Free Republic

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas exposed how easy it was for someone to walk in to a polling place and get Attorney General Eric Holder’s ballot, and now it has released another video that shows how easily non-citizens--and even dead people--can vote in North Carolina, a crucial 2012 swing state. In the video, William Romero, an apparent non-citizen, is shown to be registered to vote in North Carolina. According to jury refusal records obtained by Project Veritas, Romero was recused for being a non-citizen. Yet when a researcher from Project Veritas went into the polling station, he found that not only...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama hold assets worth between nearly $2.6 million and nearly $8.3 million, according to financial disclosure reports released Tuesday by the White House. The documents show the couple's assets for last year. The first family's assets were valued between $1.8 million and nearly $12 million in 2010.

Election season has apparently spawned a slick new way for telemarketers to get around the "Do Not Call" registry — hiding a timeshare sales pitch behind a phony political poll, say critics. With telemarketers barred from robo-calling people on the "Do Not Call" registry, a new phone campaign called "Political Opinions of America" offers a three-question "poll," and then offers a reward that sounds suspiciously like a classic timeshare sales pitch. An automated voice asks the recipient to complete a quick survey with questions like: “What’s the most important thing to restore our economy?” Other questions include: “How would you...

Illegal immigrant students and members of the House sued the Senate this week to try to overturn the upper chamber’s filibuster rule, arguing that the 60-vote supermajority requirement violates the Constitution and is blocking important legislation such as legalization for illegal immigrants. If successful, the lawsuit, filed Monday, would rewrite the way the Senate operates — though courts generally have been reluctant to meddle in internal congressional rules.

TOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas legislators restarted tax cut negotiations Tuesday, but senators quickly discovered they have less room than they'd hoped to bargain with House members as they try to modify aggressive income tax reductions that already have cleared the Legislature. Three senators and three House members discussed drafting an alternative proposal that would replace one approved last week. The previous cuts individual income tax rates and eliminates income taxes for 191,000 partnerships, sole proprietorships and other businesses. Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, who's pushed the GOP-controlled Legislature to lower income taxes, has encouraged lawmakers to keep negotiating.

Ron Paul is not suspending his presidential campaign. That's the message his staff pushed Tuesday following the candidate's declaration that he won't spend any additional funds to campaign in new states. But campaign manager Jesse Benton clearly stated that the hopes of Paul winning the Republican presidential nomination are officially over. "We recognize that Gov. [Mitt] Romney has what is very likely to be an insurmountable delegate lead," Benton told reporters on a conference call Tuesday. "And we acknowledge that we're very, very unlikely to be able to block that nomination." The campaign followed a delegate strategy that would have...

François Hollande has been sworn in as president of France, becoming the first Socialist leader in 17 years to occupy the Elysee Palace. He named close aide Jean-Marc Ayrault as his PM. Mr Hollande is now to visit Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. Mr Hollande called for "a compromise" over the German-led focus on austerity as the way out of the eurozone crisis. Stock markets and the euro have fallen amid continuing political uncertainty in Greece. The handover of presidential power in France is a strange mixture of tradition and improvisation. There is tradition in the quasi-monarchical ceremonies, such as...

DENVER — A bill that would have allowed civil unions for same-sex couples in Colorado was defeated on Monday night during a special legislative session called by Gov. John W. Hickenlooper to debate the issue. The legislation was voted down by Republican lawmakers on a 5-to-4 vote along party lines after more than two hours of emotional testimony in the State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee, where it was assigned Monday by Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. “We saw this bill die even though a majority of members of the Senate and a majority of members of the...

It’s been one week since President Obama, prodded into action by Vice President Joe Biden’s remarks on a Sunday talk show, granted Robin Roberts of ABC News an interview in which he revealed his personal policy shift on gay marriage. Whether or not Obama’s decision, and the way it was handled politically, will make a difference on election day is still anyone’s guess — and may always be. Parsing reactions by millions of individual voters, particularly on an issue that ranks far below other concerns for most Americans, obviously involves a measure of guesswork. That said, the first wave of...

The Obama administration is poised to remove an Iranian opposition group from the United States' list of terrorist groups, officials briefed on the talk told the Wall Street Journal, in a move sure to upset Tehran as nuclear talks between the countries intensify. The exile organization, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MeK, was named a terrorist group 15 years ago for allegedly being involved in assassinating U.S. citizens before the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, but the group had pursued an aggressive lobbying effort in Washington to clear up its status

Boxing champion Manny Pacquiao has come out swinging against US President Barack Obama's personal endorsement of same-sex marriage. ONE OF THE GREATS Where do Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali rank among the best boxers of all time? In an interview with the National Conservative Examiner, the religious Pacquiao said Obama's view was nothing more than a direct attack on the morals of society and the will of God. "God only expects man and woman to be together and to be legally married, only if they so are in love with each other," he said. "It should not be of the...

President Obama’s deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter said a poll released Monday that showed most Americans believe Obama’s gay-marriage endorsement was done for political reasons can’t be trusted because it’s biased. We can't put the methodology of that poll aside, because the methodology was significantly biased. It is a biased sample,” Cutter said Tuesday on MSNBC’s "Political Rundown." “They sampled a biased sample, so they re-biased the same sample.” According to a CBS News-New York Times poll released on Monday, 67 percent said Obama’s recent endorsement of gay marriage was given for political purposes, while only 23 percent said it...

President Obama’s claim that the GOP is mounting a war on women has proven to be a failure. A month into his assault on the Republicans and Mitt Romney, the new CBS-New York Times poll shows that the GOP presidential candidate now leads among women--and men. Since April, women have gone from strongly backing Obama to endorsing Romney. In April, Obama held a 49 percent to 43 percent lead among women. That has now flipped to 46 percent backing Romney with 44 percent for Obama, an 8-point switch. Ironically, Romney’s support among men has dropped, but he still edges Obama...

Tampa, Florida -- Police want your help finding four men who teamed up to beat a young U.S. Army soldier in a South Tampa street. It was an awful welcome to Tampa Bay for a young soldier. Police say the victim of a violent beating caught on camera is 24 years old and has lived in Tampa for less than a month.

The District grabbed the guns belonging to 1st Lt. Augustine Kim and won’t give them back. Two years ago, the South Carolina Army national guardsman had been injured on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan. Now he’s fighting to restore his constitutional rights. Before deploying overseas, the soldier drove his collection - which included an AR-15, a Beretta 9mm and several .45 caliber pistols - to his parents’ house in New Jersey for safe storage. Upon his return to the states and recovery, Lt. Kim wanted to bring his weapons back to his home in Charleston. On the way,...

Energy: The Government Accountability Office tells Congress the Green River Formation out West contains an "amount about equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves." So why are we keeping it locked up on federal lands? Exploding the Big Lie pushed by President Obama that we can't drill our way out of high gas prices because we have but 2% of the world's proven oil reserves, Anu Mittal, GAO director of natural resources and environment, testified before Congress last week that just one small part of the U.S. is capable of outproducing the rest of the planet. That small part...

Kris Barrett, a teacher and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett's wife, violated a Milwaukee Public School system policy last year by sending three emails from a school system account that involved county or state politics, MPS officials said Monday. The emails were first revealed Monday by Media Trackers, a suburban Milwaukee conservative group that regularly researches and releases unflattering claims about Democrats. The mayor's wife was laid off by MPS along with more than 300 other teachers in June 2011. She now works in the Wauwatosa schools. MPS spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said the school system disciplines employees who send political...

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (KMOX) - It’s official and it’s a done deal: Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh is now officially inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians. People might have wondered why he wasn’t doing his radio show today — it’s because he was in Jefferson City. Just before 1:00 p.m. the mad scramble in the halls of the state capitol began, barriers started going up and additional Capitol police and the Highway Patrol started drifting in. The word leaked out that today was the day for Limbaugh to take his place in Missouri history. Apparently the only people aware...

The weighted sample of registered voters: 36D/30R/34I, which is right in line with most national polls.Maybe Karl was right about that “turning point.”The bombshell number, obviously, is Romney leading O by two among women. If that happens on election day, rest assured that the overall margin will be a lot wider than three points. So what's driving the sudden Mittmania? It's probably not the economy: Most Americans (67 percent) believe the economy is in bad shape, but respondents expressed the most optimism on that issue since January 2008 – months before the economic crisis was in full swing. Thirty-two percent...

To Key West Housing Authority officials it was seen as a necessary task, the chopping down of banana trees Richard "Diver" Overman nurtured daily with his fingerless hands, outside the windows of his public housing apartment on Amelia Street. To Overman it was a massacre. "They were just nubs when I planted them," the 67-year-old retired lobster diver said. "Now I am so disappointed. That was my pastime -- the only pastime I've got. Now they took them away and I feel like nothin'." Housing Authority Director Manuel Castillo said he and his staff tried to work with Overman, but...