Free Republic

As we celebrate the Fourth of July, who can argue that our democracy is working the way the Founders intended? And who can deny that most of the blame for dysfunction must fall to the Republican Party? George Washington distrusted all political parties. He warned in his farewell address that, as they alternated power, parties would act in “the spirit of revenge” — rather than, presumably, in the best interests of the nation. The “disorders and miseries” that resulted, Washington feared, would inevitably threaten democracy. Whatever the motivation, Republicans have paralyzed our government in a way that would have shocked...

A surprisingly robust job market is energizing the 5-year-old U.S. recovery and driving the economy closer to full health. "This has now become a textbook jobs expansion," said Patrick O'Keefe, director of economic research at the consultancy CohnReznick. "It is both broad and accelerating." Several other signs point to the economy's brightening health. Auto sales rose at the fastest pace in eight years in June. Factory orders picked up last month. And home sales strengthened this spring after having sputtered in the middle of last year when higher mortgage rates and rising prices hurt affordability.

Tel Aviv Here is what bias against Israel looks like. Three Israeli teenagers are abducted by the terrorist group Hamas, and after a desperate weeks-long search for the boys, they are finally found—dead in shallow graves near the site of the abduction. While all this is happening, Hamas instigates a new round of missile attacks from Gaza, firing 56 rockets at southern Israeli communities. The Obama administration's response? Express sympathy but call on Israel to refrain from responding. Moments after the news broke today that the bodies of the teenagers had been found, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the...

Judge Debra Nelson has ruled in favor of NBC in a defamation lawsuit filed by George Zimmerman. Zimmerman filed the lawsuit in December 2012, saying NBC aired an edited version of the call he made to 911 right before his confrontation with 17-year-old Trayvon Martin...

Audiences will get more than a dystopian future when they line up to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes next month. The second film in the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise reportedly packs a pro-gun control message, according to a new review of the film in Variety. The story also touches on environmental fear mongering, albeit in a reduced fashion compared to the first installment. The “Apes” franchise has always been a politically loaded one, and this latest entry states its left-wing credo in ways both allegorically implicit and bluntly direct. (You’d have to be pretty obtuse...

Since its birth in the 1920s with the first national radio networks, the modern MSM has always had a cozy relationship with power, and until the creation of Fox News, one channel on your TV dial or satellite guide, that power has almost exclusively meant their fellow Democrats. The media have long voted overwhelmingly Democrat in presidential elections; as Walter Cronkite once said at a Radio & TV Correspondents Dinner in the mid-1990s, in-between feting the Clintons on his yacht in Martha’s Vineyard, “Everybody knows that there’s a liberal, that there’s a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents.” But in the...

(Reuters) - The U.S. economy contracted at a much steeper pace in the first quarter than previously estimated, turning in one of its worst-ever non-recession performances, but growth already appears to have rebounded strongly. The economy was held back by an unusually cold winter, the expiration of long-term unemployment benefits and cuts to food stamps, which curbed consumer spending. It was also weighed down by a slowdown in the pace of restocking by businesses. All these temporary factors have since faded, lifting growth early in the second quarter.

The U.S. economy shrank in the first quarter of the year, and new revisions by the Bureau of Economic Analysis show the decline was even deeper than reported. Gross domestic product contracted at a 2.9% annual. That's the weakest quarter for the U.S. economy since the first quarter of 2009, amid the Great Recession. But economists aren't too worried, for three key reasons. 1) They blame the weather. 2) It's not a final number. 3) Last, but certainly not least, other data show the economy is improving.

We live in a strange time. Historically, reporters and editors have believed that their job is to disseminate news. That is no longer true. Now, most reporters and editors believe that their principal function is to prevent people from learning things they are better off not knowing. Day after day, they run interference for their party, the Democrats. Blockading inconvenient stories from making the news is job number one. Consider Fast and Furious. The Obama administration deliberately encouraged guns to be sold illegally and transferred to Mexican drug lords, for reasons that have never been explained. Hundreds of Mexicans and...

At Monday's White House Summit on Working Families, first lady Michelle Obama admitted to a few of her own struggles as a working mother while making the case for flexible workplace policies for families. "The first thing I tried to do, which was a mistake, was that I tried the part-time thing…I realized I was getting gypped on that front," she told ABC's Robin Roberts at the event, which aimed to bring attention to strengthening the nation's workforce by addressing various workplace difficulties. "What happened was I got a part-time salary but worked full time."

When CNN rolled out the red carpet for Hillary Clinton’s town-hall interview with Christiane Amanpour, they did more than just build a set and invite an audience to participate. According to the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, who attended the event, CNN warmed up the crowd for Hillary and even coached them on how to cheer and make noise to demonstrate enthusiasm for the former Secretary of State. Note the whoops at the beginning of the broadcast, and near the end of this clip when Amanpour asks about her decision on running for President — cheers that were part of the...

resident Barack Obama exhorted Iraqi leaders to come up with a political solution to governing their nation because "if they don't, there won't be a military solution to the problem," he told CNN in an interview Friday. Obama wants to see Iraq create a command structure that includes Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, which are the country's chief groups, he told CNN's Kate Bolduan. "We gave Iraq the chance to have an inclusive democracy," Obama said on the eve of U.S. military advisers arriving in Iraq to help the government besieged by militant extremists.

...for more than ten years I was one of the nation’s leading spokesmen for the “ex-gay” movement.... But I was in denial....

At the end of a war, some people will remain holed up in the trees, thinking they can still turn the tide of a lost cause. Increasingly, that's the best description of the anti-Obamacare dead-enders, including Congressional Republicans, who continue to depict the Affordable Care Act as a failure despite facts like these:. --Nearly 60% of enrollees in ACA-compliant exchange health plans this year were previously uninsured--most of them for two years or more.

The New York Times bestseller list hasn't waited a millisecond to put Hillary Clinton's book atop its influential chart after just a week of sales, but has totally ignored another top-10 hardcover from noted conservative and critic of President Obama, Dinesh D'Souza. His new book, on sale for three weeks, isn’t just absent from the top 10 lists already set for the next two Sundays, but totally missing from the list of the nation’s top 25 nonfiction hardcovers despite having sales higher than 13 on the latest Times chart.

President Obama’s instincts about Iraq and Syria have been sound from the beginning: Greater U.S. engagement probably cannot make things better but certainly can make them worse, both for the people of the region and for our national interests. Obama’s only mistake was to buy, for a time, the notion that Bush’s troop surge had miraculously healed ancient divisions and made the dream of a pluralist democracy still possible. There are aspects of Obama’s foreign policy that I question. His heavy reliance on drone strikes may create as many terrorists as it eliminates. He should have realized that the National...

The new national poll from NBC and the Wall Street Journal is stuffed with bad news for President Obama. His job approval rating — 41 percent — is as low as it has ever been. And yet, all of those bad numbers pale in comparison to how people responded to this question: "Thinking about the rest of Barack Obama's term as president, do you think he can lead the country and get the job done or do you no longer feel that he is able to lead the country and get the job done?" Fifty-four percent — let me repeat,...

Several times in recent weeks I’ve found myself in conversations with liberals who shake their heads sadly and express their disappointment with President Obama. Why? I suspect that they’re being influenced, often without realizing it, by the prevailing media narrative. The truth is that these days much of the commentary you see on the Obama administration — and a lot of the reporting too — emphasizes the negative: the contrast between the extravagant hopes of 2008 and the prosaic realities of political trench warfare, the troubles at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the mess in Iraq, and so on. The...

....half of Cuban-Americans surveyed in Miami support an end to the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Even more support resuming diplomatic relations with the communist island's government. That's according to a Florida International University poll released Tuesday.

On Friday morning, Politico published on the previously unknown and "closely held" details of former First Daughter Chelsea Clinton's contract with NBC News. According to the story, Clinton was given an annual salary of $600,000 when she joined NBC News as a "special correspondent" in November 2011. Based on these figures, Clinton has earned about $26,724 for each minute she subsequently appeared on air.