Free Republic

.....More may be revealed this week as the Democrats meet in Charlotte, N.C., when the president will be formally nominated as their candidate. Some of the possible second-term goals are ones he set aside in the first when they were too difficult or politically costly. They include a rewrite of immigration laws, efforts to combat global warming and a sweeping change in the tax code beyond the year-to-year extensions of Bush-era tax cuts.... The government faces a “fiscal cliff” of scheduled tax increases and spending cuts at the end of this year. If he and Congress can’t reach a permanent...

When we assess the President's post-election performance and the effects of his redistributive and regulatory policies, we find that, like a falling tide, he is sinking everyone. We also find that although Barack Obama has hurt all American families, he has hurt black families most of all....... [SNIP] The man is ill-suited for the job. He scores last...in unemployment, weeks unemployed, food stamps, and black illegitimate births, and near the bottom or tied for last in black unemployment, months of 12%-plus black unemployment, and children below the poverty line. Barack Obama has crushed the business and hiring climate. What's left...

The world is dynamic rather than static, so constantly thinking ahead is the key to understanding. Recognize now that on the morning after the election, whatever the result, America will never be the same. The results themselves will have wrought basic, fundamental change for the body politic. That inevitability underlines and highlights what you should be doing now to influence those results. Karl Marx's Last Stand The wildly overconfident Left is least attuned to what is at stake for them. If Barack Obama is routed this fall as he should be, it will be worse for the left-wing neo-Marxist views...

In a clip posted to online knowledge forum Big Think via YouTube, former children’s show host Bill Nye spoke out against the denial of evolution, saying such views harm young people especially and hamper scientific progress. Nye, who hosted the educational show “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” which aired on PBS Kids from 1993 through 1998, made the statements in a clip posted online on Thursday, and has since been viewed over one million times. In the clip, Nye praises the United States for its contribution to technological innovation, but says that the denial of evolution is unique to the...

....Chávez and other thugs (such as Iranian Madman-in-Chief Ahmadinejad) send in busloads of paid agitators to interrupt challengers' speeches and make their own support look more substantial than it is. Barack Obama thought only to send Joe Biden, knowing that the throngs of supporters -- made up largely of reporters, anchormen, and their entourages -- would be provided for him by an all-in-for-Obama media aiming similarly to create a false impression of unflagging popularity. And they surely would have, had a little wind [Isaac] not sapped the brief courage of Delaware's big-talking Cowardly Lion. ....according to a 2011 PewResearch poll...

Guys, I have to let you in on a little secret: the election is already over. No, I haven’t got crazy (yet) and realize that election day is more than two months away. However, after watching the last six weeks of this trainwreck of a campaign, it is impossible to believe that Romney has any chance to win. He doesn’t, and Obama will be reelected. We can make such bold predictions by reviewing a few pieces of evidence. Romney’s campaign: These guys don’t have a clue, do they? Like most members of the observing public, I assumed that the Romney...

It's August 23rd. And 75 days from now, I'll either be looking at another four years in the White House -- or the end of this opportunity. I know what's at stake for the parents worrying about health care, the kids who need help to go to college, and the seniors who want a secure retirement. But we're getting outspent by wide margins in critical battleground states -- and what we do about that today could be the difference between winning and losing on November 6th. So as we near one of the last fundraising deadlines of this campaign, I'm...

Vice President Joe Biden will be back in Massachusetts for two fundraisers this weekend. Biden, a Democrat, will be the featured guest at a fundraiser hosted by Kathy and Mike Schell at the Wayside Inn in Chatham, on Cape Cod, at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday. The cost to attend is $5,000 per person, or $20,000 per couple to be an event co-host. Mike Schell is an Obama bundler who has raised $50,000 to $100,000 for the president, according to a list of bundlers disclosed by the campaign. The money raised will go to the Obama Victory Fund, which funds the...

While President Barack Obama addressed a crowd in the battleground state of Nevada on Wednesday, a heckler began yelling but was eventually drowned out by the audience chanting, “four more years.” When the noise began to die down, President Obama said “that young man probably needed a good teacher … we all need it.”

<p>His critics will say this unfortunate photo reveals a deeper problem with his presidency -- that he's just a walking teleprompter.</p> <p>A Reuters photographer captured a shot of Barack Obama with his face obscured by a teleprompter during a campaign event at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, on Tuesday.</p>

This year’s political season is yielding more than just heated debate in Atmore, including jail time for two women caught allegedly stealing campaign signs along Martin Luther King Avenue and Ashley Street Monday night. Crenishia Antoinette Bosby, 24, of Fairhope, and Jawada Marquetta Bosby, 31, of Daphne, were taken into custody by Atmore police officers and agents with the 21st Judicial Drug Task force at approximately 8:45 p.m. after being pulled over on Ashley Street. The pair was also found with a 12-year-old minor and a .25 caliber handgun in the vehicle. For the complete story on Monday night’s...

s President Barack Obama was departing his impromptu appearance at the White House press briefing on Monday, ABC News White House correspondent Jake Tapper had some parting words for the president. “Don’t be a stranger,” Tapper said from the briefing room. Tapper’s sentiment seemed to be expressing a consensus among the White House press corps. Prior to this Monday appearance, Obama had not made a solo press conference since June 19. ...more (w/video)...

NewsBusters reported Sunday that Newsweek is out with a truly shocking edition featuring a cover story entitled "Hit the Road, Barack: Why We Need a New President." New York Times columnist Paul Krugman took to his blog Sunday excoriating the article in a piece he called "Unethical Commentary, Newsweek Edition": There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says: The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO...

New York residents are less hesitant to vote for a Muslim or Mormon presidential candidate than either an atheist or a born-again Christian, according to a new poll. The survey, conducted by Quinnipiac University, found that 30 percent of voters said they are less likely to vote for an atheist, while 27 percent said they would be less likely to vote for a born-again Christian. On the other hand, 24 percent are less likely to vote for a Mormon, while 19 percent are less likely to vote for a Muslim.

Vice President Joe Biden told a racially mixed audience Wednesday that if Republicans take back the White House, “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.” It’s hard to say what is more offensive: Mr. Biden’s overt use of inflammatory racial symbolism, or someone from Delaware saying “y’all.”

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Anyone searching for a parking space in downtown Sacramento on a weekday might conclude that a big percentage of this city's residents is disabled. Bright blue and red placards hang in half of the windshields on some blocks, allowing those cars to park free all day at any meter, regardless of how much time the meter allows or how congested the area is. As placard numbers grow across the state, frustrated officials from Sacramento to Los Angeles say too many users are in fact able-bodied people abusing the system. It's time to put a stop to it, they say. Vehicles...

President Barack Obama is turning 51 on Saturday, with just three months until Election Day. So he will celebrate in true political fashion: spending “downtime,” as an email invitation put it, at a party at his Chicago home with a bunch of strangers who made campaign donations to be there. That party, on Aug. 12, will mark another milestone in the transformation of the president and his wife, who once tried to limit the role of politics in their lives and now seem to be increasingly giving themselves over to it. Even some longtime Obama fundraisers expressed surprise over the...

To project Obama’s 2012 vote I’ll make the plausible assumption that American military fatalities in Afghanistan continue running at the (politically relatively low) average quarterly rate of the past year: 95 or 0.3 per millions of population. At Election Day cumulative Fatalities then would amount to approximately 1500 or 4.8 per millions of population, which would depress Obama’s expected two-­‐party vote share by less than a quarter of a percentage point −0.5 ⋅ 4.8 = −0.24%. Baring a really big escalation in the aggressiveness of fighters resisting US military presence in Afghanistan, plausible alternative assumptions about the flow of...

......The Romney campaign paid its bill last week, about a month after the city sent its invoice. The Obama bill, on the other hand, was sent in May and has not been paid. City spokeswoman Tara Finnigan said the city's billing system would be sending past-due notices. About three weeks ago, the Democratic National Committee contacted the city and told officials to deal with the Secret Service. The DNC and the Republican National Committee split their Newport Beach event proceeds with the respective campaigns. ...... Councilwoman Leslie Daigle, a Republican, said, "It's the city's intention to apply its usual policies...