Free Republic

A stunning announcement out of Florida this week. The state that was exhibit A for economic disaster two years ago is now experiencing a tremendous rebound thanks to Gov. Rick Scott’s pro-growth policies. Washington should take a page – no several pages – out of Scott’s book. Since December 2010, one month before Scott took office, the unemployment rate in Florida has dropped from 11.1 percent to 7.8 percent – that rate is lower than the national average. After two years of Scott’s policies, 282,000 private sector jobs have been created; in the previous four years the state had lost...

Who the hell is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to presume that he has a say in what I or any other American chooses to drink? Of course, the answer for any self-respecting citizen is that he has no such say, and the proper response to him and his legion of petty fascist fan boys is the suggestion that they pucker up – and I will politely decline to identify what they should kiss. It’s a sad commentary that the once boisterous, independent, take-no-guff New Yorker of the past has been replaced by a gutless, cowardly supplicant eager to...

How can anyone take President Obama seriously when he tells us our national debt is no big deal? Well, we have to take him seriously, because, unserious thinking or not, he has serious power, including the power to obstruct progress on reducing the debt. I'm not making this up, of course, which is too bad because it illustrates why it is so hard for Republicans to work with this man. He neither views the fiscal world from the same lens nor shares the goal of significant debt reduction. In an interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, Obama said, "We don't...

Yesterday, Paul Ryan, Republican Chairman of the House Budget Committee, unveiled his plan that would balance the federal budget within one decade. Considering that the nation’s debt (not including the huge future cost of major entitlement programs) is now approaching $17 trillion, one might think political leaders in Washington, D.C. would consider such a proposal. On the Democratic side of the aisle, however, there is no interest whatsoever in taking such a constructive approach. Democrats in both houses of the Congress and the Obama Administration, along with many media-based pundits, began to loudly criticize the Ryan proposal even before it...

Sometime in the new millennium, "global warming" evolved into "climate change." Amid growing controversies over the planet's past temperatures, Al Gore and other activists understood that human-induced "climate change" could better explain almost any weather extremity -- droughts or floods, too much heat or cold, hurricanes and tornadoes. Similar verbal gymnastics have gradually turned "affirmative action" into "diversity" -- a word ambiguous enough to avoid the innate contradictions of a liberal society affirming illiberal racial preferencing. In an increasingly multiracial society, it has grown hard to determine the racial ancestry of millions of minorities. Is someone who is ostensibly one-half...

Today, White House tours remain closed thanks to a petulant President who insists that somebody, anybody, feel some pain over the sequester cuts that trimmed a modest 2 cents on the dollar from the $3.6 trillion federal budget. It’s an age-old lesson in what happens when one stands up to politician spoiled by a deferential media and effusive supporters and colleagues. His bluster and threats can only go so far before they run into reality. As we begin the second week of sequestration with our nation, somehow, still functioning, it is important to pause for a moment to consider the...

Although it hasn't made much news, what with the world missing a Pope, the Senate missing an on-the-floor bathroom, Venezuela missing a President, and President Hamid Karzai missing a press conference with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel; but President Barack Obama has missed the deadline for producing a budget document for the United States. It's not as if the whole government spending thing hasn't been a big deal in Washington. You might have been following along as Republicans and Democrats have been not just disagreeing with one another about how to cut the deficit from its present $16.5 trillion, but they...

There are three major factors that stand in the way of entitlement reform and the other responsible budgetary measures that must be taken to avert an eventual national financial catastrophe, and they have a common source. The first is that too many American people remain, amazingly, in the fog about the scope of the problem. The second is that a certain political ideology refuses to substitute a designated driver for the intoxicated entitlement state, which is driving the American bankruptcy bus. The third is that the leader of this noxious ideology has a further conflict of interest precluding a solution...

Three brilliant black leaders are tuning out Obama and the black community needs to tune into these leaders. I’m surfing between the major news networks on a recent evening and I catch FOX News Channel’s Sean Hannity in the middle of an amazing interview with a guest named Harry Alford, the CEO and co-founder of the Black Chamber of Commerce. My jaw drops as Alford essentially calls Obama an anti-business tyrant who is hurting the African American community; he says he voted for Obama in 2008 but now has buyer’s remorse. I get to thinking: Given the choice between Alford...

This comes amid stories that Obama's chief political goal is helping his fellow Democrats win a House majority in 2014 and as his Organizing for Action (formerly Obama for America) is still cranking out press releases about the dire effects of the sequester. It's not unheard of for a politician to make public threats and private blandishments at the opposing party at the same time. But it is sometimes awkward. Especially if the threats and blandishments are not entirely credible. Democrats have some chance of winning the 17 seats they need for a House majority. But it's an uphill climb....

Forgettable leaders deserve their anonymity. True leaders, on the other hand, can stand the test of time. Consider Hillary Clinton. The one-time presidential contender was wrapping up her tenure as Secretary of State in January, when Sen. Ron Johnson, (R-Wisc.), dared to ask her about the September 11 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. To most observers, it was a clear-cut act of terrorism that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya. Clinton, though, was uninterested in the cause of the disaster. “Was it because of a protest, or was it because of...

Communist Party USA Executive Vice Chair Jarvis Tyner joined in a conference call with Wisconsin activists last week to talk about the “struggle” against budget cutters in the state and national governments. Tyner is complimentary of President Obama and says now is the time for Obama and his allies in the labor movement to go “on the offensive” against those trying to rein in government spending and union political power. HEAR THE EXCLUSIVE AUDIO HERE. “When Obama ran in 2008 and picked up all this support, and won the presidency, it was a mighty blow against racism. You may...

WASHINGTON - President Obama has been pleading with House Republican leaders lately to raise government revenues by overhauling the tax code to erase loopholes and other income exemptions. It wasn't an idea he campaigned on last year, though the chairmen of his deficit reduction commission proposed doing just that in a report he shelved. But they also wanted to use the higher revenues to offset lowering the tax rates in order to boost economic growth, jobs and investment, which in turn would boost tax revenues and reduce the deficits. But cutting tax rates doesn't play well with Democratic voters or...

The Broadway musical "Annie" is enjoying another revival on Broadway. The show opened during the Carter administration when America was in need of some optimism. "The sun'll come out tomorrow," sang Annie, and with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, for a while, it did. Now we're back in "Hooverville," the name given to shanty towns that popped up during the Great Depression. It isn't that bad yet, though the Obama administration is forecasting gloom and doom if Republicans don't cave on another tax increase. "We'd like to thank you Herbert Hoover for really showing us the way," sang...

Take President Obama and his Cabinet of Liars, please. We all know what dirty tricks they played to try and stop the sequester's automatic budget cuts from happening. They spent weeks trying to frighten the America people into believing the country would collapse into chaos and suffering if the federal government's sequester-forced spending cuts went into effect. The campaigner in chief and his chorus of toadies did everything they could to make sure the puny spending cuts -- which would have merely taken the federal budget back to its 2012 level -- would cause the most pain to the most...

Sequester cuts had barely gone into effect last week when the uber-liberal MoveOn.org started shrilly whining that conservative barbarians were destroying the country. “Tea Party and austerity-obsessed billionaires have finally gone too far,” screamed the organization that was launched in 1998 with heavy-duty financial support from one of the Left’s own billionaires -- George Soros. The group electronically wailed that “Tea Parties” in cahoots with “billionaires,” were holding “kids” and “poor families” politically hostage in the battle over government spending. In a sense, MoveOn.org is correct. There definitely are “hostages” being held captive in the very real debt crisis in...

"What we've learned through the course of this program is that this is really not a sensible way for the health care system to be run." That was Gary Cohen, director of the Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. He was talking about the apparently surprising need to halt enrollments in a program designed as a temporary bridge for people with pre-existing conditions who couldn't wait to be covered by the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) when it fully kicks in next year. The program was allocated $5 billion, but some estimate it...

Is it possible that Obama's arrogance, personal pettiness, sanctimoniousness and egotism (for starters) could finally be his unraveling? Even the liberal media are starting to notice, but will it last? Up to this point, they've dutifully played along with his Alinskyite tactics -- converting the office of the presidency into a headquarters for community organizing at a federal level and a position to organize and fund a perpetual campaign against his political opponents instead of governing. The liberal media share Obama's leftist policy goals and the ends-justify-the-means mentality that accompanies them and have thus far been eager not only to...

Not being one to jump on the current topic du jour, we could not pass up this one. The Obama Administration picks a major fight with the most famous journalist in America -- and we are not speaking about Bill O’Reilly or Ron Burgundy. It is rarely a good thing for political leaders to jump into hand-to-hand combat with the press. Bob Woodward has been a liberal icon for forty years. After all, Woodward and Bernstein were the principals in bringing down the all-time boogie man of the left – Richard Nixon. How can you question a man played by...

Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate? It's not an entirely unfair question. Even as Barack Obama was warning of the dreadful consequences of the budget sequester looming on March 1, he spent days away from Washington, apparently out of touch with Democratic as well as Republican congressional leaders. In the meantime, Obama fans were lobbing verbal grenades at none other than The Washington Post's Bob Woodward. His offense: He's continuing to make it clear, as he did in his book "The Price of Politics," that it was Obama's then-chief of staff and now Treasury Secretary Jack Lew...