Free Republic

Obama encountered setbacks to two of his most cherished foreign-policy projects on Thursday, as he failed to achieve a trade deal that undergirds his strategic pivot to Asia and the Middle East peace process suffered a potentially irreparable breakdown.

...Charlotte’s father, Ben Bell, has been looking for a policy job for more than two years and recently has been trying to get a job with the Obama administration. He worked on the Obama campaign in 2012....

Police armed with truncheons, shields and a fire hose clashed with more than 100 left-wing activists who rallied at the U.S. Embassy in Manila on Wednesday to oppose a visit by President Barack Obama and an expected security pact that would increase the American military presence in the Philippines. Some of the protesters carried paper U.S. flags with the message: "Obama not welcome."

Finmeccanica is proposing that the OTO Melara 76mm gun be configured onto the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship as part of an effort to improve the lethality and survivability of the shallow-water , multi-mission vessel. The naval artillery piece would replace the existing 57mm weapon now on board the LCS, per the existing proposal, said Eric Lindenbaum, vice president of Navy and Maritime programs for DRS Technologies. OTO Melara and DRS Technologies are both subsidiaries for the Italian defense company, Finmeccanica SpA. Amidst an ongoing effort to develop alternative proposals for a new small surface combatant, Navy officials are busy exploring...

As a scheduled part of their home opener, the Atlanta Braves set off fireworks before their game against the New York Mets on Tuesday. As an unscheduled part of their home opener, the fireworks set fire to the American flag that flies above the Braves Vision video screen in center field. "It happened because of new pyrotechnics," Braves spokesperson Beth Marshall said. "For the first time, they put pyrotechnics on Braves Vision. One of the pyrotechnics flew at the flag and lit it on fire." Marshall added that the material of the flag is flame retardant, so it went out...

A fed-up Attorney General Eric Holder is accusing congressional critics of launching "unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly and divisive" attacks on him and the Obama administration. During a speech to the National Action Network in New truthYork on Wednesday lauding the organization's effort to advance racial equality, a heated Holder went a little off-script. "Forget about me [specifically]. Look at the way the attorney general of the United States was treated yesterday by a House committee," Holder told the crowd. "What attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What president has ever had to deal with that...

John Kerry Defends His Diplomatic Efforts: ‘I May Fail – I Don’t Care’ By Ali Weinberg Apr 8, 2014 4:03pm Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State John Kerry defiantly defended his diplomatic efforts, saying that while ambitious, they were better than doing nothing. While the purpose of Tuesday’s hearing was to pick through the State Department’s budget, it was Kerry’s record that came under scrutiny as his old colleagues on the committee accused him of taking on too many responsibilities with too few results. “I think you’re about to hit the trifecta,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.,...

US employers added 192,000 jobs in March; unemployment rate unchanged at 6.7 percent.

SNIP-- Support it or not, you cannot look at ObamaCare and call it anything but a huge, historic mess....utterly unique in the annals of American lawmaking and govt administration.....then-Democratic speaker Pelosi blithely, mindlessly said---but in a way forthcomingly—that we have to pass it to find out what's in it. .... an historic admission that she was fighting hard for something she herself didn't understand, but she had every confidence regulators and bureaucratic interpreters would tell her in time what she'd done. ....for the next three years Democrats would carry on like blithering idiots making believe they'd read the bill and...

White House officials sought valuable primetime air for a rare, impromptu Tuesday night address to tout the accomplishment of signing up more than 7 million people under the Affordable Care Act. But network officials refused to make the kind of accommodation they did previously for the announcement that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, for instance, and Obama was left instead cutting into the much smaller audiences of Ellen and other daytime shows. Three sources familiar with the request confirmed the White House asked for the primetime slot in their effort both to emphasize a bright moment following the challenging...

Welcome to America's hottest talk line! Ladies, to talk to interesting and exciting guys free, press one now. Guys, hot ladies are waiting to talk to you. Press two to connect free now." That was what some callers to California's Affordable Care Act Health Exchange website heard when they called to try and sign up for health insurance. Apparently, the number that was posted on the website had one digit wrong. As a result, customers who were rushing to sign up for Obamacare on the last day of open enrollment, ended up being offered a chance to talk dirty to...

On March 14 Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh told members of the House Armed Services committee that there was no war on religious liberty. “The single biggest frustration I’ve had in this job is the perception that somehow there is religious persecution inside the United States Air Force,” the general told lawmakers. “It is not true.” Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) told me the Air Force seems to be the worst offender when it comes to attacks on religious liberty. If that’s true, perhaps Gen. Welsh could explain why a Bible was removed from a POW/MIA Missing Man...

[B.O.] chooses Florida, Arizona, Louisville and Michigan State for his Final Four picks.

U.S. President Barack Obama has caused confusion after claiming yesterday that Kosovo held a UN-assisted referendum for self-determination – misleading people over the true origins of the country. The U.S. President used the example to hit out against Russia's annexation of Crimea, but experts have noted that no such referendum took place, and implied that Obama's "incredible mistake" should elicit a retraction or correction from the White House.

Chuck Hagel will travel to the Pacific next week to convene a meeting of defense ministers from Asia against the backdrop of the massive regional response to the loss of the Malaysian jetliner. Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said Thursday that Hagel will also stop in Japan and travel for the first time as defense chief to China and Mongolia. He visited Japan late last year. Kirby said the expansive search for Flight 370 is an example of nations in the region coming together to deal with a disaster, adding that the U.S. is looking for ways to...

Negative views of President Obama have hit a new high, according to a poll. The AP-GfK poll shows 59 percent of Americans now disapprove of Obama -- a point higher than the previous high set in December. Obama's approval rating stands at 41 percent. That's the second-lowest figure the poll has ever found.

Senate minority leader and Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell is in the midst of perhaps the greatest electoral challenge of his career, fending off a Tea Party primary challenger from his right and a charismatic and well-connected Democratic challenger from his left. He’s fighting off charges of being corrupt, a D.C. insider, and out-of-touch with everyday Kentuckians. All of this makes the fact that his latest campaign ad features a clip of Duke’s men’s basketball team winning the NCAA championship — instead of Kentucky, as is clearly intended to be the case — even more embarrassing. The mistake is incredibly brief,...

Sarah Palin believes flight 370 flew directly to heaven... how is she a senator? — DIMV (@Freshselective) March 21, 2014 The Daily Currant strikes again. The website, which calls itself “The Global Satirical Newspaper of Record,” last week claimed that Sarah Palin told Sean Hannity she believes Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 “accidentally flew too high and got stuck in heaven.” The story was cross posted to other non-satire sites and managed to fool quite a few.

In the poorest state in the nation, where supper is fried, bars allow smoking, chronic disease is rampant and doctors are hard to come by, Obamacare rolls into town in a lime green bus. It took some real convincing by the Obama administration and a leap of faith by one state Republican official to get one of the nation’s largest insurance companies — Humana — to set up shop across Mississippi. Virtually no other insurer was willing to do so, discouraged by the acute health needs here and most elected officials’ outright hostility to the law....

An anniversary passed this week that went almost completely unremarked — and for good reason. March 17th marked the three-year anniversary of the UN Security Council resolution imposing a no-fly zone over Libya to stop the Moammar Qaddafi regime from attacking rebel-held Benghazi and Ajdabiya, and the three-year anniversary on the 19th of the NATO war on Libya. French, British, and American planes began bombarding the Qaddafi regime, an air war that would continue for months — while Barack Obama refused to request Congressional approval for it. Later, Obama would claim that Libya represented the smart model of Western intervention....