Free Republic

I have posted before that we need narrative to capsulate the failure that is the Obama presidency. I nominate… “We need a President not a professor.” From his inaction, to his lecturing tone, to his holier than thou attitude, to his belief that he has the answer, to his ideology over practicality approach, BHO has treated the American public like students in a class where he gets to make the rules. Even those that tend to agree with him are finding the problem with his professorial approach to leadership. In other words, he just ain’t up to being president.

Live from the Oval Office! It's Barack Obama and the State of the Sham Wow, Gulf Oil Spill edition!Starring TOTUS as Barack Obama! Featuring: Robert Gibbs in a special YouTube after the speech infomercial.

A day before the U.S. Supreme Court hear arguments in the gun industry's challenge to the constitutionality of Chicago's handgun laws, Mayor Richard M Daley reiterated that reasonable, local gun laws are a responsible way to protect the nations streets, families and children from gun violence.

The Washington Times suggests in an editorial that the fallout from the Department's refusal to proceed with the New Black Panther party's criminal prosecution for voter intimidation is causing an implosion in the Holder Department of Justice. DOJ has already lost three top officials ; Gregory Craig,Cassandra Butts, and now David Ogden: "[T]he Justice Department has, for now, ordered two key career attorneys not to comply with a subpoena about the case issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The commission, by law, has explicit power to issue subpoenas, and the law mandates that 'all federal agencies shall cooperate...

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has concluded that the Obama administration can lawfully pay the community group Acorn for services provided under contracts signed before Congress banned the government from providing money to the group. The department’s conclusion, laid out in a recently disclosed five-page memorandum from David Barron, the acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, adds a new wrinkle to a sharp political debate over the antipoverty group’s activities and recent efforts to distance the government from it. Since 1994, Acorn, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has received about...

The Pentagon said it was never notified by U.S. intelligence agencies that they had intercepted emails between the alleged Fort Hood shooter and an extremist imam until after last week's bloody assaults, raising new questions about whether the government could have helped prevent the attack.A top defense official said federal investigators didn't tell the Pentagon they were looking into months of contacts between Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki. The imam knew three of the Sept. 11 hijackers and hailed Maj. Hasan as a "hero" after the shooting last week at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead. "Based...

A state worker is recovering after a bloody brawl at a union hall. He says members of the local SEIU 1000 beat him up and sent him to the hospital all because he wanted to expose allegedl corruption within the union. Ken Hamidi is a state worker at the California Franchise Tax Board. Last night he walked into a union hall in Sacramento for an SEIU local 1000 meeting. After he and a photographer walked in to the meeting, it didn't take long for Hamidi to be right out the door and on his way to the hospital.

WASHINGTON – Ignoring a Republican boycott, Senate Democrats pushed a precedent-setting climate bill through a key committee Thursday. Rep. Barbara Boxer, chairman of the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, had delayed the crucial vote for days because of a Republican protest over whether the cost of the legislation had been fully examined. But the California Democrat moved quickly to pass the bill, which for the first time would set mandatory limits on heat-trapping gases, without any of the seven GOP senators on the panel present. The measure cleared the panel on a 11-1 vote. Boxer said the Republican demand...

Tom Donohue sits for an interview with POLITICO. CEO and President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Tom Donahue, talks with POLITICO about his relationship with the White House, the health care debate and the Chamber's membership. Photo: John Shinkle U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue says a campaign by the White House and its allies to undermine his $200-million-a-year association has largely failed — and actually has helped raise even more money for its pro-business efforts. In a 75-minute interview with POLITICO, Donohue dismissed recent defections by Apple and at least four other companies, which quit over the...

The Department of Justice has hired a team of partisan Democrat campaign bloggers to work at the Department.....Tracy Russo is one such blogger from the campaign of John Edwards. The unit is housed in the Office of Public Affairs....They are also tasked with posting anonymous comments, or comments under pseudonyms, at newspaper websites with stories critical of the Department of Justice, Holder and President Obama....“There is clearly a designed effort to rebut stories that are exposing the Holder Justice Department as more political than the last. We’ve seen a change in the pattern of anonymous emails we receive and comments...

A serious clash may be looming between the Department of Justice and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission about the department's dismissal of a voter-intimidation case against agents of the New Black Panther Party. The commission -- not Justice -- is on the side of the just. Charges had been filed against two Black Panthers, national Panther Chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz, and the party as a whole after the two Panthers were videotaped outside a Philadelphia polling place in paramilitary garb. One of them was brandishing a night stick, while they reportedly made racially inflammatory remarks. The case was already effectively...

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Roland Burris' colleagues in the U.S. Senate have been noticeably silent since the release of a secretly recorded phone conversation with former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's brother. But back home, at least two state lawmakers are calling for Burris' swift resignation. Illinois state lawmakers are calling for swift resignation by U.S. Sen. Roland Burris, whose fighting allegations he worked with former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's brother on a favor for the governor in exchange for an appointment to the Senate seat. State Rep. Jim Durkin -- the ranking Republican on the impeachment panel who questioned Burris during his Jan. 8...

With the national media finally interested in Illinois corruption, it's too bad they were focused on Springfield's dancing monkey show and not on what happened in a federal courtroom in Chicago on Wednesday. That wasn't a monkey dancing on a string. It was an ape. The kind of ape that pulls the strings on the dancing monkeys. His name is Frank Calabrese, the former Chicago Outfit Chinatown crew boss, convicted of racketeering conspiracy involving seven murders in the FBI's historic Operation Family Secrets case of 18 unsolved hits. Six other bodies were attributed to Calabrese at his sentencing.

Just a few years ago, I took the opportunity to attend special guest appearances by two high-profile political personalities at Syracuse University whose visits were within a few weeks of each other—Ralph Reed, former leader of the Christian Coalition and a Republican strategist on the right, and Jocelyn Elders, former surgeon general of the United States during the Clinton administration and a Democrat of decidedly left orientation. Although their addresses and responses to questions that followed illustrated vividly their wide differences of opinion on current issues, that was not the most striking contrast between the two mid-week evening events at...

Organized labor helped elect Barack Obama and now eagerly awaits his promised support for its top priority—a bill that would make it easier to set up union locals. The Employee Free Choice Act would allow unions to create local bargaining units without winning the vote of a majority of workers in a secret ballot. The local unit would be certified if a majority of workers endorsed it by signing an authorization card handed out by union organizers. Fair enough? Not really. The so-called card-check bill would not protect workers and it would not be "free choice." It would strip away...

Regarding Dr. John David's commentary, "Make it Easier to Unionize Workplace": Labor unions certainly have their place in a contemporary American economy, but not at the expense of employee free choice and economic security. Indeed, the Employee Free Choice Act would severely erode the freedom enjoyed by employees for nearly 75 years to make a private, fully-informed decision about whether or not they want a union to represent them. Too often, the losing party in a union election - the company or the union - blames its loss on the opposing party's "coercive and underhanded" tactics. In reality though, the...

Alright so this auto bailout bill is in a holding pattern. But just remember that it doesn't mean it is dead. So here are some facts that should keep you seething ... The Big Three currently pay 85% of union benefits to UAW members ... who aren't even working. Yep. Remember how I told you about the Job Banks for union workers? If a union worker is employed at a plant that closes, the auto makers still pay 85% of their union benefits. Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, says that his company must reduce operating costs ... but his...

“You just sit and you worry,” said Pat Weber, a construction administrator in Fennville who was laid off more than a year ago. “In the last year, I’ve put in for more than 100 jobs. I stopped counting after 110. It’s just so defeating.” All around Fennville and its neighbors here in southwest Michigan, front lawns are peppered with for-sale signs and merchants complain about slow days. But while this remains a beautiful place with none of the obvious blight of Detroit on the other side of the state, residents say the hardship beneath the surface is very real. It...

The New Plan? Cripple Honda! Save Detroit with Card Check! Eliminating the secret ballot and making it easier to organize U.S. Honda and Toyota workers (and imposing contract terms via binding arbitration) would "level the playing field," says Dem. Congressman Tim Ryan. ... Then when Honda and Toyota responded by importing more cars from abroad, we could have import quotas! Eventually the whole automotive sector could be planned by Congress in conjunction with existing business and labor interest groups. Red State has seen the future and it is corporatist. ...12:21 P.M.