Free Republic

They’re a long way from the White House. But here in the halls of the Marriott Marquis, covered in Barack Obama’s old logo of a rising sun for the inaugural summit of his namesake foundation, Democrats were upbeat. Organizing matters! they gushed. Internationalism was cool. There was a morning meditation and yoga session, and an evening community concert with Chance the Rapper and The National. And in between breakout sessions with titles like “The Adventure of Civility” and “Who Narrates the World?,” people took pastel-colored chalk and filled out a blackboard customized with “I hope _______.” (Samples: “we speak better...

WASHINGTON — Barack Obama could be bad news for the Democratic Party. Obama’s biggest problem over the next two years may not be coming from recalcitrant Republicans, writes the National Journal. Instead, it could be from members of his own party blanching at his activist agenda over the last two years of his presidency. Obama is planning to press forward with several polarizing decisions that could advance his legacy but come at the expense of the Democratic Party’s long-term health. Issues like threatening a veto of the Keystone XL pipeline, reaching a nuclear deal with Iran and legalizing unauthorized immigrants...

Now that the election is over, we are starting to see the contours of what lies ahead for the next four years. Here are some likely consequences from the Obama victory.1. Barack Obama is not very interested in tax reform, deficit reduction, or curbing annual spending. He believes in big government, and the bigger the better. His tenure is not so much a repudiation of Reaganism as it is of Clintonism, and the whole notion of keeping the annual growth of federal spending at or below 2 percent, balancing the budget, and declaring the era of big government over....

GOP being Punk’d? We know that Democrats are crossing over in open primaries, such as Mississippi and Alabama, in order to vote for Rick Santorum, a big union candidate, their votes intended to throw the Republican National Convention into a contested balloting process. This tactic was written up at the Daily Kos. Big union money has even invested for the Santorum campaign. Pardon me for not having all the pertinent facts and I confess I don’t even have time to search for them all, today, to say nothing of presenting and formatting them, here. Can you help? Place further information...

All five new hires to the Justice Department's immigration office have far-left resumes — which were only released following a PJM lawsuit. (This is the third in a series of articles about the Justice Department's hiring practices since President Obama took office. Read parts one and two.)   Earlier this week, PJM commenced a series of articles highlighting the army of new attorneys hired for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division by the Obama administration. PJM based its reporting on resumes that were finally turned over following a lengthy Freedom of Information Act battle with the Department.The intent of...

When liberals can’t handle GOP women, they infantilize, sexualize, demonize, and dehumanize them. I diagnosed the Four Stages of Conservative Female Abuse a few years ago. Here’s how I described the 4th Stage: …the final stage of CFA is dehumanization. Conservative women aren’t real women according to the liberal feminist establishment’s definition. Remember when Gloria Steinem called Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison a “female impersonator?” Or when curdled NOW leader Patricia Ireland instructed Democrats to vote only for “authentic” female political candidates? Or when Al Gore’s fashion consultant Naomi Wolf described the foreign-policy analysis of Jeane Kirkpatrick as being...

Are they human beings, these leftists? Please join in providing links, headlines, and bizarre encounters with these strange beings [and the strange things they say about normal humans].

Here is shocking video of North Carolina Democrat Rep. Bob Etheridge being asked by some students on a public sidewalk in Washington, D.C. if he supports the “Obama Agenda.” Once he realized the students were asking him that question, he went bonkers. Etheridge hit their camera and then grabbed one of the students by the arm as he repeated over and over “Who are you, Who are you? Tell me who you are?” The students identified themselves as such, but Etheridge persisted. At one point he then grabbed the student whose arm he had been holding onto and pulled himself...

Obama: "Why I'm willing to be away from my family for long stretches at a time, the financial sacrifices that so many of you have made, being subject to criticism constantly, you don't get in this for the fame, you don't get in this for the title"....Here's a man only used to crowds cheering and people fainting....

Now that President Obama has announced his new strategy for Afghanistan, you may be focused on the number of new troops that will deploy there: 17,000 on the way, with 4,000 more trainers and advisers to join them by fall. Before you think "quagmire," consider what, to my mind, makes this plan so impressive: The troop increase is part of a much broader strategy encompassing the entire South Asia region. It emphasizes economic aid and diplomacy as much as guns. As Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special representative for AfPak, put it: "The media is talking about a military surge. What Obama...

U.S.-led coalition troops killed 21 militants in two separate clashes in southern Afghanistan, while insurgents killed 10 civilians in the same area, the U.S. military said Thursday. Coalition troops on a security patrol Wednesday in the Shaheed Hasas district of Uruzgan province repelled an ambush by insurgents, killing 12 militants, the U.S. military said in a statement. There were no coalition casualties.