Free Republic

Days spent on the links, fundraisers with celebrities and house hunting have raised questions about whether President Barack Obama has "checked out" before his term is up.... Obama has already played 81 rounds of golf in the 628 days since his 2012 re-election—as many as he played in his entire first term, according to an analysis of his schedule.... By comparison, Obama's predecessor George W. Bush only played 24 rounds of golf in the first 34 months of his presidency....Bush stopped playing golf in 2003 because he didn't want to be seen as taking the war lightly. Obama has also...

July 26, 2014 The Democrats' impeachment fundraising extravaganza Byron York In an almost farcical twist on the recent political debate, the Obama White House has joined the Democratic fundraising apparatus in what appears to be a campaign to encourage Republicans to impeach the president. In the past 48 hours, first lady Michelle Obama, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, White House spokesman Josh Earnest, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and others have raised the specter of an Obama impeachment. The first lady was first to broach the subject, in a Thursday evening fundraising speech in...

What’s happening in Arizona right now is sufficient to make every conservative shudder. And I’m not talking about the border crisis. I am talking about the state’s largest regulated utility, Arizona Public Service (APS). APS is literally attempting to purchase its regulators in the state’s August 26th Republican primary (early ballots go out this week). If successful, the implications are national, especially for fledgling solar power, and crony capitalism will have a new model that will boomerang on the Republican Party. First, a little background. APS has concluded that too much energy choice via rooftop solar is bad for it....

You and I avoid visiting the doctor by eating well. Doctors like Lee Silverman carry concealed in order to care for us when we do need them. Doctors and medical professionals should be allowed to carry concealed. Last week, a psychiatrist named Dr. Lee Silverman technically broke the letter of the law by carrying concealed at work. He courageously saved innocent lives by pulling his trigger on a mad gunman before anyone else scarcely had time to dial 911. On July 24, a 49-year-old patient of Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital smuggled a loaded firearm into the Darby, Pennsylvania medical complex. Richard...

As casualties mount and calls  for a cease-fire grow, the war  in Gaza is probably close to  quitting time. But nobody should be foolish enough to think that silencing the guns will mean a return to the pre-war status quo. For Israel, a business-as-usual approach is no longer possible. The barrage of Hamas rockets cannot be tolerated again because the weapons’ increased range puts the entire population in harm’s way. But something else also happened in the last two weeks, and the shock waves are just starting to roll through Israeli society. The discovery of Hamas’ vast tunnel system, which...

I was instrumental in establishing the “Israeli National Skin Bank”, which is the largest in the world. The National Skin Bank stores skin for every day needs as well as for war time or mass casualty situations. This skin bank is hosted at the Hadassah Ein Kerem University hospital in Jerusalem where I was the Chairman of plastic surgery. This is how I was asked to supply skin for an Arab woman from Gaza, who was hospitalized in Soroka Hospital in Beersheva, after her family burned her. Usually, such atrocities happen among Arab families when the women are suspected of...

The global warming fear mongers are at it again. Twice recently they’ve been caught in the act-- not only are they lying, they're so desperate that they're starting to look ridiculous. “Three years of observations show that the Antarctic ice sheet is now losing 159 billion tonnes of ice each year,” reports the UK’s University of Leeds, “twice as much as when it was last surveyed. A team of scientists from the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, led by researchers at the University of Leeds, have produced the first complete assessment of Antarctic ice sheet elevation change.” Like...

Kristen Bell. You were so great as sassy, wisecracking teen detective in Veronica Mars. And I teared up right along with you about sloths on the Ellen Show. But while your Mary Poppins spoof to pump up support for raising the minimum wage was definitely cute and well-produced, it was a little fact-challenged. Bell’s argument, made in rhyme, boils down to: raise the minimum wage three bucks to bump all workers over the poverty line. Seems simple, doesn’t it? And appealing. Who doesn’t want fewer people living in poverty? Who could object to a “living wage?” But in politics, the...

America is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. But as we become bogged down in our many problems, I see, unfortunately, a mentality in which we are becoming increasingly a nation of the unfree – the victim – and the timid, in how we’re approaching these challenges. Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman wrote a column this week drawing attention to the latest dire projections from the Congressional Budget Office. CBO projects the nation sinking deeper and deeper into an ocean of red ink. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the Senator notes, we’ll pile...

Perfect candor wasn't Richard Nixon's strong suit. But he spoke the gospel truth when he described himself as "an introvert in an extrovert's profession." He was one of the most successful political campaigners of the 20th century: winning election to both houses of Congress, serving two terms as Dwight Eisenhower's vice president, and twice winning the White House in his own right — the second time by a 49-state landslide. Nixon spent decades in the public eye, and was indefatigable in pursuit of votes. Yet rarely has a politician seemed less suited for the political life. When he resigned the...

SIX YEARS AGO, Jeanne Shaheen was quick to attack then-Sen. John Sununu on the cost of gasoline. This was a time when New Hampshire consumers were paying around $4 a gallon. In television ads and on the stump, Shaheen argued that the senator deserved blame for not doing more to bring prices down. Her supporters even held protests at his offices to highlight her position. One of her supporters went so far as to dress up as a gas pump to follow Sen. Sununu around at events claiming he wasn’t doing enough to “help the middle-class” deal with fuel prices....

Amnesty is coming — big time.Americans need to brace themselves for a huge new wave of Obama-led lawlessness because the president is planning what a top schemer in the White House calls a “very significant” executive action on immigration after the summer. Undoubtedly this means some kind of amnesty for illegal aliens is in the works over and above what Obama has already done, the Constitution and public fury notwithstanding.Obama’s “planned executive orders” would give legal status “to another 5–6 million illegal immigrants,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, (R-Alabama). “This would effectively end immigration enforcement in America.”Leftist congressman Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) boasted...

The Palestinians long ago realized that they cannot defeat Israel militarily and opted instead to delegitimize and diplomatically isolate Israel. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has approached this goal by pushing for unilateral diplomatic recognition, a strategy facilitated by its claim to represent a peaceful approach to the conflict with Israel. That claim became far less credible once the PA (1) accepted Hamas, which the U.S. State Department has designated as a terrorist group, into a unity government, and (2) more recently embraced Hamas' violent attacks. Like the PA, Hamas also seeks to delegitimize and diplomatically isolate Israel, and uses its...

Fifteen years ago, when I was 6, my parents and I moved to the United States from Canada, where I was born. Since moving to this great country, I have attended elementary, middle and high school in Coral Springs, Fla., and I’m currently pursuing a bachelor degree in biological sciences and pre-med at Florida Atlantic University.I’m also a “non-resident alien,” meaning I was able to stay in the United States first under a visa because of my father’s job and now thanks to a student visa. But because of my status as a non-resident alien, I have paid out-of-state tuition...

In the fall of 2011, Breanne Fahs, an Arizona State University (ASU) Women’s and Gender Studies professor, taught a course called “Psychology of Gender.” As a part of the course, Fahs asked students to break into groups and engage in what she termed "menstrual activism." More specifically, students were asked to choose some aspect of cultural attitudes toward menstruation that they wanted to "improve." Before you continue reading this column, please know that I'm not making this up and I'm not hallucinating. I stopped dropping acid in the late 1980s. Some of you may be wondering what kinds of "cultural...

... Perhaps it is not the case that in the 21st-century United States we can live under something as simple and straightforward as the Code of Hammurabi. But the principle is the same: We write laws down in order that citizens may know what is permissible under the generally promulgated rules of the polity. The writing down of laws was the first step on the road from subject to citizen, and to reverse that is to do violence to more than grammatical propriety, Mr. Klein’s huffery-puffery notwithstanding. The written law was the first real constraint on the power of kings....

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The flood of Central American women and children crossing the border into the U.S. is not a refugee crisis, or a border crisis, it's an humanitarian crisis, created by the actions of U.S. citizens and inaction of their elected leaders. While children have walked hundreds of miles, risking violence along the way as they try to escape it, Congress has hardly moved a foot on U.S. immigration reform and not at all on gun control. How many of the politicians ranting about the children crossing the border have ever lifted a finger to restrict the free-low of...

Are you ready to take a little test? I’m going to ask a series of short, informational questions followed by one philosophical question, so the test is in two parts. Part One: Informational Who said this and when did he or she say it? Quote: “I remain opposed to same-sex marriage. I believe marriage is an institution for the union of a man and a woman. This has been my long-standing position, and it is not being reviewed or reconsidered.” Answer: That was former President Bill Clinton in an interview with the flagship gay publication The Advocate in 1996. Quote:...

Any parent who tells you that they have never struggled with a child most likely is playing a little loose with the truth. Every family I have ever encountered, no matter how strong or faith committed, has had a challenge that has tested their resolve -- with most surviving the test. Then there are those who have to live through unimaginable tests of character. Bret Baier was floating through life on a trajectory that few ever experience. His career was reaching an apex: he was on a path to be named as anchor of Fox News’ Special Report. He had...

In the aftermath of District of Columbia v. Heller, many residents in the nation’s capitol have been jousting with the the overbearing “Mother-knows-what’s-best-for-you” attitude about our Constitutional rights. Even though D.C.’s mayor city council deeply desire to be a state, they aren’t willing to do what a state must do when they lose a Supreme Court case. The Heller decision, and the cases that followed such as McDonald v Chicago and Moore v Madigan, made it abundantly clear that keepinging D.C. residents defenseless outside their homes was unconstitutional . . . My friend Tim McNabb and his wife are here...