Free Republic

The unconstrained political warfare symbolized by House Speaker John Boehner's pledge to sue President Obama for allegedly abusing his executive authority pushes this presidency farther down a rocky road that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush would painfully recognize. In one key respect, each president's tenure has followed a similar arc. Each initially sought the White House promising to bridge the nation's widening partisan divide. Clinton pledged to transcend "brain-dead policies in both parties" with his "New Democrat" agenda. Bush declared himself a "compassionate conservative" who would govern as "a uniter, not a divider." Obama emerged with his stirring 2004...

The 38th President of the United States, Gerald R. Ford, was born on this date in 1913 in Nebraska, and was the first person to hold the office of President of the United States without receiving any electoral votes - he had been appointed to the Vice Presidency in December, 1973 following the resignation of Spiro Agnew, and assumed the Presidency in August, 1974 following Richard Nixon's resignation. An Eagle Scout and longtime congressman from Michigan, he was also the last surviving member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President Kennedy. Today, we raise the Michigan state...

I attend a fair number of political shindigs, and for the rest of you who do also, you’re probably familiar with the sight of various groups pushing to Draft Ben Carson as a potential 2016 GOP nominee. I saw them out in force at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference this year, and they’ve been making the rounds at all the other usual confabs. But what about Dr. Carson himself? Does he really want to take the big chair? Rare conducted an interview with him this week and lobbed the usual question. The answer may prove enlightening. Kurt Wallace: I...

Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail. - George W. Bush Sept. 20, 2001. Today is George W. Bush's 68th birthday. A man who, according to his father, "faced the greatest challenge of any president since Abraham Lincoln.” Happy Birthday, President George W. Bush. Great to visit the @GWBLibrary earlier this year! pic.twitter.com/6u3f12FF1T — Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) July 6, 2014 His presidency will...

In past columns, I've mentioned some teachers and professors that I've known who bluntly said that Ronald Reagan was the nation's worst president. It has become rather common in academia to describe the Reagan years as being filled with greed, and later, with deception in the Iran-Contra matter. Ronald Reagan's "trickle down" economic policies are dismissed in many classrooms as the very "voodoo economics" they were so termed by his onetime opponent and later vice president, George H.W. Bush. And Reagan's visible decline as a result of Alzheimer's in his later years is often implied to be a fit...

A new poll by Quinnipiac shows that Americans believe President Obama to be the worst president since World War II. The poll showed people thought that Ronald Reagan was the best.Might the scales finally be falling from America's eyes? Reuters: In a survey of 1,446 registered voters, 33 percent said Obama was the worst president since World War Two, while 28 percent pointed to his predecessor, George W. Bush, as the worst, the poll by Quinnipiac University found. Voters were split over which of the two most recent presidents has done a better job with 39 percent saying Obama has...

As I was lunching with a few conservative political types earlier this week, the subject turned, as it does, to the 2016 field. When the name of a highly regarded former governor came up, the judgment was unequivocal: “He’s just so . . . boring.” That was not intended as an endorsement. It should be. Barack Obama has been anything but boring. “May you live in exciting times” may be a fake Chinese curse, but the wisdom communicated therein is real. Thought experiment: Consider the presidency of Barack Obama from the point of view of the sort of person who...

Former Secretary of State and 66-year-old grandmother-to-be Hillary Clinton is suffering from a bad heart and President Barack Obama believes the American people deserve a fresher face than hers in the 2016 presidential election, according to author Edward Klein in his new book, Blood Feud. "She (Hillary) had managed to keep her medical history secret out of fear that, should it become public, it would disqualify her from becoming president," notes Klein in an excerpt from the book highlighted by Drudge Report. Klein claims in the book that Clinton, who is widely seen as the front runner to become the...

We all have read about Hillary's legal defense of the accused child rapist and her callous interview about the case. As I saw yet another article about it today, I realized that year in which the rapist died, 1992, was the year in which Bill Clinton was running for his first term as President and conservatives' attention was drawn to the number and nature of deaths of those people who could have said things to compromise his campaign. Does anyone know how this rapist died in 1992? Was there anything mysterious or untoward about his death?

There's no obvious reason that Scott Walker should be president. And yet. When Scott Walker won the governorship of Wisconsin in 2010, state Democrats reacted with a collective shrug, but Tim Cullen was perhaps the least concerned of all. The retired state senator had known Walker since 1993, when the two spent a series of summer evenings sitting together on concrete benches outside a Janesville hospital that was caring for both Cullen's mother and Walker's father. The men hadn't talked politics, but they'd talked plenty, and Cullen had been impressed with, and grown fond of, the easygoing rookie assemblyman. Cullen...

Trey Gowdy had a defining moment when he had to explain to Congress and Barack Obama exactly what their job titles are supposed to be. Trey Gowdy lead the charge in passing a bill that directs Obama to follow the laws – ....

By Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyJerusalem --- Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Israel President-elect Reuven Rivlin ‘agreed to agree’ on Wednesday, embracing with a hug and a smile for the cameras. Formal congratulations from the Prime Minister to the President-elect were in order despite the fact that Netanyahu worked very hard to find a different Likud candidate for the office – and Rivlin knew it. They’ve been at odds for years in fact; but they’re both professional enough and smart enough to know they must now set aside those differences. Given the many political differences between Netanyahu and Rivlin, the...

..... Hours after being elected president, MK Reuven Rivlin published a personal post on his Facebook page, in which he thanked the MKs who voted for him. "I want to thank you. Those who voted for me - for placing your confidence in me and those who didn’t vote for me - for placing their confidence in me in the future,” he wrote. “I hope to have the strength to fulfill the mission in a way that will meet the expectations of my supporters and a dispel the concerns of those who were opposed to me,” continued Rivlin. “I thank...

NEW ORLEANS -- Herman Cain, who ended his 2012 presidential campaign amid allegations of multiple affairs, said Saturday that he might run for president again in 2016. Cain, in a speech at the Republican Leadership Conference here, brought up the prospect of another run toward the end of his speech. He then suggested he would do it if he were called by God. “I do not know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future," the Georgia businessman said. "And I trust in God.” Cain, 68, was a brief front-runner for the GOP nomination in 2011 but...

Partial results indicate that Egypt’s former army chief, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, is headed for a big victory. According to Reuters, Sisi’s campaign said Wednesday night that the popular candidate had captured 93.4 percent of the votes with 2,000 polling stations counted. Judicial sources said he had 89 percent with 3,000 polling stations counted. Sisi’s only rival, Hamdeen Sabahi, was on 2.9 percent according to the Sisi campaign, while the judicial sources put Sabahi on 5 percent. The rest of the ballots were deemed void. …

If the Republican nominee for president is going to come from the ranks of current or former governors, the GOP could do worse than choose former chairman of the House Republican Conference and current governor of Indiana Mike Pence.Pence is the kind of candidate who just might be able to act as a bridge between the warring conservative factions. His conservative voting record as a House member is nearly impeccable: no to No Child Left Behind and the prescription drug biil; no to the bank bailout; and a budget hawk who was calling for big cuts in spending before...

In his lone commencement address of the year, former Florida governor Jeb Bush urged students at a Christian liberal arts college Saturday to reaffirm their socially conservative values, a sign that he is underscoring his own as he considers running in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries. “Remain true to your convictions and your faith,” Bush said, speaking at Grove City College in northwestern Pennsylvania. “This may seem a little challenging today, where we have a federal government that is willingly violating the religious freedom of its citizens. But we don’t have to accept it.” Dropping a possible hint about his...

Despite the best efforts of the mainstream media and the political establishment to protect Barack Obama, they can no longer hide the incompetence and criminality of the most divisive and sordid administration in American history. https://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/when-obama-resigns

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says the U.S. has deployed 80 military personnel to Chad to help located more than 200 girls kidnapped in Nigeria.

If we’re destined to have another Bush versus Clinton election, it’s only right that there be a Perot-type in the mix too.As David Petraeus once said, tell me how this ends. Ben Carson is warming to the idea of running for president. Since the famous brain surgeon retired last year from Johns Hopkins Hospital, he’s been speaking around the country to enthusiastic audiences. And they’ve affected his thinking about seeking national office…Carson writes that he suspects many others interested in high office would be better candidates. But in his book he has a caveat: “If I felt called by...