Free Republic

In 2008 then Senator Obama called President Bush “unpatriotic” for adding trillions to the national debt. Bush added about four trillion to the debt in eight years after the 9-11 attacks and mortgage crisis. Barack Obama then added the same amount of debt in less than three years. Via Flopping Aces:

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly responded again Friday to allegations made by "Mother Jones" that he lied about his coverage of the Falklands conflict in 1982. Thursday night, shortly after the allegations were published, O'Reilly came out blasting, calling David Corn, one of the authors of the piece, a "pig" in an interview with The Sun. Friday in his "Talking Points" memo, which was to be broadcast at 8 p.m. during his show, O'Reilly quoted from internal CBS memos that he says he found last night, which back his version of the coverage he provided for the network 33 years...

Yesterday, Walmart announced that, beginning in April of this year, the company will raise the pay of all its employees to at least $9 an hour. In 2016, the company’s minimum pay rate will again jump to $10. This move will affect approximately 500,000 Walmart employees and, along with several other changes such as increased training and scheduling options, is estimated to cost the company $1 billion. Walmart’s pay increase follows a number of businesses, including Aetna, Ikea and Gap Inc., that have announced an internal company minimum wage higher than the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. While some...

Wasserman Schultz’s office said she’d switch positions on medical pot if a donor took back his criticism, emails show. Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s office offered to change her position on medical marijuana if a major Florida donor recanted his withering criticism of her, according to emails obtained by POLITICO. The proposal to Orlando trial lawyer John Morgan was straightforward: retract critical statements he made to a reporter in return for Wasserman Schultz publicly backing his cannabis initiative that she had trashed just months earlier. Morgan declined the offer with a sharp email reply sent to a go-between,...

They say before alcoholics can decide to get sober, they first must hit bottom. This provides a “moment of clarity,” after which they consciously decide to change. But for the “moment” to occur the bottom must be hit, a point so low there is nowhere to go but up. For progressives, when it comes to advancing their agenda, there simply is no bottom to hit. Each time you think those on the left can go no lower, they find a shovel. This week the president’s unilateral action on amnesty, something he said nearly two-dozen times he didn’t have the authority...

Today's liberals are not racists, but they often behave that way. They would benefit immensely from considering some of the arguments in award-winning scholar Dr. Shelby Steele's forthcoming book, "Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country." Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, explains that in matters of race, there is an ideological vision that completely ignores truth -- a vision he calls "poetic truth." In literature, poetic license takes liberties with grammatical rules, as well as realities, in order to create a more beautiful or powerful effect than would be otherwise possible. Liberals have a poetic...

Top U.S. counterterrorism officials say they worry a potential terrorist could be hiding among refugees who are looking to come to the United States after escaping the brutal war in Syria. "It's clearly a population of concern,” the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Nicholas Rasmussen, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, went further, saying it would be a “huge mistake” to bring refugees from the conflict to the U.S. – even as an estimated 4 million children, women and men have been forced to flee Syria and another 7 million have been...

Carly Fiorina, who rose to power in corporate America to become Hewlett-Packard’s first female chairman and CEO, is aiming to smash two more glass ceilings, but this time in politics. One is the 159-year history of total male dominance of Republican presidential nominations. The other is the 225-year period when a “For Men Only” sign has hung over the door to the Oval Office. Mrs. Fiorina has no problem breaking glass to do it, candidly discussing what she sees as the foreign policy failures of George W. Bush, her opposition to amnesty and her disdain for crony capitalism that marries...

She hasn’t even announced, but the question has already resurfaced: Will Bill Clinton’s baggage derail Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes? Just a few weeks ago, reports broke that Bill Clinton had flown at least 11 times on “The Lolita Express” — a private plane owned by the mysterious financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. According to Virginia Roberts, who claims to have been one of Epstein’s many teenaged sex slaves, Clinton also visited Epstein’s private Caribbean retreat, known as “Orgy Island.” “I remember asking Jeffrey, ‘What’s Bill Clinton doing here?’ ” Roberts said in 2011. The former president, she added, was...

I tried to warn them. In addition, back in 2012, after Marco Rubio was asked about the age of the earth, I provided conservative politicians (and others interested) a primer for answering some of the “gotcha” questions that most every conservative running for political office in the U.S. will inevitably face. It seems that Scott Walker or his staff need to spend more time on my website, or on American Thinker (one of the top conservative websites in America). Byron York hopes Walker learned a valuable lesson. Silvio Canto at American Thinker doesn’t care what Scott Walker (or Hillary Clinton)...

Regular readers know that I don’t approve of drug use, but that I also favor legalization because the Drug War has been a costly and ineffective failure.(And it’s led to horrible policies such as intrusive money-laundering laws and Orwellian asset-forfeiture laws).So I was happy when folks in Colorado voted to decriminalize marijuana use, even if part of me didn’t like the idea that politicians would gain a new source of tax revenue.If nothing else, what’s happening in Colorado (and Washington state) will be an interesting social experiment.And even though we only have a modest bit of data, I’m going to be...

The charitable foundation run by Hillary Clinton and her family has received as much as $81m from wealthy international donors who were clients of HSBC’s controversial Swiss bank. Leaked files from HSBC’s Swiss banking division reveal the identities of seven donors to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation with accounts in Geneva. They include Frank Giustra, Canadian mining magnate and one of the foundation’s biggest financial backers, and Richard Caring, the British retail magnate who, the bank’s internal records show, used his tax-free Geneva account to transfer $1m into the New York-based foundation. Hillary Clinton has expressed concern over...

Listen to the stories of Bobby Unser, a three-time Indianapolis 500 champion who was charged with committing a crime in his fight to survive, and Mr. and Mrs. Denicore, a couple who fought back when facing charges for their children’s tardiness at school. For Bobby Unser and his friend, a fun day of snowmobiling turned into a nightmare when a storm hit and they were forced to abandon their vehicles to wander the terrain in temperatures as low as negative 14 degrees Fahrenheit. After surviving and waking up in a hospital, Unser sought out the location of the snowmobiles and...

The United Nation’s climate chief says that reordering the global economy to fight climate change is the “most difficult” task the international body has ever undertaken. “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history,” Christiana Figueres, who heads up the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, told reporters. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that...

1) “In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation. It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you, there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.” —Seymour Hersh2) “I haven't seen American Sniper, but correct me if I'm wrong: An occupier mows down faceless Iraqis but the real victim is his anguished soul.” – Max Blumenthal3) “Put a man in uniform, preferably a white man, give him a gun, and Americans will worship him. It is a particularly childish trait, of...

American drivers have been enjoying low gas prices lately. According to AAA, the national average price of gas per gallon is $2.03 for regular, compared to $3.29 this time last year. Also happy with low gas prices are state governments, but mainly for different reasons: politicians in certain states see low gas prices as an opportunity to raise the gas tax. Here’s a map of the states currently considering an increase in gas tax:

Gallup CEO and Chairman Jim Clifton doubled-down on his comments earlier in the week on the misleading Obama unemployment rate. Obama says the unemployment rate is 5.6% which is very misleading. Clifton went on America’s Newsroom today to explain the misleading government numbers. “The number of full-time jobs, and that’s what everybody wants, as a percent of the total population, is the lowest it’s ever been… The other thing that is very misleading about that number is the more people that drop out, the better the number gets. In the recession we lost 13 million jobs. Only 3 million have...

Has anyone noticed that the nation’s leftist socialists are using the very same tactic with Islamic Terrorists [ISIS] as they incessantly use with the Nazis and other Socialists? Talk to any of the Leftists on the national socialist scene and they will go incandescent if you accurately attribute that the Nazi were socialists. It’s part of their freaking name for Pete’s sake: German Nationalsozialistische [deutsche Arbeiter-Partei] (National SOCIALIST [German Workers' Party])But that doesn’t deter leftists from denying reality. They will also deny that the USSR was Socialist… Even though THAT is also in their very name: Union of Soviet SOCIALIST...

This is a story about two perfectly engineered inmates of the Democrats’ plantation. In many areas of the big cities run by Democrats it is dangerous for an honest person live or visit. One’s safety is not necessarily defined by skin color as a beautiful and industrious 18 year old African American woman named Marguerite La Joy Washington was to find out. On October 1, 2012, the college freshman was murdered as she sat in a New Orleans apartment. The gunmen who ended her life had come to kill her boyfriend but shot both of them during their attack. Two...

The 2nd Amendment. While it was designed to be the last line of defense against a tyrannical government, it inadvertently is also a deterrent for radical Progressives who wish to fundamentally change our Constitutional Republic. Case in point. In 1988 Progressive author, Bob Zimmerman, ran for a Hawaiian Congressional seat and was soundly defeated. In 2015 Mr. Zimmerman has written a free “book” titled Common Sense. He modeled it after the historic pamphlet written by Thomas Paine which shared the same title. But instead of embracing individual Liberty, Mr. Zimmerman uses the words of the Founders to push a centralized,...