Obama Quietly Grants 12 Pardons and 8 Commutations

Written by Daniel Halper

President Barack Obama quietly issued 12 pardons and 8 commutations late Wednesday afternoon, which happened to be one of the busiest news days of the year.

Here are the dozen folks pardoned:

The President granted pardons to the following twelve individuals:

• Roy Norman Auvil – Bartonville, IL

Offense:  Possession of an unregistered distilling apparatus; working a distillery on which the required sign is not placed (District of South Carolina)

Sentence:  Five years’ probation (Nov.

Newest GOP U.S. Senator: Vicotory an “Exclamation Mark”

Written by Bernie Becker

U.S. Senator-elect Bill Cassidy (R-LA) said Sunday that his election was the “exclamation mark” on this year’s Republican successes.

Cassidy, who unseated U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) in a runoff election on Saturday, said the GOP takeover of the U.S. Senate illustrated how dissatisfied voters were with President Barack Obama, especially in the Deep South.

“If there’s one party for the working people right now, it’s the Republican Party,” Cassidy said on “Fox News Sunday,” pointing to GOP efforts to expand drilling of natural resources and Democrats’ attempts to limit emissions.… Continue Reading

A Moral Primer: Obama’s Legacy is Government-Induced Chaos at Home, Moral Equivalence Abroad

Written by Victor Davis Hanson

The last but long gasp of the Obama administration is characterized not so much by deceit and incompetence as by growing chaos. Everything appears to be coming apart. The chariot of state now veers up and down with a terrified Phaethon clueless at the reins. Whether it is ISIS, Ebola, Putin, or Obamacare, the common strain is not simple incompetence, but a maladroitness born of intolerant ideological fundamentalism.

Have our government agencies ever seemed more corrupt or useless or both, staffed by political cronies and leftist zealots?… Continue Reading

ABC Still Ignores Obama Donor/Former Soap Opera Producer Being Named Ambassador to Hungary

Written by Curtis Houck

On Wednesday night, ABC became the only major broadcast network to not have covered the controversy over President Obama’s choice to name former soap opera producer and Obama reelection campaign bundler Colleen Bell the new United States Ambassador to Hungary.

The network’s zero coverage of this story came more than a day after ABC’s own chief White House correspondent, Jonathan Karl, grilled White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on what exactly did Bell have in terms of qualifications for the job (to which Earnest was visibly stumped). … Continue Reading

Bad Obamacare Month Could Haunt White House

Written by Brian Hughes

November has been a terrible month for President Barack Obama, between his party losing control of the Senate and seemingly unending bad news for Obamacare.

The last few weeks were the worst stretch for his signature domestic initiative since the botched rollout of Obamacare in fall 2013, stoking doubts about whether the president can ever sell his healthcare policies to the American public.

First, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear arguments on the legality of Obamacare subsidies, a move that could gut the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act.… Continue Reading

Beware the Status Quo

Written by Michale Medved

President Barack Obama’s proclamation of executive amnesty for illegal immigrants amounts to an outrageous power-grab and sets a dangerous trap for the GOP. Republicans can’t come across as stubborn defenders of the dysfunctional status quo: even if they rolled back every detail of the new White House initiative, our broken immigration system would still need sweeping reform.

Republicans should seize the initiative by passing their own reform bill, rather than fighting unpopular battles on the president’s terms.… Continue Reading

How to Rebuke a President

Written by Jay Cost

For responding to a president who defies his constitutional limits, Congress is said to possess four powers: to impeach, to defund, to investigate, and to withhold confirmation of nominees.

But there is a fifth recourse, which the new Republican Congress might consider in view of President Obama’s executive amnesty for illegal immigrants: the power to censure. In fact, censure could work in tandem with Congress’s other powers, helping the legislature make the moral case for responding to the president’s lawlessness.… Continue Reading

Alinsky Does Amnesty

The only limit on the president’s power that he recognizes is political expediency.

Written by Andrew C. McCarthy

President Obama is an Alinskyite.​

That assertion is not an epithet — well, not primarily. True, I would not describe someone I admired as an “Alinskyite.” Saul Alinsky was a loathsome figure — a radical statist who whose toxic brew of thoroughgoing deceit and brass-knuckles extortion (“direct action”) has become a part of mainstream politics. But in tying the president to the seminal community organizer whose theories and tactics so influenced him, my purpose is more to decode than to insult him.… Continue Reading

Obama’s ‘America’

What the president means when he says America is an idea, not a bloodline

Written by Ira Straus

President Obama told us this week that we must legalize millions of illegal aliens because America is “a creed, an idea” — and is not what he calls “a bloodline.” The latter is an ugly term, hinting at Nazi-style racism, but what it caricatures is a more accurate view: that America is a concrete country with a concrete citizenry that has concrete habits, institutions, and mutual relations and obligations.… Continue Reading

Obama, the Role of Race, and GOP Victory

Written by Michael Medved

To many liberals, it seems obvious that Barack Obama’s problems and setbacks– including the resounding Republican victory on November 4^th – stem in no small part from racist reaction to his status as the first non-white president in American history. The facts, however, suggest that racial factors contributed far more to Obama’s successes than they did to his failures.

Exit polling reveals the true nature of his decisive triumphs in 2012 and 2008, and the Democrats’ wretched failure in 2014.… Continue Reading