Free Republic

Change.gov, the website created by the Obama transition team in 2008, has effectively disappeared sometime over the last month. While the front splash page for Change.gov has linked to the main White House website for years, until recently, you could still continue on to see the materials and agenda laid out by the administration. This was a particularly helpful resource for those looking to compare Obama's performance in office against his vision for reform, laid out in detail on Change.gov. According to the Internet Archive, the last time that content (beyond the splash page) was available was June 8th --...

Employees at the Walt Disney Co. are bracing for layoffs that are expected in the coming weeks as part of a reorganization of key operations. It is believed that the company’s movie studio will be hardest hit, particularly in the areas of home entertainment, production and marketing, according to multiple sources familiar with matter.

In a report for Thursday's NBC Today, investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff reported on plans for a $150 million renovation of the Guantanamo Bay prison still housing 166 terror detainees and sympathetically described how "despite improvements in recent years" of the facility, "the detainees' hopes of getting released were crushed when President Obama stopped talking about closing it." Isikoff noted that some of the detainees were "engaged in a hunger strike...as an attempt to regain attention." A sound bite played of new the commanding general of the prison expressing his frustration with President Obama: "Nothing in the inauguration speech about closing...

The deadline for New York Times newsroom managers to take voluntary buyouts came and went yesterday — without reaching the target of 30 takers. Now, insiders are worried that involuntary cuts — layoffs — will start. Jill Abramson, the executive editor overseeing the process, declined to comment yesterday as the deadline passed but several insiders worried that as few as a dozen raised their hands and volunteered — meaning up to 18 heads must roll.

A staggering one out of three Illinoisans today lives in or near poverty — the peak of a continued climb over three decades ... almost half of Chicago's population is living in or near poverty. In suburban Cook and Kane counties, it's nearly a third; in DuPage, McHenry and Will counties, one out of five people, and in Lake County, one out of four. Statewide, 31 percent of the African-American population lives in poverty, along with 22.6 percent of Latinos; 12 percent of Asians, and 11 percent of whites. Of the state's households headed by single women, 34.3 percent live...

PLEASE SHARE THIS LINK Facebook, Twiiter, email, especially in swing states...share it everywhere!!! http://www.hulu.com/watch/409925

Up until the viral video of Obamaphone Lady appeared (“Keep Obama in president, you know!”), the webpage at obamaphone.net was all about how President Obama was giving all the poor people free phones. As if he was paying the bill, rather than us. But now that the Obamaphone Lady has been exposing the program so effectively as a vote-buying giveaway to hate-filled societal leeches, the Obamaphone.net page has changed completely. Guess what?! Obama has nothing to do with it! As you might expect, it’s Bush’s fault, at least partially. The webpage that previously bragged about how much Obama was doing...

Barack Obama hates the poor and middle class. Thanks to Barack Obama gas prices doubled, incomes dropped, unemployment soared and the deficit nearly tripled in less than four years. The poor and middle class suffered the most.

Vice President Joe Biden said the middle class "has been buried the last four yeas" at a campaign event in Charlotte, North Carolina: "This is deadly earnest, man. This is deadly earnest," Biden said. "How they can justify--how they can justify--raising taxes when the middle class has been buried the last four years... How in Lord's name..." Of course, Barack Obama has been president the last four years, and Biden has been vice president.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The White House on Friday told government contractors worried about fiscal cliff spending cuts to hold off on warning employees about possible layoffs. The government said it would cover legal costs if contractors are forced to slash their payrolls because of the looming $109 billion in automatic cuts next year and are alleged to have violated the WARN Act. .... Defense contractors in particular have warned for months that the upcoming sequester would cost jobs in their industry. And Lockheed Martin's CEO has said publicly he may be forced to issue notice this fall of possible...

Full title: Ground Reports from the “Depression that Shall Not Be Named” — things we notice that the corrupt media won’t report that show this is indeed a Depression On my desk, just under the computer monitor, I have a little box full of slips of scrap paper. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid because the nuns who taught me in Catholic School refused to ever waste paper. Anything that comes into my home that’s blank on one side and has outlived its usefulness is drawn and quartered and spends some time as scrap paper in that...

Remember the expectations for how Barack Obama could transform U.S. relations with the Muslim world once in office? Andrew Sullivan, writing in The Atlantic, July 2007: "What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its...

Skaneatles Falls, NY -- Welch Allyn told employees at companywide meetings this morning that it plans to cut 275 jobs, or about 10 percent of its worldwide workforce. The uncertainty surrounding the future of the Obama health care package is creating turmoil in the domestic market, [Chief Executive Steve Meyer] said. Hospitals and doctor offices aren't investing in new equipment until they see how the health care issues will play out, Meyer said. Welch Allyn and other medical device makers face a new federal tax hike come January when a new 2.3 percent tax on sales of medical devices called...

The bounce expected from Barack Obama's Democratic Convention speech collapsed the following day under the reality check that the current unemployment figure is 8.1%. And 40.7% of those people have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. Those numbers tell only a small part of Obama's failure to deliver on his promises. The real unemployment figure is closer to 19%. The official count doesn't include the 8 million unemployed who have given up and stopped looking for a job, the people who have had to settle for part-time work, those who had to take lower-paying jobs that are...

Barack Obama and his campaign hoped to make ObamaCare their pitch to get younger voters more enthused about the election this year --- a perverse but not forlorn hope, as I'll explain in a minute. That may be even more true in North Carolina, where Democrats are holding their convention this week, and where Obama needs to generate the visible and noticeable excitement among college-age voters that was so apparent in 2008 and has been lacking in 2012. Peter Hamby at CNN reports why that may be a bigger problem for North Carolina college students in particular, as the costs...

Here’s the perfect character that represents Barack Obama: The “Child Catcher” from the 1968 film “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”    It’s much better than the Jim Jones analogy the pundits have used lately … “swallowing the Kool-Aid” and all that. But Obama’s redistribution of wealth from hard workers to people who aren’t paying any taxes (not to mention liberal social policy) represents change that’s probably more deadly in the long run. The Child Catcher (and Obama), are charming (wow, doesn’t Barack shine) and both are so incredibly appealing, especially from the din of the toymaker’s basement. (And aren’t we in the din...

Barack Obama was swept to the White House in 2008 by a wave of idealism and inspirational campaigning in which he encapsulated the mood of the nation with his slogans of ‘Hope’, ‘Change’ and ‘Yes we can’. Then, his message was a fundamentally positive one. Americans wanted an end to the Bush era but that almost went without saying. Obama pointed to his own vision of the country; a post-partisan, post-racial America in which gridlock in Washington was ended and common-sense centrist solutions were adopted. What a difference four years makes. Obama is campaigning ferociously for a second term –...

Sarah Palin says Americans need to dump “the status quo” presidency of Barack Obama in order to free themselves from the “hope-ium” he’s been peddling since his 2008 campaign.

Gallup is out with a poll that essentially shows that the Change thing Barack Obama promised hasn't worked out. And Hope appears to have caught a train for the coast. The survey, focused on swing states, says that a solid majority of registered voters don't think they're better off now than they were four years ago. 56% of the registered voters Gallup interviewed in swing states said they are not better off now than they were four years ago; only 40% said they are better off. So much for Change. Equally damning for the O-Team, most of them don't believe...

PRINCETON, NJ -- A majority of voters in key 2012 election swing states say they are not better off than they were four years ago; 40% say they are better off. Swing-state voters' assessments of their situation compared with 2008 have varied little since last fall.