Free Republic

MANKATO, Minn. — Professional pollsters think they’ve got their finger on the pulse of the nation's presidential preference. But with Halloween approaching, there may be another way to predict the election outcome: the popularity of Democrat President Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney masks. Sales of both have been brisk at BuyFun.com. And perhaps telling, though it is not known if the masks are being purchased because of candidate preference or scariness. “Our mask sales have reflected an interesting pattern lately,” said spokeswoman Aleksandra Sobic. “Overall, Obama masks have outsold Romney masks. "However, whereas in September Obama masks were selling...

Buying a house is usually an impersonal transaction. The buyer sees a scrubbed version of the home, artfully “staged,” possibly with a fresh coat of paint and flowers on the table. Once a purchase price has been negotiated, the buyer and the seller sign legal papers in triplicate, and the new owner gets a set of keys and – if lucky – an extra garage door opener. So, when Hal and Corinne Prewitt decided to buy Mitt and Ann Romney’s Park City, Utah home in spring of 2009, they figured they were in for another paperwork hassle. What they got,...

New polls show Obama breaking away in key states Posted: 12:55 PM ET New state polls show Obama with clear leads. New state polls show Obama with clear leads. (CNN) – New polls released Wednesday morning suggest the race for the White House could be breaking for Barack Obama in three key battleground states. Just-released Quinnipiac University surveys show Obama with wide leads in Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as Florida — the showdown state in the 2000 presidential race where John McCain has had held an advantage for most of the summer. Quinnipiac's new survey in Pennsylvania shows Obama...

A potpourri of winter storm watches, warnings, and ice storm warnings are currently posted from north Texas to Illinois in advance of a powerful winter storm expected to get organized overnight and track northeastward into the mid-Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes by late Thursday and Friday. Overnight, snow will leave the southern Rockies and spread into the Texas Panhandle, western and central Oklahoma, and north Texas, including parts of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area. As the bullish upper-level storm swings through Thursday, snow could become heavy in eastern Oklahoma and northwest Arkansas, lifting into southeast Kansas and western Missouri. A...

WASHINGTON - New Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito broke a tie Monday in a ruling that affirmed a state death penalty law and also revealed the court's deep divisions over capital punishment. ADVERTISEMENT Justices split 5-4 in the term's oldest case, which was argued in December before Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement. The justices are in the final week of their term and handling some of the most contentious and important cases. They meet again Wednesday to announce more decisions. The Kansas case was unique. The state law says juries should impose death sentences if aggravating evidence of a crime's...

In the conventional wisdom, it is now believed that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded three years ago, nor did he have ties to terrorism. If a massive collection of recently-declassified Iraqi government documents provides truthful insight into Saddam’s regime, this conventional wisdom is completely wrong, and war was justified. The task of translating the vast trove of documents – millions of pages of Arabic text – has largely fallen into private hands. Several of the documents point to ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, as well as terrorist ambitions by Iraq not...

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide told prosecutors President Bush authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq, according to court papers filed by prosecutors in the CIA leak case. Before his indictment, I. Lewis Libby testified to the grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame leak that Cheney told him to pass on the information and that it was Bush who authorized the leak, the court papers say. According to the documents, the authorization led to the July 8, 2003, conversation between Libby and New York Times reporter Judith Miller. There was no indication in the...

For those who are still up, there is a great interview on Craig Ferguson's late night show with a man who is defending the American involvement in Iraq. He was involved in the search for prohibited weapons in southern Iraq and says they did find many such weapons and that the Iraqis welcomed the Americans into Iraq. The purpose of his booking was to discuss his book on the Iraqi museum looting, but this guy is refreshing. He is really impressive, and Craig appears genuinely interested in what he has to say. Awesome show tonight.

From the questionnaire she gave to the Senate and posted on NRO: "The role of the judiciary in our system of government is limited. While its role and its independence are essential to the proper functioning of our tripartite system of government, the courts cannot be the solution to society’s ills, and the independence of the courts provides no license for them to be free-wheeling. And, of course, parties should not be able to establish social policy through court action, having failed to persuade the legislative branch or the executive branch of the wisdom and correctness of their preferred course....

For 20 years, Sarah Scantlin was seemingly unaware of the world around her after she was hit by a drunk driver in an accident that sent her into a comatose state in September of 1984. Then in February, she shocked her parents and doctors when she began to speak. In her first national television interview, after undergoing surgery on her long-unused limbs and speech therapy to unlock her long-dormant tongue, Scantlin speaks with The Early Show national correspondent Tracy Smith in a two-part interview to be broadcast Thursday and Friday. Smith also speaks with Sarah's parents, Jim and Betsy Scantlin,...

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) -- A slight majority of Kansans believe the state Supreme Court's demand for more funding of public schools overstepped its authority, but reaction is mixed over whether lawmakers should defy justices, a new poll shows. The survey conducted this week for The Kansas City Star and The Wichita Eagle did find one point of agreement: Nearly two-thirds of respondents said schools need more money. On Wednesday, legislators will return to the Kansas Statehouse to begin discussions on how to cope with the high court's order to provide another $143 million in school funding by July 1. Lawmakers...

For decades, Wichita, Kan., police received communications from the BTK killer (search), including letters and poems. Now the man charged with those murders has been spending long hours in his jail cell writing to people he knows. "His public defender is probably pouring his heart and soul into this case," said Denver criminal defense attorney Daniel Recht (search), "only to be sabotaged by his client." FOX News has obtained two poems said to have been written by Dennis Rader (search). A fellow inmate said Rader gave them to him after they became friends in jail. There's one about the springtime...

According to the daily independent newspaper of the University of Colorado, the Regents are wanting public input to determine whether to fire or keep Ward Churchill, the professor who said 9/11 was America's fault and compared the victims to Nazis. The Regents clearly want to gauge the level of public anger. Drop them an e-mail...let's fill their inboxes. Contact info for the Regents is directly below contact info for Churchill himself. Ward.Churchill@Colorado.EDU Office: 303-492-8852 REGENTS CONTACT INFO: Jerryrutledge@adelphia.net (the chair) Tommyjclay@aol.com Peter.Steinhauer@colorado.edu Regent.Carlisle@colorado.edu Regent.Hayes@colorado.edu Carrigan@colorado.edu Regent.Bosley@colorado.edu Regent.Schauer@colorado.edu Gail.Schwartz@colorado.edu University of Colorado Dept. of Ethnic Studies: Fax: 303-492-7799 Churchill said this...

I had the tv on today, and when Oprah came on, she had people from different countries describing what their lives were like. I was absolutely amazed about Kuwait. Supposedly, Kuwait has: 1) no income taxes 2) free higher education 3) free medicine/health services....will pay for sending you elsewhere, even living expenses 4) a wedding gift from the govt for everybody when they get married...12 grand! This is almost unbelieveable. How can they afford to do this for their citizens??

I thought it might be worth it to compile a thread concerning Democratic/Kerry GOTV efforts in contrast to Bush/GOP efforts. How is Kerry's plan shaping up in contrast to the 72-hour plan of Bush? How will Moveon's massive GOTV efforts help Kerry? Will other private groups help Kerry enough to give him the GOTV edge? Will Republican private groups counter the Dem private groups with GOTV? Particularly...and this why I posted this thread due to my curiosity...what are you hearing in your neck of the woods if you are in a battleground state? What are the campaigns doing in Ohio,...

Representatives of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and a coalition that includes the Consumer Electronics Association, the IEEE and NetCoalition said negotiations collapsed early yesterday, with the coalition groups blaming the RIAA for not being willing to work toward a compromise. The fate of the controversial Induce Act that would restrict file-sharing technology that can be used to illegally download and share copyrighted material was in question today after negotiations between the music and electronics industries broke down as the current Congressional session nears an end, possibly by this weekend. The bill, formally known as the Inducing Infringement...

Freepers: I am inquiring about what you take, especially if natural, to prevent or try to lessen the impact of colds, the flu, sinus infections, etc. I go to college, and my roommates and I have been hit with illness two times already...it isn't even Halloween. This is getting a bit old; I am seeking info on what works for you; such a thread can be used for people to refer to in the future hopefully about what really works instead of what lore exists about certain substances. There are little tidbits of info on FR, but I think it...

If George Orwell could have teamed up with Lewis Carroll, maybe, just maybe, they could have concocted something as down-the-rabbit-hole outlandish as the current CBS wisdom on those four almost universally discredited memos trashing George W. Bush's Air National Guard service. After a week in the media pillory, beginning in the blogosphere and spreading even to the mainstream media bastions of The Washington Post and ABC News, Dan Rather and CBS have suggested, barely, that their documents may be fake. They insist, though, that the content is accurate. "Those who have criticized aspects of our story have never criticized the...

In a campaign forum yesterday in Niceville, Fla., President Bush spoke positively about ending the income tax and replacing it with a national sales tax. "It's an interesting idea," Bush told an "Ask President Bush" forum, Reuters reported. "You know, I'm not exactly sure how big the national sales tax is going to have to be, but it's the kind of interesting idea that we ought to explore seriously." As WorldNetDaily reported, in his upcoming book, "Speaker: Lessons from Forty Years in Coaching and Politics," House Speaker Dennis Hastert says dumping the IRS – sure to be immensely popular with...

FREE REPUBLIC EXCLUSIVE: As Hugh Hewitt has on his site....correctly...Drudge erroneously reported that Michael Kranish is authoring the official book of the Kerry campaign (then he claimed the book was spiked, but the book was an independent publication from the get-go, not something that was a piece of propaganda for the Kerry campaign). No, Drudge did not lie. He simply went to the Amazon.com page for the book that Kranish is authoring. Here it is: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1586483145/qid=1091834992/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/103-9188360-6254201?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 The cover photo is of the official Kerry book at the campaign website. However, the title of that book is NOT the book that...