Free Republic

MADISON, Wis. (Reuters) - 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. With his approval ratings down from once-lofty levels and Tuesday's Democratic election losses raising questions about his political clout, Obama held no special ceremony to mark the anniversary of his election as America's first black president.

A judge in Milan convicted 23 Americans today of the kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in 2003, culminating a landmark trial that gave a look into the secret world of CIA renditions of terror suspects. Judge Oscar Magi acquitted three Americans, including the former CIA station chief in Italy, because they had diplomatic immunity when a secret team abducted militant cleric Abu Omar in Milan and flew him to Egypt, where he underwent months of torture and abuse. The Americans were tried in absentia, and given that the U.S. government has long declined to cooperate with the prosecution, it seemed...

There are 29 of 'em. And they can be handily compared with the Newsweek Obama covers (here: http://trackacrat.com/2009/10/09/5007/), which number 30, both in terms of frequency and tone of coverage. I can safely report that the findings conform to the pattern established earlier: namely, that President Bush was consistently treated like a leper, while President Obama receives the all-star treatment. Some choice Newsweek Bush covers include the wonderfully objective titles of, “Bush’s $87 Billion Mess“, “The Price of Denial“, “How Much Power Should They Have?“, “Will Bush Listen?” and the awesomely condescending “Father Knows Best.” Follow the jump for links...

Roland Emmerich has admitted that he feared a fatwa would be placed on him if he filmed a scrapped scene for 2012. The filmmaker is well known for decimating famed landmarks on movies including The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day. He stated that while he decided to destroy the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro because he is "against organised religion", he was fearful of the Islamic religious decree for a sequence that was planned but not shot. The 53-year-old wanted to demolish the Kaaba, which is a cube-shaped building at the heart of Mecca and is...

One of President Barack Obama’s top funders, Code Pink’s Jodie Evans, is encouraging the kidnapping of former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura, according to new statements issued this week by Jodie Evans and Code Pink. While it might be tempting to look at this latest effort by Code Pink as an innocuous publicity campaign, Code Pink’s history of working with state sponsors of terrorism and supporting violent protest against President Bush–and their near successful arrest of then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales–is cause for concern. Two weeks after meeting Obama at a high dollar fundraiser in San Francisco, Jodie...

Just as they did in the 2008 elections, Democrats running in the top 2009 elections in New Jersey, New York and Virginia have sought to tie their Republican or conservative opponent to former President George W. Bush. Here's a sampling of the attacks: "Voters have a clear choice on Tuesday: They can elect to go back to the George Bush economic agenda, or they can vote to move forward," read a statement released Saturday by Democrat Bill Owens, who is opposing Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman for New York's 23rd Congressional District seat. "What can you expect from Chris Christie?...

President Obama is degrading the Oval Office. In recent months, his administration has engaged in puerile, partisan attacks on his predecessor, former President George W. Bush. Nearly every problem in America - the economy, health care, financial regulatory reform, Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo - is being blamed on Mr. Bush. For example, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel recently hinted on CNN that Mr. Obama's indecision regarding sending more troops to Afghanistan was caused by his predecessor's inept policies. "It's clear that basically we had a war for eight years that was going on, that's adrift," Mr. Emanuel said....

In a roundtable today with Pakistani editors, Hillary Clinton responded to a question about the Israeli-Palestinian issue with the now-familiar Obama administration litany: the problems are hard, they were inherited, they were ignored by the prior administration: I think that, look, we all know that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is one that is a very serious and difficult problem that we are working hard also to try to resolve. We inherited a lot of problems. If you remember, when my husband left office, we were very close to an agreement because he worked on it all the time. The next administration...

Saturday, October 31, 2009 Obama DOJ shovels out more grist for foreign prosecutions of Bush officials   [Andy McCarthy] Well, the hyper-"transparent" Obama administration won't share any of its internal deliberations on matters about which there is no good reason to keep the public in the dark — e.g., its strong-arming in Honduras, its dismissal of a slam-dunk civil rights case against the New Black Panther Party, and the legal analysis by DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel that explains why the DC Voting Rights Bill is unconstitutional — but it continues to shovel out previously classified information about interrogation techniques...

Gore Vidal says he wanted to murder Bush during his administration. Vidal also says that Obama is too "intelligent" for America.

The AP has yet again run a hit piece trying to link any scandal it can to Bush. This chart shows that he was not a bush aide.

The CIA may have misled Congress at least five times since 2001, two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee said Tuesday. Intelligence subcommittee Chairwomen Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) are leading an investigation into what they described as a practice of incomplete and often misleading intelligence briefings, which arose in the wake of CIA Director Leon Panetta’s June 24 admission that intelligence officials failed to notify Congress about a top-secret program to assassinate al Qaeda leaders.

WASHINGTON — “I wish that we had come back with better news from Copenhagen,” President Barack Obama said a few weeks ago after an unsuccessful trip across the ocean to try to snag the 2016 Summer Olympics for Chicago. It wasn’t the kind of happy spin that politicians typically come up with after a failure. Call it a breath of fresh air or a turnoff. Either way, the man in the Oval Office is making a habit of confessing, apologizing, revealing and regretting. Don’t mistake it: Team Obama doesn’t miss many chances to try to put its actions in a...

A four-hour stop in New Orleans, on his way to a $3 million fundraiser. Snubbing the Dalai Lama. Signing off on a secret deal with drug makers. Freezing out a TV network. Doing more fundraisers than the last president. More golf, too. President Barack Obama has done all of those things — and more.What’s remarkable is what hasn’t happened. These episodes haven’t become metaphors for Obama’s personal and political character — or consuming controversies that sidetracked the rest of his agenda. It’s a sign that the media’s echo chamber can be a funny thing, prone to the vagaries of news...

Online (Re)Education Bethany Stotts, October 21, 2009 The newsmagazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education ranked Walden University among the top ten of its “top 100 Graduate Degree Producers” in a number of categories this year, many rankings of which were for Master’s degrees in Education among minority populations such as the African-American, Hispanic and Asian communities. Diverse also placed Walden in 4th place for its number of “total minority” Masters degree graduates in Education. But what, exactly, is Walden teaching the nation’s future minority teachers? Walden faculty members featured at the University’s 2009 Social Change Conference offered a clue. In...

OBAMA: What I reject is when some folks say we should go back to the past policies when it was those very same policies that got us into this mess in the first place. (Applause.) Another way of putting it is when, you know, I'm busy and Nancy busy with our mop cleaning up somebody else's mess --- we don't want somebody sitting back saying, you're not holding the mop the right way. (Applause.) Why don't you grab a mop, why don't you help clean up. (Applause.) You're not mopping fast enough. (Laughter.) That's a socialist mop. (Laughter and applause.)...

A group of UC Berkeley law students will launch a torture accountability initiative next week dedicated to holding the authors of the infamous torture memos accountable, reinstating respect for the prohibition against torture and ending executive abuse of power and impunity. Called the Boalt Alliance to Abolish Torture (B.A.A.T.), at their kick-off Oct. 13 the group will host a panel of lawyers and legal academics to discuss the memos crafted by the Bush administration’s legal counsels at the Department of Justice, including Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo. Yoo, who spent the previous semester at Chapman University, returned to the UC...

Krauthammer on Special Report responding to the White House's new war on Foxnews,...(Video)

John Yoo is back teaching at the University of California Berkeley Law School this semester and there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it. A few UC faculty members have pronounced that they consider this to be disgraceful, and some of the more colorful citizen protest groups have trained their sights on Yoo’s public appearances and even hounded him at home, but the Law School itself seems to be paralyzed. One would think that being an obviously incompetent or dishonest practitioner of the legal trade would be enough to disqualify him from teaching impressionable students, but law...

Some Chicago officials say anti-American resentment likely played a role in Chicago's Olympic bid dying in the first round Friday. President Obama could not undo in one year the resentment against America that President Bush and others built up for years, they said. "There must be" resentment against America, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, near the stage where he had hoped to give a victory speech in Daley Center Plaza. "The way we [refused to sign] the Kyoto Treaty, we misled the world into Iraq. The world had a very bad taste in its mouth about us. But there was...

Some Chicago officials say anti-American resentments likely played a role in Chicago’s Olympic bid dying in the first round today. President Obama could not undo in one year the resentment against America that President Bush and others built up for decades before, they said. “There must be” resentment against America, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said, near the stage where he had hoped to give a victory speech in Daley Plaza. “The way we [refused to sign] the Kyoto Treaty, we mislead the world into Iraq. The world had a very bad taste in its mouth about us. But there was...

Senator Rowland Burris of Illinois, the Senator who was appointed to fill President Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat, blames George Bush for Chicago not getting the Olympics in 2016. Burris stated in an interview, shortly after the announcement, that the image of the U. S. has been so tarnished in the last 8 years that, even Barack Obama making an unprecedented pitch for the games could not overcome the hatred the world has for us as a result of George Bush.

A federal judge has ordered the Justice Department to release notes and summaries of former Vice President Dick Cheney's 2004 interview with Special Prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald in the CIA leak case, but is allowing the deletion of what may be some of the most interesting details in the documents. In a ruling issued Thursday morning, Judge Emmet Sullivan flatly rejected claims by both Bush and Obama appointees at DOJ that the entirety of the records should be withheld because their disclosure could discourage White House officials from cooperating in future investigations. The judge said the prospect of such inquiries was...

Documentary film director Michael Moore, who has become a millionaire thanks to the profits from his movies, told CNSNews.com that “capitalism did nothing” for him. CNSNews.com spoke with Moore on the red carpet at the Uptown Theatre in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday night before the premiere of his upcoming documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story." CNSNews.com asked: “Critics may say, when they see this movie, Michael Moore has amassed a fortune of over $50 million, some have said and –” Moore said: “Really? Are you kidding me? Seriously? Wow. Where did it go?”

At the conservative How to Take Back America Conference over the weekend, Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., had some harsh words for President Obama. Franks told those assembled: “Obama's first act as president of any consequence, in the middle of a financial meltdown, was to send taxpayers' money overseas to pay for the killing of unborn children in other countries. Now I gotta tell you, a president that will do that, here's almost nothing that you should be surprised at after that. You shouldn’t, we shouldn't be shocked that he does all these other insane things. A president that has lost...

The next time the wee-wee-weepy-whiney left and President Pantywaist cry about the treatment they are getting at town hall meetings, show them this. President Bush has been out of office for 9 months and the Hollywood leftists are still bashing him. Click Photo for Video--

(Sorry all. Meant to post this last night but had some technical difficulties.) Karl Rove in San Francisco? Even he seemed a bit...awed? Bewildered? Bemused? Nonetheless, Bush's Brain was the rock star attraction at a dinner Thursday night at The Ritz-Carlton to kick off the debut of the Heritage Foundation's new San Francisco Bay branch. (For the past couple of years, the premier conservative thinktank has been establishing outposts around the country to stoke the grassroots brush fires all year-round. And anybody who lives in the Bay Area knows that there's a lot of closeted conservatives here. Why do you...

Remember President Obama's first full day in office: "The record is clear: Rather than keep us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security," Obama said during an address on national security at the National Archives in Washington. "It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it." At the time the President was roundly criticized for announcing the closing without...

President Obama made his first address to the U.N. General Assembly today. He had them at hello. Even his opening -- "It is my honor to address you as the 44th president of the United States" -- got a round of applause. The reason? The latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey of 21 countries found global confidence in Obama’s leadership on foreign affairs at 71% -- far higher than approval ratings at home (in the low 50% range) and even more striking matched against world opinion of George W. Bush last year, which Pew tracked at 17%. To Nile Gardiner of...

President Obama made his first address to the U.N. General Assembly today. He had them at hello. Even his opening -- "It is my honor to address you as the 44th president of the United States" -- got a round of applause. The reason? The latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey of 21 countries found global confidence in Obama’s leadership on foreign affairs at 71% -- far higher than approval ratings at home (in the low 50% range) and even more striking matched against world opinion of George W. Bush last year, which Pew tracked at 17%.

Facing the increasing likelihood of losses in the 2010 midterm congressional and gubernatorial elections, President Obama and his fellow Democrats are returning to a tried-and-true campaign strategy - run against former President George W. Bush. In speech after speech since taking office, Mr. Obama has pointed back to the problems he inherited from the Bush administration when he took office. And earlier this month, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine catalogued a slew of perceived Bush failures to the delight of supporters. Already, Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey are testing the strategy - so far, however, unsuccessfully....

Print Headline: "Patriots or Pinheads? Tea Party movement must contain its extremes" ... For its critics, the tea party was a rabble-rousing mob of right-wing hotheads and religious nuts who lack the education to know the difference between a communist and a Nazi – but who are sure that our black president is both. The truth is surely closer to what Byron York of The Washington Examiner said he saw – a wide variety of people espousing different points of view, united in their fear of the future and bedrock belief that Washington is not to be trusted.

'Bro', 'Brother', 'Dude', 'Cool Daddy', 'CAT", are all names that I've personally been called in the past to clearly annotate that I was the different one in the room, the meeting, on the team, or at the social event. President Carter's words are being parsed, "segregated" and dismissed as poorly timed, when in actuality they apply all the time. President Bush's latest off the cuff comments about then Presidential Candidate Barack Obama, as recanted by Matt Latimer, were yet another confirmation of just how pervasive and true the point that President Carter was trying to make was. I don't know...

VIDEO At Link HERE .A Houston man was handcuffed and assaulted by cops for posting anti-Obama flyers around his town, actions described as “criminal vandalism” by police and some local residents, despite the fact that giant pro-Obama murals are openly displayed in the same neighborhood for all to see. 21-year-old Mark Fuhre, an Alex Jones Show listener, decided to post the flyers even though the Infowars Obama Joker Poster Contest had ended, because he wanted to alert his neighbors to the cult of personality being manufactured around Obama and how the establishment is stifling any criticism of the President by...

A lot of Republicans are in a foamy rage against the grass roots, whom they feel failed to be adequately supportive of the Bush administration, helping the Democrats take over Congress in 2006. A lot are showing up on Free Republic making comments to the effect that Obama's communist regime is what we get when we fail to stand up for the Republican Party. But the fact is that President Obama was merely an employee of sorts of ACORN. President Bush was the one who funded it with millions of dollars of taxpayer funds. President Bush's justice department broke banks'...

...Or how they were all religious nuts and acting "un-American".....A little reminder from just a few short years ago... ...just a few of the thousands.

Democrats must drop efforts to censure a GOP representative who shouted "You lie" during President Obama's speech, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday. Democratic leaders Thursday were looking into what formal action the House could take against Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., whose outburst during Obama's address on healthcare reform to a joint session of Congress the night before, shocked the chamber, The Hill reported. "It's time for us to talk about healthcare, not Joe Wilson," said Pelosi, D-Calif. One option Democrats considered was censure. Pelosi nixed censure, as well as a call for Wilson to apologize on the floor. "I'm...

Welcome Awaits Iraq Shoe Thrower Dargham al-Zaidi is helping to prepare the family home for his brother's party The Iraqi journalist jailed for hurling his shoes at former US President George W Bush is to be freed on Monday - to an uncertain future. Muntadar al-Zaidi's release after nine months in prison will be celebrated by many across the Arab world to whom he has become a hero. He is reported to have been offered money, lucrative jobs, marriages and even a career in politics. His brother says an official boycott may stop Zaidi's return to journalism. Zaidi, a reporter...

Jones likens Bush to a 'crackhead' in latest video gaffe By Tony Romm - 09/04/09 02:33 PM ET Another video of White House green jobs czar Van Jones has hit the Web today: This time, Jones labels former President George W. Bush a "crackhead" for his policy to lower the price of foreign oil. Although it is unclear when and where Jones delivered his diatribe, this latest video is the first in which the subject of Jones' remarks somewhat relates to his work with the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The clip picks up with Jones in the middle...

As Barack Obama prepares a nationwide broadcast to America's students next Tuesday, it has been revealed that Democrats complained in 1991 when then President George H. W. Bush broadcast a speech from a Northwest Washington junior high school. In fact, the House Majority leader at the time, Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), said "The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students." Such was reported by the Washington Post on October 3, 1991 (h/t KY3 Political Notebook via Chuck Todd): House Democrats criticized President Bush yesterday for using...

Four years have elapsed since one of the most amazing cases of Republican-bashing media bias in the television era began. The media elites laugh when preachers say immorality causes God to send hurricanes, but they suggested with straight faces that Hurricane Katrina was a death sentence President Bush and his cronies brought to the less fortunate. In the early spin, race-baiting rapper Kanye West and "objective" anchors like Brian Williams were in rhetorical sync: George Bush didn't care about black people. On "The Daily Show," Williams said "everyone" knew Bush would have done better if white people were endangered: "Everyone...

But of course it is. One sure way to determine the state of the Obama Aministration’s policies is by the thickness of it’s political skin. Fun to watch because Gibbs gets sooooooo irritated. At today’s WHPB CBS reporter Chip Reid I believe, asked Robert Gibbs to explain why things seem to be getting worse since the President announced his new strategy (increased troop levels, unmanned drones in Pakistan, and taking the fight to the poppy farmers as well as AQ) for Afghanistan. Gibbs response grew testiier by the minute … but it didn’t take long to blame the whole thing...

Picture a recovering alcoholic falling off the wagon. First he says he can handle a few drinks... But eventually he turns mean... As a drunk is to alcohol, the Bush administration is to budget deficits. During the 2000 campaign George W. Bush often pledged to maintain fiscal responsibility... [H]is people said they could cut taxes, pay for new programs... and still pay off most of the federal government's debt... Now the budget director, Mitch Daniels, has admitted the obvious: The federal government faces the prospect of large deficits as far as the eye can see. And sure enough, the drunk...

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator John McCain, a torture survivor from his days as a captive during the Vietnam War, says his private comments about harsh interrogation methods were misrepresented by the Bush Administration in a recently released legal document intended to justify a six-day-long course of sleep deprivation for one CIA detainee in November of 2007. The newly declassified memo by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel mentions a secret briefing McCain and other members of Congress received sometime before October 17, 2006. The memo says the lawmakers were told about six CIA interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation....

SAN DIEGO — They say the older you get, the smarter your parents get. Likewise, it seems, the deeper President Barack Obama gets into his first term, the smarter President George W. Bush gets. Hard-line liberals will never accept this. They have too much invested in the narrative of Bush-as-incompetent-dolt to make room for the possibility that the Texas Republican got one or two things right in eight years. Nor do they want to believe that the supposedly more enlightened Obama is emulating his predecessor. Yet the Obama administration has — on issues both foreign and domestic — adopted as...

President Obama's reluctance to investigate the CIA's Bush-era treatment of terrorism suspects — and his insistence that the nation look forward, not back — has long infuriated his most ardent supports: those on the liberal left who view the president's inaction as electoral betrayal.This week, it became clear that it will take more than a newly launched Justice Department inquiry into the CIA's post-Sept. 11 interrogations of terrorism suspects to convince those restive supporters that Obama has the political will to follow the facts wherever they lead. We shouldn't kid ourselves: This has real serious political implications. It would be...

It's a stretch By MATT WICKENHEISER, Portland Press Herald Writer Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles (and) onions on a sesame-seed bun might make an American classic, the Big Mac, but are they steps in a manufacturing process? That's the question raised in the Economic Report of the President, given to Congress recently. In the manufacturing chapter, President George W. Bush's economists suggest that the government's definition of "manufacturing" is vague, which might affect policy-making and even provide factory tax breaks for fast-food businesses. "When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a 'service'...

On Wednesday, August 12, a man holding a sign that said “Death to Obamaâ€� at a town hall meeting in Maryland was detained and turned over to the Secret Service for questioning, which is pursuing an investigation into charging him with threatening the president. As well they should. I fully and absolutely agree with this arrest, since anyone who threatens the president is breaking the law and should be prosecuted. It doesn’t matter that Obama was not at the meeting nor that the man was unarmed: the threat all on its own is a federal crime, according to the United...

When George W. Bush was President, ABC and Charles Gibson, like most media members, couldn't get enough of anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan. Now that Barack Obama is in the White House, the host of "World News Tonight" is no longer interested in Sheehan, even telling WLS radio in Chicago, "Enough already." I guess she served her purpose as reported by the Washington Examiner's Byron York Thurday: In an appearance August 18 on WLS radio in Chicago, ABC News anchor Charles Gibson was asked about anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan's plans to travel to Martha's Vineyard next week, where she will protest...

Those words begin this stark, frank, and -- unfortunately -- utterly necessary column by the very fine writer Leonard Pitts, Jr.. The subject is Nazis, who seem to be everywhere these days. Read on: I hope this column makes you sick. See, we'll be talking about Nazis, something many of us are doing lately. Indeed, just this week a fellow named Joseph e-mailed me about a caller he heard on a radio show. The man, vexed over healthcare reform, likened President Obama to Adolf Hitler. Asked why, he said, ``Hitler took over the car companies, then healthcare and then he...