Free Republic

To be precise, the union-backed Greater Wisconsin Political Fund is actually trying to pressure non-voters in liberal Dane County into voting in Tuesday's recall election. "We're sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicize who does and does not vote," reads the "incredibly creepy" mailer that UW-Madison law professor Ann Althouse received from the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund. Althouse writes: This is an effort to shame and pressure people about voting, and it is truly despicable. Your vote is private, you have a right not to vote, and anyone who tries to shame and an harass you about...

Sex and the City" star Sarah Jessica Parker is borrowing a tactic from the George Clooney fundraising book, planning a campaign dinner for President Barack Obama and offering a chance to win two tickets with $3 online donations. Parker, who is married to actor Matthew Broderick, sent an email to supporters and appeared in an advertisement on Sunday's MTV Movie Awards telling people of the online donations and tickets to the affair at her New York home. "I'm hosting this event on June 14th because there is so much at stake this year and I want to keep doing what...

Mormon Group Shows Its Support In Salt Lake City Gay Parade By Jennifer Dobner SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) - Nearly 300 Mormons marched in a gay pride parade on Sunday, holding signs that read "God Loves His Children" in a unique display of support from believers of a religious tradition that has long opposed homosexuality. "When people hear that Mormons are marching with gay and lesbian people in Salt Lake City... I think that's going to be a surprise," said Dustin Lance Black, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of the 2008 movie "Milk" about slain San Francisco gay activist Harvey Milk....

Pelosi: Hillary Clinton's 'Our Shot' in 2016 (CNN) – House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi kept the “Hillary Clinton for president in 2016” refrain alive in an interview published Sunday. “Why wouldn’t she run? She’s a magnificent secretary of state,” Pelosi told the San Francisco Chronicle when asked about Clinton’s 2016 ambitions. “She’s our shot.” – Follow the Ticker on Twitter: @PoliticalTicker The Democratic congresswoman and former House speaker similarly stoked the flames in April, describing the prospect as “so exciting.” Clinton, the former first lady and New York senator, has consistently shot down speculation of a future political run, saying...

Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, marked the beginning of the Great Depression, but for Barack Obama, last Friday was Black Friday because the U.S. Department of Labor announced that only 69,000 jobs were added in May, well below expectations that it might reach 150,000. The official unemployment rate ticked up to 8.2 percent, but it is actually far closer to 15 percent. The news means that Obama's hope of being reelected ranges between slim to none. Beyond the current numbers, on Friday CNS News reported that 766,000 more women are unemployed than when he took office in 2009.

THE first time I questioned the conventional wisdom on the nature of a healthy diet, I was in my salad days, almost 40 years ago, and the subject was salt. Researchers were claiming that salt supplementation was unnecessary after strenuous exercise, and this advice was being passed on by health reporters. When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating...

by John HillStand With ArizonaFlorida has drawn a line in the sand which must be adopted by every state against an Attorney General and administration which is increasingly abusing and distorting the law to stop efforts to keep illegal voters away from the polls this November. The Department of Justice this week demanded that Florida immediately cease its current massive purge of non-citizens and dead persons from its voter rolls, absurdly citing the outdated and outmoded Voting Rights Act of 1965. Well, now Florida has refused, saying it will not give up its efforts to make sure only legal citizens...

Eric Holder, Barack Obama's attorney general and David Axelrod, his top political adviser had to be separated after squaring up during a furious row over attempts to impose White House operatives in the justice department.

Calypso Louis is back with another deranged rant. He brings back the NOI's long held demand for a separate Black nation. Farrakhan claims that God will punish America unless this new Black nation is formed. He also mentions the Mahdi is about to return! He claims the US will attack Iran for Israel and that there are plans to bomb Mecca! This is one of his most evil speeches. He claims "his god" will destroy American cities in retaliation of a possible bombing of Iran. His god isn't my god. Farrakhan is pure evil.

The myth persists that the left—while it might often be naive and unrealistic—still has its heart in the right place. Those who want to redistribute income are the gallant Robin Hoods of contemporary life. "Occupiers" and socialists clearly have real concern for the downtrodden and poor. Those who demand social justice are more sincere, more compassionate, more spiritual, and surely more Christian than the rest of us. Fairness and decency are the heart of the left; materialism and selfishness the hallmarks of the bourgeoisie, Wall Street, the tea party crowd, and, well, ordinary Americans in general. So we are told....

Layoffs will begin on Monday for workers at RG Steel in Warren. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week in Delaware. The financial problems will idle plants in Warren, West Virginia and Maryland. Over a thousand employees are effected. RG Steel said that despite cost reductions and improvements, it has been unable to succeed in the current market. The company is looking to sell its operations.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitt Romney's campaign says President Barack Obama's policies aren't working in large part because Obama lacks executive leadership experience. Romney campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom says Americans turned over the world's largest economy to someone who had no prior executive leadership experience. In contrast, Fehrnstrom points to Romney's role in running the 2002 Winter Olympics and his term as Massachusetts governor.

Bloomberg News reports that Emigrant Bank in New York will be the sole recipient of a Dodd-Frank exemption. The bank asked legislators on the House Financial Services Committee to change the language of the financial regulations slightly, exempting Emigrant from having to comply and saving the bank $300 million.  A New York City bank with $10.5 billion in assets would be the sole beneficiary of a Dodd-Frank Act exemption approved today by the House Financial Services Committee. Emigrant Bank asked lawmakers on the committee to approve a change to the 2010 financial-regulation overhaul law that will save the institution $300...

Elizabeth Warren fessed up last week and admitted telling Harvard Law School officials she was a Native American. Actually, it wasn’t quite a fess up – because she admitted only what she had to and didn’t apologize for taking weeks to answer the question. She also didn’t put the problem to rest. In fact, her announcement was provocative rather than reassuring because it was oddly cavalier, suggesting she sees the whole controversy as no big deal. And her words were so surgically prepared, they seemed more tactically designed to make the press go away than help voters assess the situation....

On Friday's PBS NewsHour, both "conservative" David Brooks and liberal Mark Shields thought this was a tough, tight election for Barack Obama. Shields said "it becomes a race about disqualifying, a campaign about disqualifying your opponent. And that's not attractive or appealing. It's not hope and change. It's blood and guts." But Brooks really felt Obama's pain: "So the president is obviously going to try. He is going to have. And to some extent, you have to feel sorry for him. This is in large degree not his fault. Things are happening way beyond his control. I don't believe a...

When the Reagan administration barred critical news media from White House press conferences, liberals quite rightly protested. So where is liberal outrage now that gubernatorial candidate Tom  Barrett has blocked a reporter from his public events? Four male Barrett campaign staffers escorted Wisconsin Reporter’s Dustin Hurst from a Chippewa Falls rally for Barrett, the Democrat hoping to oust Republican Gov. Scott Walker in Tuesday’s Wisconsin recall vote. Hurst is the Wisconsin Reporter journalist who caught on tape the arrest of a pro-Walker protester at a June 1 Barrett rally featuring former President Bill Clinton. But limiting Hurst’s access to the Barrett campaign was more...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman got another much-needed education from syndicated columnist George Will on ABC's This Week Sunday. After Krugman impugned Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wisc.) for his so-called "fiscal irresponsibility," Will simply and quite accurately responded, "A more than $3 billion budget that he inherited, a deficit, has now become a surplus" (video follows with transcript and commentary): George Will Schools Krugman on Gov. Walker: $3 Billion Deficit 'He Inherited' Has 'Become a Surplus' GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, HOST: We have a couple minutes left before we have to take a break, and I just quickly want to go to...

The radio show was a preview of what was to come in Wisconsin—a season of angry diatribes, militant union marches, not-so-nice attacks on a governor who, after all, has done nothing more than reform a debt-laden system and has actually saved union jobs and saved unions. Rather than engage the issues, the left has chosen to echo the approach taken by callers to that radio show—stomp their feet, yell, and scream and absolutely, positively refuse to provide an alternative path. There’s something bizarre in all this, a reminder that the once-proud movement of working people has morphed into an upper-middle-class...

Good grief. Democrat Elizabeth Warren told reporters this weekend that if elected she would be the first Native American Senator from Massachusetts. Here's the video: Elizabeth Warren: I Would Be MA's First Native American Senator - YouTube

Former President Bill Clinton appears to be playing a game that is calculated to embarrass the current president, Barack Obama, whom it is reported he has despised since the 2008 campaign. First, according to Big Government, Clinton appeared on the Piers Morgan show and slammed the Obama campaign's attack on Mitt Romney's tenure as the CEO of Bain Capital. He is just the latest high-profile Democrat to so. Then, Clinton went to Wisconsin for a get-out-the-vote effort in advance of the recall election, the Chicago Tribune reports. President Obama has studiously avoided venturing to Wisconsin, concluding as have most people...

House Speaker Christopher G. Donovan, D-Meriden, intends to publicly announce tonight that he will continue as a candidate for Congress in the wake of an FBI sting that led to the arrest of his campaign fundraiser and the firing of his campaign manager last week. Donovan's says he "will be available to make a statement" outside his campaign headquarters in Meriden, his first significant public comments since his campaign was upended Thursday by the news of the arrest of Robert Braddock Jr. on charges of concealing the source of campaign donations. His new campaign manager, Tom Swan, declined to say...

Romney Surrogate McDonnell Says Obama Stimulus Plan Helped Virginia By Dan Eggen June 3 Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) wandered off script somewhat Sunday as a surrogate for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, conceding that President Obama’s stimulus measures helped his state weather the economic crisis. McDonnell, a potential vice presidential candidate who has sought to walk a tightrope between conservatives and moderates, acknowledged on CNN’s “State of the Union” that federal assistance aided Virginia in balancing its budget, but said it had no positive long-term impact. “Did it help us in the short run with health care and education...

Paul Krugman: 'It's Terribly Unfair Obama's Being Judged on the Failure of the Economy' By Noel Sheppard Created 06/03/2012 - 3:22pm Readers are strongly advised to remove food, fluids, and flammables from proximity to their computers prior to reading any further. You've been warned! New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said on ABC's This Week Sunday, "It's terribly unfair that [President Obama is] being judged on the failure of the economy to respond to policies that had been largely dictated by a hostile Congress" (video follows with transcript and commentary): PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: Can I just -- these...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmiDvAoCF68&feature=youtube_gdata_player Brilliant economic planning from Obama. /s

FOX News analyst and CBN News Chief Political Correspondent David Brody told the FOX News Sunday panel today the Wisconsin recall vote this week will be a clear defeat for unions. Brody praised the Tea Party, FreedomWorks, AFP and others for their outstanding work in the state. “It’s a huge defeat for unions clearly. I think what you’re seeing here is what Scott Walker, Paul Ryan and others, you’re seeing this word courage come up a lot. That they had the courage to take on the tough problems… I got to tell you, I think the unreported story here is...

With Mexico's presidential election one month away, the leftist candidate is making modest gains while the incumbent party's contender has slipped, polls show. The polls thus far, however, do not alter the front-runner status of Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, which is attempting to return to presidential power after a loss in 2000 ended its seven-decade rule. Opinion surveys released this week showed Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, heading a coalition of leftist parties, inching into second place, dislodging Josefina Vazquez Mota of the National Action Party, or PAN, of President Felipe Calderon. The margin between...

Limbaugh, brother of Rush and a New York Times bestseller, is driving the effort to remind Americans of the moves Obama's team has taken to push their agenda. His new book, "The Great Destroyer, Barack Obam's War on the Republic," out Monday, is a 150-point list of reasons - from Obamacare to Fast & Furious to logging historic time on the golf course - Limbaugh says the president must go. But Limbaugh said that Obama's first four years are just a down payment on the next four if he is reelected. "We're on autopilot to bankruptcy and I'm trying to...

Bruce Harris lost the fight of his life Thursday, and it wasn’t his fault, not even one bit. It was painful to watch because he is so clearly a decent man and a gentle soul, caught between larger political actors who played him as an expendable pawn in their never-ending game of chess. Yet there he was, taking one blow after another as Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee built a rock-solid case against his nomination to the state Supreme Court during a five-hour hearing.

Chris Matthews must be really getting concerned that the man that gives him a thrill up his leg is in serious jeopardy of losing in November. On this weekend's syndicated Chris Matthews Show, the host asked his panel of perilously liberal journalists, "Can the president make Mitt Romney scary?" Video CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Can he make, with all we know about his allies like Donald Trump and all those connections of the past and cultural conservatism, can the president make Mitt Romney scary? Are we at the stage where all pretense of impartiality has been dropped and the media are...

War in the White House: attorney general Eric Holder and top Obama adviser David Axelrod 'had to be separated' Eric Holder, Barack Obama's attorney general and David Axelrod, his top political adviser had to be separated after squaring up during a furious row over attempts to impose White House operatives in the justice department. By Jon Swaine, Washington 6:22PM BST 03 Jun 2012 Eric Holder, who heads Mr Obama's justice department, is said to have become "incensed" after being accused by David Axelrod of complaining publicly about political interference in his office. "That's bull****," Mr Holder said in a confrontation...

As the national media's political attention turns again to a Wisconsin recall election ginned up by angry labor unions -- that's not counting Ed Schultz, who's never stopped obsessing about ousting Gov. Scott Walker -- it's easy to forget that the national media used to be on the other side of a recall election. In 2003 in California, it was liberal Gov. Gray Davis who was recalled, and conservatives who ginned up the campaign. Back then, the governor was a hero and the opponents were cranks. As reporters Howard Fineman and Karen Breslau summed up in a Newsweek cover story:...

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Five months before Election Day, you'd think there would be no better harbinger about who will win the White House than a contentious statewide vote in a critical battleground state that never moved on from the 2010 campaign.You'd be wrong.Yes, there will be tea leaves to read after Wisconsin voters decide Tuesday whether to recall rookie Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a tea party-supported GOP hero who might be the only politician in America to rival President Barack Obama in contentious achievement that inspires loathing among opponents.A win for Walker and some will say Mitt Romney is sure...

ABC in Atlanta reports that an Atlanta government position that Obama bundler Stacii Jae Johnson claims to have held does not actually exist. Johnson listed herself as the commissioner of the mayor’s Office of Film, Television, Music and Digital Media in a presentation last year; according to ABC Atlanta, that position does not exist. Johnson also starred and produced in a instructional strip video entitled “I Want to Strip for My Man but I Don’t Know How,” which the Washington Free Beacon first reported on in May. ANCHOR: Good morning. A woman who once produced and starred in a video...

As one who has made the occasional dumb mistake (which readers tend to be quite adept at catching), I figured I'd give the Associated Press's Todd Richmond and his editors a while to correct a pretty obvious miscue relating to a Wisconsin gubernatorial recall campaign visit by challenger Tom Barrett. In a report whose first version appeared yesterday morning and currently has a 2:42 p.m. Saturday time stamp, Richmond wrote that Barrett's campaign Saturday started "with the Barron County Dairy Breakfast in Hillsdale, a burg of 1,250 people about 90 miles west of Minneapolis." Well Todd, if Barrett actually was...

Alan Krueger, head of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, pointed out that the country has added jobs for 27 months in a row, including 4.3 million jobs in the private sector. The economy still has a few bright spots. Americans bought cars and trucks a strong pace last month, giving automakers their best May since 2008. Underscoring the challenge for Obama with five months to go in the campaign, a May poll by The Associated Press and GfK, a research company, showed that 52 percent disapproved of Obama's handling of the economy while 46 percent approved. Some financial analysts...

In 2008, Barack Obama took aim at the "pew gap," the overwhelming Republican edge among voters who regularly attend church. The Democratic presidential nominee came nowhere near closing it, but he didn't have to. He just needed an extra percentage point or two among traditional GOP constituents, and he got it. According to exit polls, the effort paid off. Obama made gains over the 2004 nominee, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, with voters who attend religious services more than once a week, 43 percent to 35 percent. Obama also won 26 percent of the evangelical vote, compared with 21 percent for...

According to the poll, 49% of registered voters say that if the November election were held today, they would vote for Obama, while 46% say they would cast a ballot for Romney, the unofficial GOP presidential nominee. The president's three point margin is within the survey's sampling error. Obama had a nine point advantage in CNN's last national poll, which was conducted in early April. "Which candidate better understands how the economy works? That's a tie as well - 45% pick Obama, 45% choose Romney," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. Although the race for the White House is essentially...

SPRINGFIELD — Fearing a costly and potentially damaging primary, the Democratic establishment at yesterday’s convention went all in for Elizabeth Warren — warts and all — as party leaders muscled out her longshot rival, allowing the embattled candidate to focus on Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Scott Brown. She spent the week leading up to the loyalist gathering trying to clear up the scandal. She fessed up to telling Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania about her tribal roots when she had originally said she didn’t know how they found out. She also once again defended her heritage, telling supporters she...

A very strange story, that 6,000-word front-page New York Times piece on how, every Tuesday, Barack Obama shuffles “baseball cards” with the pictures and bios of suspected terrorists from around the world and chooses who shall die by drone strike. He even reserves for himself the decision of whether to proceed when the probability of killing family members or bystanders is significant. The article could have been titled “Barack Obama: Drone Warrior.” Great detail on how Obama personally runs the assassination campaign. On-the-record quotes from the highest officials. This was no leak. This was a White House press release. snip...

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows Mitt Romney picking up 48% of the vote, while President Obama attracts 44%. Three percent (3%) prefer some other candidate, and five percent (5%) are undecided.

(CNN) – Tom Barrett, the Democratic challenger in Wisconsin’s vote over the recall of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, said Sunday he did not ask President Barack Obama to visit the state ahead of Tuesday’s election. “We understand he’s got a lot going on,” Barrett said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Although Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch recently said the president’s absence on the campaign trail is a troubling sign for Barrett, the Milwaukee mayor said the election should not be about national politics.

ON Friday night, the nation’s capital was under a tornado watch. And that was the best thing that happened to the White House all week. As the president was being slapped by Mitt Romney for being too weak on national security, he was being rapped by a Times editorial for being too aggressive on national security. A Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane revealed that the liberal law professor who campaigned against torture and the Iraq war now personally makes the final decisions on the “kill list,” targets for drone strikes. “A unilateral campaign of death is untenable,”...

In 2008, Barack Obama took aim at the "pew gap," the overwhelming Republican edge among voters who regularly attend church. The Democratic presidential nominee came nowhere near closing it, but he didn't have to. He just needed an extra percentage point or two among traditional GOP constituents, and he got it. The Democratic National Committee is promising a repeat performance in 2012. But some religious leaders and scholars who backed Obama in 2008 are skeptical. They say the Democrats have, through neglect and lack of focus, squandered the substantial gains they made with religious moderates and worry it will hurt...

Desperate Dems: Vote against Scott Walker because according to an unconfirmed rumor published on some left-wing website, he fathered a love child 24 years ago With two days to go before Wisconsin’s recall election, Gov. Walker is looking very strong in the polls. According to Intrade, he has a 96 percent chance of winning on Tuesday. Democrats clearly aren’t winning on the issues, but they hope they have found something else that can turn the tide for them. Late Saturday night, a left-wing anti-Walker website reported an unconfirmed, second-hand rumor that Gov. Walker fathered a “love child” 24 years ago.

Panic is never pretty. When it involves a politician scrambling desperately to stay afloat, it is ugly. When it involves a president of the United States trading national-security secrets for political gain, it is obscene. Twice last week, The New York Times published insider accounts of Obama-administration decisions. One involved “kill lists” of terrorists targeted by drones. The other described cyberwarfare attacks against Iran. The articles revealed details of top-level meetings and quoted the president’s comments. They were so gushingly favorable to him that it’s clear they were based on authorized leaks by the White House designed to make Obama...

Just when you feel like you're going to throw up, some thug punches you in the gut.  That's what today's jobs report from the Labor Department felt like.  A mere 69,000 jobs created in the month of May – less than half of the already lackluster expectation – and the disappointing March and April jobs reports were revised downward by 49,000.  Unsurprisingly, the unemployment rate increased to 8.2%.  The number of long-term Americans (those jobless for 27 weeks or longer) rose from 5.1 to 5.4 million in May, representing 42.8% of the unemployed. Ugh!One thing that every single American shares...

The single-mother revolution shouldn't need much introduction. It started in the 1960s when the nation began to sever the historical connection between marriage and childbearing and to turn single motherhood and the fatherless family into a viable, even welcome, arrangement for children and for society. The reasons for the shift were many, including the sexual revolution, a powerful strain of anti-marriage feminism and a "super bug" of American individualism that hit the country in the 1960s and '70s. The single-mother revolution has been an economic catastrophe for women. Poverty remains relatively rare among married couples with children; the U.S. census...

A strong majority of voters is against the bullet train project just as Gov. Brown is pressuring the Legislature to green-light the start of construction, a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll finds. Across the state, 55% of the voters want the bond issue that was approved in 2008 placed back on the ballot, and 59% say they now would vote against it. Since voters approved that $9-billion borrowing plan, the state and national economic outlook has dimmed and some of the promises about the bullet train have been compromised. 55% of the respondents said the state has bigger priorities than...

In 1947, at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, the free-market conference in Switzerland, august Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises harrumphed that young Milton Friedman and many other budding anti-socialists of those dark days of mid-century Western culture were, in reality, “all a bunch of socialists.” Mises stormed out of the room. I thought of this when I heard that Jon Stewart had defended himself from Roger Ailes’s “socialism” charge. Ailes said that the Daily Show host had once confessed, in a bar, to being a “socialist.” On Stewart’s Tuesday show, after an elaborate (and neither fair nor...

Jerry Brown, not surprisingly, used a ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge to tout his two bids for public works posterity – a north-south bullet train and a tunnel for water to bypass the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. "Suck it in!" Brown said. "We got to build, we got to do it right. And this bridge I think really expresses that sense." Just as the bridge proved to be an economic boon, Brown said, so would a bullet train and a tunnel to improve water supply reliability, adding that just as the Golden Gate Bridge "connects...