Free Republic

Having escalated the judicial confirmation wars at virtually every turn since the 1980's, Senate Democrats in the early 2000's pioneered a new form of self-interested obstruction to block a number of President Bush's nominees to the federal bench.  When Republicans retaliated in kind during the Obama era, many of those same Senate Democrats -- led by Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer -- voted to eliminate the filibuster rule they'd exploited to thwart Bush.  Detonating the 'nuclear option' was the latest ends-justify-the-means maneuver by upper chamber liberals, to whom then-minority leader Mitch McConnell made this final plea prior to the fateful...

RUSH: I have spent considerable time detailing and explaining how the Obama administration spied on domestic opponents of the Iran deal and that that was the forerunner of the attempt to spy on Trump transition and campaign people, and how the Obama administration used a new alliance between intelligence community people and media to advance the mythology and lies about the Iran deal. And when they saw how easy it was to compromise the media in pushing the phony Iran deal narrative of the Obama administration, that essentially became the trial run for what we are going through now with...

Earlier today President Trump announced the United States is leaving the "defective" and "terrible" Iran deal. Former President Obama, who signed the deal in 2015 after it was rejected as a treaty by Congress, isn't happy about it.  There are few issues more important to the security of the US than the potential spread of nuclear weapons or the potential for even more destructive war in the Middle East. Today’s decision to put the JCPOA at risk is a serious mistake. My full statement: https://t.co/4oTdXESbxe— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 8, 2018 A long lecture has been posted on Obama's Facebook page,...

One would have thought that once President Obama left office his charade of never doing anything illegal or having a smidgen of corruption would be exposed. Yet nearly 18 months later, he has found new enablers to continue his destructive policies that have no basis in law. This past week reiterated that situation. As I have defined before, once Obama lost the majorities in the House and Senate in January 2011, he did not abandon his desire to fundamentally remake our country. He just adopted a new strategy. With the help of political appointees who were true believers and career...

Former president Barack Obama is a man who exhibits selective outrage based upon how a tragedy can benefit advancing the utopian vision.  If an event includes changing "the world as it is" into the world Obama thinks it "should be," the former president will commend whomever he has to. With that in mind, recently, via a piece written for Time magazine entitled "Cameron Kasky, Jaclyn Corin, David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez and Alex Wind," Obama praised the five Parkland student-activists who made Time's 100 Most Influential People list.The former president wrote, "America's response to mass shootings has long followed a predictable pattern."  Obama's article...

On Friday, shortly after President Donald Trump's announcement of air strikes against Syria, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow twice put on her tinfoil hat, alleging that there is a "perception that the president may have ordered these strikes in part because of scandal," and that Trump's decision "may have ... (been) inflected by the scandals surrounding him." Maddow even contended that this alleged perception of scandal-driven decision-making will "affect the impact and the effectiveness of these military strikes." Maddow's first speculation appeared shortly after Trump's announcement:Transcript RACHEL MADDOW: As we follow the news in these incredible days that we have been having recently...

Former President Barack Obama (I love the adjective preceding his title) made some comments at the recent Global Opinion Leaders Summit in Japan that I can't let slide, so please forgive me. "It used to be that the two political parties in the United States would disagree but there was a common base line of facts and a set of norms in terms of political behavior that were followed. ... You could have a disagreement, but basic things got done. ... And some of the reason for that is ... it used to be that in the United States, there...

The left is outraged that President Trump’s campaign used data mining to win the 2016 election – but neither the media nor Democrats seemed to mind when President Obama’s team did the same thing. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro penned a column for The Hill on Tuesday headlined, “What’s genius for Obama is scandal when it comes to Trump,” which outlined the differences in the way similar news was covered during contrasting administrations. Shapiro surfaced a 2012 report from The Guardian that proclaimed Obama’s reelection team was mining data through Facebook to target specific voters. The Guardian is also the publication...

RUSH: I want you to hear a couple sound bites from 2015. There was an event called the Personal Democracy Forum, and a woman named Carol Davidsen spoke. She was a high-ranking Obama campaign official in 2012. She was at Rentrak [Corporation], the Vice President of Political Technology. I want you to just listen to this. She is describing what we talked about yesterday. When Obama and the Democrats were basically Hoovering every bit of data Facebook had, they were praised! The New York Times… We had a great caller reminded me of this yesterday. In June of 2013, the...

RUSH: Auntie Maxine, who’s the queen of the resistance. She was on a TV show called Washington Watch with Roland Martin. It’s on some network called TV One. And he said to Maxine, “The reality is like anything else, you’d better get what you can while he’s there, because look, come 2016…” They’re talking about Obama, and they’re talking about African-Americans and other minorities. “Hey, you better reach in and grab everything you can while Obama’s there, because after 2016, Obama’s gone.” Now, if I may make a brief departure here, in less than a year, Donald Trump has done...

RUSH: When we left the program yesterday, the bridge at Florida International University had collapsed only moments ago. There was still some confusion being reported. The way it was being reported, I thought the bridge was open. The bridge wasn’t open. The span had been put in place on Saturday. The bridge not supposed to open ’til early next year. At any rate, the left has already found a way to politicize this. The left has already found a way to incorporate the name Donald Trump into the assignation or the assignment of blame. When, in fact, the culprit here...

Why are people with foreign policy experience on North Korea and elsewhere referred to as "experts" when they so often fail to achieve their goals? The media, Democrats, and supposed experts on North Korea are wringing their hands about President Trump's planned meeting with the North Korean dictator. They say that Trump doesn't know what he is doing and that people at the State Department that have expertise are gone. I always have trouble with all the people who are called experts because they have had so little success at what they supposedly are expert about. For the last 25...

Upon hearing that former President Barack Obama recently boasted that he had a scandal-free administration, my first thought after regaining my faculties was: How can I possibly cram all the evidence refuting this in a little bitty column? Then I read that what he actually said was, "We didn't have a scandal that embarrassed us." At first blush, that sounds better, right? Because I assume he doesn't mean he's incapable of being embarrassed. After a little more thought, though, it occurred to me that this construction just highlights the real reason he has apparently deluded himself into thinking he served...

When Barack Obama spoke at the 12th annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, MA, many of us scratched our heads as to why the event was off-the-record. No photography, recording, or social media posting about Obama’s appearance was allowed. Obviously, he would not be talking about golf. But, with over 3,500 people in attendance, there was no way this speech would be hidden for long. As expected, a recording of Obama’s appearance was leaked. Obama said a lot of things over the course of an hour, but I’d like to focus on his claim that, while some people in...

RUSH: How many are you are aware that Barack Hussein O was in Boston over the weekend and made a private speech, an off-the-record speech? Did you hear about this? MIT’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference invited Obama to come make a speech, reflections on his presidency and thoughts on other things. And the command went out that Obama’s speech was to be off-the-record, that nobody but nobody was to record it. Nobody but nobody was to report it! Even though they invited journalists in there, nobody was supposed to leak it. Nobody was supposed to say a word about what...

On Friday, President Trump addressed the largest crowd of conservative activists in the history of CPAC. It was another memorable Trump speech, listing his many accomplishments and encouraging the crowd to support Republican candidates in the mid-term elections. For 80 minutes, the President discussed an array of issues such as tax cuts, judicial appointments, immigration and the strong economy. To the delight of the crowd, Trump claimed that “we have got seven years to go folks.” Of course, this did not thrill the President’s many enemies in the national news media. MSNBC’s Ali Veshi said the President’s speech was similar...

On Wednesday there was an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by William Galston titled: "The Clear and Present Danger of Trump.” A bold insert said: His weekend Twitter outburst calls into question his ability to discharge his powers. The article starts off: In business, it is said, the customer is always right. Politics is more complicated, because citizens are called upon to be more than consumers. “The people commonly intend the public good,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 71, “but their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always reason right about the means...

When "presidential politics experts" ranked all presidents, past and current, the headlines typically focused on Trump’s position at the bottom of the list. After one year—a year with a booming economy, increased business and consumer confidence, and significant gains on the foreign policy front—they have concluded that Trump is the worst president of all time. There’s no chance of any partisan bias there, right?Trump's record is certainly up for debate, but even famed liberal pollster Nate Silver wrote off the rankings as partisan garbage in a tweet. "It speaks poorly to the field of presidential scholarship that political scientists have Trump...

It happened in the midst of America's 2012 election year. Then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was elected president of Russia for the third time that March. When he was inaugurated that May, he would replace his protege, then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who, in turn, would succeed Putin as prime minister. President Barack Obama, up for re-election in the United States that same year, phoned Putin to congratulate him on his election victory. "President Obama called Russian President-elect and Prime Minister Putin to congratulate him on his recent victory in the Russian presidential election," said the White House "readout" of that call....

Congressional Republicans have been raked over the coals in the last two weeks for slamming through budget caps and inflating government spending and debt by another $300 billion. The criticisms are well-deserved. It's a historical truism that Republicans are much more fiscally conscientious when they are in the minority than when they run Congress. And Republicans tend to be much bigger fiscal hawks when there is a Democratic president than a Republican president -- as we are now witnessing. The only time in half a century that the budget has been balanced was in the late 1990s, when Bill Clinton...