Free Republic

"...Blame Bush? Of course, President Obama has to lead; it’s his superpower now, his armies to move, his stage. But the prior president gave every world leader, every member of Congress a reason to keep the dogs of war on a leash. The isolationists in the Republican Party are a direct result of the Bush foreign policy. A war-weary public that can turn an eye from children being gassed — or express doubt that it happened — is another poisoned fruit of the Bush years. And for the nearly 200 members of both houses of Congress who voted on the...

Administration officials have made clear that Obama isn't angling for "regime change" with any intervention, a point he touched upon as he stressed that the goals of the United States and its allies are less dramatic. He's considering "limited, tailored approaches, not getting drawn into a long conflict, not a repetition of, you know, Iraq, which I know a lot of people are worried about," he said.

NASA is committed to launching our astronauts on American spacecraft from U.S. soil as soon as possible. Since the end of our Space Shuttle Program in 2011, NASA has relied on the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) for the launch and safe return of astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) aboard its Soyuz spacecraft. While our Russian counterparts have been good partners, it is unacceptable that we don't currently have an American capability to launch our own astronauts. That’s why the Obama Administration has placed such a high priority on correcting this situation. Three years ago, the Administration...

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News. Faulk said he joined in to listen, and...

"My job this morning is to be so persuasive...that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Barack," he told a crowd of about 300 Ivy Leaguers--and, by the looks of it, a handful of locals who managed to gain access to what was supposed to be a students-only event. For one thing, under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney...

The outrage over President Barack Obama’s authorization of a nearly limitless federal dive into Americans’ phone records obscures a hiding-in-plain-sight truth about the 44th president many of his supporters have overlooked for years: For all his campaign-trail talk of running the “most transparent administration” in U.S history, Obama never promised to reverse the 43rd president’s policies on domestic anti-terrorism surveillance — and he’s been good on his word. Obama’s effort to strike what he’s repeatedly called “a balance” between personal liberty and homeland security has exposed what amounts to a split political personality: Candidate Obama often spoke about personal freedom...

Classy, eh? Andrew Kaczynski discovered this lovely eulogy from C-SPAN’s archives in which the man who wants to run Virginia said that his 83-year-old father couldn’t handle seeing a Republican President: Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, once blamed his father’s death on President George W. Bush’s election in 2000.In a May 2001 interview with C-SPAN, titled the “Life and Career of Terry McAuliffe,” the former Democratic National Committee chairman says one of the “reasons” his father, Jack, died was “he could not go into a new year knowing that a Republican was actually moving into the...

Dem VA Gov Candidate McAuliffe: My Dad Died Because of Bush by Ben Shapiro 30 May 2013, 10:21 AM PDT 5 post a comment George W. Bush has been blamed by the left for everything from hurricanes to the IRS targeting conservative non-profits. But now, it turns out that former Democratic National Committee head and current Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe blames Bush for his dad dying. Really. In an interview in May 2001, McAuliffe said that his father, Jack, died because “he could not go into a new year knowing that a Republican was actually moving into the White...

Saw it last night. Couldn't make sense of certain aspects of it until I realized they're telling the 9/11 truther plot that Bush planned everything. (Spoilers ahead with plot details revealed)

Obama to address the nation on the IRS scandal...nothing else...

"Two things need to be noted: IRS is an independent enforcement agency, which I believe, as I understand it, only contains two political appointees within it. The individual who was actually running the IRS at the time was actually an appointee from a previous administration. But separate from that, there is no question that if this activity ever took place that it was inappropriate and action should be taken. And the President would expect that it be thoroughly investigated and action would be taken."

At the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, President Obama and former President Clinton took to the podium to praise Bush – and in the process, stump for their version of immigration reform. Trying to leverage Republicans into handing over their principles by suddenly singing odes to the president he labeled the root of all evil, President Obama gushed over Bush “reaching across the aisle to unlikely allies like Ted Kennedy” with regard to his immigration reform effort. He continued: “Seven years ago, President Bush restarted an important conversation by speaking with the American people about our history...

Israel's top military intelligence official said Tuesday that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons repeatedly, and he criticized the international community for not taking tougher action against the Syrian leadership. Israel and the Syrian opposition have on multiple occasions accused President Bashar Assad's government of using chemical weapons in the country's civil war, but have not offered much in the way of evidence. Israeli Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, speaking at a security conference in Israel, gave the most definitive statement so far by an Israeli official. "To the best of our professional understanding, the regime used lethal chemical weapons...

The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews. --------------snip------------------------------ The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said Dzhokhar and his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed by police as the two attempted to avoid capture, do not appear to have been directed by a foreign terrorist organization. Rather, the officials said, the evidence so far suggests they were “self-radicalized” through Internet sites and U.S....

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Zombies seem to be everywhere these days. In the popular TV series "The Walking Dead," humans struggle to escape from a pack of zombies hungry for flesh. Prank alerts have warned of a zombie apocalypse on radio stations in a handful of states. And across the country, zombie wannabes in tattered clothes occasionally fill local parks, gurgling moans of the undead.

Three leading House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats are calling for an oversight hearing on the Federal Communications Commission's Lifeline program, a phone subsidy for the poor that has been disparagingly referred to as the "Obama phone" program. The program, which began long before President Obama took office, has been notorious for waste and abuse. The FCC enacted reforms last year aimed at trimming billions of dollars from the program, but recent reports indicate that people who are ineligible for the program are still receiving subsidies. The program gained more attention last year when conservatives seized on a viral video...

On the web-only "Overtime" segment of HBO's "Real Time" with host Bill Maher, guest Tina Brown, editor in chief of Newsweek/Daily Beast, said if President Obama were former President George W. Bush he would have been impeached by now.

Steven Chu, the retiring Secretary of Energy, is blaming the power outage at the Superbowl on the Republicans. Steven Chu had arranged to have the Superbowl completely powered by solar panels as a final act of demonstrating the reliability and feasibility of solar power. To accomplish it, he had asked the Food Stamp President to request Congress to change the day/night ratio to 80% daylight versus 20% night to support the increased light requirements. The Republicans laughed off the request and the resultant unexpected darkness rendered the solar panels inoperable. The battery and generator backups proved to be up to...

Boomer Esiason, the former Cincinnati Bengals quarterback and co-host "The NFL Today" on CBS, said Beyonce's halftime performance may have been responsible for the 34-minute blackout during Sunday's Super Bowl between Baltimore and San Francisco. “Beyonce blew the electric in the Superdome twice, I’m told, during her rehearsals during the week," Esiason said on Monday on his radio show. Esiason recalled there was a buzzing sound in the Superdome shortly after Beyonce's halftime show. On his "Boomer & Carton" radio show, Esiason said about "five or six minutes prior to" the "the breaker going," Kevin Harlan, a CBS announcer who...

President Obama blamed the recent contraction of the U.S. economy on “bad decisions in Washington” in his weekly address. The national economy shrank by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to figures released this week by the Commerce Department. The contraction was an unexpected reversal of months of modest economic growth since the end of the recession in mid-2009. Obama said in his address that the dip was the fault of “bad decisions” being made in Washington. “We began this year with economists and business leaders saying that we are poised to grow in 2013,” he said....