Free Republic

President Obama oversaw the deepest legislative malaise in modern political history, according to the Washington Times Legislative Index, which captures his struggles to find ways to work with a Congress that ranged from lukewarm to openly hostile toward him. Over the course of his eight years, he has signed just 1,227 bills into law — less, even, than one-term Presidents Carter and George H.W. Bush. Digging deeper into the numbers, Congress spent less time in session, handled less business on the chamber floors and generally sputtered for much of Mr. Obama’s tenure, according to The Times’ index. Blame for the...

The closing arguments for the Obama years are arriving, and they aren’t helping the outgoing president. A case in point is a new book published this week, one that acknowledges “Obama’s supporters have experienced [his presidency] as a continuous disappointment.” Those supporters, and others, must have noticed that “for most of Obama’s term, wage gains were largely confined to the rich.” Or that “The administration’s planning in Libya clearly failed” or “It is certain that the actual outcome [of Obama’s Syria policy] was disastrous.” Even many of President Obama’s proudest achievements look about as enduring as April snow: “If there...

As easily as he slid into office with no qualifications for the post, Obama is falling from grace with fate and the voters. His dishonesty and incompetence are too patent. This week, no sooner had his relatively sparsely viewed presser ended and his clearly manufactured tears about gun violence dried, than his central argument -- that gun control, not fighting Islamic terrorism, should be our priority -- was exposed as nonsense. A thug, who had stolen a gun from a cop, used it in Philadelphia to try to assassinate a law enforcement officer. Echoing Obama Philadelphia's Democratic Mayor declared Jim...

Thursday, October 08, 2015 How the Left Rebranded as Non-Ideological Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog Every time Obama issues another public ultimatum to Congress (before doing what he wants to do anyway) he phrases it in terms like "common sense" or "pragmatic". It's "non-ideological" he insists. The left's ideological agenda just happens to be the common sense pragmatic non-ideological solution. Obama may be the most radical political figure to occupy the White House, but he is careful to avoid political labels. His leftist allies calculatingly compare him to Reagan or Roosevelt. He's not an ideologue. Just...

President and first lady Michelle Obama's bid to cut kid obesity through new demands for more costly but healthier food is financially crushing the nation's school cafeterias, forcing staff cuts, boosting waste and killing plans to buy new equipment, according to an industry association. A new survey from the School Nutrition Association reported that 70 percent of the nation's lunch programs have been financially "harmed" by the new low-salt, low-sugar menus and that a stunning 93 percent report fewer students buying the chow. "Meeting these mandates has harmed the financial health of nearly 70 percent of school meal programs surveyed,...

No president in our country’s history has been more concerned about his legacy than has Barack Obama. How ironic that people might someday best remember our first African-American Commander in Chief for having inspired the candidacy of Donald Trump. Six years of Obama forcing unpopular policies down Americans’ throats; six years of lies and misdeeds by unaccountable bureaucrats; six years of lame growth and resulting wage suppression; six years of appeasing our enemies and facing down our friends; six years of dividing the country – they have all taken their toll. People are angry and are willing to champion a...

A giant black curtain was draped to hide half an arena of empty seats during an Obama campaign appearance Sunday in Philadelphia. “A long way, for the president, from 2008 when he had Greek columns, and adoring crowds,” said Fox News White House reporter Ed Henry. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-HApkKm1MQ Meanwhile, there was pandemonium in the hall during an appearance earlier in Bridgeport, Connecticut as immigration activists heckled the president. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Mn1RPw4Nc

Reader (unless you’re the kind of chickens**t who calls people “chickens**t” anonymously), Obama fatigue is setting in. Indeed, I’ve gone from Obama fatigue through full-on Obama Epstein-Barr to end-stage Obama narcolepsy. I hear him talking, or hear some MSNBC-type rhapsodizing about how misunderstood he is, and I start dozing off like a truck driver who took the drowsy-formula Nyquil by mistake. “Gotta stay awake! This is my job!” But then 20 seconds later, Jonathan Alter starts telling me how misunderstood the president is, and suddenly orange traffic cones are bouncing off my truck’s grill as I somnolently drift into a...

--snip-- Obama's disjointed ISIS speech was about saving his presidency. He is sinking fast... It may already be too late to save the SS Obama......teeming w/ second term disasters....the toxic brew of his Obamacare lies, middling economic growth and violent global breakdown.... ....the public has tuned him out...they no longer trust him and don’t think he’s a good leader.....a tsunami of recent polls amount to a vote of no confidence.....his plan to grant amnesty to millions of illegals was put on hold to try to protect Democratics from voter wrath in November. He has been wrong about virtually every major...

My fellow Americans, we are all bit players in the making of a metaphoric slasher movie: Obama Unchained, starring Barack Hussein Obama. Here is a summary of the movie. It is a heartwarming tale about how the mainstream media and Democratic Party suckered America into electing their extreme far-left dream president – a Trojan Horse in the form of a black man. Once in the Oval Office, Obama began incrementally implementing his socialist/progressive agenda and iron-fist pressure on Americans to conform. Everyone, including a 175-year-old order of elderly Catholic nuns, was forced to comply with Obama's decreed anti-biblical new moral...

We don’t have a president leading our government; we have a petulant child throwing a series of temper tantrums. Barack Obama has never shown an aptitude for leadership, mostly because he’s never led anything. But in his limited pre-government career as a community organizer, his job was not to accomplish anything. It simply was to get people riled up over the “injustice du-jour,” make them believe he has the cure for what ails them, and raise money. He’s run his presidency on this snake-oil-salesman mentality; only now, he’s begun to run out of suckers to bilk. There always will be...

Remember the President’s repeated assurances that his bailouts and Obamacare would revive the economy? Those claims probably sound pretty hollow to the President’s one-time supporters, young adults. These eight graphs, which examine adults under the age of 25 who have moved out of their parents’ home, via PolicyMic, show that this group is suffering the worst from dwindling incomes and long-term unemployment.

Monday on MSNBC's "The Daily Rundown," host Chuck Todd discussed the complete failure of President Barack Obama's reelection goals named the "year of action" saying, "Let's face it there hasn't been much." Todd dubbed the presidents lack of accomplishments a "six-month stalemate. "The president has largely failed to meet even those modest goals wether it was raising the minimum wage signing a trade agreements, or getting an immigration reform done," he said.

H/T Eric Worrall and Breitbart – Obama’s inability to make a decision on Keystone has finally yielded a result – Canada has made the decision for him. Breitbart reports Canada has just approved the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project – a major pipeline to ship Canadian oil to Asia. The Canadian oil will still be burnt – in Asia, instead of America. All the jobs and energy security which Canadian oil could have delivered to America, will instead be delivered to Asia.

Amid all the talk of the isolationism that supposedly characterizes the Obama administration’s foreign policy, we forget that since World War II, the global order has largely been determined by U.S. engagement. The historically rare state of prosperity and peace that defined the postwar world were due to past U.S. vigilance and sacrifice. Germany in the last 150 years has been at the center of three European wars, winning one, losing another, and destroying much of Europe and itself in the third. Yet present-day Germany has the largest economy in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. It is...

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Less than two years after voters gave President Barack Obama a strong mandate for a second term, the White House is struggling against perceptions that it is losing its grip. At home, the bungled rollout of the Obamacare website and the shocking revelations about an entrenched culture of incompetence and fraud in the VA have undercut faith in the President’s managerial competency. Abroad, a surging Russia, an aggressive China, a war torn Middle East and a resurgent terror network are putting his foreign policy credentials to the test. With the GOP hoping to...

The news for Democrats, already bad this year, just got worse. Consider this story in the USA Today: A nationwide USA TODAY/Pew Research Center Poll shows the strongest tilt to Republican candidates at this point in a midterm year in at least two decades, including before partisan “waves” in 1994 and 2010 that swept the GOP into power. Though Election Day is six months away — a lifetime in politics — at the moment, Democrats are saddled by angst over the economy, skepticism about the health care law and tepid approval of the president. The specific data point worth focusing...

Column: The 2014 election was decided before Obama’s second term beganFitting, I thought, when I saw Air Force One returning to Andrews Air Force Base in the rain the other day. The weather had not only assumed the character of President Obama’s demeanor, it had become a physical representation of the sentiments inside his administration, inside Democratic circles in Washington. Those sentiments are dark, foreboding, cloudy, and gloomy. The president’s foreign policy is under attack, his agenda is stalled in Congress, and his signature program remains unpopular. A second repudiation of Obama, a second shellacking, may be at hand.Less than a...

Glenn Reynolds said that the worse Barack Obama performed the blacker he would get. That is true, but it's also true that the worse Obama performs the more his inner Karl Marx bleeds through and Obama's real character is on full display right now. Gimme what you got And think for a moment about how Obama is framing his economic speeches. The core of what he’s trying to do, he said at Knox College in Illinois Wednesday, is not to make the economy better or create jobs. It’s to eliminate inequality. So in many ways, the trends that I spoke...

Staten Islanders were fed up with Mother Nature’s wrath.