Free Republic

President Barack Obama's trip to Africa later this month could be one of the most expensive of his tenure, costing the government as much as $100 million. According to a confidential internal planning document obtained by The Washington Post, hundreds of Secret Service agents will be dispatched to secure facilities in Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania, which the first family will visit from June 26 to July 3. A Navy aircraft carrier or amphibious ship, with fully staffed medical trauma center, will be stationed offshore in case of an emergency. In addition, military cargo planes will airlift in 56 support...

The White House sought to pressure House Republicans into a budget conference with the Senate on Monday, warning President Obama would veto any 2014 spending bills based on the House GOP budget. In Statements of Administration Policy, the White House said Obama would veto all spending bills unless they pass Congress "in the context of an overall budget framework that supports our recovery and enables sufficient investments in education, infrastructure, innovation and national security for our economy to compete in the future." That language suggests the administration, like congressional Democrats, wants to use the conference to turn off the automatic...

Have they no shame! Another month, another lavish vacation for the Obama clan. No, I don’t begrudge the first family a little down time, but considering our current economic situation, their choice of venues is just plain tacky. Ads by Google Online CMBA from FIU $10,000 scholarships available. AACSB accredited. 100% Online. cmba.fiu.edu Say No to Obama's Amnesty Don't let Barack Obama give amnesty to illegals. Sign petition! Townhall.com/No-Amnesty Obama won the 2008 election, not because he was the most qualified, but because the populous largely believed he cared about them. It was the same in 2012. Despite a dismal...

In the first three months of the year, members of the first family have been on three vacations, averaging a vacation a month. And now it's being reported that the first daughters are on a spring break vacation in the Bahamas. Obama Photo AP / Steven Senne The Obamas began the new year in Hawaii. "President Obama departed Hawaii this morning for Washington, after spending NINE days vacationing with family and friends in his native state. Here’s a quick look at how he spent his vacation," ABC reported on January 6, 2013. "Obama played FIVE rounds of golf with SEVEN...

In the first three months of the year, members of the first family have been on three vacations, averaging a vacation a month. And now it's being reported that the first daughters are on a spring break vacation in the Bahamas.

Traffic alert: There's a massive clown car pileup in the Beltway. And with the White House court jesters of sequester behind the wheel, no one is safe. Fiscal sanity, of course, is the ultimate victim. President Obama has been warning America that if Congress allows mandatory spending "cuts" of a piddly-widdly 2 percent to go into effect this week, the sky will fall. The manufactured crisis of "sequestration" was Obama's idea in the first place. But that hasn't stopped the Chicken Little in Chief from surrounding himself with every last teacher, senior citizen and emergency responder who will be catastrophically...

(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama won’t have to worry about his paycheck if the spending sequestration included in the Budget Control Act that he signed into law in 2011 begins taking effect this Friday.

The U.S. Department of State once again has resumed its search for providers of high-end crystal stemware and other tabletop glassware, only this time the estimated cost has leaped back up a couple of million. The estimated price tag previously was $5.4 million, but had dipped to $3.5 million at the time of the initial report. That estimate has jumped to $5 million--though State now assures taxpayers that it will not spend more than $2 million on the glasses in any given year over the five year life of the contract.

President Obama will propose a 1 percent pay raise for federal civilian employees in the administration’s fiscal 2014 budget proposal, the Washington Post has learned. At the same time, the House plans to vote soon on legislation that would extend the current freeze on basic pay rates through the end of calendar 2013. The freeze was originally set for two years and scheduled to expire at the end of last year, but it was extended until a temporary budget measure expires next month. When the measure expires, federal employees will receive a 0.5 percent raise for the remainder of 2013,...

"Already some in Congress are trying to undo these automatic spending cuts. My message to them is simple: No," Mr. Obama said from the White House briefing room Monday evening. "I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending." November 21, 2011

Obama: 'My Goal Is to Improve My Gene Pool' 10:26 AM, Feb 7, 2013 • By DANIEL HALPER President Barack Obama kicked off this morning's prayer breakfast by saying that his "goal is to improve [his] gene pool." "Mark, thank you for that introduction," Obama said, according to the White House transcript, thanking Democratic senator Mark Pryor. "I thought he was going to talk about my gray hair. (Laughter.) It is true that my daughters are gorgeous. (Laughter.) That's because my wife is gorgeous. (Applause.) And my goal is to improve my gene pool." Obama went on to thank the...

President Obama and his wife just closed on a mansion in Hawaii and plan to move – in January 2013! Barack and Michelle Obama will be moving to Hawaii in January of 2013. They have just purchase an estate in close proximity to land owned by the University of Hawaii, where the Obama presidential library and “political center” will be located. The estate is valued at $40 million. This story was broken by Hillbuzz.org . Reports out of Washington are that Barack and Michelle are counting on a loss in November and are anxious to return to Hawaii to start...

President Obama has spent far more lavishly on White House state dinners than previous chief executives, including nearly $1 million on a 2010 dinner for Mexico's president, according to documents obtained by The Washington Examiner. Presidents have long used formal dinners to court foreign heads of state and to dish out fine food and wine to reward political, financial and show business celebrities and supporters. But current and former government officials said the documents obtained by The Examiner point to an unprecedented upsurge in White House spending on such events. The Obama extravaganza two years ago for Mexican President Felipe...

Air Force One turned to Air Force Waaaaahhhh yesterday in Atlanta. Barack Obama tied up lunch time traffic in the Peach State once again while he milked it for money. During a public speech, President Obama formally abdicated his role as Commander in Chief to become Chief Victim. Those dirty Republicans are outspending him, he cried to a sympathetic audience. In fact, this may be the first time Barack Obama has ever been outspent and he just can’t handle rejection. In 2008, the Annenberg Public Policy Center reported that Barack Obama outspent John McCain 3 to 1 and “raised more...

The White House is trying to recast president Obama’s image- again. This time he's an eager reformer just trying to do away with all the red tape getting in the way of the economy. Since the class warfare thing didn’t work, the Sandra Fluke thing alienated the very voters- Catholics- who provided Obama his margin of victory in 2008 and Americans are becoming disenchanted with a president who, honest-to-goodness, thinks everything is “fine”- except that taxes are too low- why not try casting Obama in a part wholly and utterly unbelievable? Obama wants to be known as the president who...

On Wednesday the Department of Energy began financing solar power installation research with a $2 million award to Solar Mosaic. The solar energy research company has former Obama “green jobs” czar Van Jones listed as an advisor. It also employed Rebuild the Dream, Jones’ firm, to do its public relations work. The DOE’s grant money will be distributed to nine companies in four states. Solar Mosaic received the most money, four times the amount of most other grants. Jones resigned his post in the Obama administration three years ago amid controversy stemming from his past remarks. Before working in the...

<p>NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The average American family’s net worth dropped almost 40% between 2007 and 2010, according to a triennial study released Monday by the Federal Reserve.</p>

It’s becoming increasingly clear why Attorney General Eric Holder is so reluctant to hand over subpoenaed documents to Congressional investigators. Today, House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) wrote Holder to discuss some wiretaps related to Operation Fast and Furious, the deadly Obama Administration program that put American guns into the hands of Mexican cartel killers. Holder has always maintained that he and his top deputies were unaware of the outrageous methods employed in Fast and Furious, which involved “walking” American guns across the border, ostensibly to trap cartel bigwigs with firearms charges. No serious effort was made to track...

America’s millionaire population declined last year for the first time since the financial crisis, according to a new report.

The White House says President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama hold assets worth between nearly $2.6 million and nearly $8.3 million. The White House released financial disclosure documents Tuesday showing the couple's assets for last year. In 2010 the first family's assets were valued between $1.8 million and nearly $12 million. The disclosure form requires public officials to list their assets in broad ranges, for example, between $1 million and $5 million, making it difficult to determine a precise net worth.

With two presidential signatures- one on New Year’s Day and the other issued last week – President Barack Obama has assumed the right to assert dictatorial powers over almost all aspects of the U.S. economy and to hold American citizens indefinitely without trial! On New Year’s Day, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to fund the Pentagon. But smuggled into its language is an explicit authority “allowing him to indefinitely detain [US] citizens” according to Jonathan Turley writing in the U.K. Guardian newspaper. While the story was buried in the American media, Turley notes that it is “one...

President Barack Obama's Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu uttered the kind of Washington gaffe that consists of telling the truth when inconvenient. According to Politico, Chu admitted to a House committee that the administration is not interested in lowering gas prices. Chu, along with the Obama administration, regards the spike in gas prices as a feature rather than a bug. High gas prices provide an incentive for alternate energy technology, a priority for the White House, and a decrease in reliance on oil for energy. The Heritage Foundation points out that hammering the American consumer with high gas prices to...

Warren Buffet’s secretary, Debbie Bosanek, served as a stage prop for President Obama’s State of the Union speech. She was the President’s chief display of the alleged unfairness of our tax system – a little person paying a higher tax rate than her billionaire boss. Bosanek’s prominent role in Obama’s “fairness” campaign piqued my curiosity, and I imagine the curiosity of others. How much does her boss pay this downtrodden woman? So far, no one has volunteered this information. The IRS publishes detailed tax tables by income level. The latest results are for 2009. They show that taxpayers earning an...

I was thinking about writing a novel about what might happen if a man who hates America and wants to bring it down is somehow elected president. What would he do? I sketched out a few plot elements, and you can decide whether this will fly. First, the Trojan Horse president would initiate unprecedented spending, driving the debt up by more than $4 trillion just in the first three years. Much of the money would go into the pockets of political supporters and people who donate heavily to his campaigns. He would ram through an unreadable law allowing the federal...

Better than George Washington. Better than James Madison. Better than Theodore Roosevelt. Better than John F. Kennedy. Better than Ronald Reagan. That's Barack Obama's opinion of his accomplishments during the first couple years of the eight years he plans to be president. The revelation about Obama's opinion of his own presence in the Oval Office came during an interview for "60 Minutes," where the network reported Obama described himself as a "good captain" of the ship of state. But the aired footage of the comments that his own accomplishments surpass those of every president – with only a couple of...

Morning Joe remains the home of the overwhelming ratio of liberal to conservative guests. Even so, in recent weeks a narrative unflattering to Barack Obama has emerged around the table: Obama doesn't like his job. He doesn't particularly like people and is in the wrong line of work. An even more damning appraisal was offered today: Obama doesn't think he has failed America. He thinks America has failed him. Or as Jon Meacham encapsulated the concept, Obama believes "the country is not commensurate with his gifts." View the video here.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA-05) and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) Dec 8 - With the European debt crisis dominating the news and threatening to pull the world into a double-dip recession, there are growing calls for Uncle Sam to come to the rescue. The U.S. is already committing untold billions to the $1.4 trillion European bailout fund, but that's not enough, according to some European leaders and even U.S. politicians. They say that while the EU bailout is costly, it's also necessary. They are only right about the cost. These endless bailouts are not only unnecessary, but are in fact...

President Obama’s decision to send Michelle and his daughters to Hawaii ahead of him if he is delayed by a fight with Congress could cost taxpayers tens of thousands of extra dollars to fund two separate vacation flights and related costs. The move would also violate the intent of an executive order he issued just last month urging federal employees to cut back on expenses like travel. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday that Obama told Senate Democratic leaders during a White House meeting that he would delay his scheduled December 17 departure for Hawaii to keep Congress in...

Wrapping himself in the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt's "National Greatness" agenda, President Obama urged the nation to stand strong and unite behind ... his umpteenth regulatory czar. Nothing symbolizes American strength and vigor more than another unaccountable Washington bureaucrat. If Richard Cordray, the stalled White House nominee to enforce the Dodd-Frank financial bureaucracy, is not approved, the wheedler-in-chief warned in Osawatomie, Kan.: "Every day we go without a consumer watchdog in place is another day when a student or a senior citizen or member of our Armed Forces could be tricked into a loan they can't afford -- something that...

While most Americans are lucky to get a few weeks of holiday every year, it seems the country’s leader gets a little more freedom in the matter. President Barack Obama has announced his Christmas vacation to Hawaii – for a staggering 17-day trip. Obama, who visited the island just two weeks ago for an economic summit, will head to Honolulu on Saturday December 17 until Monday January 2. The president, who was raised in Hawaii until he was six, will be joined by his wife Michelle and their daughters, Malia, 13, and Sasha, 10. The White House travel office announced...

The first ever GAO(Government Accountability Office) audit of the Federal Reserve was carried out in the past few months due to the Ron Paul, Alan Grayson Amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which passed last year. Jim DeMint, a Republican Senator, and Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator, led the charge for a Federal Reserve audit in the Senate, but watered down the original language of the house bill(HR1207), so that a complete audit would not be carried out. Ben Bernanke(pictured to the right), Alan Greenspan, and various other bankers vehemently opposed the audit and lied to Congress about the effects an...

Via POLITICO Pro: "President Obama today threatened to veto the “Regulatory Accountability Act” (H.R. 3010), a bill the House is set to take up this week that would revamp the regulatory process. In a Statement of Administration Policy, the White House said the bill “would impose unprecedented procedural requirements on agencies that would prevent them from performing their statutory responsibilities. It would also create needless regulatory and legal uncertainty and increase costs for businesses, as well as state, tribal, and local governments, and further impede the implementation of commonsense protections for the American public.” The White House also threatened to...

As expected, the Fed has just bailed out the world once again: FED, ECB, BOJ, BOE, SNB, BANK OF CANADA LOWER SWAP RATES - BBG ECB, FED other major central bank to lower the pricing of existing USD liquidity swaps by 50BPS And as we have been writing every single day, the worldwide dollar crunch is now confirmed: At present, there is no need to offer liquidity in non-domestic currencies other than the U.S. dollar And finally, a promise to bailout Bank of America when it hits $4.00 again: U.S. financial institutions currently do not face difficulty obtaining liquidity in...

It appears that central bank intervention was not the only thing in full force today: The US version of the Chinese Ministry of Truth in economic reporting has now officially joined the fray. Anyone wondering just how much of a joke the US high frequency economic data updates have become should look no further than these three charts showing Wall Street forecasts (consensus and distribution) and actual prints for the ADP Payroll, the Chicago PMI and Pending Home Sales. Not one indicator has come below 4 standard deviations above the average forecast, and every single one has printed above the...

In a bipartisan effort, the House of Representatives and the United States Senate approved the Conference Committee report on spending bill H2112, which among other things, funds the United States Department of Agriculture. On November 18th, as the country was celebrating Thanksgiving, President Obama signed a law, allowing Americans to kill and eat horses. Essentially, one turkey was pardoned in the presence of worldwide media while in the shadows, buried under pages of fiscal regulation, millions of horses were sentenced to death.

President Barack Obama will press European Union officials on Monday to reach a definitive solution to their sovereign debt crisis which is emerging as a major 2012 U.S. election worry. As Germany and France scramble to tighten budget controls across the euro zone, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso will face tough questions from Obama at the White House on how much longer the crisis might go on. No breakthroughs are expected from the meeting, which will not include the European heads of state who need to make crucial decisions about the future...

A west Georgia business owner’s sign that he is not hiring until President Obama leaves office is going viral, according to a local Georgia television station. "New Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone," read the company’s signs on the side of its trucks, according to the station, 11Alive. "Can't afford it," explained the employer, Bill Looman. "I've got people that I want to hire now, but I just can't afford it. And I don't foresee that I'll be able to afford it unless some things change in D.C." Looman's company is U.S. Cranes, LLC. He said...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama plans to make a statement to reporters Monday after the deficit-cutting supercommittee announced that it had failed to reach an agreement.

Leadership: The president is at it again, bad-mouthing the U.S. abroad. Last week he told Australians that our kids are "behind" in education and that the solution is —what else? —more government spending. Let's unpack that.To start, normal presidents don't go around to other countries telling the locals that their country's schoolchildren are underachievers. Not Obama. "A lot of poor children don't get the support they need when they're very young," Obama told a roomful of inquiring students down under. "So by the time they get to grammar school, they're behind."From that, Australians can only take home the message that...

The United States government officially passed the $15 trillion debt milestone on Tuesday. The Republican National Committee produced a little video to commemorate the occasion, and remind us of the bygone days when Barack Obama​ stridently declared $9 trillion in debt was too much, and he’d cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term: Many people have become concerned about the staggering amount of American debt purchased by China. Those people can relax, because China is no longer the largest holder of U.S. government debt. Who is? Why… none other than the U.S. Federal Reserve​. That’s...

(Visiting DC)The Obama Administration announced its objection to including President Roosevelt’s prayer on the World War II Memorial in Washington DC. The Obama White House said the prayer would dilute the message of the memorial.Todd Starnes reported: Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are expressing outrage after the Obama administration announced its objection to adding President Franklin Roosevelt’s D-Day prayer to the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.The objection was noted during a congressional hearing on Rep. Bill Johnson’s (R-OH) bill – the “World War II Memorial Prayer Act of 2011.”“It is unconscionable that the Obama administration would stand...

Republicans’ economic proposals are inflexible, insincere, selfish and motivated by the pursuit of partisan advantage rather than by a concern for Americans, according to President Barack Obama’s statements to an international press conference at the G-20 meeting Friday morning. “As soon as I get some signal from Congress that they’re willing to take their responsibilities seriously, I think we can do more [for the economy], but that is going to require them to break out of the rigid ideological positions they’ve been taking,” he told the assembled media in Cannes, France.

President Barack Obama said Monday he does not regret a $528 million loan to a solar energy company that later collapsed, saying officials always knew a clean energy loan program would not back winners 100 percent of the time. "There are going to be some failures, and Solyndra's an example," Obama said in a television interview, referring to a California solar panel maker that declared bankruptcy last month and laid off its 1,100 workers. The company's failure has become a rallying cry for critics of Obama's clean energy program who say the government should not try to predict winners and...

Newly released emails show a Democratic donor, as well as officials inside the White House, were expressing concern more than a year ago that now-bankrupt solar firm Solyndra's financial situation could deteriorate and prove "embarrassing" for the Obama administration. The emails were released Monday by a Republican-led House panel looking into Solyndra, which filed for bankruptcy last month after receiving nearly $530 million in federal government loans. As with other internal emails that have been disclosed as part of the investigation, the documents reflected uneasiness with Solyndra among those inside and near the administration. A Democratic fundraiser, in a May...

“Some Republicans in Congress have said that they agree with certain parts of this jobs bill.” Obama said. “If so, it’s time for them to tell me what those proposals are. And if they’re opposed to this jobs bill, I’d like to know what exactly they’re against. Are they against putting teachers and police officers and firefighters back on the job? Are they against hiring construction workers to rebuild our roads and bridges and schools? Are they against giving tax cuts to virtually every worker and small business in America?” The Senate is expected to take up the bill next...

While we're fighting with our own, the queen is out there flaunting her wealth again while Americans "eat their peas."

CNN, like the rest of the Main Stream Media, likes to pretend that they do not have a liberal bias. Everyone knows they do, but they simply stick their fingers in their ears and mumble "no we don't" over and over again. Gloria Borger, in an odd op-ed that doesn't particularly seem to make a point, now states that President Obama has somehow "transformed... from the mild-mannered Clark Kent into, well, Superman." No liberal bias, huh? The piece's main gist is this: evil "Republicans" went against "liberals" and "the rest of us" by demanding spending cuts, while refusing to raise...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve on Wednesday dialed up its aid to the beleaguered U.S. economy, launching an effort to put more downward pressure on long-term interest rates over time and help the battered housing sector. The Fed said it would launch a new $400 billion program that will tilt its $2.85 trillion balance sheet more heavily to longer-term securities by selling shorter-term notes and using those funds to purchase longer-dated Treasuries. It will now also reinvest proceeds from maturing mortgage and agency bonds back into the mortgage market, an acknowledgement of just how weak conditions in the sector...

He’s got a deficit-reduction package that can’t clear the House, thanks to massive new tax hikes that everyone knows are a deal-killer. He has a jobs package that can’t clear the Senate. What’s a President to do? Threaten a veto: President Obama warned he will veto any deficit plan brought to him by Congress that wasn’t ‘balanced’ between taxes and spending cuts.‘We are not going to have a one-sided deal that hurts the folks who are most vulnerable,’ Obama said Monday morning, speaking from the Rose Garden.He rejected accusations that tax increases for the wealthy was ‘class warfare’.The president argued,...

Sloyndra is not the name of a recent Obama appointee. It’s not a Middle East rebel faction, a country facing revolution, the name of a stripper, rap singer, or a newly discovered planet. It is the name of a company that robbed the tax payers of over 500 million dollars and tried to come back for more. Aided and abetted by the White House. Solyndra was a pipe dream California company that planned to manufacture solar panels. It had applied for government loans during the Bush administration. That administration dragged their feet or sat on the deal because the financials...