Free Republic

As the calendar turns toward the final two years of the Obama Presidency, this is a moment to consider the world it has produced. There is no formal Obama Doctrine that serves as the 44th President’s blueprint for America’s engagement with the world. But it is fair to say that Barack Obama brought into office a set of ideas associated with the progressive, or left-leaning, wing of the Democratic foreign-policy establishment. “Leading from behind” was the phrase coined in 2011 by an Obama foreign-policy adviser to describe the President’s approach to the insurrection in Libya against Moammar Gaddafi. That phrase...

Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) walked into a meeting with Wall Street Journal editorial writers last year and laid his cards on the table. “I don’t really care what other people write about me, but I really do care about what the Wall Street Journal writes,” Cruz said, according to a source in the room at the time. The blandishment failed to move his audience. Cruz occupies a place of singular ignominy on the opinion pages of the paper, which treats him as an opportunistic charlatan — even by Washington, D.C., standards. And yet, the strained relationship between Cruz and...

A huge front-page story in today's Wall Street Journal is called "Israel Outflanks White House in Pressing Gaza Strategy." The piece contends among other things that Israel has been doing an end-around the White House by securing munitions directly from the Pentagon. That contention is false. In fact, buried in the twenty-first paragraph of the piece is an explanation that the weapons purchase that they suggest is an end-around in the first few paragraphs is actually standard operating procedure. The WSJ piece begins: White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel's military campaign...

What is happening at the southern border is a true and actual crisis. News accounts justly use words like chaos, collapse and breakdown. They feature images of children—toddlers, 4- and 5-year-olds—being shuffled to warehouse holding centers, sleeping crowded at night on what look like pallets, covered only in Mylar blankets. "I never thought we'd have refugee camps in America," said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, "but that's what it's appearing." All this gives normal people a feeling of besiegement and foreboding. Is a nation without borders a nation? Washington's leaders seem to recognize what's happening as a political problem, not a...

There is rarely a good time to do hard things, and America won't advance if legislators act like seat-warmers. When I learned that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor had lost his Republican primary, my heart sank. Not simply because I think he is an intelligent and talented member of Congress, or because I worry about the future of the Republican Party. Like others who want comprehensive immigration reform, I worried that Mr. Cantor's loss would be misconstrued and make Congress reluctant to tackle this urgent need. That would be the wrong lesson and an undesirable national consequence of this single,...

Behind the surprise exchange of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban detainees were secret negotiations that began three years ago and ended over the weekend with the retrieval of America's last known prisoner of war, rekindling debate over the propriety of such deals with American adversaries.

One of the strategically interesting things about Vladimir Putin is that he has been careful not to set himself against religious belief but attempted to align himself with it. He has taken domestic actions that he believes reflect the assumptions of religious conservatives. He has positioned himself so that he can make a claim on a part of the Russian soul, as they used to say, that his forbears could not: He is not anti-God, he is pro-God, pro the old church of the older, great Russia. ... At the top, religious references. Crimea is "where Prince Vladimir was baptized....

Jim Jordan wants to know what the White House knew about the IRS targeting scandal, and when they knew it-- as if we didn’t know. The conservative Representative from Ohio has penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the activities of the IRS and, more specifically Lois Lerner, the former IRS official who is at the center of the controversy. Jordan essentially is saying where there is smoke there is fire, and oh yeah, where there’s fire, there is fire too. “Emails and testimony that we confronted Ms. Lerner with showed her...

Russia gave its clearest signal yet Monday that it plans to move fast to annex Crimea, defying U.S. and European threats of sanctions a day after a referendum in the breakaway Ukrainian region to secede passed handily. The Moscow-backed leadership of Crimea wasted no time in formally asking to join Russia following the hastily called referendum in which 97% of voters supported becoming part of Russia. "We will take care of our part quickly, quickly and responsibly," Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of the lower house of Russia's parliament, told reporters in response to the Crimean parliamentary vote, according to local news...

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times. The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in...

President Obama: "20 Million people have logged on to the website and that certainly shows that the interest is there for health care ... "

The Obama administration may give Americans extra time to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, postponing when penalties for failing to buy coverage will go into effect, MarketWatch has learned. The health care law requires most people to have health insurance by Jan. 1, 2014, but allows for “short coverage gaps” of up to three months before imposing the penalty, which is $95 or 1% of an individual’s income (whichever is greater) next year. That means someone must be covered by March 31, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed, which is...

I posted this last night on the thread that discussed the NBC report, but it needs to be seen by some of our talking heads who lurk on here and later report things without looking at the details... So it has it's own thread. Go to the complete poll PDF on the WSJ web page on page 16 it has the demographics of the poll. 43% of Respondents are Democrats and 32% were Republicans. 44% voted for Obama vs 35% for Romney. And 5% did not know who the voted for? That right there should instantly put this poll in...

A sharp reader caught a statistical problem with that much-cited NBC/WSJ poll that shows Republicans are getting whooped in the shutdown: Tampa @S1CT @texasbryanp In today's NBC/WSJ poll, 1 in 5 respondents work for govt.  Only 8% of pop works for govt.  See last page. 8:12 - 10 Oct 2013 It’s true. Here is the complete poll with the sample, the questions, etc. On the very last page we get the breakdown of where the 800 respondents work. The wording of the question is broad enough to sweep in spouses of government workers and other situations in which the respondent...

Contrary to claims from its editorial pages editor, a Wall Street Journal editor knew of Elizabeth O’Bagy’s connections to the Islamist Syrian Emergency Task Force and took at least three days to publish a clarification. “We were not aware of Elizabeth O’Bagy’s academic claims or credential when we published her Aug. 31 op-ed, and the op-ed made no reference to them,” editorial pages editor Paul Gigot told Politico in a statement on September 11. “We also were not aware of her affiliation with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, and we published a clarification when we learned of it,” Gigot wrote....

The Syria researcher whose Wall Street Journal op-piece was cited by Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. John McCain during congressional hearings about the use of force has been fired from the Institute for the Study of War for lying about having a Ph.D., the group announced on Wednesday. “The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University,” the institute said in a statement. “ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.” O’Bagy told POLITICO’s Kate Brannen...

On Monday, Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto expanded on themes he recently wrote about relating to Florida’s thin case against George Zimmerman, the man accused of murdering Trayvon Martin in 2012. Taranto told WSJ’s Mary Kessel that the prosecution of Zimmerman, in the words of one Slate columnist, was supposed to serve as a “referendum” on racial privilege in America. “There’s a word for a trial that is held as a referendum – it’s a show trial,” Taranto said. “We don’t do show trials in this country.” “Why has the press been so convinced from the very beginning that...

I have had my posting privileges cut off at the WSJ. The help desk admits that it is a case of partisan censorship and have asked me to plead my case to the WSJ Community Board. First, the moderator accused me of not being who I said I was, then he said that I used offensive language. I saved a copy of that post to prove that the most offensive word in the post was, pregnant. Then he demanded that I complete a personal profile, giving out my place of employment and email address. I told them that I was...

Every day brings new revelations about who knew what about the IRS targeting conservative groups during President Obama's re-election campaign, but the overall impression is of a vast federal bureaucracy run amok. While the White House continues to peddle the story of a driverless train wreck, taxpayers are being treated to a demonstration of the dangers of an unwieldy and unaccountable administrative state. Look, Ma, no hands! In his press events, Mr. Obama has said that while he learned about the Cincinnati rogues on the news, he plans to "hold accountable those who have taken these outrageous actions." But the...

"The Democrats have lost on sequestration," Journolist founder Ezra Klein declares ..... (snip) Reader Harriet Hart is on to something with this observation: So far I haven't seen any commentary on the correlation between Mr. Obama's training as a community organizer and the sequester fiasco. Community organizers' main efforts are to stir up public sentiment to achieve special goals without implementing any solutions. Solutions are the province of someone else. The present administration has used this tactic endlessly, most noticeably with the White House tour shutdown during spring break and now flight-controller furloughs. This is definitely not an effort to...