Free Republic

Three groups sued California Secretary of State Debra Bowen and San Francisco’s elections director Wednesday, asking the court to ensure that more than 85,000 people sent to county jails instead of state prisons under the recent “realignment” can vote.All of Us or None, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, and the League of Women Voters of California contend that low-level, non-violent offenders should be able to cast ballots this year and beyond. The state’s First District Court of Appeal ruled in 2006 that people serving county jail terms as a condition of felony probation are entitled to vote under California...

Gov. Jerry Brown was at the Chronicle Tuesday for an editorial board meeting (mostly to sell his tax plan), and we asked him about how Gavin Newsom is doing in the number two, largely ceremonial, spot of lieutenant governor. The two former Bay Area mayors, you may remember, have a rocky past (in part because of personality, and in part because Newsom also had his sights set on the governor’s office two years ago before dropping out of the race) .“I think he’s well within the tradition,” Brown said when asked whether he’s satisfied with the job Newsom has done.Ouch....

The web is abuzz today about video of a speech Barack Obama gave in 1990 (some reports have incorrectly identified the speech as occurring in 1991) at Harvard Law School defending the actions of Professor Derrick Bell. Bell, the law school’s first tenured black professor, had protested Harvard’s failure to offer tenure to women of color as law school professors. Online publisher Andrew Brietbart, who died last week, had said he possessed the speech and hinted that he would release it, arguing that it provided evidence that Obama has long held radical political beliefs. Today, the website BuzzFeed published a...

America's long-slog presidential campaigns are a process of discovery. Candidates, voters and the press criss-cross a complex nation trying to discover where the public mind will be the first Tuesday in November. No candidate has had a more interesting journey through 2012's campaign frontier than Rick Santorum. Few are going to forget Sen. Santorum in the early debates, stuck in the left-field bleachers, begging to be heard over such center-ring heavyweights as Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. In August, no one thought this guy would be toe-to-toe with the Romney machine in March. What happened? I went to...

President Obama touted the construction of an oil pipeline from Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico today as a sign of oil production under his leadership, even though his State Department originally killed that pipeline when it refused to permit the construction of the Keystone pipeline. "We just announced that we’ll do whatever we can to speed up construction of a pipeline in Oklahoma that’s going to relieve a bottleneck and get more oil to the Gulf -- to the refineries down there -- and that’s going to help create jobs, encourage more production," Obama said in North Carolina today....

WHNT News 19 Staff Reports 3:48 p.m. CST, March 7, 2012 BIRMINGHAM, AL— The Alabama Republican Party will host a presidential forum in Birmingham on Monday, March 12. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich say they're in, and Mitt Romney and Ron Paul have also been invited. Bill Armistead, Chairman of the Alabama Republican

LENEXA, Kansas -- Rick Santorum is trying to turn the tables on the Romney camp’s suggestion that it would take an “act of God” for Santorum to come out ahead in the GOP delegate race, telling reporters here at his first campaign event since Super Tuesday that Mitt Romney must now believe that he’s God’s chosen candidate in the race. “What won’t they resort to try to bully their way through this race?” Santorum asked reporters after addressing more than 200 supporters at a graphics company. “If the governor thinks he’s now ordained by God to win, then let’s just...

Forty-seven years ago, marchers attempting to cross the William Pettis Bridge from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., to protest Jim Crow laws aimed at suppressing voting rights for African-Americans were savagely beaten by state police on foot and horseback. ... But yesterday, demonstrators assembled in New York to march to protest a situation created by laws in dozens of states across the country that will negatively impact the voting rights of minorities and low-income citizens. Unlike the blatant conduct of the Democratically controlled "Solid South" of years gone by, it's Republican dominated legislators of the New South who are passing bills...

A verbal typo by President Obama at today’s Mt. Holly, N.C. speech, but a self-serving one that warrants a quick correction: “Now, because of these new standards for cars and trucks, they're going to -- all going to be able to go further and use less fuel every year. And that means pretty soon you’ll be able to fill up your car every two weeks instead of every week -– and, over time, that saves you, a typical family, about $8,000 a year,” Obama said. “We like that!” shouted an audience member. “You like that, don't you?” Obama replied. Except...

He has maintained a relatively low profile on the Sandra Fluke story, but Democratic Rep. Elijah E. Cummings played a big role in putting the Georgetown law student in the spotlight and sparking a nationwide conversation over contraceptives. It was Cummings who helped put Fluke on Washington's radar. Aides to Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, discovered Fluke weeks ago as they were scrambling to find a witness to testify about the Obama administration's controversial contraceptive policy. Staff first noticed the third-year law student and former president of the school's Students for Reproductive Justice...

The voting is over, and so for the most part is the counting. The delegate math, I leave to others; let’s take a look at how the popular vote has shaped up over the course of this primary season and what conclusions we can draw. First, the overall popular vote before Super Tuesday, on Super Tuesday, and to date.* In addition to listing the candidates’ individual vote totals, I’ve classified them in three groups: the five conservative candidates (Santorum, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann and Cain), the two moderate candidates (Romney and Hunstman) and the libertarian (Paul). While there will undoubtedly be...

When I heard yesterday that Sarah Palin was already talking about a potential presidential bid in 2016, I saw the writing on the wall: The Republican establishment isn’t even pretending to care about 2012 anymore. That an Obama win seems certain despite Obama’s middling approval ratings is an embarrassment to the Republican Party, to be sure. The people in the trenches care, certainly, but the Party bigwigs? Not so much.Even so, those who are sounding alarms about the end of the Party as we know it need to calm down and remember 2004. By the end of George W. Bush’s...

<p>TODAY'S Wall Street Journal features an op-ed in which Rick Santorum pledges that "...in my first 100 days as president, I'll submit to Congress and work to pass a comprehensive pro-growth and pro-family Economic Freedom Agenda". No one is more receptive than I to an "economic freedom agenda", yet Mr Santorum's has my bullshit detector howling like an air-raid siren.</p>

"Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign has an interesting response to a call from the super PAC supporting Rick Santorum for the former House speaker to exit the race. It’s front-runner Mitt Romney who should say sayonara, says Gingrich policy adviser Vince Haley, Politico reports. The pro-Santorum Red, White and Blue Fund put out a statement Wednesday urging Gingrich to stand aside, so that the former Pennsylvania senator can stand as the former Massachusetts governor’s sole conservative challenger. Haley, appearing on Geraldo Rivera’s radio program, would have none of it. But his first response was to take on Romney rather than Santorum....

On his show Wednesday, radio host Rush Limbaugh denied he was hemorrhaging advertisers over the Sandra Fluke incident as has been widely reported. “People are reporting things that, A, are not true, and B, I don’t even think the people reporting it have the slightest idea what they’re talking about, nor do they have the ability to understand it,” Limbaugh fumed and shared that his own brother had asked him if he was bleeding sponsors. “No, we have not lost 28 sponsors! ‘Well, how can they say it?’ Because they lie and because they don’t understand how it works, and...

Rick Santorum’s campaign said it’s not planning for any more GOP primary debates, while Newt Gingrich is calling for one to happen before next Tuesday’s contests. Gingrich said on Monday he planned to attend an upcoming debate in Portland, Ore., hosted by PBS. He also said he wanted there to be more debates, possibly in Mississippi and Alabama, states with upcoming primaries in which the former House Speaker is hoping to do well. Mitt Romney’s campaign wouldn’t say if the former Massachusetts governor will attend the Portland debate, and the Santorum campaign wouldn’t commit either.

ROMNEY CAMPAIGN DRAGGED DOWN BY BIG BOATLOAD OF DELEGATESRead More » March 7, 2012   Mitt Romney won more than twice as many delegates on Super Tuesday as Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. The Non-Fox Media's take-away is that Romney suffered a major setback Tuesday night.      No matter what happens, Barack Obama's boosters in the NFM portray it as a debilitating blow to Romney. On Nov. 7, The New York Times' headline will be: "Romney ekes out narrow electoral victory, leaving race uncertain."      To explain the widening gulf in delegates won by Romney compared to the others...

It wasn't pretty and it wasn't easy, but Mitt Romney has essentially locked up the GOP nomination. On Super Tuesday, the former Massachusetts governor won the most states (six out of 10), the most votes (nearly 1.4 million vs. 819,000 for his closest rival, Rick Santorum) and the most delegates (more than 210 Super Tuesday delegates vs. less than 180 for his three rivals).

Breaking footage shows a young Barack Obama leading a protest at Harvard Law School on behalf of Prof. Derrick Bell, a radical academic tied to Jeremiah Wright. We will be releasing significant information in the coming hours.