Free Republic

My First Observation: President Obama’s overall campaign theme is, "I will take it from them and give it to you" couched in one word – fairness. My producer, Hairy-Scary Uncle Larry, and I packed up our radio broadcast equipment and trucked off to the Clemente Center on the Florida Tech campus in Melbourne, FL to cover an Obama campaign rally live for AM 1300 WMEL – and what a day it was. My Second Observation: The first problem covering an Obama campaign rally is that, as my readers and radio show listeners know, I am a red-meat conservative and my...

While Justice Department and ATF officials (reportedly including key players from the Phoenix Field Division at the time Operation Fast and Furious was being implemented) pore over the Office of Inspector General draft report during the required review and comment period, Arizona attorney, author, civil rights activist and blogger David T. Hardy, reminded his readers yesterday of an earlier report that, in his words, “spells out ‘gunwalking.’” Writing on his Of Arms and the Law blog, Hardy linked to the Justice Department’s September, 2010 “PROJECT GUNRUNNER, A Cartel Focused Strategy” publication and called attention to several key passages. Including, and...

The College Football Czar: Week 1 If you're reading the week one picks by the College Football Czar, that must mean that yet another long summer of terrible TV is about to come to a merciful end. So -- if you’ve found yourself taking a knee, not to mimic Tim Tebow, but to psych yourself up for the countless thrilling touchbacks that are in store this season; if you’ve become so football-starved that you’ve recorded Jerry Maguire and edited out all the crappy non-footbally parts, so that only the crappy parts having to do with football remain; if you inflicted...

After 16 months of unimaginable discord, Wisconsin feels more divided than ever. But the underlying fault lines are not new. Gov. Scott Walker’s job performance is splitting the state along familiar political and demographic lines. Walker’s job rating is positive among men, married people, frequent church-goers, higher-income-earners, whites, non-union households and people without a college degree. Walker’s job rating is negative among women, people who aren’t married, people who don’t go to religious services, non-whites, lower-income-earners, union households, and people with a bachelors degree or higher. These patterns transcend the Wisconsin recall wars; they are basic features of today’s red-blue...

With an approval rating stuck below 50 percent, a sour national mood, and polls showing him tied or trailing rival Mitt Romney, President Barack Obama's re-election bid faces an uncertain future. Gallup polls show that Obama’s job approval rating in the first week of May averaged just 47 percent and a May 3-6 Gallup poll found only 24 percent of Americans were satisfied with the way things are going. A poll released Thursday in the battleground state of North Carolina showed Romney leading the president, and the same day another poll showed Wisconsin — which Obama won handily in 2008...

It’s Lucy and the football, Iran-style. After ostensibly tough talk about preventing Iran from going nuclear, the Obama administration acquiesced this week to yet another round of talks with the mullahs.

It’s Lucy and the football, Iran-style. After ostensibly tough talk about preventing Iran from going nuclear, the Obama administration acquiesced this week to yet another round of talks with the mullahs.

According to an analysis posted in February on a website linked to Iran’s government, the Islamic republic has plans to attack targets in both America and Israel, The Daily Caller has learned. The analysis, posted in Persian on the Iranian website psyop.ir, is titled “From Mediterranean Sea to the Waters of America.” It ominously warns of an impending attack on American soil. That website, which analyzes psychological warfare tactics employed by Iran’s so-called enemies, “America & Israel,” has close ties to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, the Islamic regime’s cyber army, and its Revolutionary Guard Corps — the military force charged...

CNN touted a study from the liberal Tax Policy Center claiming that Newt Gingrich's tax plan would increase the deficit. On Tuesday afternoon's The Situation Room, business correspondent Poppy Harlow simply labeled the Tax Policy Center "non-partisan" even though it is a joint venture of two liberal think tanks, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institute. CNN even reported the Gingrich campaign's claim that the study did not include "many details" of the plan because the campaign "does not recognize them as an independent arbiter of tax policy information." That bit of information was buried at the end of CNN's...

Analysis from the new annual report from the Planned Parenthood abortion business: Planned Parenthood Helps Fewer Pregnant Woman, Adoptions Drop http://www.lifenews.com/2011/12/30/planned-parenthood-helps-fewer-pregnant-woman-adoptions-drop/ Planned Parenthood Report: $1B Group Gets 46% From Tax Money http://www.lifenews.com/2011/12/30/planned-parenthood-report-1b-group-gets-46-from-tax-money/

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government is not taking advantage of an enforcement tool that could potentially hold top Wall Street figures accountable for their role in the recent financial crisis, despite its prior success. Broker-dealers, investment advisers, and others regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission are required to supervise their representatives. If a trader engages in misconduct, the SEC can sue the management with "failure to supervise." But in some of the biggest cases the SEC has brought in recent months -- against units of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup -- the agency has sued only low-level bankers....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama is bombarding Americans with job initiatives that may lack economic heft but show him as an activist leader compared to a 'do-nothing' Congress as he campaigns for re-election in 2012. Obama will have rolled out three separate measures in three days when he wraps up a tour of electorally vital western states on Wednesday, and more moves are coming. White House Communications Director Dan Pfieffer said the Democratic president will use executive orders and other tools to deliver initiatives "on a consistent basis for months to come." "While the policy benefits of this new...

LA CROSSE, Wis (Reuters) - A day after Wisconsin held the largest round of recall elections in U.S. history, analysts parsing the bruising, expensive and inconclusive battles have a gloomy prediction for the rest of the country. Get used to it, the 2012 national election will be nasty. Politics, said Mordecai Lee, a governmental affairs professor at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, is now "a battle of inches, it is a battle that never ends, it is a battle to the death." Wisconsin's recalls, and the fight earlier this year over the union rights of public-sector workers that triggered them, have...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - They bonded over golf, bickered over debt, and now President Barack Obama and House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner face even more tests of an uneasy relationship critical to a functioning government. America's two most powerful politicians drew fire from their backers in reaching an 11th-hour compromise on Sunday that barely averted a U.S. government debt default. Along the way, Obama and Boehner developed a better understanding of each other, but they are no closer to seeing eye to eye on a host of issues, aides for both men say. Obama and Boehner will find it hard...

President Barack Obama misrepresented the House Republicans' budget plan at times and exaggerated its impact on U.S. residents during an April 13 speech on deficit reduction. He said the GOP plan would replace Medicare with "a voucher program that leaves seniors at the mercy of the insurance industry." That's an exaggeration. He said "poor children," "children with autism" and "kids with disabilities" would be left "to fend for themselves." That, too, is an exaggeration. He repeated a deceptive talking point that the new health care law will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion. He falsely claimed that making the Bush...

A Federal watchdog revealed this week that Transportation Security Administration counterterrorism specialists failed to detect 16 separate jihad operatives who moved through target airports "on at least 23 different occasions." The name of the TSA monitoring program paying for all this flying-blind failure, I kid you not: SPOT. Under the "Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques" plan, TSA's designated behavior detection officers are supposed to closely watch travelers who pose potential security risks and who exhibit any number of appearances or activities "indicative of stress, fear, or deception." But long-entrenched, bipartisan American political correctness hampers the kind of effective, efficient...

How dishonest has the left/media spin about The One’s alleged diplomatic triumph been? Go look at the sentence Jeffrey Goldberg pulled from Reuters’s latest excrescence. Somewhere Tony Blair is reading these comparisons of Obama’s League of Justice to Cowboy George having “gone it alone” and wondering if he hallucinated those years of endless screeching about him being “Bush’s poodle” for sending thousands of British troops to hold southern Iraq together. Anyway, here’s how triumphant our coalition-building triumph is: The Cable compiled a chart listing all the countries that contributed at least some military assets to the five major military operations...

The seizure of the 'Victoria' cargo ship is just another chapter in the larger covert war that Israel is waging against Iran. Israel waged war against Iran on Tuesday. No Iranians were present and not a single shot was fired, but make no mistake – the seizure of the Victoria cargo ship is part of Israel’s battle against Iran, one that is fought in the shadows and sometimes in the most unlikely places. When the commandos from the navy’s Flotilla 13 approached the ship under cover of darkness late Monday night, they still did not know what to expect. Only...

RUSH: I just listened to a little bit of Obama's press conference opening spreading his "calm" on the troubled waters between here and Japan, and he pointed out that we are at one with the Japanese people. The American people, through him, offer our condolences, and we will do anything. He said we're sending an aircraft carrier over there to help them. He didn't identify the aircraft carrier. I happen to know which one it is. It's the USS Ronald Reagan. Obama didn't identify it. I don't know if that was purposeful or a faux pas or he thought it...

Every March, millions of Americans fill out NCAA tournament brackets and enter competitions with friends, coworkers, and strangers. The term “March Madness” may just as aptly describe the mayhem associated with the typical office pool as the games themselves. Many of us devote a lot of time and effort to picking our winners. Much is at stake: experts estimate that $7 billion is wagered on the tournament each year. There is no perfect way to pick a bracket, but it is surprisingly easy to increase your odds of winning your pool if you study the math for a minute.