Free Republic

Jurisdictions in at least four states - Vermont, Michigan, Mississippi and Wisconsin - failed to send absentee ballots to members of the military by the required September 22 deadline, Breitbart.com reported Monday. Republican lawmakers sent a letter to the Departments of Justice and Defense demanding assurances that the rights of military personnel and overseas citizens who vote absentee will be protected in the November elections after learning the states failed to mail the ballots by the deadline, the Army Times said. “We are concerned that, absent prompt and effective remedial action, some men and women in uniform will be deprived...

A complicated three-way tangle drew in Candy Crowley for an utterly outrageous effort to tag-team the governor. But Romney shouldn’t worry, writes Michael Medved, it just made him look better. [Snip] Mitt made the mistake of wading into a pointless dispute about parsing words where the reputedly impartial moderator ended up outrageously taking sides. [Snip] Nevertheless, this brief combination of farce and melodrama will nonetheless benefit the Romney campaign for two reasons: First, any prolonged discussion of Libya obviously hurts the president, not Romney, and the mangled muddle in this encounter fairly begs for clarification in the next debate, which...

RICHMOND, Va. -- Police believe ... same person ... three armed robberies ... Virginia Commonwealth University's ... downtown Richmond ... Tuesday night. There were no injuries ... robberies ... 9:50 p.m. in the 1000 block of Grove Avenue... and at 10 p.m. in the 1300 block of West Clay Street ... 10:12 p.m. in the 700 block of West Clay,.... Richmond and VCU police were searching ... black man in his 20s ... small, silver, semiautomatic handgun ... wearing a ... gray hoodie ... white Chevrolet Impala. Police said ... victim's wallet and cell phone.... There ... two victims in...

In what surely was one of the weirdest incidents in a presidential debate, CNN’s Candy Crowley egregiously sided with President Obama on his false remarks on Libya, was repeatedly and decisively fact-checked post-debate as wrong (somewhere between “mostly wrong” and “pants on fire” in my book) and then backed away from her own incorrect assertion. As was the case in the vice presidential debate, the biggest story may be the after-the-debate tumult over White House misrepresentations on Libya.

There is only one real measure of who won a debate — who won undecided voters? According to a CNN poll after Tuesday night’s presidential debate, it was a tie: “Who did the debate make you more likely to vote for?” Barack Obama 25 percent, Mitt Romney 25 percent. Most pundits thought Obama won the debate. In a CBS poll of debate viewers, Obama was thought to have won, 37 percent to 30 percent. The CNN poll had it Obama 46, Romney 39. But on the crucial issue of “who would do a better job on the economy?” Romney won....

(Associated Posers)- LONG ISLAND, New York – Mitt Romney showed up on time at an Obama campaign rally held at Hoefstra University. Obama sycophant Candy Crowley led the so-called “debate” in as pro-Obama manner as possible, filling in for the role of his missing TelePrompTer. At one point Republican candidate Mitt Romney accused the President of taking almost two weeks before he called the attack in Benghazi, Libya a “terrorist attack”. Obama and the moderator said this was not true. “Get the transcript” Obama said, in what was almost surely a scripted move, because Candy Crowley just happened to have...

The Military Demarcation Line splitting the "truce village" of Panmunjom doesn't legally demarcate the political boundary between North Korea and South Korea. Instead, it splits a demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating two warring armies who have observed a tenuous ceasefire since 1953. No, the Korean War is not over, at least not officially. The next president, whether President Barack Obama in his second term or Gov. Mitt Romney in his first, will be a Korean War president, and, unless the ceasefire totally craters, one of them will oversee the 60th anniversary of that ceasefire and the 63rd anniversary of the beginning...

Rose Garden 10:43 A.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Every day, all across the world, American diplomats and civilians work tirelessly to advance the interests and values of our nation. Often, they are away from their families. Sometimes, they brave great danger. Yesterday, four of these extraordinary Americans were killed in an attack on our diplomatic post in Benghazi. Among those killed was our Ambassador, Chris Stevens, as well as Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith. We are still notifying the families of the others who were killed. And today, the American people stand united in holding the families of the...

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I do want to make sure that we just understand something. Governor Romney says he wasn't referring to Arizona as a model for the nation. His top adviser on immigration is the guy who designed the Arizona law, the entirety of it — not E-Verify, the whole thing. That's his policy, and it's a bad policy. And it won't help us grow. Look, when we think about immigration, we have to understand there are folks all around the world who still see America as the land of promise. And they provide us energy, and they provide us innovation....

Hempstead was hot as the two Presidential contenders engaged in verbal fisticuffs from the moment the bell rang. The second presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney was a verbal slugfest. Those who predicted that the Town Hall format would not lend itself to such an aggressive and bombastic brawl were wrong. The real question is whether this second debate actually helped many in the purported target audience, the undecided voters, make up their mind in what is clearly one of the most important presidential contests in American history. Candy Crowley of CNN's "State of the Union"...

The question is not whether America is afflicted with socialized medicine, it is whether the socialized medicine afflicting this country is curable or incurable. The inescapable diagnosis: If nothing is done, America dies. You don't need to run an expensive test -- or commission a group of fiscal pathologists -- to see the metastatic growth of government-controlled health care. You only need to look at the data the U.S. Treasury and Office and Management Budget have released to the public. In 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation creating Medicare and Medicaid, all federal outlays equaled $118.23 billion, according to...

During an official visit to India to improve relations and trade between the two nations, Julia Gillard caught the heel of her shoe in a lawn and fell, but was unhurt. The PM has been attracting the admiration of Indians, particularly women, for her anti-sexism speech in Parliament.

Did you watch the presidential debate last night? Wow! Talk about fireworks! I’ve never seen such an exciting war of words. In fact, I half expected the President and Mitt Romney to throw down their microphones and wrap their hands around each others throats, like they do sometimes in various European Parliaments. There is no love lost between these two, and it felt like they both threatened to cross over from bold debater to inconsiderate jerk. The debate was focused toward the undecided voter. Did it help you make up your mind? Too bad your vote doesn’t count. Your vote...

...International reinsurers provide about 90 percent of the private back-up coverage for domestic home insurers throughout the state. In 2005, these international reinsurers paid 50 percent of the losses for hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. In addition to the ever-present threat of hurricanes, another destructive development is imperiling Florida homeowners and businesses. U.S. Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) are working together on legislation that would impose costly new taxes on the very insurance companies that provide the reinsurance that is indispensable for Florida's residential and commercial properties...

French President Francois Hollande has vowed to ban homework as part of wide-ranging reforms to the country's education system. Hollande has expressed worries over the fact that privileged children benefit from parental assistance on take-home assignments and that disadvantaged children do not have support at home. "An education program is, by definition, a societal program. Work should be done at school, rather than at home," the New York Daily News quoted Hollande, as saying. According to a report by France 24, Hollande's extensive education reform plans also include increasing financial aid while combating truancy. He also intends to provide incentives...

I want to preface by saying I am voting for Mitt Romney and I thought the debate moderated by Candy Crowley was horrendously bad. I think she was even worst than Martha Raddatz, if that was possible. But one statement Romney said that bothered me during the debate. A feminazi asked a loaded question about how men make more than women (a falsehood for the most part). Gov. Romney said that when he first became Governor, he looked at a stack of potential cabinet members and complained that they were all men. He then directed his chief of staff to...

President Obama spoke of being president in the past tense during last night's second presidential debate with Mitt Romney: "The way we're going to create jobs here is not just changing our tax code, but also to double our exports. And we are on pace to double our exports, one of the commitments I made when I was president. That's creating tens of thousands of jobs all across the country."

This is fine news indeed, especially since he says he is giving up in the face of immovable opposition from the U.S. and Europe. But with so many recent calls for the imposition of Islamic blasphemy laws in the West under the guise of "hate speech" laws, and with many of them coming from Western journalists, we're not quite out of the woods yet in regard to Islamic supremacist assaults upon the freedom of speech. "West's free speech stand bars blasphemy ban - OIC," by Tom Heneghan for Reuters, October 15 (thanks to David): (Reuters) - Western opposition has made...

JACKSONVILLE -- Gun rights advocates Tuesday told a task force reviewing Florida's "stand your ground" law that the statute needs to be revised to take the burden off defendants trying to prove their use of force was justified.