Free Republic

A cross honoring those who died in World War I was returned after being stolen two years ago. Fox News reporter Dominic Di-Natale reported from Barstow, California where a rededication ceremony was taking place for the Mojave Desert cross. It was originally raised in 1934 and was at the center of a national controversy over the separation of church and state. The objections over the cross being place on public land went all the way to the Supreme Court. The cross was hidden from the public and eventually stolen in a nighttime heist but returned about a week ago. The...

So what should conservatives do, now that the nation has elected Barack Obama to a second term? The popular vote is fairly split evenly, and we are still a divided nation. Politically, there is nothing ahead but continued stalemate in Congress. The president will attempt to move ahead via executive branch fiat, thereby bypassing Congress. In this atmosphere, it is foolhardy to give the nation evidence that failure to try and solve problems that are confronting us is the fault of Republicans and conservatives. Those opposed to the direction Obama favors should provide serious and meaningful alternatives of their own,...

Now that Obama effectively fooled a majority of Americans again into allowing him to have the steering wheel, and we begin to process things and figure out what happened and where we go from here. Now that the MSM effectively covered up his failure in Benghazi...can we get back to figuring out what happened in Benghazi, educating the American public about it, and demanding justice for this failure? I hear the defeatism in many frustrated folks. Many exhausted and ready to fold. You know we have to keep on fighting.

Here is some optmistim for the weekend: Michael Hudome: Romney will win Pennsylvania!Despite all the hype, it’s going to be a short election night. The Keystone State is the key reason. Pennsylvania will go for Governor Mitt Romney. Why Romney Will Win Ohio Reasonable prognosticators — and even the MSNBC crowd — will realize once the results are in from Pennsylvania that the other three time zones won’t matter. Once everyone discovers that the emperor has no clothes (or that Obama has no argument after the negative ads stopped working), the vote shift could be of historic proportions. Morris also...

Senior counterterrorism officials felt cut out of the loop the night of the attack on the Benghazi consulate, according to emails that were shared with Fox News by military sources who are familiar with discussions of how to respond the night of the Sept. 11 attack. Top State Department officials decided not to send an interagency rapid response unit designed to respond to terrorist attacks known as a FEST team, a Foreign Emergency Support Team. This team from the State Department and CIA has a military Joint Special Operations Command element to it and has been routinely deployed to assist...

Due to stonewalling and the complicity of the Big Media in ignoring or downplaying the Benghazi story during the last weeks of the campaign, the Obamaites may get past the post on Nov. 6 without being called to account. But the truth is coming out, and an accounting is coming. For the character, competence and credibility of Obama’s entire national security team have been called into question. Hillary Clinton said she takes full responsibility for any security failure by her department at the Benghazi compound. But what does that mean? Did she see the Aug. 16 secret cable sent to...

As to the nature of the arms themselves, an October 6 report by the New York Times’ Robert Worth reveals that “Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been funneling money and small arms to Syria’s rebels but have refused to provide heavier weapons, such as shoulder-fired missiles, that could allow opposition fighters to bring down government aircraft, take out armored vehicles and turn the war’s tide.” The reason they have refused to provide more lethal weapons to the rebels is partly because “they have been discouraged by the United States, which fears the heavier weapons could end up in the hands...

In a statement, the committee said it first will hold a closed oversight hearing on November 15 on the Benghazi attacks, when lawmakers return after the November 6 presidential and congressional elections. The Democratic-controlled panel said additional hearings would follow. Some Senate Republicans have said the committee should hold public hearings on the response to the attacks, in which U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other American officials were killed. The committee, chaired by Senator Dianne Feinstein, said it had received briefings and documents related to the attacks It said aspects under investigation include how U.S. intelligence and...

It will still be a nail biter on election day, but it is now undeniable that the momentum is with Mitt Romney. We keep hearing that it will come down to Ohio, and that may be true even though there are other routes to an electoral victory for Romney. Regardless, Obama’s negative campaigning is backfiring on him. His hope and change with a halo image is caving in. Rick Wilson says we are at an inflection point. Obama senses it, but can’t quite believe it. He seems confused by how easily Romney started punching over his weight class on October...

The trends appear to be worsening for millennials. Data from Gallup and the Public Religion Research Institute indicate that fewer young people plan to vote in the upcoming election. Gallup found that just 58 percent of young voters say they will “definitely vote” this fall, down from 81 percent in October 2004 and 78 percent in October 2008. Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center survey shows that young voters are generally less engaged in politics than they were in 2008. The proportion of young voters expressing increased interest in politics this year has plummeted: At this time in 2008, 69 percent...

ACLU: The American Civil Liberty Union announced today that President Obama’s decision to mandate coverage for birth control does not violate religious liberty. The ACLU’s Alicia Gay warns that the “powerful lobbying arm of the Catholic Church” mistakenly claims that the HHS contraception mandate violates their religious liberty. Individuals who choose not to pay for employees’ contraceptives, the ACLU counters, are forcing their beliefs on their employees. “The fundamental promise of religious liberty in this country doesn’t create a right to impose those views on others, including ignoring civil rights laws or denying critical health care,” Gay insists. Somehow in...

Here is video of Newt Gingrich telling a rally of supporters that we now have before us the “Obama Hostage Crisis” unfolding in Egypt, where 19 Americans are being held against their will and are being threatened with trial. Gingrich said this is beginning to remind him of “Jimmy Carter” and the “Iranian Hostage Crisis.”

So, we shouldn’t worry about the poor because we have a welfare state that keeps them on a crutch (or “a float”). I understand that his focus is on the middle class and that he believes these were the people hurt the most by the financial situation in America, but is the underlying philosophy here to just “fix holes” in the “safety net” or should we be trying to fix the entitlement mentality that helped pull us into this debt? This should be red meat for Newt who worked to reform welfare. Some are defending this as being taken out...

Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain endorsed Newt Gingrich for the GOP nomination late on Saturday – at the same time accepting a position as the former House Speaker’s tax reform chairman."It is time for conservatives and Republicans to refocus their attention on the ultimate mission of defeating President Obama," Cain said. "I believe Speaker Gingrich is the bold leader we need to accomplish this mission."

In last night's debate it was brought up that Romney had stock in Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac among other controversial investments. He told the audience that his stock was not picked by him and it was taken care of through a blind trust. Hands clean? Well, not quite. Here is what Romney said in 1994 about blind trusts. "The blind trust is an age-old ruse," Romney told the Boston Globe in October of that year. "You give a blind trust rules. You can say to a blind trust, don't invest in properties which would be in conflict of interest...

Thanks to Dan Riehl for this. There’s a short excerpt of a 1988 C-SPAN video purportedly showing Newt Gingrich bashing Reagan when talking about how Bush, Sr. should run. As I suspected, it’s edited to give a false impression. What you don’t see is immediately after when Gingrich praises Reaganism and the Reagan platform. If you can’t watch it all, it begins at about 2:30 in to confirm it’s the same segment. It’s the minute or two afterward you also need to hear to understand that Newt wasn’t bashing Reagan at all. See Video here...go viral.

One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a Libertarianish right. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. That is not how traditional conservatives view the world. There is no such society that I’m aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.” - Rick Santorum See Video Here

A Republican source who was at the dinner in which pollster Chris Wilson says Herman Cain sexually harassed a young staffer is contradicting the account, telling CBS News he never saw Cain sexually harass anyone that night, although he does remember Cain drinking. "I did not see a lech," the source said. Wilson, who was doing polling for the Restaurant Association during Cain's tenure, told an Oklahoma radio station yesterday: "This all occurred at a restaurant in Crystal City [Virginia] and everybody was very aware of it. And so it is, it was only a matter of time because so...

Mitt Romney was firm and direct with the abortion rights advocates sitting in his office nine years ago, assuring the group that if elected Massachusetts governor, he would protect the state’s abortion laws. Then, as the meeting drew to a close, the businessman offered an intriguing suggestion — that he would rise to national prominence in the Republican Party as a victor in a liberal state and could use his influence to soften the GOP’s hard-line opposition to abortion… “You need someone like me in Washington,” several participants recalled Romney saying that day in September 2002, an apparent reference to...

Hot Air has learned that the Cain campaign will launch a moneybomb starting at midnight tonight. According to a source close to the Herman Cain campaign, this has been in the works a while, planned for early in November to take advantage of their polling boost from late September and October. The sudden support they got as conservatives rallied around Cain in the first couple of days after the Politico story may have almost made it unnecessary, but given the events of the last 24 hours or so, the timing’s probably as good as possible to start a seven-day fund...