Free Republic

Before a wildly enthusiastic and adoring crowd of an estimated 14,000 supporters, many of whom waited in line for hours in the freezing, windy cold of a Chicago winter off the city's justifiably famed lakefront the preceding weekend for their free tickets, President Barack Hussein Obama (D) returned to the city where it all began for a farewell to his presidency. How cold was it for those waiting in line for tickets? So cold -- 6 degrees above zero with a wind chill factor driving the uncomfortable index further down -- that even Chicago's notorious shooters stayed inside. The city...

It was recently mentioned that U.S. Forces have dropped over 27,000 bombs on Syria and Iraq during Operation Inherent Resolve, the Obama administration's campaign against ISIS. Given the current controversies over the reliability of and possible political motivations behind American intelligence assessments, let's look behind this figure to see what these munitions have bought the U.S. during the campaign, and whether we can count on the Obama administration's related claims about the war on ISIS or the claims of his intelligence community in general. Historically, air campaigns are mostly measured by aircraft sorties rather than munitions dropped. In the age...

I was there. In the Tiergarten in Berlin, in July 2008. And the more I think back on it, the more bizarre it was... You see, there was no substance to the charade. Obama only wanted to speak in Berlin because it was where John Fitzgerald Kennedy made his most famous address, back in 1963. And he was trying to position himself as a modern JFK.... But the difference was that Jack Kennedy was a great statesman, who had not only vision, but had implemented his dreams – and Obama was a fraud....

RUSH: We have an entire half of the political system in meltdown over the fact that Donald Trump won this election and that their candidate lost it. We have Obama and his farewell address last night, which went longer than George Washington’s, Ronald Reagan’s, and Harry Truman’s combined. He mentioned himself 75 times, and it was pathetic. And do you know who was in the front row of that speech last night standing up with applause every now and then? Remember the name Robert Creamer? You’ve forgotten already? Robert Creamer is the husband of Jan Schakowsky. Robert Creamer was exposed...

resident Obama mentioned in his farewell speech that no foreign terrorist organization has planned and executed an attack on the homeland. Because of the extraordinary courage of our men and women in uniform, and the intelligence officers, law enforcement, and diplomats who support them, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland these past eight years The president has been laying it on thick over the past week with this claim. On January 4, at Fort Myer in Arlington, President Obama addressed members of the military in a farewell ceremony, where he reiterated the...

RUSH: Oh, yeah, that’s right. I forgot. Tonight is Obama’s swan song speech. Oh, yeah! The farewell address. What do you think that’s gonna be? What’s Obama gonna…? I just saw the little promo up there on CNN: “Obama Farewell Address Tonight!” They got a countdown, 7 hours, 53 minutes, 43 seconds to the Obama farewell address! Big whoop. But what do you think it’s gonna be? Well… (interruption) Oh. Oh. Yeah. I do think he’s gonna mention the media. I tell you what I think it’s gonna be. I think Obama’s farewell address is gonna have the following tone....

to Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information Act requests, Americans now know that the Obama family spent a whopping $96.9 million on travel at taxpayer expense. These expenses far exceed the President's $100,000 annual travel expense authorization codified in 3 U.S. Code, Chapter 2, Section 103. Section 105 of this Federal code also limits the number of staff the President can have and staff member's maximum salaries. Presumably, Secret Service staff for the President and his family should be counted among that number. Here are some details of the Obama's unnecessary political and vacation expenses: Barack Obama's April 2015 Earth Day...

On January 20, President Barack Obama will depart the Oval Office in much the same way as he entered eight years earlier: as a wartime Commander-in-Chief. U.S. military operations against an alphabet soup of terrorist organizations around the world have proven to be a lot more unpredictable than the administration previously believed (or our D.C. elites recognize or admit). In fact, on the Obama administrationÂ’s watch, the war on terrorism has expanded to new frontiers and new countries, with very little evidence that those campaigns will enhance American security or end anytime soon.If President George W. Bush chose to go...

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY, THE FEDERALIST: Obama is absolutely delusional about what his own legacy is. His legacy can be summed up in three words, which is President Donald Trump. Americans did not vote for Donald Trump because they thought Obama's presidency was a success. They voted for him because they thought it has been a tremendous failure. .......

The swift currents of liberal promises empty always into the great desert of their futility. Someday, historians will dig into the ruins of the Obama administration and they will find in that moldering heap a record of political actions far removed from America's founding principles of government. They will walk among disasters. They will gaze upon the rubble of old propaganda mills and theaters of intolerance from a time of willful ignorance and civil strife; and they will try to understand our madness. They will wonder that democracy could have survived the vast entitlement plantations built by the Democratic Party...

resident Obama said Sunday that he’s OK with Republicans making changes to his Affordable Care Act and even changing its name from “ObamaCare” to “TrumpCare.” “I’m fine with that,” the president told ABC’s “This Week.” Obama suggested that ObamaCare will survive Republicans’ efforts to repeal and replace his signature health care law. And he said that he would be the “first one” to laud Republicans if they can “come up with a system that insures more people cheaper, better.” The president, who turns over the White House in 12 days to President-elect Donald Trump, also suggested that he has wanted...

“Republicans would create chaos in the health care system because they are stuck,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says, “between a rock and a cliché.” Oh. Off by a word or two. But I don’t need to fix it. What needs to be fixed is the whole medical-industrial complex, including the over-regulated, mis-regulated, bastardized financial system attached to it, as if an umbilical cord wrapped around a prenate’s neck. That is, what needs fixing is the whole of ObamaCare. Barack Obama’s “legacy.” And our President-elect seems to agree. “The Democrats, lead [sic] by head clown Chuck Schumer,” Donald Trump tweeted...

After eight long years, thankfully, the second term of President Barack Obama is finally coming to an end. On his way, out of office, the President has issued more executive orders, set aside 1.65 million additional acres for national monuments, released more prisoners and tried to find as many ways as possible to politically handcuff his successor. Along with his continual executive overreach, the President should be remembered for expanding the federal debt by almost $10 trillion, giving us a stimulus plan with no “shovel ready jobs” and forcing upon the American people the unworkable and disastrous Obamacare legislation that...

Oh, Chicago, we will miss having the president be one of our own. After eight years, we've gotten used to it. President Barack Obama. First lady Michelle Obama. South Siders, both. They made us proud to be Chicagoans. We set aside our sides - North, South, West, Southwest, Southeast - and with one voice in Grant Park on election night in 2008 we celebrated. A Chicagoan had won the presidency. Obama's most tangible Chicago legacy will be the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park, which will last beyond our lifetimes. But consider, too, the intangibles of his legacy, things...

Instead of admitting his responsibility for fostering this type of environment, President Obama recently claimed that race relations have “gotten better” during his two terms in office After eight long years, thankfully, the second term of President Barack Obama is finally coming to an end. On his way, out of office, the President has issued more executive orders, set aside 1.65 million additional acres for national monuments, released more prisoners and tried to find as many ways as possible to politically handcuff his successor. Along with his continual executive overreach, the President should be remembered for expanding the federal debt...

President Barack Obama reflected on the attack on a white disabled man aired on Facebook by four African-America teenagers, describing the incident as a “terrible” and “despicable” hate crime. Obama made his remarks in the context of a discussion of race relations and whether or not they had gotten better or worse during his presidency. “I don’t think it’s accurate to say that race relations have gotten worse,” he said, blaming social media, smart phones, and the internet for “surfacing” more incidents of racial violence. “What we have seen as surfacing, I think, are a lot of problems that have...

Over the New Year’s weekend, President Barack Obama’s chief policy adviser and closest strategist, Valerie Jarrett, told a talk show host that her boss would have a happy legacy because there was an absence of scandal in his administration. When first I heard this preposterous claim, I thought I had misheard it. Yet it is apparently true that President Obama and his team somehow can overlook recent history and behave as if events with which we are all familiar never happened. Here is the back story. When Obama became president in 2009 and enjoyed significant Democratic majorities in both houses...

Obama is proud of himself. He and his devoted followers believe he has left America in better shape than when he found it. Wrong. To avoid the accusation of bias and (fake) "fake news," let's use the mainstream news media and government websites, in almost every case, to prove that Obama and his core followers are misjudging their own country and the world. Foreign Affairs 1. His Benghazi policy was deadly for four Americans.These deaths happened in September 2012, before his re-election, so the DNC had to adopt a false narrative about a video because terrorist groups were supposedly in...

President Obama leaves office on Jan. 20 after eight years. We invite you to reflect on his successes and failures, and how you will remember him. Please keep your submission brief — no more than 200 words. The deadline is Thursday, Jan. 5, at 10 a.m., Eastern time. We plan to publish a sampling on Sunday, Jan. 8. Email: letters@nytimes.com (Please put “legacy” in the subject line.)

Any honest man, looking back on a very long life, must admit — even if only to himself — being a relic of a bygone era. Having lived long enough to have seen both "the greatest generation" that fought World War II and the gratingest generation that we see all around us today, makes being a relic of the past more of a boast than an admission. Not everything in the past was admirable. Poet W.H. Auden called the 1930s "a low dishonest decade." So were the 1960s, which launched many of the trends we are experiencing so painfully today....