Free Republic

Mitt Romney's campaign leapt just now on Rick Perry's restatement of his view that Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme" and that promising to maintain it in its current form is a "monstrous lie." "PERRY DOES NOT BELIEVE SOCIAL SECURITY SHOULD EXIST," read the headline of Romney's press release. Romney adviser Stuart Stevens emails: He has lost. No federal candidate has ever won on the Perry program to kill Social Security. Never has. never will.

Sarah Palin has parted ways with the neoconservative foreign policy advisers who had been writing speeches and advising her on policy since she joined the McCain campaign. An aide to Palin, Tim Crawford, confirmed that Orion Strategies' Randy Scheunemann and Michael Goldfarb are no longer working for her PAC. They parted, both sides said on good terms. "Randy flat out said, 'We can't give you the time,'" Crawford said. (snip) Crawford said they've been replaced by Peter Schweizer, a writer and fellow at the Hoover Institution who blogs regularly at Andrew Breitbart's Big Peace. The personnel shift carries an ideological...

JERUSALEM — Vowing to change a region that has resisted the best efforts of presidents and prime ministers past, Barack Obama dove head first into the Middle East peace process on his second day in office. He was supposed to be different. His personal identity, his momentum, his charisma and his promise of a fresh start would fundamentally alter America’s relations with the Muslim world and settle one of its bitterest grievances. Two years later, he has managed to forge surprising unanimity on at least one topic: Barack Obama. A visit here finds both Israelis and Palestinians blame him for...

JERUSALEM — Vowing to change a region that has resisted the best efforts of presidents and prime ministers past, Barack Obama dove head first into the Middle East peace process on his second day in office. He was supposed to be different. His personal identity, his momentum, his charisma and his promise of a fresh start would fundamentally alter America’s relations with the Muslim world and settle one of its bitterest grievances. Two years later, he has managed to forge surprising unanimity on at least one topic: Barack Obama. A visit here finds both Israelis and Palestinians blame him for...

Isn't this called piling on? Well, sometimes piling on is justified. Yesterday former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer heaped what looks to me like well deserved scorn on the Obama administration's attempt to “bribe” Israel back to the peace table, and predicted it will never work. This morning Politico's Ben Smith uses a wider club to bash the President, arguing that his unclear, seemingly naive policies in the region have managed to alienate both Israelis and Palestinians, and may actually have set back the cause of peace. “[F]ar from becoming the transcendent figure in a centuries-old drama, Obama has...

BREAKING: JAYSON BLAIR NOW WORKING AT POLITICO!September 28, 2010 Excerpts from a Politico reporter who seems not to have been at the event he was allegedly reporting on, probably because he's homophobic: “The broad surge in the conservative grassroots made it as far as PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s grand apartment overlooking New York’s Union Square Tuesday night, where about 150 backers of the conservative gay group GOProud gathered to laugh at Ann Coulter’s red meat riffs on Democrats, blacks, and the Obamas at a fundraiser organizers touted as ‘Homocon.’” The event was Saturday night -- not "Tuesday" -- there...

(Politico) — A regular correspondent wondered why Newt Gingrich’s recent declaration on the planned downtown mosque sounded so familiar, and found this: Gingrich: There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. Mussolini: There will be a mosque in Rome, the Fascist ruler said, only when a Roman Catholic church is permitted in Mecca.

. . . Present among the bloggers, reporters and editors were a number of professional political operatives, including top White House economic advisors, key Obama political appointees, and Democratic campaign veterans . . . Two of the administration’s chief economic advisors, Jared Bernstein, the vice president’s top economist, and Jason Furman, deputy director of the National Economic Council, were members of Journolist until they began working officially for Obama. Ilan Goldenberg, now an advisor on Middle East policy at the Pentagon, was a member until he joined the administration. Moira Whelan left Journolist to work at the Department of Homeland...

The now closed down JournoList, has caused considerable controversy in recent weeks. According to its opponents, JournoList, teamed up some 400 prominent "progressive" journalists in an effort to smooth Barack Obama's path to the White House. There have been accusations that "Journolitstas", deliberately sought to downplay Obama's association with the marxist Rev. Jeremiah Wright and tried to smear conservatives, or opposing journalists as "racists". This post looks at 106 reported "Journolistas" to look for connections or common threads. Of the known "Jounolistas" and organizations listed below, many can be linked back to two interrelated groups Democratic Socialists of America, the...

Spencer Ackerman - Wired, FireDogLake, Washington Independent, Talking Points Memo, The American Prospect Thomas Adcock - New York Law Journal Ben Adler - Newsweek, POLITICO Mike Allen - POLITICO Eric Alterman - The Nation, Media Matters for America Marc Ambinder - The Atlantic Greg Anrig - The Century Foundation Ryan Avent - Economist Dean Baker - The American Prospect Nick Baumann - Mother Jones Josh Bearman - LA Weekly Steven Benen - The Carpetbagger Report Ari Berman - The Nation Jared Bernstein - Economic Policy Institute Michael Berube - Crooked Timer, Pennsylvania State University Brian Beutler - The Media...

It was interesting to see Ben Smith, from Politico.com, listed as a member of Journolist — the committed Obama operatives in the Media who banded together to make sure negative stories about their Lightbringer were quashed while attacks were coordinated to label anyone opposing Obama “RAAACIST” during the 2008 campaign. We had a brief encounter with Smith during September and October of 2008, where he repeatedly refused to run a story we were involved in that would have damaged Obama and drawn closer attention to his continued and longstanding ties to terrorist bomber William Ayers. Here in Chicago, we’re friends...

The following 65 names are confirmed members of the now-defunct JournoList listserv. 1. Ezra Klein 2. Dave Weigel 3. Matthew Yglesias 4. David Dayen 5. Spencer Ackerman 6. Jeffrey Toobin 7. Eric Alterman 8. Paul Krugman 9. John Judis 10. Eve Fairbanks 11. Mike Allen 12. Ben Smith 13. Lisa Lerer 14. Joe Klein 15. Brad DeLong 16. Chris Hayes 17. Matt Duss 18. Jonathan Chait 19. Jesse Singal 20. Michael Cohen 21. Isaac Chotiner 22. Katha Pollitt 23. Alyssa Rosenberg 24. Rick Perlstein 25. Alex Rossmiller 26. Ed Kilgore 27. Walter Shapiro 28. Noam Scheiber 29. Michael Tomasky 30....

EXCERPT Well, the mystery may be over. A woman who said her name was, in fact, Ellie Light called this morning into the radio show of Michael Smerconish, a national talker based in Philadelphia who has been friendly to Obama, to clear things up. "I'm only me," she said, identifying herself as a traveling nurse who works for 13-week stretches at hospitals around the country, and whose primary residence is in Southern California. "I need to own up – I did misrepresent my home town in some places," Light told Smerconish. Her logic in faking the addresses is one familiar...

Kennedy hires insider to soothe critics By BEN SMITH & GLENN THRUSH | 12/15/08 7:19 PM EST Caroline Kennedy’s trial balloon candidacy for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate seat was springing a few leaks over the past few days — so she’s made her ambitions more explicit and hired one of New York’s top political consultants to gain some altitude. After a week of coy courtship and low-key feelers, Kennedy began working the phones in earnest Monday — and signed up major Democratic fixer Josh Isay, who has deep connections to New York powerhouses Sen. Charles Schumer, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and...

December 10, 2008 Categories: Transition Blagojevich questions censored on Transition site President-elect Barack Obama's Transition today launched "Open for Questions," a Digg-style feature allowing citizens to submit questions, and to vote on one another's questions, bringing favored inquiries to the top of the list. It was suggested when it launched that the tool would bring uncomfortable questions to the fore, but the results so far are the opposite: Obama's supporters appear to be using -- and abusing -- a tool allowing them to "flag" questions as "inappropriate" to remove all questions mentioning Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich from the main pages...

Ben Smith: Perhaps the best way to see him is as a neutral in the (lopsided) battle between machine and reformers in Illinois. That's the stance he took in a defining battle, the 2006 contest for the presidency of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Reformers fault him for failing to support their champion; but he didn't endorse the machine favorite either. He stayed on the sidelines, and kept his focus on the White House. You can accuse him of cowardice for that, or you can grant him that he had decided to devote himself to larger causes and ambitions...

Though Obama has built his campaign upon being the first “black” candidate (entirely ignoring the white half of his family tree as if it doesn’t even exist), the questions over whether or not he is African or Arab, Christian or Muslim, seems to have a very simple answer… Yes - all the above! Those who have not spent much time with a world globe lately might have forgotten that Africa is made up largely of Arab nations and Arab Muslim people. Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Algeria and Niger are all Arab nations on the African continent. Across the Red Sea...

Barack Obama's appearance in Denver won't be the first convention speech framed by Greek columns. Republicans who are mocking Obama's appearance haven't mentioned it, but George W. Bush accepted his own nomination in 2004 on a set with a similar neoclassical theme, with columns rising on either side of him, as the pictures above and below show.