Free Republic

Mandatory voting might be a big boon for the Democratic Party, but the idea President Obama floated this week of forcing Americans to show up at the polls and cast ballots is never going to happen, legal experts told FoxNews.com. Obama made the comment while speaking to a civic group in Cleveland on Wednesday, noting that some countries require citizens to cast ballots in key elections. "If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country," Obama said, calling it "potentially transformative." Not only that, Obama said, but universal voting would "counteract money more than anything."...

Just in from the White House: President Obama spoke today by telephone with Prime Minister Netanyahu to congratulate the Prime Minister on his partyÂ’s success in winning a plurality of Knesset seats. The President emphasized the importance the United States places on our close military, intelligence, and security cooperation with Israel, which reflects the deep and abiding partnership between both countries. The President and the Prime Minister agreed to continue consultations on a range of regional issues, including the difficult path forward to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The President reaffirmed the United StatesÂ’ long-standing commitment to a two-state solution...

Following the upset in Israel that saw Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party and its allies win a decisive victory in Tuesday’s parliamentary elections, a few postmortems have observed that Israeli voters did not merely fail to reject Bibi but they also delivered a resounding rebuke to the Obama administration. As any nigh-omnipotent being would, President Barack Obama and his administration have begun to suggest that retribution is imminent for the state of Israel, its profane government, and its idolatrous voters. The retributive justice meted out to Israel by a wounded Obama administration began well before any votes were cast...

WASHINGTON — Benjamin Netanyahu pulled off a stunning election win, but President Obama made it clear Wednesday he thinks the Israeli prime minister couldn’t be more of a loser.

Wednesday at town hall event held at the City Club of Cleveland, when asked what he would have done differently, President Barack Obama said he regretted he did not “more aggressively” warn the American public how long it was going to take for them to recover from President George W. Bush’s failures. Obama said, “I would have told myself to anticipate because the recession was so bad and so tough for so many people, that I was going to have to be more aggressive in explaining to the public how long it was going to take for the recovery to...

Obama is going to the UN to get approval instead of getting approval of the senate. Marc Thiessen said that Obama intends that UN will give it force of international law. The problem is that the Constitution trumps international law. Obama is trying to make it difficult for the next president to revoke the deal.

Targeting stagnant wages in an otherwise improving economy, President Barack Obama on Monday called on employers, educational institutions and local governments to develop a home grown high technology workforce that could help drive up higher-income employment. The effort aims to attack a stubborn downside of the current economic recovery and fill what the White House says is a gaping demand for high-tech workers in the United States. […] Obama has obtained commitments from more than 300 employers as well as local governments in 21 regions of the country to train and hire low-skilled workers for jobs in software development, network...

From President Barack Obama’s speech yesterday in Selma, Ala., celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches:[…] We’re the firefighters who rushed into those buildings on 9/11, the volunteers who signed up to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’re the gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down this bridge. (Applause.) […] That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others. (Applause.) …

Citing his failure to pass stricter gun laws in 2013, President Obama used dramatic language to discuss the gun debate on Friday.“It is hard to reduce the easy availability of guns,” Obama complained during a town hall meeting at South Carolina’s Benedict College. “As long as you can go on into some neighborhoods, and it’s easier for you to buy a firearm than it is for you to buy a book, there are neighborhoods where it’s easier for you to buy a handgun and clips than it is for you to buy a fresh vegetable,” Obama continued. “As long...

As long as you can go in some neighborhoods and it is easier for you to buy a firearm than it is for you to buy a book, there are neighborhoods where it is easier for you to buy a handgun and clips than it is for you to buy a fresh vegetable, as long as that’s the case, we’re going to continue to see unnecessary violence,” Obama said in a response to a question at the town hall meeting at Benedict College.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-Is0PL7jZg

The Bethlehem-based news agency Ma’an has cited a Kuwaiti newspaper report Saturday, that US President Barack Obama thwarted an Israeli military attack against Iran's nuclear facilities in 2014 by threatening to shoot down Israeli jets before they could reach their targets in Iran. According to Al-Jarida, the Netanyahu government took the decision to strike Iran some time in 2014 soon after Israel had discovered the United States and Iran had been involved in secret talks over Iran’s nuclear program and were about to sign an agreement in that regard behind Israel's back. The report claimed that an unnamed Israeli minister...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Friday, President Barack Obama spoke at the portrait unveiling ceremony for outgoing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, which led to the commander-in-chief breaking into tears that he wiped away as he finished his remarks. The president said, “Having good men in a position of power and authority, who are willing to fight for what is right, that is a rare thing, a powerful thing....

While I normally focus on jaw-dropping examples of hypocrisy by politicians, I realize that our beloved leaders also can be absurdly brazen in their exaggerations, deceptions, and prevarications. But sometimes you can’t help but be shocked by their chutzpah.Sort of like the time back in 2010 that a Greek politician issued an ultimatum that his country should get a giant bailout without taking the necessary steps to rein in bureaucratic bloat.But nothing compares with Obama’s recent claim that his opponents are trying to “bamboozle” voters. President Obama, in a fiery speech to Democrats Friday, accused Republicans of trying to “bamboozle...

We hear a lot about the United States' Judeo-Christian heritage, but according to President Obama, "Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding." That's what the president told a White House conference on "countering violent extremism" on Wednesday.

In an interview with Ezra Klein of Vox, President Obama said traditional market forces that used to redistribute income are failing and the time for government to do it instead has arrived. The interview, which ran today, was conducted January 23. Touting what he referred to as inclusive capitalism, Obama made the case for what actually sounds a lot like socialism. So part of our job is, what can government do directly through tax policy? What we’ve proposed, for example, in terms of capital gains — that would make a big difference in our capacity to give a tax break...

The Homeland Security Department has set up hotlines for illegal immigrants who believe their rights under President Obama’s amnesty policy have been violated. In a memo announcing the customer complaint line, U.S. Customs and Border Protection asked illegal immigrants to “please tell us about your experience” if they believe they were treated “contrary to the new DHS enforcement priorities.” The department alerted “stakeholders” last week of three complaint hotlines: one for CBP, which oversees the Border Patrol; one for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles immigration laws in the nation’s interior; and one for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services,...

Since 2009, the Obama administration issued roughly 5.5 million work permits to non-citizens beyond what Congress has authorized, according to recently-released documents that critics of U.S. policy say reveals a "shadow" or "parallel" immigration system stifling wages and taking jobs from Americans. The information was obtained by the conservative-leaning Center for Immigration Studies through a Freedom of Information Act request and has prompted Alabama GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions to call for an investigation. "This request has unearthed the operation of a shadow immigration system previously unknown to the American public," said Sessions, one of Capitol Hill's most outspoken critics of...

If you were to engage in a debate about religious violence with your average high school senior, you might encounter the claim that the modern scourge of religiously-inspired barbarity attributable to those who consider themselves Muslims is no historical anomaly. They might contend that the Christian world engaged in its own form of fundamentalism at the turn of the first millennium when the medieval European world embarked on a campaign to liberate the Middle Eastern territories conquered by Muslim armies. Having erected a dubious moral equivalency, your interlocutor is likely to then insist that it is hypocritical for Westerners to...

At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama reminded attendees that violence rooted in religion isn’t exclusive to Islam, but has been carried out by Christians as well. ~snip~ “Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”