Free Republic

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.