Free Republic

Today, this country has a black President, and the Russians have a nickname for him too. He is called Maximka—after a character from a popular Soviet movie, made in 1952, which told the story of a black boy saved by the Russian sailors from the cruelty of the vicious American slave-traders who were terribly abusing him and calling him just that—“Boy.” In the film, the saved boy was fed well by the Russian crew, given the name Maximka, and became one of their own in the end. But by the modern-day Russian legend, Maximka, unfortunately, has grown up into an ungrateful...

President Barack Obama saluted a pair of United States Marines on Tuesday while holding what appeared to be a styrofoam cup in his saluting hand, a breach of military regulations that won't win him fans among veterans and servicemen.

Batter up! Obama pops in on Little League game WASHINGTON (AP) — Put down the juice box and lace up your sneakers. President Barack Obama is pinch-hitting for Little League. The president paid a surprise visit Monday to Washington's Friendship Park, where a handful of teams were warming up for the big game. Stepping onto the field in a tie but no jacket, Obama shook hands with the players and posed for photos with each team. "What's going on people? How's it going?" the president said, before sidling up to a young girl whose arm was in a sling. "Hey,...

The opening months of Colorado’s first-in-the-nation recreational marijuana industry have seen a rise in fiery explosions and injuries as pot users try to make the drug’s intoxicating oil in crude home-based laboratories. Since Jan. 1, when sales began, the state’s only certified adult burn center has treated 10 people with serious injuries they suffered while making hash oil, compared with 11 in 2013 and one in 2012. Law enforcement and fire officials, meanwhile, are grappling with how to respond, as the questionable legality of the process has made it difficult to punish amateur chemists. Some prosecutors are charging them with...

NAPLES, Italy (Reuters Life!) - If you are looking for something different for your nativity scene this year, head to Italy's city of Naples where you can buy miniature replicas of U.S. presidential candidates to place next to your baby Jesus. The production of handmade nativity scene figurines is big business in Naples and has been since the eighteenth century. Thousands of angels, sheep and Marys and Josephs fill market stalls at this time of the year as shoppers choose their personal way to tell the Christmas story. Tradition requires that the nativity scene be built up over time until...

The lunch conversation inevitably turned to whether the White House would display its crèche, customarily placed in a prominent spot in the East Room. Ms. Rogers, this participant said, replied that the Obamas did not intend to put the manger scene on display — a remark that drew an audible gasp from the tight-knit social secretary sisterhood. (A White House official confirmed that there had been internal discussions about making Christmas more inclusive and whether to display the crèche.) Yet in the end, tradition won out; the executive mansion is now decorated for the Christmas holiday, and the crèche is...

Obama administration proposes 15 cent Christmas tree tax By Alicia M. Cohn - 11/09/11 09:17 AM ET The Obama administration is proposing a new tax on Christmas trees to fund a board promoting the holiday trees. The Christmas Tree Promotion Board would be funded by a new 15 cent per tree tax on large-scale producers of Christmas trees. A group of Christmas tree producers and importers worried about the skyrocketing use of artificial trees proposed the new board. Under the proposal from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the board would seek to revitalize the marketing and image of fresh-cut Christmas...

Just as the mainstream media initially failed to report the erupting controversy over President Obama’s contraceptive mandate, they are again ignoring the sustained uproar against it. MSM thinks Obama’s faux concession on February 10 settled the matter. According to The Hill on February 13: The furor over President Obama’s birth-control insurance mandate appears to have vaporized as quickly as it blew up. The White House faced just two questions on the issue at a briefing with reporters Monday, just days after the intense controversy threatened to swamp the president’s reelection campaign. To be fair, liberal journalists may simply have...

The President called the budget plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), “social Darwinism“.Do you want an example of true social Darwinism?  Look at Pres. Obama’s eager support of abortion and even infanticide.Only the strong survive.The trajectory fueled by authentic Darwinism led to the eugenics and hate-filled agenda of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood, the queen of big-business abortion, of which Pres. Obama is a huge supporter.Can we forget that Pres. Obama’s unelected appointee, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius openly declared that lowering live births would help pay for health care?  ““The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for cost of...

It would be easy if Satan came as he is often portrayed, with horns and a pitchfork. We would naturally flee this ugliness.Alas, he often comes cloaked in beauty, in sheep’s clothing: He claims to offer us freedom and autonomy from an unreasonable God and Church, liberation from rules and being “told what to do.” He cloaks himself in the false righteousness of being “tolerant” and “not judging others.” He exalts us by telling us we have finally come of age and can disregard the “hang-ups” and “repression” our ancestors had of sex and pleasure. He flatters us by...

On Wednesday, after Breitbart News reported that Politico magazine writer Ian Murphy had written a piece titled “@*#@ the Troops,” Murphy proceeded to go berserk on Twitter, posting a .gif of himself setting an American flag ablaze. He then tweeted, “Some of you folks are unfairly questioning my patriotism. So here I am on a very typical Tuesday evening.” This follows hard on Murphy’s tweeting on Tuesday that “Reagan f***s Satan in hell.”

Obamacare Zombies: Now they are the ones being chased WASHINGTON, November 13, 2013 — President Barack Obama’s legions of Obamacare Zombies are in confusion with the meltdown of Obamacare. It is one crisis that Obama cannot cover-up. For once, the media could not help him by ignoring events, because insurance cancellation letters bypassed media and took bad news directly to the public. Unfortunately, exposing years of deceit required a personal crisis for millions, which for some is a life-and-death crisis. It is inexcusable that it took such disaster to shock these political zombies from their trances. Now it’s too late...

President Barack Obama should act less like an Saul Alinsky-trained community organizer and more like the president of the United States, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan charged on Fox News. Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”criticized Obama’s plans to go to Asia on Wednesday’s episode of “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” blaming parts of his administration as the culprits behind the government shutdown. “He is president of the United States, and the idea he is flying off on a junket to Bali, and he is going to Brunei as well, when his own country —...

HALLOWEEN: Is this Barack Obama vampire card offensive? While shopping for Halloween cards at Target in San Bernardino, JoAnn Nelson was appalled when her 5-year-old granddaughter showed her this card. Nelson said she finds the card tasteless and offensive. ”I was disturbed and did not want my grandbaby to see this,” she wrote in an email.

“I think that Dr. King would be amazed in many ways about the progress that we’ve made,” he said. “What he would also say, though, is that the March on Washington was about jobs and justice,” he added. “And that when it comes to the economy, when it comes to inequality, when it comes to wealth, when it comes to the challenges that inner cities experience, he would say that we have not made as much progress as the civil and social progress that we’ve made, and that it’s not enough just to have a black president.

When it comes to Vietnam, I'm all for moving on, putting the past behind us, looking forward, letting bygones be bygones, but doing so requires honesty about the past, lest history be forgotten and the memory and honor tarnished of the 60,000 Americans who died in that war. On his visit to Washington last week, President Truong Tan Sang of Vietnam told President Obama the late revolutionary Ho Chi Minh was inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution and by the words of Thomas Jefferson. In an ad in the Washington Post, President Sang even claimed Jefferson's vision...

When Barack Obama ran for the presidency five years ago, pundits on both the left and right reassured the country that the election of America’s “first black president” promised to issue forth a new era of interracial harmony. Some of us, however, knew all too well that this was the kind of stuff that only fools and liars could peddle. In fact, we predicted that, far from inaugurating a “Post-Racial” America, cries of “racism” were sure to increase if Obama seized the White House. Unfortunately, in retrospect, we appear to have been prescient. We knew, first of all, that there...

Embassy Row: Gay diplomat an ‘insult’ Church leaders in culturally conservative Dominican Republic are outraged that President Obama nominated an openly homosexual activist to serve as ambassador to the Caribbean nation. Cardinal Nicolas de Jesus Lopez, the Roman Catholic archbishop of the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo, Bishop Pablo Cedano and the Rev. Cristobal Cardozo, leader of the Dominican Evangelical Fraternity, are urging President Danilo Medino to reject the nominee, Chicago lawyer James Brewster. “It’s an insult to good Dominican customs,” Father Cardozo said last week. Bishop Cedano denounced the nomination for showing “a lack of respect,” and added cryptically:...

DNC: Nearly $500,000 of equipment was lost or stolen in Charlotte To stage last year’s Democratic National Convention, the local host committee raised millions of dollars, much of it for computers, phones and other communication devices. Now it appears a sizable amount of that equipment was lost, stolen – or perhaps kept by the staffers it had been assigned to. The Democratic National Convention Committee said it recently sent the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department a spreadsheet detailing $496,000 worth of missing equipment. CMPD created an incident report in May. Among the missing items: MacBook Pro laptops, iPads, iPod Nanos, computer printers,...

Five years and 50 years. As President Barack Obama revisits Berlin, he can't escape those anniversaries and the inevitable comparisons to history and personal achievement. His 26-hour whirlwind visit to the German capital caps three days of international summitry for the president and marks his return to a place where he once summoned a throng of 200,000 to share his ambitious vision for American leadership. That was 2008, when Obama was running for president and those who supported him at home and abroad saw the young mixed-race American as a unifying and transformational figure who signified hope and change. Five...