Free Republic

 As of August 12, 2014, Obama has taken 20 "vacations" lasting 2 to 15 days. He has spent all or part of 129 days on “vacation.” And the president has made 33 visits to the official Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, totaling all or part of 84 days. (Knoller does not count Camp David trips as “vacation.”) Obama’s morning round of golf on Tuesday brought his total since January 2009 to 186, with 22 of them on Martha’s Vineyard. At this point in George W. Bush’s presidency, he had taken 58 trips to his Prairie Chapel ranch near Crawford,...

A president’s job is tough. And that goes for any president. Aside from being in charge of an organization that employs millions of people and is responsible for the expenditure of trillions of dollars, he is the Commander in Chief. And it is in that area that no doubt weighs most heavily on presidential shoulders. The decision to send young men into battle where you know for an absolute certainty that some will not return must be an extraordinarily difficult decision to make, even when, as in say the D-day landings or Afghanistan, the clarity of the line between good...

There is an idiom, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” or as George W. Bush said, “fool me once…you fooled me, can’t get fooled again.” However one puts it, the proverbial definition is that after being tricked once, one should be very wary so a person cannot trick one again. Republican warmongers certainly understand they fooled Americans in 2003 and lied through their teeth to take the country to war against a sovereign nation with no connection to al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, or the terror attacks on 911. Now, they are back again lying,...

With prospects for major legislation nonexistent, Obama is looking to plant seeds that he hopes his successors can cultivate.President Obama spent much of his first term fending off criticism that he hadn’t done enough for the black community, and that he wasn’t paying enough attention to Africa, where his father was born and where expectations soared after his election. In his second term, he’s making up for lost time. Earlier this year, he launched his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative aimed at boosting opportunities for boys and young men of color, and this week, he hosted 50 heads of state from...

’What do you think about Dr. Ben Carson as the GOP candidate for president in 2016?” Republican friends frequently ask me, to which my response is: “Did he win World War II?” In 1952, General Dwight David Eisenhower became the last president of the United States to be elected without first holding a lower elective office. Carson’s path from a very tough childhood to the head of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University is certainly impressive. (In a political field where many Ph.D’s insist on being called “doctor” and few office holders wow you with their intelligence, Carson stands out by...

According to speculation by the Daily Mail on Friday, Nicolle Wallace, a liberal Republican who worked on John McCain's 2008 campaign and famously feuded with Sarah Palin, has been selected to fill the "conservative" seat on ABC's The View. The rumor comes a day after the producer of the left-wing Rachel Maddow Show was hired to run the ABC chat show. Daily Mail writer Topper Toussaint claimed, "Commentator S.E. Cupp was also considered, but clashed with Rosie [O'Donnell]." He added, "'Rosie told her that her approach was just like Elisabeth Hasselbeck, which did not sit well,' according to the show...

Here’s how bad things are between Washington and New Delhi these days: It’s news that Kerry even made the trip. Why this reluctant partnership might be best left to wither.So low is the bar in U.S.-India relations right now that the best thing that can be said about John Kerry’s two-day hop-over to New Delhi was that he went there at all. A relationship that burst into true blossom under George W. Bush, one that held for many Americans the promise of a mold-breaking alliance for the 21st century, lies shabbily dormant. Indeed, the only memorable episode in Kerry’s visit...

Not only did Democrats try to impeach George W. Bush during his presidency, they did so aggressively. While many have laughingly claimed that efforts to impeach President Obama are racist, or have blatantly lied by saying that there was no effort to impeach George W. Bush; history tells quite a different story. One of the most egregious statements was made by Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who said in part, We did not seek an impeachment of President Bush, because as an executive, he had his authority. President Obama has the authority. Lee, who co-sponsored legislation to impeach George W....

President Barack Obama was halfway out the door, joking with his counterparts in the press that he had not yet been wished a happy birthday, when a chorus of uniform questions from the assembled reporters forced him to address the recent admission that CIA Director John BrennanÂ’s intelligence agency had improperly spied on the Senate.On Thursday, the CIA admitted that intelligence operatives tapped into computers linked to staffers with the Senate Intelligence Committee in March. Those computers contained documents pertaining to an ongoing investigation into the agencyÂ’s Bush-era enhanced interrogation techniques. The report, which is set to be declassified,...

While speaking out on the House floor yesterday against the House GOP lawsuit against President Obama, Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said the move is a “veil for impeachment.” Jackson Lee also took the opportunity to point out that “We [Democrats] did not seek an impeachment of President Bush” when he was in office. Really? Not only did some Democrats seek an impeachment of President Bush, but Rep. Jackson Lee co-sponsored the bill? Classic!

Instead of tossing out a lot of comments about how dumb Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee is, I’ll just link to this. Sheila Jackson-Lee might be the dumbest person in congress. She might even be the dumbest person outside congress. If there were ever a global championship for idiots, the country could send her there. And leave her there; because unlike Lassie, she wouldn’t be able find her way back on her own. In February, Congress was debating federal spending. And Sheila Jackson-Lee got up to make her contribution denouncing a Pepsi commercial as racist. Other things that Jackson-Lee has denounced...

Hot Air Presidential Survey After you click Submit the page may appear blank, but there should be a confirmation message at the top of the page. If you scroll up and see it, your votes have been received... ---snip--- ***** Polls to FReep on candidates for 2016 and issues. Please hurry, they usually close these pretty quickly,

Forgive South Carolina voters if the looming 2016 presidential contest is giving them a strong sense of deja vu. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is leading the Democratic pack among this state's voters, according to a new Palmetto Politics poll, while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is receiving the most love here on the GOP side. "I think it's hilarious," College of Charleston political scientist Gibbs Knotts said. "This is not 1992 all over again, but we've still got Bush and Clinton. Of course, we're talking about a different Bush and a different Clinton." About one-third of 1,000 likely...

Remember when former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the consummate “moderate Republican,” shocked everyone by calling immigration an “act of love?” It looks like he’s changed his mind. On Thursday, he called for nearly all of the 50,000-plus immigrants in limbo on our Southwest border to be sent home. That is, “except for those deserving few who may demonstrate a true case for asylum.” Deserving few? Someone should ask Bush which of the children fleeing impoverished and violent countries (where they have a 1 in 15 chance of being murdered) like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras “deserve” to be sent home....

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who said that illegal immigration is an "act of love" that should not "rile" up Americans, now believes most of the illegal immigrant children from Central America should be sent back. But he also called for Congress to use the border crisis to pass comprehensive amnesty legislation. -snip- But he also urged Congress to "demonstrate leadership" on the border crisis by passing amnesty legislation. "Congress should not use the present crisis as an excuse to defer comprehensive immigration reform," Bush said. Bush, who has pushed amnesty legislation while considering a 2016 presidential run, called for...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) wants Democrats to “use this crisis” on the border to pass comprehensive immigration legislation — just as immigration hawks fear they’ll do. “The most important thing that we can do to use this crisis as an opportunity is to pass comprehensive immigration reform,” Pelosi told reporters in Texas while discussing the border crisis. Of the House Republican Working Group’s proposal, she said she needed to see “what the amount is, hopefully with no offsets, hopefully with no language that changes immigration.”

Halper believes that the Clintons’ effort to in effect keep their friends close while turning enemies into friends has been a masterful and hugely overlooked part of the rebuilding of their machine: "What has been little understood in the past decade, from 2001 to the present, is how successfully the Clintons undertook a systematic, comprehensive, and sustained effort to win over leaders in the GOP, especially figures who were once the biggest critics. In return, both Clintons were able to develop a bipartisan, statesmanlike image that had eluded them through eight years in the White House."

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) HBO supernatural drama takes aim at conservatives in bloody takedown. HBO's “True Blood” took another stab at conservatives on Sunday's episode when it left a bloody mess of an event held in Ted Cruz's honor. It was exactly what the doctor ordered for an ailing Eric (Alexander Skarsgard), who has been infected with the dangerous virus that's killing vampires. He was all ready to meet the true death until his progeny Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten) informed him that Sarah Newlin, part of the group manufacturing the virus, was still alive and on the run. That was enough for...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The head of Iraq's largest church said on Sunday that Islamic State militants who drove Christians out of Mosul were worse than Mongol leader Genghis Khan and his grandson Hulagu who ransacked medieval Baghdad. Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako led a wave of condemnation for the Sunni Islamists who demanded Christians either convert, submit to their radical rule and pay a religious levy or face death by the sword. At the Vatican, Pope Francis decried what he said was the persecution of Christians in the birthplace of their faith, while U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the...

Anyone who believes that Hillary Clinton will not run for President in 2016 should examine her recently-published book, Hard Choices, which in places reads like a campaign manifesto. The 600 pages of text offer much more, but on myriad domestic and international issues readers can readily predict her positions as president, even beyond what she has already indicated as first lady, senator from New York, and Barack Obama’s first secretary of state. With the escalating violence in Israel and Gaza, for example, her chapter on the Middle East indicates in detail how she dealt with key regional leaders in earlier...