Free Republic

In CNN’s last poll, taken soon after the Democratic convention, O led by six among likely voters. That lead’s now cut in half, to within the margin of error, despite weeks of media doomsaying about Romney’s campaign. In fact, the last four national polls all have the race within two or three points with a bounce opportunity for Romney looming 48 hours from now. I think the first debate will essentially be an audition for him: Obama’s the ultimate known quantity but, for millions of low-information voters, this’ll be the first time they see Romney in action. If he’s as...

Here is an unofficial list of potential nominees for the Supreme Court if Mitt Romney is elected president in November. This list was compiled from a number of sources, including those serving as informal advisers to the Romney campaign. The Republican nominee has not specified publicly on favorites for the court. Many names mentioned are relatively young judges named to the federal bench by President George W. Bush. Paul Clement, former U.S. Solicitor General Born 1966. Considered by many as one of the best lawyers of his generation. The Wisconsin native went to Harvard Law School where he was a...

Over the weekend the Univision network broke major news in the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal. They found 57 previously unreported guns used in crimes by Mexican cartels, but ABC, CBS and NBC have yet to report the Spanish-language network’s findings. There were zero mentions on Sunday night’s ABC's World News and CBS's Evening News (NBC's Nightly News was pre-empted by Ryder Cup coverage) or on any of Monday’s morning shows. The blackout on ABC’s broadcasts is particularly confounding since they have an excerpt from Univision's report on ABC's official Web site. The refusal by ABC, CBS or NBC to...

democRAT Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator Scott Brown meet in a debate hosted by the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and WHDH-TV. Watch the debate LIVE tonight (Monday, October 1, 2012) on C-SPAN. 7:00pm ET.

Bill Gertz has the grim news in the Washington Free Beacon: Hackers linked to China's government broke into one of the U.S. government's most sensitive computer networks, breaching a system used by the White House Military Office for nuclear commands, according to defense and intelligence officials familiar with the incident. One official said the cyber breach was one of Beijing's most brazen cyber attacks against the United States and highlights a failure of the Obama administration to press China on its persistent cyber attacks. Disclosure of the cyber attack also comes amid heightened tensions in Asia, as the Pentagon moved...

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows President Obama attracting support from 50% of voters nationwide, while Mitt Romney earns the vote from 47%. Two percent (2%) prefer some other candidate, and two percent (2%) are undecided. See daily tracking history. These results include “leaners,” people who are initially uncommitted to the two leading candidates but lean towards one of them when asked a follow-up question. Platinum Members can still see the more detailed numbers along with demographic breakdowns, and additional information from the tracking poll on a daily basis.

The Spanish language television news network Univision unleashed a bombshell investigative report on Operation Fast and Furious Sunday evening, finding that in January 2010 drug cartel hit men slaughtered students with weapons the United States government allowed to flow to them across the Mexican border. “On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez,” according to a version of the Univision report in English, on the ABC News website. “Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for...

Two of Mitt Romney's senior advisers say they are backing Todd Akin, the Missouri Republican Senate candidate they once shunned.

Economists think Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney would be better for the economy than President Obama. But they're not very enthusiastic about either of them. Nine of 17 top economists surveyed by CNNMoney picked Romney when asked who's election would help the economy grow more. Only three picked Obama.

U.S. spending on health insurance grew at an accelerated rate in 2011, breaking a two-year trend of smaller cost increases. The culprit, a new study suggests, is not Americans seeking more treatment but rather rapid growth in the price of medical care. Spending for private health insurance surged by 4.6 percent in 2011, according to a report from the Health Care Cost Institute. That growth rate is faster than the rest of the economy and higher than the previous year, which had 3.8 percent growth. Average spending on a private insurance patient rose to $4,547 in 2011, compared with $4,349...

As President Barack Obama widened his lead over Mitt Romney in polls this month, traders at hedge funds and investment firms began shooting emails to clients with a similar theme: It's time to start preparing for an Obama victory. What many in the market worry about isn't that high earners may pay more in taxes if Obama is re-elected. It's gridlock in Washington come January, when more than $600 billion in spending cuts and tax hikes could kick in just as the country smacks into its borrowing limit again. There is reason to expect a deal. If Obama wins, the...

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has weighed in on the U.S. presidential race, saying he prefers President Barack Obama. Chavez also said in a televised interview that aired Sunday that he'd like to have "normal" relations with the U.S. government.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- A firefight broke out between U.S. forces and their Afghan army allies in eastern Afghanistan Sunday, killing two Americans and three Afghan soldiers and pushing the number of U.S. troops killed in the long-running war 2,000. The fighting started Saturday when what is believed to have been a mortar fired by insurgents struck a checkpoint set up by U.S. forces in Wardak province, said Shahidullah Shahid, a provincial government spokesman. He said the Americans thought they were under attack from a nearby Afghan army checkpoint and fired on it, prompting the Afghan soldiers to return fire.

In Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 3 a.m. television ad in the 2008 primary campaign, we heard the sound of a ringing phone and saw sleeping children. In ominous tones, a narrator warned that “something is happening in the world” and asked, “Who do you want answering the phone?” Well, it’s 2012, and — the phone is still ringing. Please, somebody answer the damn thing! The story of the terror attack in Benghazi is that neither Clinton nor the president who made her secretary of state responded to the real emergency when it came. The biggest foreign-policy crisis of the last four...

WASHINGTON (AP) — When last we saw the chief justice of the United States on the bench, John Roberts was joining with the Supreme Court’s liberals in an unlikely lineup that upheld President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

As a recovering pollster (I worked for Democratic pollster Peter Hart from 1974 to 1981), let me weigh in on the controversy over whether the polls are accurate. Many conservatives are claiming that multiple polls have overly Democratic samples, and some charge that media pollsters are trying to discourage Republican voters. First, some points about the limits of polls. Random-sample polling is an imprecise instrument. There's an error margin of 3 or 4 percent and polling theory tells us that one out of 20 polls is wrong, with results outside the margin of error. Sometimes it's easy to spot such...

One child has been killed and six critically hurt, the Red Cross says, in a grenade attack on a church's Sunday school in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. The attacker targeted St Polycarp's church on Juja Road. A police spokesman said they suspected sympathisers of Somalia's al-Shabab Islamist militants were to blame. Kenyan troops are at present part of an African Union force that has forced al-Shabab from its last Somali urban stronghold of Kismayo. The Daily Nation quoted local police as saying that a number of those hurt at the church were injured in a stampede after the attack. The...

The Obama administration clearly hoped that the Department of Justice’s Inspector General report on Operation Fast and Furious would be the last word on the scandal. which has been tied to hundreds of deaths in Mexico and the murders of two American law-enforcement officials. However, a new report from Univision to be broadcast tomorrow, previewed here by ABC News, may put the issue back on the front pages. One source called Univision’s findings the “holy grail” that Congressional investigators have been seeking:

BENGHAZI, Libya (AP) — Hundreds of Libyans converged Saturday on a main square in Benghazi and another in Tripoli in response to a call from the military to hand over their weapons, some driving in with armored personnel carriers, tanks, vehicles with mounted anti-aircraft guns and hundreds of rocket launchers. The call by the Libyan chiefs of staff was promoted on a private TV station in August. But it may have gained traction in the wake of the attack against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in which the American ambassador and three staffers were killed. The incident was followed by...

"In our latest Politico/GWU Battleground Poll with middle class families, which comprise about fifty-four percent (54%) of the total American Electorate and usually split in their vote behavior between Republicans and Democrats, Romney holds a fourteen-point advantage (55%-41%)."