Free Republic

Stuart Stevens was the chief strategist for the Romney presidential campaign. Over the years, one of the more troubling characteristics of the Democratic Party and the left in general has been a shortage of loyalty and an abundance of self-loathing. It would be a shame if we Republicans took a narrow presidential loss as a signal that those are traits we should emulate. I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.’s green-room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians. That’s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought that he would win the Republican nomination. But...

"You know it's going to be boring, but you just don't appreciate how boring it actually is," one first-year associate at a large New York law firm tells us. The young lawyer describes long days of reading dense papers, which he only barely understands, and which seem to have no bearing on any actual case. "Doc review is the most boring experience of your life, but strangely nerve-wracking because you know you're messing it up, but you just can't bring yourself to care that you're messing it up. And you're probably going to mess it up even if you did...

Last week’s news that the state Department of Environmental Conservation will miss a Nov. 29 deadline to release regulations guiding future natural-gas exploration in New York was another blow to a beleaguered industry — an industry, by the way, that has operated safely in New York for decades and isn’t asking for a dime of public money to expand here. This latest delay is necessary, according to the state, for three “experts” chosen by the state Health Department to review the potential health impacts. Never mind that these experts have already made public statements that suggest a bias against natural-gas...

Who within the Obama administration deleted mention of "terrorism" and "al-Qaeda" from the CIA's talking points on the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi? It isn't the only unanswered question in the wake of the tragedy, but it's proven to be one of the most confounding.

The Level 3 sex offender arrested yesterday in a horrifying Beacon Hill home invasion and rape was sprung from custody twice in the past year, prosecutors said. Anthony G. Williams, 45, made bail in July on a charge of failing to register as a sex offender — and then again in September in an assault and battery charge, Suffolk District Attorney spokesman Jake Wark said. Prosecutors at that hearing had asked Judge Mark Summerville to revoke his earlier bail and keep him in custody on an additional $200, Wark said. Summerville denied the request; Wark did not know why. Williams...

With all the efforts to understand the recent election defeat, a lot of the focus has been on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his campaign. That is exactly the wrong way to begin analyzing the outcome of the 2012 campaign.The focus on Romney as a candidate is profoundly misleading for those who want to prepare for future Republican victories.Any analysis of recent Republican presidential results will reveal a systemic failure which can’t be ascribed to Romney.The last clear Republican presidential victory was in 1988 when Vice President George H W Bush won with 53.37 percent over Dukakis.Since then we...

In response to a question from reporter Major Garrett on whether the Obama administration's mishandling of Benghazi raises "core questions of basic competency," press secretary Jay Carney revealed that Barack Obama "is not particularly concerned" about whether Susan Rice misled the American people: "What the president is worried about, Major, is what happened and why in Benghazi. He is not particularly concerned about whether the ambassador or I went out and talked about the fact that we believed extremists might have been responsible.

The Bolsheviks, according to historians, robbed banks before they rose to power in Russia. That foreshadowed their economic policies. The Marxism they implemented once in power was just an extension of their armed robbery. Today's redistributionists in America don't have bank robbery in their pasts but they do accept organized theft as the norm of politics. They see all wealth belonging to the state automatically, which is why they count all tax cuts as "government spending" and why they feel entitled to hike up taxes whenever a self-inflicted "crisis" appears. Taxpayers didn't cause the "fiscal cliff" emergency; derelict pols did....

First the Associated Press announced that it would continue using “Illegal Alien” instead of “Undocumented American”, “Accidental Border Crosser” or “Beautiful Dreamer” on the grounds that it was well… technically accurate. Now the AP is throwing out Homophobia and Islamophobia on the grounds that they are inaccurate and conflate prejudice with mental illness. And that has led to outrage hysteria from the usual organs of the left who like sticking to their politicized words once they’ve made enough people aware of them. “Ethnic cleansing is a euphemism for pretty violent activities, a phobia is a psychiatric or medical term for...

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) -- An elder from Montana's Crow Indian Tribe who ceremoniously adopted then-Sen. Barack Obama into his family during the 2008 presidential race has died. Tribal officials say 78-year-old Hartford "Sonny" Black Eagle Jr. died Monday at his home in Lodge Grass on the tribe's reservation in the southeastern part of the state.

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – Founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, dismissed discussion of GOP defections from his “no new taxes” pledge, and President Obama’s tax theories, as pure fantasy. In a Tuesday interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition,” the conservative activist reinforced that support for his “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” — which was signed by 95 percent of Republican congressmen earlier this month – is not waning. Norquist stated that Democrats’ openness to substantial spending cuts is like imagining a “pink unicorn.”

Iran will step up its uranium enrichment program by sharply increasing the number of centrifuges used to make nuclear fuel, a senior official said Wednesday, in direct defiance of Western demands. The statement by Iran’s nuclear chief, Fereidoun Abbasi, is likely to escalate tensions. The West suspects Iran’s nuclear program could be headed toward weapons production and has imposed punishing sanctions to try to persuade Tehran to stop enrichment. Iran has denied the charges, saying its program is peaceful and geared toward generating electricity and producing radioisotopes to treat cancer patients. …

WASHINGTON (AP) — The first cracks are developing among Republicans over whether to accept a quick deal with President Barack Obama on allowing the top two income tax rates to expire. Conservative Oklahoma GOP Rep. Tom Cole told GOP colleagues in a private meeting on Tuesday that it's better to make sure that tax cuts for the 98 percent of taxpayers who make less than $200,000 or $250,000 a year are extended than to battle it out with Obama and risk increasing taxes on everyone. Cole's remarks are noteworthy because he's a longtime GOP loyalist and a confidant of House...

Winston Churchill has been quoted as saying, “Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.”And any man who writes on politics for New York Magazine has neither heart nor brains --- especially if his name is Jonathan Chait: How doomed are conservatives? Pretty doomed, if you look carefully at the Pew Research Survey’s close analysis of the youth vote in the 2012 elections. The Republicans’ long-term dilemma has generally been framed in racial terms, but it’s mainly a...

<p>The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was written in order to keep the government from invading the right to be left alone--today known as the right to privacy. The Framers who wrote the Constitution, and Jefferson and his colleagues who insisted on the Fourth amendment among others, had suffered grievously at the hands of the British king and his soldiers.</p>

The Environmental Protection Agency has suspended BP from bidding on any new federal contracts as a result of the company’s conduct during the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster that led to 11 deaths and the largest U.S. offshore spill. The EPA said the suspension would not affect BP’s current contracts or leases, which are crucial to the company. The London-based oil giant is the largest leaseholder in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico, with more than 700 leases, and it is the gulf’s largest producer of oil and gas from more than 20 fields there. Although the EPA did not say how...

President Barack Obama urged Americans on Wednesday to help him pressure Congress to prevent a Jan. 1 tax hike on the middle class, saying it was up to the public to make sure Washington doesn't "screw this up." "When the American people speak loudly enough, lo and behold Congress listens," Obama said, flanked by Americans who answered the White House's call to detail what that tax increase would cost them personally. "We really need to get this right. I can only do it with the help of the American people," the president said. "It's too important for Washington to screw...

HOUSTON—As family members of a man who was shot by a Valero clerk in southeast Houston called for the store clerk’s arrest, the store owner released surveillance video. Alexander Calloway, 21, and his two cousins were trying to enter the gas station on Martin Luther King and Belarbor around 3:30 a.m., but the store was locked. The young men got into an argument with the clerk, who unlocked his door and came outside, police said. Someone punched the clerk in the face and the clerk pulled out his gun and shot Calloway in the stomach, according to HPD. Calloway’s cousins...

The federal lending program designed to make college education available to everyone is creating a pile of debt so large it is fanning worries that it has become too easy to borrow too much.

When even Chris Matthews can see the dangers in pushing Susan Rice as Hillary Clinton's replacement, maybe the White House should pay attention. Via Eliana Johnson at NRO, the second term hasn't yet begun and Barack Obama needs as much political capital as possible to win on the "fiscal cliff." Why take on this fight, especially when an easy option --- and a better one --- in John Kerry is at hand? Matthews predicts a "very messy and hot" fight over the nomination if it indeed comes, which will be "not helpful," and Matthews hears it may not come at...