Free Republic

So says Investors Business Daily after yesterday’s steep market drop. In their lead editorial, IBD puts the onus for stagnation and the inexorable slide back into stagnation squarely at the feet of Barack Obama and his economic policies. In fact, they list seven areas in which Obama is not just passively inept but actively hostile to American business and capital: • Failed Fed policy. For three years, we’ve kept interest rates at record lows, undergone two rounds of quantitative easing and created $2 trillion in new money. On Wednesday the Fed announced its next move: the $400 billion “Operation Twist”...

Solar panel installer SolarCity said on Friday it was the second company in as many days that will not get finalization of U.S. government loan aid by a September 30 deadline. The Department of Energy informed SolarCity of its inability to close the loan 48 hours ago, blaming increased paperwork resulting from a Congressional investigation into the Department of Energy's $535 million loan guarantee awarded to bankrupt solar company Solyndra, SolarCity said in a letter to the Republican lawmakers heading the probe.The DOE loan guarantee program, which is under fire for missing signs its first recipient of loan aid, Solyndra,...

Earlier this week, Eli Lake reported that the four-star Air Force general in charge of US Space Command told a Congressional panel that the White House pressured him to change his testimony to favor a company that shelled out donations for Democrats. LightSquared wants to press forward on a project that the military fears will create serious interference with GPS systems, and General William Shelton was going to address those concerns with Congress before the White House tried to push him into saying a few nice words on behalf of their sponsor. A reminder: The four-star Air Force general who...

President Obama anticipated Republican resistance to his jobs program, but he is now meeting increasing pushback from his own party. Many Congressional Democrats, smarting from the fallout over the 2009 stimulus bill, say there is little chance they will be able to support the bill as a single entity, citing an array of elements they cannot abide. “I think the American people are very skeptical of big pieces of legislation,” Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, said in an interview Wednesday, joining a growing chorus of Democrats who prefer an à la carte version of the bill despite White...

Few things astound me more than those with the temerity to defend the indefensible with casuistic obfuscation. Recently, prominent media personage and Obama apologist Jonathan Alter challenged the world to explain why Barack Hussein Obama is a bad President. At the risk of deigning myself by explaining the self evident, I will respond to Alter’s challenge with the following indictment of Obama and extend an open invitation to debate this very topic on radio, television, or before a public audience. I could never comprehend the irrational exuberance of Obamatrons or their predilection for ascribing infallible qualities to such a mediocrity...

It's September 2011 – just 14 months before the next presidential election. Barack Obama claims to be running for re-election – though he has stated on more than one occasion he could take it or leave it. He's buried deep in the worst approval ratings of any modern president. There are at least a baker's dozen prominent Republicans lined up for the chance to challenge him. His "leadership" led to a Republican revolution in the 2010 midterm elections – though the GOP leadership has squandered its opportunities to reverse Obama's policies. The recession plods on without a light at the...

Last week, Jonathan Alter issued a challenge to his readers and Barack Obama’s critics — make the case that Obama has been an objectively bad President and doesn’t deserve re-election: Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president? I’m not talking here about him as a tactician and communicator. We can agree that he has played some bad poker with Congress. And let’s stipulate that at the moment he’s falling short in the intangibles of leadership. I’m thinking instead of that opening sequence in the show “Mission Impossible,” the one where Jim Phelps, played by Peter...

Progressive Jonathan Alter is outraged that everyone is ready to “fire” Obama. “I want to know,” wrote a snippy Alter on Bloomberg.com, “on a substantive basis, why you think he deserves to be in a dead heat with Mitt Romney and Rick Perry and only a few points ahead of Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann in a new Gallup Poll. Is it just that any president -- regardless of circumstances and party -- who presides over 9 percent unemployment deserves to lose?”I was tempted to treat Alter with the “What? You got to be kidding,” routine. Any Republican should be...

President Barack Obama is hoping that black voters don't stand on the sidelines when Democrats need all the election help they can get this year.

George W. Bush is gone from Washington but his legacy, like an abandoned toxic waste dump, lingers on. Like President Franklin Roosevelt before him, President Bush helped redefine American freedom. And like Roosevelt's, Bush's changes were perversions of the clear vision the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us. What did freedom mean in the era of George Bush? In Iraq in September 2004, the U.S. military constructed Camp Liberty, a tent compound to house Iraqi detainees next to the Abu Ghraib prison. (The torture scandal and photos had been revealed in late April.) Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller declared that Camp Liberty...

This week the Senate grinches stole Christmas. The Obama Nation is getting Obamacare. It’s easy to blame the sixty Democrats, as the Wall Street Journal does, for "the worse bill ever." It solemnly declares: "These 60 Democrats are creating a future of epic increases in spending, taxes and command--and control regulation." True enough. But what's the root cause of this permanent disaster? Sorry, friends, but it’s not the Democrats, nor the American people who elected them. The real culprits are two Republicans who ran the show the previous eight years: George W. Bush and his "master political strategist" Karl Rove....

WASHINGTON: Former US President Jimmy Carter has said the Iraq war was one of the "greatest blunders" ever made by a US leader. Carter however, said on CNN he believed the raging sectarian violence wracking the US-occupied country so far fell short of a civil war. "I think that the original invasion of Iraq, and all of its consequences were a blunder," Carter said. "It's going to prove, I believe to be one of the greatest blunders that American presidents have ever made." Asked whether the Iraq war would prove to be a bigger mistake in the annals of US...