Free Republic

<p>With final losses from the auto industry bailout near $15 billion, President Obama is using fuzzy math to claim that taxpayers lost no money on his administration’s portion of the rescue program, analysts say.</p> <p>On the heels of the Treasury Department’s announcement Monday that it was selling its final shares of General Motors Co. acquired during the 2008-09 bailout, Mr. Obama seems more intent on claiming credit and avoiding blame than providing taxpayers with a final accounting of the bailout that also included Chrysler LLC and GM’s financing arm, Ally Financial.</p>

Ben Affleck is smart enough to know an actor taking up political causes can shatter the illusion movies are meant to conjure. Yet the Argo director and avowed liberal still sticks his foot in his mouth during a new interview with Playboy Magazine by insulting half of his audience. Seems he's not sure he can be friends with anyone who pulls the lever repeatedly for GOP politicians. The future Dark Knight (Affleck plays Batman in the upcoming Man of Steel sequel) said he can't help but consider an actor's politics while watching movies, and he takes that information to heart....

Washington’s $49.5 billion bailout of General Motors saved at least 1.2 million jobs, protected hundreds of thousands of pensions and earned about $40 billion in tax collections, turning what some have dubbed a poor investment into a whopping bang for Uncle Sam, according to a new report. The bottom line, according to the Center for Automotive Research study heralded by GM: When the full picture of what was at stake is considered, including the potential for millions to be put out of work, the government actually made out big time. And when bailed-out Chrysler is included, the study found that...

Flanked by dutiful reporters Barack Obama exclaimed to the American public on December 3, 2013, that as long he is President, the law, (ObamaCare) will not be repealed. Adding defiance to the legacy of lies and lawlessness raises the all-important question – has the authority of the legislative and judicial branches of our government been nullified and concentrated from henceforth in the president? Isn’t that a dictatorship? Entire websites are engaged in compiling accurate lists of Obama’s lies, but since everything he says is on public record we already know that it wouldn’t require a forensic expert to prove he...

Fact: The IRS targeted conservative and tea party groups requesting tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. That’s a fact. Congress held hearings — embarrassing hearings. Three top Internal Revenue Service officials resigned. No heads rolled, but for the Obama administration, and the lawless Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., that amounted to a major scandal. Even White House spokesman Jay “Circus” Carney called the IRS‘ actions “inappropriate.” Fact. But President Obama, in an interview last week with sycophant Chris Matthews, now says the entire scandal was made up by the media. “When we do things right,...

When the Pelosi-Reid-Obama troika triumphantly celebrated cramming through the ACA (Affordable Care Act) over majority sentiment, they crowed that this was the president's signature achievement and ACA soon took on the name of its creator, ObamaCare. Though not one of them, nor any of the Democrats in the Senate who voted it into law uni-partisanly had read it, they all assured us that we'd grow to really, really like it. Boy, were they wrong. We've paid almost a billion dollars to a Canadian firm whose vice-president is a college buddy of Michelle Obama's from their black radical days at Princeton...

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) toNew Orleans TV station WAFB. "The Affordable Care Act, as I said, the bill itself has got very good concepts and yes, I would support it again, But, that doesn't excuse the poor roll out of what should have happened. There should have not been a glitch in the software."

House Speaker John Boehner’s new pro-amnesty advocate immigration staffer Rebecca Tallent was heard on national television earlier this year admitting that she has no faith in American workers. “The unemployment rate, and this is definitely a situation that’s different than when we addressed this the last time in 2006 and 2007, the last time we tried to do immigration reform, the [un]employment rate is much higher now,” Tallent said in an appearance on C-SPAN in March 2013, while working for the Bipartisan Policy Center and pushing for the Senate to develop the “Gang of Eight” bill. “But I think that...

In his first term, Obama managed to get his paws on health care, banking, energy, student loans, the auto business, and more. Now he has his sights set on your 401(k). The left has had its eye on retirement savings for years, but so far takeover attempts have been rebuffed. One egregious attempt was the proposal, following the 2010 financial crisis, to "safeguard" retirement savings by requiring that they be rolled over into Treasury bonds. Had this legislation succeeded, it would have appropriated all or part of the retirement savings of millions of Americans. The funds would have been used...

History will record that on Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2013, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary met to consider the impeachment of Barack Hussein Obama. They didn’t use that word, of course. Republican leaders frown on such labeling because it makes the House majority look, well, crazy. It is, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said from the dais, “the word that we don’t like to say in this committee, and I’m not about to utter here in this particular hearing.” One of the majority’s witnesses, Georgetown law professor Nicholas Rosenkranz, encouraged the Republicans not to be so shy. “I...

Their own “Gated Community”: - Everyone treated equally - Free food - Free medical / healthcare - Only the police and guards have guns Liberal Paradise

The Growth and Opportunity Project, aka “the autopsy,” was heralded as the Republican Party’s clear-eyed assessment of its 2012 presidential defeat. Autopsies are done on dead things, and ever since its March 2013 release, the GOP has done everything possible to stay dead. The Republican Party is dead to African Americans. Not that there was much of pulse to begin with. Romney won 6 percent of the black vote to 93 percent for Obama, which isn’t surprising since Romney was looking to unseat the nation’s first black president. But it is also not surprising considering all of the voter suppression...

Barack Obama, who has spent a career inveighing against the politicians in Washington, is thinking of staying there even after his second term expires, ostensibly because he doesn’t want his 12-year-old daughter, Sasha, to leave Sidwell Friends School. Obama has often intoned, “It is good to be out of Washington.” But when interviewed by Barbara Walters of ABC News this week, Obama and Michelle Obama averred they might stay beyond their call of duty in order to let Sasha graduate. “We gotta make sure that she’s doing well . . . until she goes off to college,” Obama said, “Sasha...

In The Washington Post, Jonathan Zimmerman, a history professor from NYU, has written an article claiming that all of America’s problems would be soloved–GET THIS–if only we would allow Barack Obama to run for a third term! He wants to amend the Constitution and abolish presidential term limits. Zimmerman writes that Obama–whose approval rating is at an all time low of 37%–would be much more effective at governing if he could stand for re-election in 2016 because then he’d be less likely to “ignore” the will of the American people. “It’s time to put that power back where it belongs,”...

Here’s one of those impossible logical conundrums, of the sort that Captain Kirk could use to short-circuit a killer robot: who’s lying, Barack Obama or Iran? Because Iran says the Obama White House is lying about their nuclear weapons agreement. And their charges are quite plausible, especially to Americans who have grown wearily familiar with the Obama brand of dishonest politics. From the Washington Free Beacon: The White House released a multi-page fact sheet containing details of the draft agreement shortly after the deal was announced. However, Iranian foreign ministry official on Tuesday rejected the White House’s version of the...

As President Obama said, they got away with it. Harry Reid and the Democrat-controlled Senate got away with changing the Senate’s rules so that they can shove through anything they want without having to worry about Republicans filibustering against it. Just a few short years ago, then-Senator Obama spoke forcefully against doing what Senate Majority Leader Reid (D-NV) just did. When Republicans talked about a similar rule change in 2005, Obama said (emphasis added): I urge my Republican colleagues not to go through with changing these rules. In the long run, it is not a good result for either party....

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on a conference call organized by Karl Rove’s Crossroads organization for large donors and their advisers on Oct. 30 that the Tea Party movement, in his view, is a “nothing but a bunch of bullies” that he plans to “punch … in the nose.” On the call, according to a donor who was on it, McConnell personally named Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) as Tea Party conservatives he views as problematic for him. “The bulk of it was an attack on the Tea Party in general, Cruz in particular,” the source,...

The Obama administration will delay by one month next year’s ObamaCare enrollment period, pushing what promises to be broader and even more painful disruptions to existing policies past midterm elections. With Democrats poised to lose control of the Senate, this could be a very big deal. With new regulations set to ban more policies and the prospect of millions of Americans being dumped from their employer-based health insurance, next fall promises to be a painful season for ObamaCare implementation. But by delaying the start of the enrollment season, the White House may be able to push some of the outrage...

An illegal alien who sneaked across the porous U.S./Mexico border from El Salvador to go on an MS-13 gang crime spree and murder rampage has been sentenced to life in a U.S. prison. Carlos Ortega (aka “Silencio”), a former MS-13 leader (Sitios Locos Salvatruchas clique of La Mara Salvatrucha), was sentence to life in prison after his March 21, 2013 convictions for racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, murder, assault with dangerous weapons, and related firearms and conspiracy offenses, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Ortega was a member of MS-13 in El Salvador. He illegally entered the U.S. and embarked on what...

The White House on Tuesday threatened to veto two Republican-backed energy bills in the House of Representatives, which aim to reduce federal regulation of energy production in the United States. If the President were presented with either bill "his senior advisors would recommend that he veto" the legislation, the White House said. H.R. 2728, authored by Texas Republican Bill Flores, would restrict the ability of the Bureau of Land Management, part of the Department of Interior, to regulate hydraulic fracturing (fracking) on Federal and Indian lands. BLM oversees oil and gas operations, including fracking, on over 700 million acres of...