Free Republic

During the 2008 campaign Barack Obama ran more against lame-duck President Bush than against his Republican opponent, John McCain. The campaign is now long over, and yet President Obama still seems haunted by the ghost of his predecessor. Last week, for example, he was railing at the Bush phantom, whom he blamed for his received economic mess. In the world of Barack Obama everything he inherited was someone else’s fault — unless he believes past policies offer him some advantage and thus are to be claimed as entirely his own. The stock market is sliding. Gas and food prices are...

Top congressional leaders agreed Thursday to a four-year extension of the anti-terrorist Patriot Act, the controversial law passed after the Sept. 11 attacks that governs the search for terrorists on American soil. The deal between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner calls for a vote before May 27, when parts of the current act expire. The idea is to pass the extension with as little debate as possible to avoid a protracted and familiar argument over the expanded power the law gives to the government. SNIP "I still have some concerns, and at this point I'm...

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales chided fellow Republicans on immigration, urging them to work toward comprehensive immigration reform. Gonzales, the first Hispanic attorney general of the U.S., said it was a "failure" by both parties to have not achieved immigration reform yet, and warned against a proposal favored by some Republicans to amend the U.S. Constitution to deny birthright citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. "My recommendation not just to the Republican Party but also the Democratic Party is that this country, our federal leaders need to pass comprehensive immigration reform," Gonzales said Sunday on Univision's "Al Punto" program....

WASHINGTON -- I in my innocence was, in the aftermath of SEAL Team Six's disruption of Osama bin Laden's bucolic life in posh Abbottabad, reading editorial comment by the great newspapers of this republic. As always, the Wall Street Journal was superb, pausing to congratulate President Barack Obama for "ordering a special forces mission rather than settling for another attack with drones or stand-off weapons from afar." The Washington Post was, likewise, informative and appreciative of the president's prudent decision to let SEAL Team Six do its thing, skirting the laws of a sovereign nation and acting unilaterally to put...

DEVELOPING: Usama bin Laden was given a religious funeral prior to his burial at sea, senior military officials told Fox News. Religious rites were conducted on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier at about 1:10 a.m. Monday in the Persian Gulf. In accordance with Islamic practice, bin Laden was washed and wrapped in a white sheet before buried at sea at 2 p.m. local time, senior U.S. military and intelligence officials said.

(snip) What triggered the upswing? In part: ethanol. President George W. Bush "came forward with—what do you call?—the edict that we were going to mandate 36 billion gallons of alternative fuels" by 2022, of which corn-based ethanol is "a substantial part." Companies that blend ethanol into fuel get a $5 billion annual tax credit, and there's a tariff to keep foreign producers out of the U.S. market. Now 40% of the corn crop is "directed to ethanol, which equals the amount that's going into livestock food," Mr. Pope calculates. (snip) Food price inflation isn't a problem confined to America's shores....

In the latest effort to accommodate its cherished trade partner in the south, the U.S. government is paying to upgrade outdated Mexican trucks that hemorrhage illegal amounts of exhaust on their trips north to deliver merchandise.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Persistent Federal Reserve critic Representative Ron Paul plans to hold a hearing on the U.S. central bank's emergency loans to the branches of non-U.S. banks, his spokeswoman said on Saturday. "I was surprised and deeply disturbed ... to learn the staggering amount of money that went to foreign banks," Paul said in a statement. "These lending activities provided no benefit to American taxpayers, the American economy, or even directly to American banks," he said.

(CNN) – Former President George W. Bush is worried the U.S. might pull out of Afghanistan too early to the detriment of that country's women. In an interview with Fox News that aired Thursday, Bush warned that Afghan women will "suffer" should the Obama administration decide to downscale troop levels there. "My concern of course is that the United States gets weary of being in Afghanistan and says 'It's not worth it, let's leave' and Laura and I believe that if that were to happen, women would suffer again," he told Fox's Greta Van Susteren. "And we don't believe that's...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - While Congress brawls over how to shrink a $1.6 trillion budget deficit this year, an even tougher battle has begun over cutting popular Social Security retirement benefits to achieve long-term savings. It's unclear whether Congress will be able to agree on how to reform the massive government pension program, which has provided a social safety net for the elderly since 1935. That in part will depend on whether President Barack Obama throws his weight behind a reform effort that politicians of all stripes fear could be full of political risks. While the president has invited a conversation...

The defector who convinced the White House that Iraq had a secret biological weapons programme has admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war. Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995. "Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right," he said. "They...

Two members of a notorious Central American gang face life in federal prison in a murder-for-hire scheme cooked up over bad blood in Honduras that ended in gunfire in West Columbia, a prosecutor said Friday. Josue Benitez, 22, and Martin Teran, 36, were convicted Thursday after a three-week trial of a hit on Jorge Ramos, U.S. prosecutor Jay Richardson said. Ramos was gunned down while he worked on his car Nov. 2, 2008, in Hendrix Mobile Home Park on Leaphart Road. The MS-13 gang members drove from Houston to South Carolina to carry out the contract killing, Richardson said. Jurors...

In a new advocacy ad, one of the daughters of former President George W. Bush endorses gay marriage. “I’m Barbara Bush and I’m a New Yorker for marriage equality. New York is about fairness and equality, and everyone should have the right to marry the person that they love. Join us," the former first daughter says in a Web video by the group Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

It's called "an admission against interest" in legal circles. Example: When the New York Times says something good about George W. Bush. It was George W. Bush's fault, the NYT just confessed, that the Stuxnet computer worm ended up destroying 984 Iranian uranium centrifuges over the last year or so. Bush got the Stuxnet program started in cooperation with Israel and other countries in the last years of his presidency. Of course the Times buries the truth half-way down its long story on Stuxnet computer worm, instantly saying that when Obama found out about it he made the program speed...

I’m going to take the death panel end-of-life planning conundrum down one point at a time to make this very clear for Americans to understand what the Pelosi-led Democrats have done to your healthcare and their attempt to take cover under a Bush-era law–the Medicare Improvement for Patients and Providers Act of 2008. The Hill reported that the Obama White House attempted to calm Americans’ fears of the dreaded death panels: The Medicare policy will pay doctors for holding end-of-life-care discussions with patients, according to the Times. A similar provision was dropped from the new healthcare reform law after Republicans...

Back in 2007, a U.S. senator asked ICE's then-Assistant Secretary Julie Myers to estimate the cost of finding and deporting all of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. According to the New York Times, Myers pegged the price tag at $94 billion. Now that the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. has declined by about 1 million, the cost has somehow increased significantly, to $135 billion, according a new estimate from the Department of Homeland Security, prepared in response to questions from Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. So DHS is saying essentially that the cost...

On Wednesday, Henrico County Judge Daniel T. Balfour sentenced convicted rapist, Arturo F. Lopez, 18, to 50 years in prison, but suspended 20 of those years. Due to the grievous nature of the illegal alien’s crime, Judge Balfour actually went beyond the sentencing guidelines which ranged from nine years and 10 months to 21 years and one month for abduction and rape convictions. Lopez, who took a bus to Richmond, after entering the country illegally last year, was placed with a foster couple after he was found wandering the streets, homeless. On April 9, just five days after his 18th...

News reports on Saturday reporting that the TSA was announcing warnings to would-be travelers that any "would-be commercial airline passenger who enters an airport checkpoint but refuses to undergo the method of inspection as prescribed by the TSA workers on duty would not be allowed to fly, (but far more importantly)--would not be permitted to leave the airport." But that wasn't all. The TSA also included in it's announcement for the first time the new fine of $11,000 and possible arrest for anyone who refused. TSA worker Sari Koshetz was quoted in one report, "Once a person submits to the...

This annoys the hell out of me, because I'm not some rabid Palinista. Crap like this from Barbara Bush leaves one no alternative but to respond to it. What, does she have another son, or a grand kid lined up for the job of President? Reagan handed your husband his, despite some misgivings, and he blew it, Barbara. And as much as I supported her husband and her son while they were in office, they've hardly gotten us to a great place. Guess what? If not for 9/11, GW may well have been a one-term-er, just like his father. He...

13-year-old Cody Alicea rides with an American flag on the back of his bike. He says he does this to be patriotic and to honor veterans, like his own grandfather, Robert. He's had the flag on his bike for two months but Monday, was asked told to take it down. A school official at Denair Middle School told Cody some students had been complaining about the flag and it was no longer allowed on school property. "In this country we're supposed to be free," said Cody. "And I should be able to wave my flag wherever I want to. And...