Free Republic

resident Biden is returning to the Barack Obama playbook of “reforming” municipal police departments by forcing multi-year federal court “consent decrees” down their throats -- a strategy that makes it extremely difficult for those departments to hire and retain good officers, or to administer their agencies in accord with the needs of the communities they serve. Of course, as with everything being undertaken by this Administration, it is all about race and politics, not good policing. Police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville are but the latest recipients of this federal intervention. It is noteworthy, though not often noted, that both...

How will future historians explain this? From 2001 to 2014, majorities of Americans, including supermajorities of blacks and non-Hispanic whites, told Gallup pollsters that "race relations" were either very or somewhat good. Then, after the election and reelection of the first American president of African descent, each case with majorities of the popular vote and electoral votes, perceptions suddenly plunged. Only around 50% of non-Hispanic whites rated race relations as good in 2015, 2019 and 2020. And the percentage of blacks taking that view fell to 51% in 2015, before Donald Trump's election as president, to 40% in 2019 and...

Washington -- In predicting what we can expect to be the achievements of President Joe Biden, let us consider what his modern Democratic predecessors have achieved. There is a pattern in the president's predecessors' achievements that is revelatory. Briefly consider what they did. President John F. Kennedy entered the White House as a war hero, and he pursued the Cold War with courage and growing astuteness. He had plans for the domestic front but was not given the time to implement them. Suffice to say, he was a successful Cold Warrior. President Lyndon Baines Johnson was no war hero, but...

The question confronting us Neanderthals during the present leftward lurch is: who exactly is the man behind the curtain pulling the levers of the Biden operation? Sundance thinks it’s the Obama crew: Barack Obama and his ideologues (who took over the DNC) are now completely in control over the leftist policy execution... Today, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, the former spokesperson for Obama’s State Department, essentially admitted that Obama’s network was in charge, and Biden receives his instructions from the crew.In a way, I’m encouraged, because I don’t think the Obama crew is that smart. I think that if...

These are treacherous times. Our principal institutions have been overtaken by the left. However dysfunctional and disturbed they may be, leftists rule us, and they grow more authoritarian and imperious as we speak. The latest example of their audacity and command of our dominant institutions is the response to Georgia's modest election law (S.B. 202 or the Election Integrity Act). It included ID requirements for mail-in ballots, banned the practice of giving food or water to voters in line at polling stations, limited the number of "drop boxes," and shortened early voting, none of which was racial or restrictive in...

A middle school in Illinois wanted to change its name. You guessed correctly—it was over being named after a problematic individual. Thomas Jefferson Middle School near Chicago wanted to be renamed after Barack Obama, but the illegal alien community was not pleased, saying the most popular Democratic president in recent memory and his deportation history was deeply disturbing or something. This is truly silly season. It’s ridiculous the Left has a stroke over Thomas Jefferson, one of our finest presidents and a Founding Father. It’s even more comical that Barack Obama is now being canceled (via Washington Examiner): Immigration activists...

It is no secret that Joe Biden is not in charge of the executive branch. Nor does it come as a surprise. The only observable difference between 2020 presidential hopeful Joe and 2021 President Joe, is his change of address. He moved from a basement somewhere in Delaware to a basement at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, a benign question from a pathetic journalist today as to what type of ice cream Joe is eating would be received with a standing ovation.What is surprising, however, is how effective and advantageous his non-presidency has been for the Democratic Party. His mental...

Biden 'has replaced in-person meetings with video calls. He allows only a limited number of people in the building...He doesn’t leave the White House often…. He isn’t planning any foreign or domestic trips.'78-year-old President Joe Biden is nowhere to be seen, aside from sporadic television appearances through a black mask the size of a Rawlings baseball mitt, or appearing to be on the verge of collapse from dehydration in social media videos. On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced Biden’s name will not appear on the $1,400 COVID-19 stimulus direct payments being sent out to millions of Americans...

This week, Barack Obama passed Franklin Roosevelt for the longest presidential tenure in American history. What's that, you say? — president for longer than FDR? But FDR was elected president four times; Obama was elected president two times. Yes, all of that is true. That's why this record has an asterisk next to it. For anyone with eyes to see, the current presidency is being run by Barack Obama. Archives Home → Articles American Thinker on MeWe Parler| Print| March 6, 2021 Barack Obama Has Now Been President Longer than FDR By Ayad Rahim This week, Barack Obama passed Franklin...

If you’ve a memory longer than a nanosecond you might recall that in 2016 when he was nominated by then-President Obama to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, Merrick Garland was widely touted as a “moderate.” President Biden has now nominated him for the slot of Attorney General, and the confirmation vote is scheduled for this coming week. How do you define moderate? His confirmation hearings reveal to me that Garland is certainly not one: Last summer, 220 cities were besieged by gangs that attacked homes, businesses, federal buildings, and local law enforcement....

Unity to the left means playing God and governing like kings and queens. In his first address on Nov. 7 to the nation after being prematurely crowned “president-elect” by legacy media, Joe Biden called for “a time to heal” and urged for “unity.” At his January inauguration, President Biden did the same. “With unity we can do great things. Important things. We can right wrongs. We can put people to work in good jobs. We can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome this deadly virus. We can reward work, rebuild the middle class, and make health care...

As we endure the political circus and charade of impeachment proceedings, does this reflect a great nation? The Book of Proverbs personifies wisdom as a woman calling out in the streets offering counsel. Is anybody in D.C. listening? How did we get to this contemptible place? In 2008, presidential candidate Obama promised to fundamentally transform America. Well, "mission accomplished." Perhaps I give the former president too much credit, as he didn't build that, but his philosophy and policies directed our culture onto a path such that now everything has become political. It's infected our education, science, businesses, and even health...

When Barack Obama ran in 2008, I was virulently opposed to his candidacy. I wasn’t a huge McCain fan, but at least I knew he had America’s best interests at heart, something I never felt about Obama. Four years later I had issues with Romney, but for similar reasons, I voted for him. Once Obama was in office, I disagreed with almost everything he did for eight years, whether Obamacare, DACA, GM, DADT, or virtually everything race-related. I disagreed with his trading for Bowie Bergdahl, his pardon of Chelsea Manning, and his commutation of the sentence of FLAN terrorist Oscar...

Many signs pointed to an inevitable conclusion that Myanmar's so-called transition to a democracy was a farce. Nevertheless, Obama embraced it wholeheartedly.The small South East Asian nation Myanmar became headline news last week after its military staged a coup, seizing power after detaining the country’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other democratically elected political leaders.Only a decade ago, Myanmar’s transition from military dictatorship to democracy was celebrated as one of President Obama’s foreign policy accomplishments. Now, the small nation is President Joe Biden’s first foreign policy nightmare.A Proxy For PowerMyanmar, also known as Burma, is a country...

America’s foreign policy establishment just received a massive jolt of energy from the new Biden administration. Unlike his predecessor, who waged a bitter but largely ineffective campaign against America’s permanent bureaucracy, Biden’s statements and cabinet picks have sent a clear message. America is back – to a foreign policy dominated by the same Washington insiders who have enabled decades of bipartisan military adventurism and reckless nation-building.As of now, Biden has no effective opponents. While the Trump presidency breathed new life into non-interventionist sentiments on the right, most Republicans still believe that fixing the world is America’s job. If conservatives want...

Barack Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, famously, and cynically, said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” As has become increasingly clear, teachers unions across the nation have used that advice as their playbook during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploiting a crisis, as the teachers unions have done for the past 11 months, carries significant risks, however, and the unions will likely soon understand that their strategy of stalling the reopening of schools has backfired. Exhausted parents and exasperated public officials – even some of the most far-left progressive advocates of teachers unions – are increasingly...

Trump leaves his party in better shape than his previous two predecessors left theirs, but the GOP is still at war with itself.Amid the fallout from a stunning Republican loss in Georgia that effectively hands control of the U.S. Senate to Democrats, we’re already seeing commentary and think pieces about how this means the end of Trumpism, that Donald Trump killed the GOP, that Trump sabotaged his own party, and so on.Not so fast. Yes, President Trump will leave office having served only one term, but consider where he will leave his party relative to his previous two predecessors. When...

Okay, right off the bat, in the annoying category, Obama is tied with Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and the usual Leftist gang of congressional idiots. At the moment, however, Obama has a louder megaphone. He is shooting his mouth off all over the place, for good reason. He knows that if Donald Trump somehow is re-inaugurated, the ongoing investigations into Russiagate are eventually going to lead to Obama himself and that such investigation will reveal his treachery. At this very moment, Barack Obama is highly knowledgeable about the level of Democrat election and voter fraud that took place this year....

To appreciate the value of our judiciary and its role in preserving democracy, one need only compare the 2016 election to the 2020 election.Since election day, President Trump’s legal team, as well as surrogates and down-ballot candidates, have filed more than 50 lawsuits in state and federal courts challenging the conduct of the election in six swing states. The cases range from allegations of violations of the U.S. Constitution to the failure of local election officials to grant poll-watchers “meaningful access” to observe ballot-counting.These cases have two things in common: (1) They have, to date, been uniformly unsuccessful, and (2)...

As a writer, I get a lot of pitches and stories sent to me. Somehow or another, writers end up on email lists for any number of candidates, fundraisers, causes, activist groups, etc. All those press releases and pitches can clutter up your inbox pretty quickly. And when you’ve been involved in politics for more than a couple of years, you get pitches from friends too. Not all of them work in the PR world, some just find an interesting story and have no outlet themselves to do anything with it. These aren’t scoops in the traditional sense, they’re just...