Free Republic

House Speaker John Boehner sat down with Bret Baier today for an exclusive interview, covering everything from immigration to ObamaCare to Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Boehner charged the administration with antipathy toward Netanyahu, and he sounded off on plans to sue President Barack Obama over his executive action on immigration. […] Baier asked whether this Congress is Boehner’s “last time around” and if he thinks he can bring all Republicans together. He responded with a laugh and said “I’ll be here for a while,” before adding that he sympathizes with the concerns of the more conservative...

AS the west reels from global Islamic jihad, what is the leader of the free world doing to abate its thrust? Incontrovertibly, he is deliberately, decidedly, and incrementally siding with Islamists. This is beyond a reasonable doubt. BUT one only needs to look at his domestic and foreign fires to glean whose side he is on. Yes, his allegiances become overwhelming clear, linkage after linkage, unless one is willfully malignant. ADDING to his malfeasance, several very recent treacheries stand apart: TREACHERY ONE: ON the domestic front, his Congressional (red/green) front arms increasingly empower radical Islamists within Congress. Rep Andre Carson,...

Millions of Americans are about to get their first taste of the Obamacare tax. Last year the tax penalty for failing to buy private health insurance is $95 or 1% of income, whichever is greater. Because the media hyped the $95 end of the tax, millions of people are unaware that their taxes are more likely to increase far more. The tax increases to $325 or 2% this year, it increases further in 2016. For many taxpayers, it’s going to be a rude awakening when they discover that Obamacare is going to cost them in tax much more than they...

Police say this suspect is the commander-in-chief of a shooting and robbery. Zachary Bowyer, a President Obama look-alike known by his street name “Baby Obama,” is wanted in Denver for a December holdup that ended with the victim shot in the ankle, police said. Authorities are offering $2,000 for the apprehension of the 21-year-old baby-faced perp, who should be considered armed and dangerous.

She was just criticized in Saudi Arabia for not wearing a headscarf, but even at home she’s not allowed to say what she wants. First ladies should be more than decorative.It must be very strange to be Michelle Obama. You are intelligent, capable, you have opinions and charisma, and yet you are fundamentally mute—your public utterances are scripted and tightly controlled. You are allowed to talk about broccoli and children’s exercise, and safe, non-inflammatory topics. The only time the public sees the Michelle Obama fire, thrillingly, is when she is on the campaign stump for her husband. Even when scripted...

ISIS militants have threatened to behead Obama in the White House in a video released on Jan. 26. The video shows ISIS militants standing in the streets of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, following an artillery barrage on the city by Kurdish Peshmerga forces. In front of the militants is seated a Kurdish soldier who is executed at the end of the video.

U.S. President Barack Obama told CNN he will not meet with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in March because his trip to Washington comes too close to Israel's upcoming elections. "I'm declining to meet with him simply because our general policy is, we don't meet with any world leader two weeks before their election," Obama told Fareed Zakaria in an interview which will air Sunday and of which excerpts were released Wednesday. "I think that's inappropriate, and that's true with some of our closest allies," he added. The President said the United States and Britain had to quickly to put...

ast year boasted the strongest job numbers since 1999, and as a result, many commentators have concluded that left-wing critics of austerity were wrong all along. The basic case — advanced by Jeff Sachs, Scott Sumner, and others — is that the surge in growth and jobs proves that austerity is not the poison its detractors claimed it would be. These commentators make some good points. But they are wrong about austerity. A close examination of the counterfactuals shows that austerity almost certainly held back the recovery — and without it, we might have had 2014's strong numbers in 2011....

One in three, or 35.2 percent, of people getting federal disability insurance benefits have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, according to the latest data from the Social Security Administration (SSA). Washington, D.C., the seat of the federal government, ranked in the top-ten list of states where disabled beneficiaries were diagnosed with mental problems. In 2013, the latest data from SSA show there were 10,228,364 disabled beneficiaries, up 139,625 from 2012 when there were 10,088,739 disabled beneficiaries. Disabled beneficiaries have increased 49.7 percent from a decade ago in 2003 when there were 6,830,714 beneficiaries; and the number is up 14.3...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil slumped on Wednesday, with U.S. crude prices at near six-year lows, after the government reported record-high inventories in the United States that raised anxieties about the global oil glut that had pressured the market since last summer. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said domestic crude oil stocks rose by almost 9 million barrels last week to reach nearly 407 million, their highest since the government began keeping records in 1982.

Raising the capital gains rate will put a stranglehold on risk taking and available capital President Obama just told the country during his State of the Union address that he is going to increase the capital gains rate again in order to raise revenue for new spending programs. Given that Obama already knows that raising the capital gains rate actually REDUCES revenue, we are left with a President who believes that we can pay for increased spending by reducing revenue. He acknowledged this in 2008 during a televised debate against Hillary Clinton, but went on to state that rates should...

During Wednesday afternoon’s White House press conference, ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl cornered Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz over why the administration does not consider the Taliban to be a “terrorist” organization. In light of a possible Jordanian prisoner swap with ISIS forces, Karl asked Schultz how that government’s actions differ from the United States’ 2014 release of Gitmo prisoners to the Taliban in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. When the spokesman suggested the Taliban is just an “armed insurgency,” and not a “terrorist organization” like ISIS, Karl pounced: “You don’t think the Taliban’s a terrorist group?” In the clip...

Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” when asked why the administration is refusing to use the term “radical Islam,” White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said, “Lets be clear nobody denies these are Muslims.

The American public should encourage Obama to take up a new occupation as a voiceover artist What does it take to be a great narrator for documentaries? The ability to read a teleprompter with conviction. While the majority of Americans may not believe that President Obama has the last quality in hand, most will agree that the first is his best attribute. He is a teleprompter reader par excellence. Though it may be a useful skill, it doesn’t take the place of being a leader, even a poor one. The latest attempt by the president to convince citizens that climate...

U.S. President Barack Obama ended a landmark day in India on Monday with a pledge of $4 billion in investments and loans, seeking to release what he called the "untapped potential" of a business and strategic partnership between the world's largest democracies. Earlier in the day, at the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Obama was the first U.S. president to attend India's annual Republic Day parade, a show of military might that has been associated with Cold War anti-Americanism. -snip "We are moving in the right direction ... That said, we also know that the U.S.-India relationship is defined...

A tsunami struck the country this morning. A tsumani of stupid. I wasn't sure what to do with it all, so here are some of the best bits. Politico makes an issue of Huckabee complaining that women at Fox News swear while at work, apparently referring to them as "trashy." “My gosh, this is worse than locker-room talk,” Huckabee continued. “As we would say in the South, that’s just trashy.” Neither Huckabee nor Politico seems to have met Hillary, who is said to swear "like a sailor." Sara Nelson writes about the book in Tuesday's New York Post, revealing the...

President Barack Obama continues to speak out against mass incarceration, the devastating impact of our drug policies on communities of color and his expectation that marijuana legalization will continue to spread. Obama's comments came today during his YouTube interviews with YouTube bloggers, Bethany Mota, GloZell Green and Hank Green. Some Obama nuggets from today's interview include this on marijuana: "What you're seeing now is Colorado, Washington through state referenda, they're experimenting with legal marijuana," the president said in response to a question from host Hank Green. "The position of my administration has been that we still have federal laws that...

Islamic State militants have threatened to behead Barack Obama and turn the U.S. into a Muslim province in the latest gruesome video to emerge from their self-styled caliphate. The footage shows a black-clad jihadist standing over a Kurdish soldier who, in a sickening climax to the video, has his head cut off. Before the hostage is executed, the ISIS fighter warns the U.S. president: 'Know, oh Obama, that we will reach America. 'Know also that we will cut off your head in the White House and transform America into a Muslim province.'

Every girl’s life matters to Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett only so long as those lives can be exploited for publicity Are first lady Michelle Obama and her mentor Valerie Jarrett, who is her husband’s senior advisor, complicit in a publicity stunt making it appear that they champion women’s rights? While Michelle Obama seized the spotlight by not wearing a head scarf when meeting with Saudi officials in Riyadh yesterday, Jarrett was sending out this message on Twitter: “Every girl’s life matters. Every woman should be able to go about her day and be safe and treated with respect.” The...

What can I say; sometimes the predictions are just wrong.That doesn’t always stop us from pretending that our prediction was more accurate than it really was:It appears that the model used to forecast New York’s  Snowmageddon II was just wrong. A National Weather Service official says the agency will evaluate its storm modeling after a storm that was predicted to dump a foot or more of snow on many parts of New Jersey and the Philadelphia region delivered far less than that. So, using the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) instead of the U.S. Global Forecast System (GFS)...