Free Republic

Mitt Romney’s commanding performance on the debate stage last week has generated a significant bounce for his presidential candidacy, according to national polls released Monday. The Republican nominee opened up a 4-point lead over President Obama, 49% to 45% among likely voters, in the latest national opinion survey by the independent Pew Research Center. In mid-September, Obama led by 8 points, 51% to 43%. Post-debate interviews with 1,201 voters found that the debate had lifted Romney’s standing among a wide range of voter groups. His overall personal image improved, with the percentage of voters holding a favorable opinion of the...

By the time of Thursday night's debate between Vice President Biden and Congressman Ryan, the polls will reflect the early consequences of President Obama's disastrous debate performance from Wednesday night. Mitt Romney had a superb night and the contrast between his calm and in-command performance and that of a flailing, rambling president could not have been sharper, and indeed it could not have been more disorienting for the Chicago Gang running the president's re-election campaign. The day after the president's face-plant in front of 67 million viewers, the geniuses behind the nation's dismal economy instructed the president to go ugly,...

The State Department has officially removed all government personnel from the Libyan city of Benghazi, closing the consulate building and possibly ending any chance of an on-site investigation of the attack there. Although it has been three weeks since the assault there that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other embassy employees, the FBI has still not been able to visit the compound, set up any operations in the city, or even interview any witnesses who were present during the terrorist attack.

"I'm deeply disturbed by efforts to find the politics instead of finding the facts in this debate," Kerry said in a Friday statement. "I’m particularly troubled by calls for Ambassador Rice’s resignation. She is a remarkable public servant for whom the liberation of the Libyan people has been a personal issue and a public mission," Kerry said. "She's an enormously capable person who has represented us at the United Nations with strength and character."

In a departure from typical political discussions along party lines, the USC Schwarzenegger Institute Inaugural Symposium kicked off the center’s first semester with a bipartisan look forward into political change... Veteran political journalist Cokie Roberts delved into the politics of partisan government while moderating a panel of political experts including Charlie Crist, former governor of Florida; Tom Daschle, former senator and senate majority leader; Tom Ridge, former governor of Pennsylvania; Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico; and McCain.

"I'm sorry."

It is a measure of how skewed the reporting is and how intellectually inconsistent is most of the “analysis” from the mainstream media that while Mitt Romney’s comment on the embassy attacks held the attention of the press for days (when in fact he had correctly surmised that the administration was trying to make excuses for the embassy attack by expressing regret over an anti-Muslim video)), there has been comparatively little concern with a much more critical story: Did the Obama team intentionally lie to voters (or just shoot first and aim later) for a week about what it knew,...

American embassies are burning across the Middle East and further afield. Jihadist Islam bites the hand which helped it during the revolutions. Embracing the idea that this mass murderous frenzy is due to a negligible film on Muhammad on the web is pathetic. It is never only about cartoons, videos, films, or statements. **SNIP** It is self-destructive that Hillary Clinton rather than blasting as expected from a Foreign Minister after the loss of her ambassador, briefly labeled the moronic film as “reprehensible”, as if this implied violent consequences. It is despicable that Obama, the appointed advocate of freedoms of the...

WASHINGTON, DC – Special Operations Speaks (SOS) today called upon Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to resign from office for his claim that Barack Obama had special authority to provide classified information about the Navy SEAL attack on Osama bin Laden to Hollywood filmmakers and others with no security clearance. Panetta made the claim in a September 10th interview on CBS This Morning. As he threatened to punish former Navy SEAL “Mark Owen” for revealing details about the assault on the bin Laden compound in his book No Easy Day, he stated that Department of Defense release of top secret information...

While Washington vacationed in August, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service issued a now prescient-sounding report warning that Libya's security concerns were an "immediate priority" that might require far more attention and resources than the United States had given it. That self-restraint broke down severely this week as, according to U.S. officials, an apparently coordinated attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi emerged from a crowded protest, leading to the death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and others. It was the apex of a string of concerning violent incidents dating back months. The author of the report, Christopher Blanchard, specialist in...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/revealed-inside-story-of-us-envoys-assassination-8135797.html

In his ghost-written (by William Ayers) 'autobiography', "Dreams of My Father", Barack Hussein Obama said, "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction..."

Today, speaking about the despicable and stomach-wrenching attacks by Islamists on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and our embassy in Cairo, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked: “How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction?” That single line is the most damning indictment of Hillary Clinton’s State Department that could ever be penned. It demonstrates her complete lack of knowledge about the region, her failure to anticipate security threats, and worst of all, her willful ignorance about the Islamists that she and President Obama trusted to take over Libya and...

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Thank you very much.  Good afternoon.  I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions... The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights.  All this has bred more fear and more mistrust... Just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter or forget our principles.  Nine-eleven was an enormous...

He’s been busy with more important stuff. He’ll get to it when he gets to it, even though (a) he signed a bill just last month setting today as the deadline, and (b) the whole idea of a defense sequester came from Democrats as a poison pill for the GOP in last year’s debt-ceiling deal. "One month ago, the PRESIDENT SIGNED the “Sequestration Transparency Act,” a law that IMPOSED UPON HIM a 30 day deadline to outline what Pentagon spending will be cut. That deadline was last night." "White House press secretary Jay Carney today said White House officials would...

Unemployment remains above 8.0%. Lowest unemployment rate during Obama term was his first month in office.Unemployment rate drops ONLY because more people quit looking for work. 368,000 Americans left the labor force. This is devastating news for the Obama White House. The AP reported: U.S. employers added 96,000 jobs last month, a weak figure that could slow any momentum President Barack Obama hoped to gain from his speech to the Democratic National Convention. The unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent from 8.3 percent in July, the Labor Department said Friday. But that was only because more people gave up looking...

VLADIVOSTOK, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- As U.S. President Barack Obama has decided to dodge the upcoming APEC summit, people from around the world, the Pacific rim in particular, are witnessing a mal-functioned reset of the relationship between such world powers as the U.S. and Russia. The push-button to initiate the reset was done in 2009 by Obama and then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the London G20 Summit. But the resetting process since then has not been faring well. To sit up alongside APEC leaders will only be U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has just skipped the regular...

Q: Did the President have any role in the decision to move his speech from the stadium to the arena? And was he disappointed by the outcome there? Q: How does that square, though, with what you said yesterday when we asked about the concerns about weather and you said, we plan to go ahead -- I think you had even mentioned that sporting events happen there, and now you’re saying this isn’t a sporting event. Q: Can I ask you, Jen, about the -- or even Jay -- about the change in the platform regarding Jerusalem from 2008. This...

<p>The obvious comment is that they couldn't fill the outdoor stadium.</p> <p>Fox is discussing all those planners, volunteers, etc. whose hours of labor have been futile.</p>

Incomplete typically is reserved for people who don’t show up for class.  Leaving an empty chair. How appropriate. President Obama gave himself an “incomplete” when asked in Colorado over the weekend to grade his first term. “I would say incomplete,” Obama told Colorado’s KKTV 11, in an interview aired Monday evening. “But what I would say is the steps that we have taken in saving the auto industry, in making sure that college is more affordable and investing in clean energy and science and technology and research, those are all the things that we are going to need to grow...