Free Republic

The Republican-led House Ways and Means committee on Tuesday plans to hold the fifth hearing on the IRS’ inappropriate targeting of conservative groups. Viewers who watch Tuesday’s hearing can expect to see the congressional panel — especially its GOP members — draw out dramatic accounts of the worst experiences from the review process. A representative from one of the targeted groups said the review process was “pretty much a proctology exam through your earlobe,” while others complained that their applications had been lost or that the IRS demanded names of board members, copies of meeting minutes and résumés, among other...

There were two big shocks for me on election night 2012: 1) Obama beat Romney. I had concluded that 2012 would look a lot like 2004, i.e. a 50-49 victory with about 290 Electoral votes. I did not subscribe to the landslide (i.e. Dick Morris) but did see a narrow Romney victory! 2) All of the talk about the "hispano" vote. I had looked at anecdotal evidence and did not see a "hispano" wave on election day. So I was surprised with all of the conventional wisdom that "hispanos" had reelected Obama. It turns out that "hispanos" did not really...

President Barack Obama may have used the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to find damaging personal information about Republican challenger Mitt Romney leading up to the 2012 presidential elections.

See for yourself. Issa’s committee was told last year that the report would be ready in September, two months before the election. Eight months later, the bomb finally dropped. Why? Did the IG initially underestimate the volume of malfeasance and how long it would take to dig it up? Or are there other, more cynical reasons?Even if the report wasn’t ready, Issa claims the IG had a statutory obligation to keep Congress updated on its findings as they were made. He didn’t. Why not? Issa is referring to part of the Inspector General Act that requires watchdogs to report serious...

Voter ID didn’t reduce turnout, but the IRS may have. By John Fund The 2012 election season was filled with angry cries of “voter suppression,” almost all of them regarding attempts by states to require voter ID and otherwise improve ballot integrity. Bill Clinton warned that “there has never been — in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting — the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.” Democratic-party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said “photo-ID laws, we think, are very similar to a poll tax.”

Tempers flared in a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Wednesday, with members on both sides of the aisle castigating the Internal Revenue Service for targeting conservative groups with special scrutiny, and then hiding the practice from Congress.Rep. Darrel Issa, the committee's chairman, said that the committee learned just yesterday that the IRS completed its own investigation a year before a Treasury Department Inspector General report was completed.But despite the IRS recognizing in May 2012 that its employees were treating right-wing groups differently from other organizations, Issa said, IRS personnel withheld those conclusions from legislators.'Just yesterday the committee interviewed...

What if this is all happening according to plan? I don't mean that Obama planned Benghazi to happen the way it did or planned the timing of the IG report on the IRS...but that he knew his scandalous behavior and actions would eventually see the light of day...and that's OK by him.And why would that be OK by him...what would this accomplish?First, when/if it is discovered that he is insulated from culpability for these scandals, it will demonstrate to those who are afraid of his tyranny that they are right to be afraid. He is giving us (the patriots) the...

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was Jay Leno’s guest on the Tonight Show Friday, and he didn’t have kind things to say about the current White House resident or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. At one point in their discussion, Romney said, “I’m not a fan of the president—in case you didn’t know that.” …

WH Live Stream Scheduled to begin at 12:30 pm EDT

Alinsky Rule #13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”In 2010 Republicans thundered into the majority in the House of Representatives, making historic gains by a proportion not seen in more than 70 years. The party won more than 60 seats. This was completely due to the enthusiasm of the Tea Party movement in response to the overreach of the Democratic leaders. Democrats and the Obama Administration knew they had to stop the Tea Party to win in 2012 so they organized, made their plans and took action. They planned their attack based on Alinsky’s 13th rule...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - Obama’s Benghazi PropagandistPosted By Matthew Vadum On May 8, 2013 @ 12:56 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 4 Comments A young White House speechwriter may be responsible for concocting the official lies about last September’s deadly terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya.The Obama administration’s rapidly unravelling narrative about what happened at the U.S. consulate in Libya’s second-largest city may have been cooked up by creative writer Ben Rhodes, the president’s 30-something Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting.The origin of the administration’s desperate election-season fabrications may come up today as a congressional committee...

Even as the White House strove last week to move beyond questions about the Benghazi attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2012, fresh evidence emerged that senior Obama administration officials knowingly misled the country about what had happened in the days following the assaults. The Weekly Standard has obtained a timeline briefed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailing the heavy substantive revisions made to the CIA’s talking points, just six weeks before the 2012 presidential election, and additional information about why the changes were made and by whom. As intelligence officials pieced together the puzzle of events...

The Benghazi scandal is easy to understand, and that’s what makes it so dangerous for the White House. Simply, the Obama administration’s narrative — that al-Qaeda was on the run, that Hosni Mubarak had to go, and that the Arab Spring was a good thing — was proven false when four brave Americans were killed. Because the administration was a slave to their own narrative, rather than aggressively fighting al-Qaeda, rather than recognizing the $50 billion investment in Mubarak’s stability, and rather than realizing that the upheaval they sponsored in the Middle East empowered Muslim Brotherhood radicals, they lied repeatedly...

Speaking to a Mexico City crowd on Friday, President Barack Obama said he would not be president if not for Latino voters, and then he pledged immigration reform in the United States to legalize those who are here illegally. “Without the strong support of Latinos, including so many Mexican-Americans, I would not be standing here today as president of the United States,” Obama said. “That’s the truth.” …

The U.S. government had the ability to “react and respond” to the Benghazi terrorist attack and could have had forces on the ground before the second wave of the assault began, a special operator with knowledge of the response told Fox News in an exclusive interview. Due to the explosive nature of his allegations, the special ops member asked to remain anonymous. “I know for a fact that C 110 the UComm CIF was doing a training exercise, not in the region of northern Africa, but in Europe. And they had the ability to react and respond,” he told Fox...

Former Rep. Todd Akin said he regrets the comments he made about “legitimate rape” which derailed his Missouri bid for U.S. Senate last year. In an interview with KDSK-TV on Thursday, the 65-year-old was asked whether he would take back the controversial comments. “Of course I would,” the former congressman replied. “I’ve relived them too many times. But that is not reality.” …

Last week, Paul Ryan and House Republicans released their budget plan, which combined spending and tax cuts to reach a projected balanced budget by 2022. It was met with skepticism by pundits from the left and center, and even by some on the right. A common refrain was that the GOP hadn’t learned the lessons of 2012, and that it would probably take another losing cycle or two before the party wised up and moved to the middle. The problem is, in a reasonably close election like the last one, there are conflicting signals that make it nearly impossible to...

This tells the story, why Bush was so bad at the end of his term, or so they say......... The day the democrats took over was not January 22nd 2009, it was actually January 3rd 2007 the day the Democrats took over the House of Representatives and the Senate, at the very start of the 110th Congress. The Democrat Party controlled a majority in both chambers for the first time since the end of the 103rd Congress in 1995. For those who are listening to the liberals propagating the fallacy that everything is "Bush's Fault", think about this:

How the Republican candidate lost the presidential election. < snip > ..... [Republicans] are concocting explanations and excuses for what they see as Mitt Romney's snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They should realize that it was economics that sank Romney. His crucial problem was his campaign's failure to make a sufficiently convincing case on the money issues. Most postmortems have focused on the demographics of the defeat. ..... < snip > But none of Romney's demographic defeats are as significant as the electoral potential Romney missed on money issues. Election Day exit polling by Edison Media Research/Mitofsky International...

The best thing about math is that it’s a constant. The numbers are what they are. That’s why I’m a data guy, because as a person that believes in absolute truth I have a tendency to like things cut and dried. Leading up to the 2012 election several lies and clever myths were postulated by the ruling class know-it-alls and the charlatans who act on their behalf, and you can bet they will continue peddling their wares this year in light of the results. But the beauty of real numbers is they cut through all the horse puckey right to...

Eva Longoria's Next Role: Hispanic Activist in Washington By MONICA LANGLEY Eva Longoria emerged in 2012 as President Obama's secret weapon in securing the Hispanic vote. Now the Hollywood star is starting in earnest her transition from celebrity to political activist. WSJ's Monica Langley sat down with Ms. Longoria for an interview. When Barack Obama takes the presidential oath of office on Monday, he will be joined on the platform by Supreme Court justices, former presidents—and one of the "Desperate Housewives." Actress Eva Longoria, the 37-year-old star of the hit television show and twice Maxim magazine's Hottest Woman of the...

In combing through the results of the 2012 election -- apparently finally complete, nearly two months after the fact -- I continue to find many similarities between 2012 and 2004 and one enormous difference. Both of the elections involved incumbent presidents with approval ratings hovering around or just under 50 percent facing challengers who were rich men from Massachusetts (though one made his money and the other married it).In both cases, the challenger and his campaign seemed confident he was going to win. and had reasonable grounds to believe so.In both elections, the incumbent started running a barrage of negative...

A top priority of Democrats nationwide is to try to expand early voting even beyond the more than 40-plus million votes that were cast on days other than Election Day in 2012 or by mail. The present system balkanizes and deprives our nation of the unifying value of one nation on Election Day. The Democrats know that their massive use of early voting was a major factor that enabled them to pile up the winning votes to reelect Barack Obama. Obama enthusiastically supports early voting; he urged 10,000 fans at his campaign speech in Urbandale, Iowa to vote right now...

Exclusive: Pamela Geller traces death of the republic to 2 short words The United States of America was created as an independent nation whose founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Freedom. Ayn Rand said that “freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion.” America was the first moral government based on individual rights, the nation of the Enlightenment. In this age of Obama, that ideal has been tossed aside for … “free stuff.” I have, for some time, struggled with the new reality: America void of her reason, existing without the reason for her existence, her...

Sen. John Kerry is the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations responsible for oversight of US State Dept., execution of foreign policy and oversight of diplomatic facilities. But in Oct. 2012, Kerry was also acting as Obama's debate coach when Obama prepared for the 2nd debate, the foreign policy debate at which Romney was expected to grill Obama over the Benghazigate disaster. Did Kerry violate the separation of powers and ignore a conflict of interest in being both Obama's foreign policy debate coach and Chair of the committee? Kerry's committee in the legislative branch is supposed to provide...

Star Parker urges freedom-lovers to continue fight to restore America Now, suddenly, the tea party is everybody’s whipping boy. Liberals, in the wake of the election, gloat about what they see as liberalism’s return to the mainstream and cheer the end of the Republican “extremists.” And, despite the spin, which never stops in Washington, it is not accidental that four prominent tea-party congressmen have been purged from key committee posts by Speaker John Boehner. So as the Washington “establishment” cozies up to the mindset that a bloated, debt-ridden America can go on just fine as long as there is political...

Exclusive: Molotov Mitchell says 'the computers are taking over!' Molotov Mitchell is president of the award-winning Illuminati Pictures. His specialty is entertainment communications, particularly reaching the "under 40" demographic.

PUTTING 2012 UNDER A MICROSCOPE Reflections on the late disaster, a month after November 6… When disaster strikes, it is easy to see only the negatives, and easier still to cry out “All is lost.” Negativity rules the day, all the more so in politics after a national election. But there are lessons to be learned in every defeat, and if we objectively view these election results, we will see a foundation upon which a wise movement can build, to save this country from its current path of destruction. This won’t pretend to be an exhaustive list, but perhaps there...

Karl Rove taken off the air as Fox News distances themselves from conservative pundit after his Election Night tantrum Karl Rove has officially been benched as Fox News chief Roger Ailes has reportedly suspended the Republican operative from their airwaves. Rove and Dick Morris, a fellow paid political analyst, have been temporarily banned from appearing on Fox News as the network tries to distance themselves from the two men whose election predictions ended up being so far from the result. New York Magazine's Gabriel Sherman reports that Ailes decided that it is important for Fox News to take a step...

When Barack Obama was re-elected on November 6, the vast majority of professors across the country cheered and continued to force their liberal ideology on their students. In fact, 96 percent of Ivy League professors who donated to a campaign this election cycle, donated to President Obama. Ivy League educators overwhelmingly supported President Obama with their campaign donations in the presidential election, reinforcing the suspicions of critics who say their bias also shows up in the classroom. Some 96 percent of faculty and staffers at the eight universities who donated wrote their checks to Obama, and at Brown University, just...

You know you’re in trouble as a nation when the Communist Party USA is openly celebrating the re-election of the president. And that is exactly what is happening in late November 2012. The Stalinists are calling Barack Obama’s win a “victory for the people.” As a former communist (note small c), I can translate that for you. It means a “victory for communism – or, more precisely, a victory for the party.” Just listen to some of the hyperbolic and ecstatic rhetoric: “We meet on the heels of an enormous people’s victory. It was a long and bitterly contested battle...

Barack Obama did not win the election. Mitt Romney and the Republicans lost it. Obama has no mandate. None whatsoever. Here's why: Obama received roughly 7 million fewer votes in 2012 than in 2008. He was perceived to be something much less than he had portrayed himself. No matter what the Democrats did, they could not turn out anything like the 69.5 million votes they got in 2008. The election was handed to Romney on a silver platter, but his campaign advisers — and a couple of Republican Senate candidates — wrecked his chances. Let's give the Republicans some credit....

Stuart Stevens was the chief strategist for the Romney presidential campaign. Over the years, one of the more troubling characteristics of the Democratic Party and the left in general has been a shortage of loyalty and an abundance of self-loathing. It would be a shame if we Republicans took a narrow presidential loss as a signal that those are traits we should emulate. I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.’s green-room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians. That’s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought that he would win the Republican nomination. But...

In many aspects of the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney and the establishment Republicans who were running his campaign just plain got outgunned and outsmarted. Yet, in the aftermath of Romney’s defeat, he said he lost because he couldn’t overcome the effect of Obama’s “gifts” to key demographics: student loan modifications for young voters and amnesty for young and predominantly Hispanic illegal aliens. We think Romney missed the mark with that analysis because conservative ideas have successfully countered the Democrats’ attempts to bribe voters in the past. To avoid the kind of defeat Republicans suffered in 2012, conservatives must learn...

Barack Obama has edged ahead of Mitt Romney in the final days of the presidential campaign. In the Pew Research Center’s election weekend survey, Obama holds a 48% to 45% lead over Romney among likely voters. The survey finds that Obama maintains his modest lead when the probable decisions of undecided voters are taken into account. Our final estimate of the national popular vote is Obama 50% and Romney 47%, when the undecided vote is allocated between the two candidates based on several indicators and opinion

A funny thing happened as I was looking at the political map of this year's presidential election: It began to look like the map of the presidential election of 2004. I'm not talking about the superficial similarity, the fact that in both elections an incumbent president beat a challenger from Massachusetts by a 51 to 48 percent popular vote margin.I'm talking about the fact that the large majority of states voted just a little bit more Democratic in 2012 than they did in 2004.Enough to give 2012 nominee Barack Obama 332 electoral votes, far more than 2004 nominee John Kerry's...

In the aftermath of establishment Republican Mitt Romney’s defeat in the 2012 presidential election, Governor Romney said he lost because he couldn’t overcome the effect of Obama’s “gifts” to key demographics; student loan modifications for young voters and amnesty for young and predominantly Hispanic illegal aliens. We think Romney missed the mark with that analysis because conservative ideas have successfully countered the Democrats’ attempts to bribe voters in the past. However, the comment is a good place for conservatives to start analyzing the failures of the Romney campaign – and learning from the successes of the Obama campaign. Here are...

I keep thinking, “Christie can’t possibly come back from this.” And then I think, “Wait, did we actually just nominate John McCain and the guy responsible for RomneyCare?” Never underestimate the Republican capacity to forgive, my friends: But behind the scenes, the intensity of the reaction from those in Mr. Christie’s party caught him by surprise, interviews show, requiring a rising Republican star to try to contain a tempest that left him feeling deeply misunderstood and wounded...The tensions followed Mr. Christie to the annual meeting of the Republican Governors Association in Las Vegas last week. At a gathering where he...

When last we left Dean Chambers, the Duffield, Va., resident was licking his wounds in Virginia’s coal fields, trying to figure out how he’d fooled himself and much of a nation into believing the Mitt Romney would win the election. Chambers, 45, the founder of UnskewedPolls.com, ultimately decided he had incorrectly forecast that too few Democrats would vote. He admitted this mistake. Now, it appears he’s reconsidering. Recently he launched a new website, BarackOFraudo.com. It seeks to understand how four states that he had incorrectly predicted would go to Romney — Virginia, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania — actually went to...

Every person who talks and writes about politics gets stuff wrong. I’ve gotten my fair share wrong. But what I think I got most wrong in Campaign 2012 was the damage Mitt Romney’s “47%” remark would do to him. It may seem obvious, but bear with me. Mitt Romney was talking off the cuff to a supposedly off the record group of donors and muddled several data points together, ultimately telling the tale of the 47% who won’t vote for him for any reason. He was referencing the 47% who don’t pay taxes and interwove it with a 47% of...

From California to Maine, unions used their political muscle in the recent elections to help install Democratic governors, build labor-friendly majorities in state legislatures and defeat ballot initiatives against them. The combination of union money and member mobilization helped Democrats take control of state legislatures in Maine and Minnesota. In Michigan, voters repealed a law that allowed cities in financial distress to suspend collective bargaining contracts. But unions lost there on an effort to make collective bargaining rights a part of the state constitution. In New Hampshire, unions helped Maggie Hassan win the governor's race. Unions spent millions backing Hassan...

Just watched FOX & Friends and Col Allen West was on live and stated that he will no longer fight for the FL D18 seat. (paraphrasing) He stated that even though they found problems with the way the vote count was handled he said it is not about him but is about what is best for the people of FL D18 so he conceds the seat to Pat Murphy. I have a feeling we have not seen the last of Col West. Thanks for your service to our country Col West.

Brothel owner who employs 80 prostitutes wins election as county commissioner in Nevada... and he's a Republican Lance Gilman is a thriving businessman with dozens of employees. That those workers include a good many prostitutes didn't faze the people of a rural Nevada county who recently elected him as a Storey County commissioner by a wide margin. The Mustang Ranch brothel owner is the first such owner to win election to public office in Nevada since prostitution was legalized here in 1971, Nevada historian Guy Rocha said. And he's believed to be the first to do so in the state's...

Mitt Romney's Republican Get Out the Vote system (ORCA) had a meltdown on Election Day leaving some campaign workers wandering around with nothing to do. Now Anonymous has released a video claiming responsibility for jamming ORCA...

Wearing the garments of their respective faiths, a rabbi, two Protestant ministers and a Franciscan friar set aside theological differences on a December afternoon to lead a march – sponsored by a broad coalition of community and labor groups – down Market Street in San Francisco to the Occupy San Francisco encampment at Justin Herman Plaza. They were united in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s main rallying cry against inequality, recession, high unemployment and unaffordable health care. These conditions and the economic system behind them, they say, are in opposition to the Gospel and Catholic social teaching. “If...

County board grants Rep. Allen West’s recount request The St. Lucie County Canvassing Board has ordered a recount of all early votes in that county, beginning Saturday morning. The ruling is a victory for West, but overcoming his current 1,900-vote deficit will still be difficult. A Florida judge on Friday denied Rep. Allen West’s (R-Fla.) request to recount early votes in St. Lucie County, dealing another setback to the congressman’s effort to overcome an apparent defeat in last Tuesday’s election. West had requested the recounting of 37,000 ballots from early voting, suggesting that they may have been miscounted. The judge...

...Congressional officials familiar with the briefings told the Associated Press that Gen Petraeus testified that security at the consulate was so lax that the attackers walked in and set fire to the facility. Security at the CIA annex was much better, the AP reported, but the attackers had arms and broke in. Republicans were also critical of the Obama administration's handling of security situation. Florida Senator Marco Rubio said Gen Petraeus testimony showed that "clearly the security measures were inadequate despite an overwhelming and growing amount of information that showed the area in Benghazi was dangerous, particularly on the night...

...Democratic senators who emerged from the hearing said Petraeus' testimony supported U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said Rice was speaking from talking points prepared by the CIA and approved by the intelligence committee. "The key is that they were unclassified talking points at a very early stage. And I don't think she should be pilloried for this. She did what I would have done or anyone else would have done that was going on a weekend show," Feinstein said. "To say that she is unqualified to be Secretary of State I think is a...

Top Florida Democrats sounded the alarm Friday over what they see as improper interference by Gov. Rick Scott in U.S. Rep. Allen West’s attempt to hold onto his congressional seat. U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, flatly asserted in a statement that the Republican governor is attempting to interfere in the contest between Republican West and Democrat Patrick Murphy. A spokesman for Scott's secretary of state denied the Democrats' assertions. Unofficial results show Murphy as the winner, but the West campaign has asserted that counting irregularities in St. Lucie County – part of...

Crowds began to emerge around 11 a.m. in front of the St. Lucie County courthouse to express support for Congressman Allen West’s call for a complete recount in the Congressional District 18 race. The West team has been putting together a legal argument to persuade St. Lucie County Circuit Judge Dan Vaughn to order county Elections Supervisor Gertrude Walker to recount all early voting ballots. Walker has admitted to problems with the ballots,...