintains that the "emoluments clause"...

In his novel "The Plot Against America," Philip Roth imagined that Charles Lindbergh, an isolationist and an anti-Semite (but a hell of a flier), ran for president in 1940 and beat Franklin Roosevelt. In his novel "Fatherland," Robert Harris imagined a Britain that had succumbed to the Nazis. These works are categorized as "alternate history." Here is my contribution to the genre: Sarah Palin becomes president of the United States. Far-fetched? Not really. After all, Palin really was on the Republican ticket, and the Democratic candidate was both untested nationally and the first African-American to claim the nomination. A significant...

Eight days before the election, I spent 20 minutes alone with Sarah Palin on her campaign bus between rallies in Leesburg, Va., and Fredericksburg, George Washington's childhood home. Our encounter brought to mind a crusty Texas editor's description of politicians who didn't know what they didn't know: Delusions of adequacy. By then, John McCain's handlers were so spooked by the disastrous Katie Couric interview they'd hermetically sealed his running mate from media interrogators. But Tucker Eskew, the savvy Republican operative running her road show, graciously offered some "face time" - if our conversation was off the record. Reluctantly, I took...

WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. John Kerry must have been channeling his inner Letterman yesterday. The Bay State senator was telling a group of business and civic leaders in town at his invitation about the “bizarre’’ tale of how South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford had “disappeared for four days’’ and claimed to be hiking along the Appalachian Trail, but no one was really certain of his whereabouts. “Too bad,’’ Kerry said, “if a governor had to go missing it couldn’t have been the governor of Alaska. You know, Sarah Palin.’’ The Democratic-centric crowd laughed. Of course, Kerry couldn’t know that 24-hours...

The Obama administration plans to kill a controversial Bush administration spy satellite program at the Department of Homeland Security, according to officials familiar with the decision. The program came under fire from its inception two years ago. Democratic lawmakers said it would lead to domestic spying. The program would have provided federal, state and local officials with extensive access to spy-satellite imagery — but no eavesdropping capabilities— to assist with emergency response and other domestic-security needs, such as identifying where ports or border areas are vulnerable to terrorism.

President Obama is feeling the heat lately for his limp foreign policy postures, showcased now more than ever with the increasing violence and chaos following Iran’s presidential election. Surprisingly, the critique is stemming from both sides of the aisle and is beginning to crescendo. Since the announcement of Ahmadenejad’s victory, Obama’s response has been more than unimpressive, it’s been plain impotent. If Iran is the ringing red phone, Obama is putting the call straight to voicemail. Apparently in this administration, forceful, timely responses have been reserved for houseflies instead of our most threatening enemies. The president believes that we shouldn’t...

A substantial majority of Americans say President Obama has not developed a strategy to deal with the budget deficit, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, which also found that support for his plans to overhaul health care, rescue the auto industry and close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, falls well below his job approval ratings. A distinct gulf exists between Mr. Obama’s overall standing and how some of his key initiatives are viewed, with fewer than half of Americans saying they approve of how he has handled health care and the effort to save General Motors...

Tuesday, September 11, 2001. A day full of shock, anger, fear. And confusion. The country was under attack. And at first it wasn't even clear who had attacked us. The identity of the attackers became clear even as the fires still raged: This was the work of the same bunch of terrorists who had tried to topple the Twin Towers back in 1993. Back then the killers had been treated as defendants in federal court, with all rights and privileges pertaining thereto. They would be convicted only after a lengthy and arduous trial. As if theirs had been not an...

....For, the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. "The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here's the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today -- foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them and they're reading them their rights -- Mirandizing these foreign fighters," says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on...

May 29, 2009 "Hussein will Make Jimmy Carter look like E.F. Hutton" (That of course is not a positive statement toward Carter but rather just how horrendous the results of Obama's prodigality will be.) as MrArbitrage explains...

During the U.S. Presidential primaries last year, I had expressed my misgivings that Barack Obama might turn out to be another Jimmy Carter, whose confused thinking and soft image paved the way for the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The subsequent Iranian defiance of the U.S. and Carter's inability to deal effectively with the crisis in which Iranian students raided the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and held a number of U.S. diplomats hostage led to disillusionment with him in sections of the U.S. and to his failure to get re-elected in 1980. The strong line taken by him...

The nomination of Judge David Hamilton by President Obama to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals should concern all Americans. His nomination raises several issues that should run up the red flag for any American who loves his country and believes in constitutional government. The first problem with Hamilton is that when he was appointed in 1994 by then-President Clinton, the American Bar Association rated him as unqualified. Judge Hamilton used to be a fund-raiser for ACORN, an acronym and an organization that have become synonymous with voter fraud. Judge Hamilton served on the board of the ACLU, a group...

Does President Obama want the U.S. economy to decline further? Or is he just simply naïve about what is required to make the economy grow, and about the differences between “good“ and “bad“ economic policy? I’ve pondered these questions several times since January 20th, not only in the column I write here for this publication, but on talk radio, and in columns published elsewhere. And in light of the President’s behavior within the past ten days, the questions are worth reviewing again. Back in February and March I began stating - - in writing and on talk radio - -...

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is under fire for what critics see as a string of gaffes, with a small but vocal group of conservatives calling for her to step down. The outrage continues to build over a report from her department that warned of the danger of right-wing "extremists," and singled out returning war veterans as susceptible to recruitment. Napolitano expressed regret for the reference to veterans -- but she raised eyebrows again this week when she suggested that the Sept. 11 hijackers entered the United States through Canada, even though the 9/11 Commission determined they came to the...

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 23 /Christian Newswire/ -- Opposition to the nomination of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services continues to grow as the Senate is flooded with calls, faxes, and e-mails from grassroots campaigns led by an increasing number of conservative, pro-family groups. This opposition exploded when Operation Rescue made public, and the Associated Press reported, that Sebelius had grossly underreported to the Senate Finance Committee the amount of financial support she had received from controversial late-term abortionist George Tiller. "We have been urging our supporters to call, e-mail, and fax their senators, and I...

House Republicans are calling on Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to step down or be fired in the wake of a controversial department memo that has sparked indignant battle cries from conservatives and some veterans. “Singling out political opponents for working against the ruling party is precisely the tactic of every tyrannical government from Red China to Venezuela," said Texas Rep. John Carter, a member of the party's elected leadership who has organized an hour of floor speeches Wednesday night to call for Napolitano's ouster. “The first step in the process is creating unfounded public suspicion of political opponents, followed...

In Africa from Djibouti at the southern end of the Red Sea eastward through the Gulf of Aden to round Cape Guardafui at the easternmost tip of Africa (also known as "The Horn of Africa") is about a 600 nm transit before you stand out into the Indian Ocean. That transit is comparable in distance to that from the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans to the tip of Florida at Key West-- except that 600 nm over there is infested with Somalia pirates. Ships turning southward at the Horn of Africa transit the SLOC (Sea Lane of Commerce)...

President Obama visited the CIA headquarters yesterday to placate officials dismayed by his decision to release top secret “torture” memos, a move that has provoked accusations that he is willing to compromise America’s safety out of political correctness. Mr Obama’s first visit to the CIA, to boost morale there and shore up his own reputation, came as his decision to release the memos detailing brutal interrogation sessions of terror suspects continued to attract criticism. There were claims from inside the agency’s ranks that the move had undermined its ability to extract vital intelligence from America’s enemies, and could even blow...

For someone in Obama’s cabinet to warn the nation about decent God and country loving people as being “extreme” is like Rosie criticizing chunky and obnoxious middle-aged white lesbian comics for being unfunny. Behold, the Audacity of Irony. Or hypocrisy. Both work for me. You choose. Uh, hello, Ms. Napolitano, you work for the Czar of the Extreme, Barack Hussein Obama. By the way, what’s up with all this Czar crap? What’s next, leopard skin fezzes? Eye patches? Geez, we have more czars in Barack’s Bizarroland administration than Russia had during the entire Romanov Dynasty. We’re not Russians yet, so...