Free Republic

WWIII over CIA backed rebels? No thanks We needed a President and Secretary of State who could stymie Russia on the diplomatic front. We needed a President who was up to the task of managing the world stage. We needed a Commander in Chief who would be either feared or respected by our allies and enemies alike. We don’t have that. Instead, we’re faced with Middle Eastern chaos, a rapidly expanding global terrorist force, and a refugee crisis that is spreading to every corner of the globe. The President’s response has, so far, consisted of a feckless UN speech and...

WWIII over CIA backed rebels? No thanks. We needed a President and Secretary of State who could stymie Russia on the diplomatic front. We needed a President who was up to the task of managing the world stage. We needed a Commander in Chief who would be either feared or respected by our allies and enemies alike. We don't have that. Instead, we're faced with Middle Eastern chaos, a rapidly expanding global terrorist force, and a refugee crisis that is spreading to every corner of the globe. The President's response has, so far, consisted of a feckless UN speech and...

…is neither Russia’s Vladimir Putin nor China’s Xi Jinping, nor at this time, Ayatollah Khamenei – it’s none other than America’s Barack Hussein Obama. This is not because of any aggressive, risk-laden actions he has taken, far from it. It is because of those he has failed to take at critical times to credibly dissuade strategic competitors and potential aggressors, such as Russia and China, from actions that may suddenly compound into destabilizing confrontations, even war. When the Middle East cauldron spawned the barbaric ISIS, Obama’s indecisive, pusillanimous response allowed this Islamic malignancy to rapidly metastasize, compounding and accelerating an...

Speaker of the House John Boehner is going, going, gone. Ben Shapiro fears that in his last month of power, Boehner will roll over and roll Barack Obama’s agenda all over his restless and restive caucus. Whether within the Beltway or the Bible Belt, conservatives are learning to accept that politics is an ongoing numbers game, one in which We the People have to do more than sit on the porch and complain about the state of affairs. We get to change them, if we are willing. The fight is rolling ahead, and already I have networked with fellow conservatives...

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) is bracing for what could be the toughest weeks of his speakership as several dozen conservatives in his party are threatening to topple him unless he is more ferocious with Democrats during the upcoming fiscal showdowns. That internal Republican feud has increased the chances that Washington, for the second time in two years, could stumble into a shutdown of the federal government. The speaker’s lieutenants are openly girding for battle with the small but influential bloc of anti-Boehner conservatives, who have signaled that if Boehner cuts any deal that they don’t like with Hill...

adical leftwinger Jeremy Corbyn on Saturday won the crown of Britain's main opposition Labour party in a landslide victory, becoming the nation's most left-wing political leader for over 30 years. The 66-year-old socialist, whose policies have been compared to those of Greece's Syriza and Spain's Podemos, was named leader after clinching 59.5 percent of the 422,664 votes cast by Labour party members and supporters. The newly-elected leader condemned "grotesque levels of inequality" and "an unfair welfare system" in his victory speech to party members in central London. The veteran campaigner also called for Britain's Conservative government to show more "compassion"...

“I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.” — Donald Trump, in an interview for Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success, by business journalist Michael D’Antonio. “Trump was willing to say and do almost anything to satisfy his craving for attention. But he also possessed a sixth sense that kept him from going too far.” — D’Antonio’s conclusion to the book. One often-underappreciated virtue of U.S. presidential campaigns is that their extreme length makes it very difficult to conceal what makes a candidate tick. (Barack Obama in 2008 was an exception,...

As the primary season for the 2016 presidential election heats up, we hear all sorts of rhetoric surrounding the meaning of good leadership. Men and women from all over the country try to convince us that they are full of integrity, compassion, decisiveness and all sorts of other abstract qualities that seem impossible to measure or quantify. But what is God’s plan for leadership, not just for our elected officials, but for everyday people? Every Christian exercises leadership in some capacity. Whether we are at home, at church, at school, at work, in our peer groups or in our communities,...

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the nation needs a president with an Ivy League education. “I went to an Ivy League school,” he said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.” “I was an excellent student at the Wharton School of Finance, which is the best in the world, one of the hardest to get into in the world, maybe the hardest, but maybe one of the hardest to get into, even back then.” “That’s the kind of thinking our country needs, that mindset,” Trump added. “The fact is, that’s the kind of mindset or thinking we need...

House Speaker Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) had been planning to call up on the House floor last week a measure from Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) that would have removed him as Speaker of the House if it succeeded—intending to embarrass Meadows—but abandoned the plan after his entire leadership structure learned that they did not have the votes to re-elect him as Speaker before the August recess. “[House Majority Leader Kevin] McCarthy was making phone calls—he was whipping it—and so was [House Majority Whip] Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA),” a senior conservative movement leader who’s had many personal and direct discussions with...

Seven long years into the presidency of Barack Obama, The Washington Post continues its obsessive quest to suggest that Obama may be lying when he professes to be a Christian. The latest fringe assertion from the Post about Obama’s religion emanated this weekend from national political correspondent James Hohmann. A previous instance occurred in February. Both recent times when the Post raised questions about Obama’s private religious beliefs, the newspaper also focused on Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker. The reasons that the Post has used reporting about Walker to channel its bizarre questions about Obama’s Christianity remain unclear. At a...

From time to time as the 2016 campaign unfolds we will publish here the full text of some candidate speeches on important topics. We launch this series with Carly Fiorina's national security address at the Reagan Presidential Library the evening of July 27. The full text is below, as is a complete video... You'll notice here — and hopefully in the upcoming debates — that the business executive speaks in clear, simple declarative sentences. No fudge words or rhetorical escape clauses. Clean, crisp, no nonsense. She outlines the problem, then states clearly what she would do. That style drew frequent...

It is time forSen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)and Rep. John Boehner (R-OH)to resign for the good of the nation and the Republican Party.

It really shouldn’t be a surprise to see Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell allow the Ex-Im Bank to be revived after it expired in June. Nor is it really surprising to hear McConnell apparently made a deal with three senators (two of them Democrats) to get Ex-Im back on the calendar as long as they voted for Trade Promotion Authority. McConnell is just doing what some people believe leadership and compromise are all about: the ability to wheel and deal. He’s essentially following the same tactics House Speaker John Boehner did to get the “Doc fix” bill passed earlier...

Scott Walker, along with Ted Cruz and perhaps a handful of others on the Right, understands the pernicious nature of the kind of “bipartisanship” that has give us the likes of Poppy and W. Bush, and is currently exemplified in the current entitled scion, Jeb. It’s a terrible, undemocratic idea: The town hall attendee asked for the microphone to pose this question to newly announced presidential candidate Scott Walker: Americans are fed up with the partisan gridlock in Washington, so what would he do as president to “end the partisanship and parochialism that is really stifling this great country”? Walker...

Madison— Secretary of State Doug La Follette sued Gov. Scott Walker on Tuesday, arguing the budget he signed Sunday violates the state constitution by interfering with his ability to maintain state records.The spending plan Walker approved cut La Follette's budget by about half,transferred some of his duties to Walker's Department of Administration and called for moving La Follette's office from rented space into smaller space in the basement of the state Capitol.The lawsuit comes a day after the Republican governor launched his presidential campaign.La Follette is a Democrat.The state constitution requires the secretary of state to"keep a fair record of...

"Leadership is not a talent or a gift. It's a choice. It's not complex, but it's very hard." General Stanley McChrystal explains to a packed auditorium of 600 at Stanford Graduate School of Business. McChrystal shares his perspective on leadership and influence discussing the importance of understanding culture, leading by example, building trust, and creating a common goal within a team. McChrystal is a four-star general and former commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan. He also served as the former leader of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

To keep conservative rebels in check, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his allies have been doling out punishments at an aggressive clip in the 114th Congress. From kicking unruly members off the Rules Committee and GOP whip team to stripping a lawmaker of his subcommittee gavel, leadership has been growing more comfortable with taking retaliatory measures to try to enforce party discipline. But several Tea Party targets haven’t gone quietly. They’ve been fighting back with help from Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan’s conservative House Freedom Caucus, which successfully pressured leaders this week to return a subcommittee gavel to one of their...

Societies across the globe are engaged in conversations to redefine marriage. Media debates, election-day balloting, and governmental court rulings have provided the platform for this redefinition. We believe a biblical view of marriage involves a monogamous, covenantal relationship between a man and a woman. Jesus said, “At the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one...

This past weekend’s Wall Street Journal carried an article entitled “Our Most Peculiar President” which reviews two new books on former President Richard M. Nixon. The reviewer concludes that Mr. Nixon was an extreme introvert in an extreme extrovert job. The lengths to which Mr. Nixon would go to avoid engagement in social discourse – focused primarily on conversations with others – were extraordinary. Virtually everyone in Washington was aware of Mr. Nixon’s peculiarities – meaning that the press had to also know – and yet it was left to the historians to compile and comment on those peculiarities decades...