Free Republic

10:30 p.m. The mayor of Memphis, Tennessee, says he thinks a statue of Confederate General and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest should be removed from its location at a city park. In a statement emailed to The Associated Press on Wednesday, Mayor A C Wharton Jr. said he would like to see the statue removed from Health Sciences Park. Wharton said the graves of Forrest and his wife, also located at the park, should be relocated as well. Health Sciences Park was called Forrest Park until the City Council voted in February 2013 to change the name. It...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court says a Maryland veteran can’t own a gun because of a misdemeanor assault conviction more than four decades ago.</p> <p>The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Friday turned away an appeal from 68-year-old Navy veteran Jefferson Wayne Schrader, who sued after failing a 2008 background check.</p>

LOGANVILLE, Ga. — A woman hiding in her attic with children shot an intruder multiple times before fleeing to safety Friday. The incident happened at a home on Henderson Ridge Lane in Loganville around 1 p.m. The woman was working in an upstairs office when she spotted a strange man outside a window, according to Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman. He said she took her 9-year-old twins to a crawlspace before the man broke in using a crowbar. But the man eventually found the family. "The perpetrator opens that door. Of course, at that time he's staring at her, her...

Poll Date Sample MoE Romney (R) Obama (D) Spread RCP Average 9/28 - 10/8 -- -- 48.2 47.8 Romney +0.4

Such is the genius of The One that even his biggest failures are actually huge successes that most people simply haven’t appreciated yet. Someday, we’ll all see ObamaCare for the masterpiece that it is. While the pundits are generally calling the president’s Thursday night address mediocre, Obama and his advisers had taken great pains to avoid soaring rhetoric that might have been derided as empty. Indeed, they extensively tested the president’s speech in dial groups, a type of focus group where voters twist dials to register approval or disapproval of specific passages, and say it tested off the charts. The...

The amazing conclusion to yesterday’s snafu involving the Democratic platform’s language on Israel. After an evening of bad press they decided to reinsert the language about Jerusalem being the capital of Israel, along with some language about God after people noticed that the phrase “God-given” in the 2008 platform had been dropped in the new one. Simple process, in theory: Have someone from the floor propose adding the new language, then let the delegates approve it via a voice vote. The result? A trainwreck so awful that even Paul Begala didn’t try to spin it. As you’ll see, Villaraigosa’s astonishment...

President Barack Obama was a pioneering contributor to the national subprime real estate bubble, and roughly half of the 186 African-American clients in his landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices. As few as 19 of those 186 clients still own homes with clean credit ratings, following a decade in which Obama and other progressives pushed banks to provide mortgages to poor African Americans. The startling failure rate among Obama’s private sector clients was discovered during The Daily Caller’s review of previously unpublished court information from the lawsuit that a young Obama...

ATLANTA -- Investigators say a 20-year-old Tennessee man had been drinking before he died in a fall at the Georgia Dome. Police Lt. Chad Hurston said Saturday that authorities need to review results from the medical examiner's office to determine how much of a role alcohol played in the accident. Isaac Grubb fell about 45 feet inside the Dome while celebrating a Tennessee touchdown against North Carolina State during a Friday night game. He struck and injured a 34-year-old man from Fort Mill, S.C., who suffered minor injuries. Hurston said that Grubb had started drinking around 5 p.m. before he...

The message from the Obama campaign and Democrats in general seems to be that women are somehow incapable of finding birth control on their own unless some paternal entity dispenses it to them, despite all evidence to the contrary. They’re so incapable of this task that employers and schools have to hand it for them, no matter how much income they derive nor how much tuition they manage to pay otherwise. This has already backfired during Team Obama’s “Life of Julia” campaign, which offered a creepy, solitary vision of a woman’s life approaching that of the song “Eleanor Rigby.” Former...

In a very subtle move, instead of covering the speech given by Puerto Rican Governor Luis Fortuno Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, MSNBC interviewed Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. MSNBC has vilified Brewer for her tough stances against illegal immigration and has painted her as anti-Hispanic. Fox News covered the speech briefly, but interviewed Chris Christie for the majority of the time. Fox News however, hasn't painted Jan Brewer as racist and anti-Hispanic, etiher. To be fair, Brewer should have declined an interview with MSNBC during Fortuno's speech but, they set her up.

Go watch the clip again. There’s nothing jokey or witty or clever about it. It’s a straightforward accusation of racism and callousness, and of course one of the other schmucks there laughs because he’s a nasty liberal hack too who’s thinking the same thing. It’s a laugh of recognition, and maybe a bit of surprise that Chalian would be willing to say that with mics around. So here’s his attempt to make himself employable again: I am profoundly sorry for making an inappropriate and thoughtless joke. I was commenting on the challenge of staging a convention during a hurricane and...

We should not forget that John Harris of the Politico, who asked the stupidest and most irrelevant questions of any moderator during the GOP Primary debates, is married to the former head of NARAL in Virginia. We should not forget that Jonathan Allen of the Politico once worked for Debbie Wasserman Schultz. We should not forget that Andy Barr of the Politico left the Politico to go work for the Democratic National Committee. We should not forget any of this because I do not believe it is any accident that today the Politico has a big story from John Harris...

According to a new book released this summer from a former member of Polish intelligence and reported by McClatchy today, an anti-Taliban guerilla group offered the CIA a perfect opportunity to end the threat of al-Qaeda’s inspirational leader, Osama bin Laden, in 1999 — after the Khobar Towers attack in 1996 that killed 19 Air Force personnel, and after the twin embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 12 Americans and more than 200 people overall. All the CIA had to do was green-light an assassination mission by the group run by Ahmed Shah Massoud, as they...

Forget the media concern-trolling about cancellation. ThereÂ’s no way the RNCÂ’s going to forfeit face time for Romney on national television by pulling the plug when the whole point of this week was to introduce voters to the softer, more human side of Mitt. Barring Isaac turning into a hypercane, thereÂ’ll be at least one night of convention proceedings with Romney as the star speaker, and itÂ’s not hard to guess what heÂ’ll say. "Planners are considering a range of options, depending on the vagaries of the storm. One of the worst-case scenarios would have Romney delivering a brief speech...

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows Romney at 47 percent among registered voters and Obama at 46 percent — barely changed from the deadlocked contest in early July. The findings continue a months-long pattern, with neither the incumbent nor the challenger able to sustain clear momentum, despite airing hundreds of millions of dollars in television ads — most of them negative — and exchanging some of the harshest early rhetoric seen in a modern presidential campaign. Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as his running mate also did not fundamentally reshape the race, although the GOP’s conservative base...

FRIDAY 2 PM: The anti-Obama movie 2016 Obama’s America went into wider release around America today and is opening right now in first place at the domestic box office. That’s quite a feat since the Rocky Mountain Pictures political documentary is still playing in only 1,090 North American theaters – or about 1/3 as many theaters as big-budget actioner The Expendables 2 (3,355 theaters). But these political documentaries like faith-based films are frontloaded. The Stallone picture from Millenium/Lionsgate is still expected to end the weekend #1 and should top the box office tonight. And, based on matinee trends, 2016 Obama’s...

For all the attention it got, Republican Mitt Romney's selection of Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate has not altered the race against President Barack Obama. The campaign remains neck and neck with less than three months to go, a new AP-GfK poll shows. Overall, 47 percent of registered voters said they planned to back Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in November, while 46 percent favored Romney and Ryan. That's not much changed from a June AP-GfK survey, when the split was 47 percent for the president to 44 percent for Romney. At the same time,...

Here's a (relatively) easy way to picture what Mitt Romney has to do to win the White House: First, he has to win every state John McCain won in 2008. That shouldn't be a problem. Then he has to win Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana -- three states McCain should have won in '08. That won't be easy -- right now, Virginia and North Carolina are tossups -- but it's very doable. Next, Romney has to win two big ones: Florida and Ohio. They're tossups, too, with the RealClearPolitics average of polls giving President Obama a one-point edge in Florida...

Since PPP decided it can't help itself, I've done you all a service. I went through their ridiculous R+9 sample and ONLY changed the D/R/I proportions to match previous elections, and an even turnout. With R+9, PPP's headline screams Akin up by 1. It is an obvious, sick ploy to get this delusional Bio101 flunkie to stay in and cost us a seat. Here are the real numbers: If turnout in November matches 2008 (it won't): McCaskill 49.25% Akin 39% (this is a D+6 turnout model) If turnout in November is even, an incredible feat for the GOP considering heavy...

The surest sign that Democrats know they are in trouble after Paul Ryan's nomination to the Republican presidential ticket behind Mitt Romney is the desperation with which they are trying, desperately, to steer the conversation away from the economy, entitlements, and the Constitution--with the help of the media, of course. This is the substantive debate that President Barack Obama always said he was ready for, and which the media always calls for in high-minded tones, but once it is here they are suddenly trying to change the conversation. The latest distraction is a side show in the Missouri race for...