Free Republic

Robert Gibbs told reporters that President Obama is not watching the results tonight. Politico reported: Hours after urging reporters not to draw sweeping conclusions from Tuesday’s gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told POLITICO President Barack Obama wasn’t even keeping an eye on the results. “He’s not watching returns,” Gibbs said.

Roland Emmerich has admitted that he feared a fatwa would be placed on him if he filmed a scrapped scene for 2012. The filmmaker is well known for decimating famed landmarks on movies including The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day. He stated that while he decided to destroy the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro because he is "against organised religion", he was fearful of the Islamic religious decree for a sequence that was planned but not shot. The 53-year-old wanted to demolish the Kaaba, which is a cube-shaped building at the heart of Mecca and is...

When Obama stated that he was going to reach out to the Islamic world, he was not kidding. The weakness of Obama has lead to the Taliban getting stronger. He has even given the Taliban the OK to participate in the future political landscape of Afghanistan. Apparently none of this was enough though, and now Obama is willing to share power in Afghanistan with the Taliban thugs. This is straight out of the Twilight Zone. US Offers Taliban 6 Provinces for 8 Bases By Aamir Latif, IOL Correspondent

(CNN) - Is Mitt Romney weighing in on the intra-Republican Party fight in race for New York's 23 Congressional District by refusing to make an endorsement? That's the special election where the GOP nominee, Dede Scozzafava, is facing a challenge not only from Bill Owens, the Democrat's candidate, but also from Doug Hoffman, who's running on the conservative party line. Because of the split among Republicans, Owens has a good chance of taking back a district the Democrats haven't won in generations. On Wednesday Romney was asked whether he'd make an endorsement in the New York 23 contest. "I have...

I have no illusions that you are interested in the opinions of a middle-aged housewife. Indeed, you don't seem interested in anyone's opinions that do not mirror your own, nevertheless as long as I have the freedom to express myself, I will. Since you've decided to allow our troops to languish in purgatory, why not just bring them home before even one more son or daughter is killed due to your dithering? Just bring them home...it's ok. If tucking tail and running was good enough for John Kerry, it's certainly good enough for you. Who cares if the world laughs...

The Washington Post reports tonight that Barack Obama and top administration officials have concluded the Taliban cannot be beaten and that they are looking for ways to cede parts of Afghanistan to the Taliban without those regions becoming safe havens for al Qaeda.The article also reports that Obama may wait until after he returns from a 10 day visit to Asia that begins November 11 to decide his policy for Afghanistan.The Post article is largely about Obama's request made this week, two months after he received Gen. Stanley McChrystal's request for tens of thousands more troops to fulfill Obama's counter-insuregency...

He's not a Cabinet member or an ambassador, but Sen. John Kerry has ascended to the unofficial role of President Obama's global adviser on key issues that could reshape the nation's image around the world. Mediating Afghanistan's presidential election vaulted Mr. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, from the already prominent chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee into the most exclusive circle around a new president who is juggling but has yet to resolve a variety of domestic and foreign policy matters. Beyond policy, Mr. Kerry knows how Washington works.

Only nine months ago, the Pentagon pronounced itself reassured by the early steps of a new commander in chief. President Obama was moving slowly on an American withdrawal from Iraq, had retained former President George W. Bush’s defense secretary and, in a gesture much noticed, had executed his first military salute with crisp precision. But now, after nearly a month of deliberations by Mr. Obama over whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan, frustrations and anxiety are on the rise within the military. A number of active duty and retired senior officers say there is concern that the president...

The New York Times has an interesting update on the never-ending spat between the White House and The Fox News Channel (FNC). The White House communications director, Anita Dunn, said this weekend, ”We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” Wow. Is there any wonder why Chris Wallace said, after being rebuffed during Obama’s news show extravaganzathon a few weeks ago, that Obama’s administration was ”the biggest bunch...

On Thursday, NBC's "Saturday Night Live" spin-off "Weekend Update Thursday" mocked President Obama as being willing to discuss healthcare reform on virtually any cable channel that will have him -- except, of course, Fox News. Although the opening skit did poke fun at FNC's Glenn Beck, the real joke was that the President, having just done Sunday interviews on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Univision, wanted to "get the healthcare message out to as wide an audience as possible. I don't want to shut anyone out of this debate."

<p>Just announced by Jennifer Griffith in a live interview, WH has asked Pentagon for a formal assessment of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, that the Afghan Wart is no longer in our nations interest, blamed the Afghan elections.</p>

WASHINGTON — President Obama has long suggested that he would like to move beyond race. The question now is whether the country will let him. He woke up on Wednesday to a rapidly intensifying debate about how his race factors into the broader discussion of civility in politics, a question prompted in part by former President Jimmy Carter’s assertion Tuesday that racism was behind a Republican lawmaker’s outburst against Mr. Obama last week as the president addressed a joint session of Congress. Even before that, several conservatives had accused their liberal counterparts of unfairly tainting them as racists for engaging...

ROAD BLOCK: President Obama keeps the pedal to the metal on health care by doing Sunday shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Univision’s “Al Punto,” con Jorge Ramos. That’s the most ever for a president. He’ll tape ’em Friday at the White House.

George F. Will, the elite conservative commentator, will call in his next column for U.S. ground troops to leave Afghanistan, according to publishing sources. “[F]orces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters,” Will writes in the column, scheduled for publication later this week. Obama ordered a total of 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan in February and March, and casualties have mounted...

'JUSTICE Secretary Kenny MacAskill freed Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al- Megrahi over fears Scotland would suffer a terrorist backlash if he died behind bars. He believed Megrahi would have been seen as a MARTYR by Islamic extremists if he had been left to die in Greenock Prison. And last night a source close to the Cabinet Secretary said: "Kenny feared the repercussions would have haunted Scotland for a generation and more. "If Megrahi had died in a Scottish jail, we'd have seen burning Saltires across the Middle East." MacAskill and SNP First Minister Alex Salmond are preparing to publish...

A New Jersey man with a lengthy rap sheet was indicted yesterday for preying on senior citizens in a months-long mugging spree through Greenwich Village and Chelsea. The oldest of Robert Stewart's victims was 91, prosecutors said. [snip] ...he accosted the 91-year-old man, whom he'd followed into a building on West 12th Street. He hit him in the head and took $400 from his wallet, investigators said.

The Obama White House is behind a cynical, coldly calculated political effort to erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry. This effort to reshape the American psyche has nothing to do with healing the nation and everything to do with easing the nation along in the ongoing radical transformation of America that President Obama promised during last year's election campaign. The president signed into law a measure in April that designated Sept. 11 as a National Day of Service, but...

Today's New Hampshire town hall was billed as a real one. The President was going to take questions from everyone, both pro and con. Asked about the town hall, White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton said today that there will be about 1,800 people in the audience, including members of the general public and those who received tickets through members of Congress... "We expect that there will be a vigorous debate, as there have been at plenty of town halls that President Obama has had as president and as candidate, and we look forward to it," Burton told reporters...

It's official. The United States is no longer engaged in a "war on terrorism." Neither is it fighting "jihadists" nor locked in a "global war." President Obama's top homeland security and counterterrorism official on Thursday declared as unacceptable the terms crafted by the George W. Bush administration.

Congressman Brian Baird accepted an invitation to a living-room chat with a local Republican leader who volunteered Friday to be his bodyguard, and agreed to a national radio appearance with a conservative talk-show host. Baird was scolded for his choice of words in an ongoing political storm, and was both supported and criticized for holding a "telephone town hall" instead of an actual town hall meeting. And then there was the fax that the Vancouver Democrat characterized as a death threat. Friday added several new chapters to a story that started this week when Baird said he wasn't going to...