Free Republic

The economy, abortion, and national security took center stage, but the moderator stole the show at Tuesday night’s presidential debate at Hofstra University. While liberals were racing to announce, “Obama is back,” the debate resulted in a firefight that clearly highlighted the contrasts between former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and President Obama. From their leadership styles, approach to governing, and national security strategies, to their domestic, foreign, and economic policies, the contrast could not be clearer. Regardless of the questions, President Obama found a way to steer them to the issues he wanted to discuss even if the answer was...

President Obama is in a fix over firearms. He needs to win undecided voters in the swing states to be re-elected, but these areas are largely pro-gun. So after years of trying to dodge the issue, Mr. Obama let it slip in Tuesday’s presidential debate that he’d push a gun ban in a second term. It’s a revelation that could sway the election. In the town-hall event at Hofstra University, “undecided” voter Nina Gonzalez asked the president what he’d done to limit the availability of assault weapons. Mr. Obama feigned support for the Second Amendment before calling for regulation of...

Total annual spending on federal means-tested welfare programs has hit $1 trillion. The Congressional Research Service is out with a new memorandum on spending on these programs. Senator Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate budget committee who requested the memo, has crunched the numbers and come up with the astonishing figure of $1 trillion in annual total spending on these programs as of fiscal year 2011, nearly $750 billion in federal dollars and another roughly $250 billion in state funding. Senator Sessions explains: Ranking Member Sessions and the minority staff of the Senate Budget Committee requested from...

Crowley cuts off Romney’s Fast and Furious remarks at Obama’s behest In the Oct. 16 presidential debate between President Barack Obama and GOP challenger W. Mitt Romney, when the president dropped the pretense of being neutral on restricting gun rights with a key assist from moderator Candy Crowley, hostess of the CNN program “State of the Nation.” After his policies were rebuked in the 1994 midterms, President William J. Clinton, blamed more than anything else his support for a national ban on so-called assault weapons. It must have been a calculated move for Obama to suggest he would bring back...

The Blog Michelle Obama: 'On Nov. 7 We're Going to Party Hard' 2:00 PM, Oct 17, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts At a fundraiser today in New York, First Lady Michelle Obama expressed confidence in her husband's chances for reelection. "On Nov. 7 we're going to party hard," she said. Election Day this year is November 6. From the pool report: "After hearing my husband talk about his values and his vision at the debate last night, I'm pretty fired up," she said. "Let me tell you, I am so glad last...

Last night, President Obama presented himself as a crusader for women's issues. He later tweeted:  Mitt Romney still won’t say whether he’d stand up for equal pay, but he did tell us he has “binders full of women.” OFA.BO/LMVWmZ— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 17, 2012 What's interesting about this is President Obama's own history with women in the work place.When one of President Obama's debate coaches, Anita Dunn, worked at the White House, this is what she reportedly had to say about her experience there: “This place would be in court for a hostile workplace. ... Because it actually fit all of...

Obama's Brutal Gaffe: Low Gas Prices Cratered Our Economy by Ben Shapiro 17 Oct 2012, 11:48 AM PDT Last night, President Barack Obama dropped the biggest campaign gaffe of the season – only the media wasn’t watching. It happened during his testy exchange with Mitt Romney over gas prices. First, Obama denied that he’d done anything about denying licenses on oil and gas; he backed off of that shortly. Then he denied that production on federal land was down; he was lying. Finally, Romney hit him with this devastating line: The proof of whether a strategy is working or not...

Energy Policy: As the administration fast-tracks solar projects on public lands, it has locked up more than half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, preferring to continue outsourcing energy jobs and dollars. The price of gasoline, which was $1.84 a gallon the day President Obama took office, has more than doubled since, willfully aided and abetted by an administration that claims we can't drill our way to energy independence as we ignore vast reserves of North American energy that dwarf OPEC's and we sit on 100 years' supply of petroleum. Few Americans have heard of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska...

“[F]rankly, in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s.” - President Obama Oct 16, 2012 --IMAGE HERE-- As co-founder and spokesperson for OpenCarry.org, I very much wanted to hear a question about guns put to the candidates. More specifically, like many Americans, I wanted to hear what kind of Supreme Court justices the candidates would nominate where gun rights are concerned. In fact, we formulated a question that encompassed the core of these concerns and issued a press release urging that the candidates be asked the following: A divided United States...

President Barack Obama declared during Tuesday’s presidential debate that his goals as president include the reinstatement of a so-called “assault weapons ban” in the United States. As part of a plan to reduce street violence in cities — including in his own hometown of Chicago — Obama proposed “seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced.”This appears to be among the boldest pro-gun-control comments Obama has made as president, and the first time has has openly called for the reinstatement of the assault weapons ban. “So my belief is that, A, we have to enforce the laws we’ve...

A message from Tom, a machine shop owner and businessman, who is trying to help Americans understand just how destructive Obama and his minions are toward business owners across America.

Neera Tanden, a former aide to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, had this to say about the relationship of the two presidents: Clinton, being Clinton, had plenty of advice in mind and was desperate to impart it. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, the phone calls Clinton kept expecting rarely came. “People say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes Tanden. “The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people. My analogy is...

White House, Obama Campaign, Won’t Answer When President Met with NSC After Benghazi By Fred Lucas October 15, 2012 (CNSNews.com) – Neither the White House nor the Obama re-election campaign will answer when President Barack Obama first met with his National Security Council after the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. On Monday, neither responded to CNSNews.com, which asked, “‘At what hour on what day did President Obama first meet with the National Security Council to discuss what had happened in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012?” The NSC is chaired by the...

Letters signed by Barack Obama 25 years ago and obtained by The Daily Caller, show the future president approaching Chicago’s then-mayor Harold Washington in 1987 about a community organizing project whose advisory board would include his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright; the controversial leftist Catholic priest Father Michael Pfleger; and the brother of  Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.When Obama later ran for president, he sought to distance himself from Rev. Wright, although the letters obtained by TheDC indicate a working relationship between the two men on a political level when the future president was just 26 years old.They hint at a young Obama,...

25) Debate preparation, obviously. 24) Facts. 23) When he has to talk to Sasha and Malia about getting in trouble at school and his teleprompter is broken. 22) People who don't want to "spread (their) wealth around" to pay for Obama phones, Egyptian foreign aid, and free birth control for Sandra Fluke. 21) Chris Matthews for not being biased enough in his favor. 20) Women who have concerns that go beyond government-funded abortion and birth control, gay Americans who vote on issues other than gay marriage, Hispanic Americans who think illegal immigration isn't that big of an issue, and black...

On a day when Hillary Clinton fell on her sword and took "responsibility" for the lack of security in Libya, President Barack Obama's Twitter account (@BarackObama) frivolously tweeted a picture with his arm around a life-size cardboard cutout of himself. "You look familiar," the tweet said. Humility is not Obama's strong suit, and a person who replied to Obama's tweet may have said it best, in reference to the cardboard cutout and Obama's first debate in which he barely showed up: "Just don’t let him stand in for you at the debate tomorrow, OK?"

As he prepares for the second debate, Obama faces a major dilemma: how to be more aggressive without jeopardizing his alleged likability, the main thing he supposedly has going for him with voters. The Barack Obama the public usually sees is not the real Barack Obama. The former is a carefully manufactured media image designed to appear eminently reasonable, highly engaged, ultra-caring, inordinately intelligent and as one who transcends the pettiness that plagues so many politicians. The real Obama is none of those things. These things wouldn't matter as much if the liberal media hadn't insulated Obama from scrutiny and...

Gas prices have more than doubled since Barack Obama took over the White House. But that didn’t stop him from cutting off drilling in August in half of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. The Obama Administration planned for higher gas prices and fewer jobs through their many job-killing decisions. The Wall Street Journal reported, via FOX Nation: President Obama is campaigning as a champion of the oil and gas boom he’s had nothing to do with, and even as his regulators try to stifle it. The latest example is the Interior Department’s little-noticed August decision to close off from drilling nearly...

President Obama is campaigning as a champion of the oil and gas boom he's had nothing to do with, and even as his regulators try to stifle it. The latest example is the Interior Department's little-noticed August decision to close off from drilling nearly half of the 23.5 million acre National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The area is called the National Petroleum Reserve because in 1976 Congress designated it as a strategic oil and natural gas stockpile to meet the "energy needs of the nation." Alaska favors exploration in nearly the entire reserve. The feds had been reviewing four potential...