Free Republic

Meghan McCain, daughter of former Republican presidential candidate and Arizona senator John McCain, was asked by KTAR's Mac & Gaydos Tuesday if she agreed with Bush's viewpoint. McCain didn't quite go that far, but she offered up some interesting insight as to what they might mean in regards to a possible run at the presidency. "I understand what he's saying meaning that America is this shining beacon at the top of the hill as Ronald Reagan once said," McCain told KTAR. "I think everyone wants to be an American if you can be, especially if you come from a place...

Perhaps we'll be seeing less of Lena Dunham on screen in the future: The "Girls" talent says she might consider quitting acting to focus on some of her other work. But don't worry, she's not going far. "I don't know if I'm going to want to act anymore. I'm always relieved on the days I don't have to. I'd rather give parts to other women than be the woman having the parts," the Golden Globe-winning 27-year-old said in the April issue of Glamour, which hits newsstands March 18. Appearing in the critically acclaimed HBO series about four 20-something women growing...

Republican strategists work to improve data analytics in advance of the midterm elections. or two days last week, Republican strategists, political consultants, and digital gurus convened in a sleek, wood-paneled conference room on the third floor of New York City’s Standard hotel. Their mission: to reverse the fortunes of the Republican party by leveraging voter data, technology, and public opinion to win elections. More than a year removed from an election year in which Democrats used data to gain insights that allowed them to swing a handful of races, including at the top of the ticket, those gathered were determined...

Trumpeting the ever-increasing weight of outside political organizations, Karl Rove's campaign groups out-fundraised the Democratic National Committee during the 2012 election cycle, according to a draft tax return obtained Friday by the Wall Street Journal. American Crossroads and its nonprofit arm, Crossroads GPS, together raked in more than $325 million during the 2012 campaign. The DNC, by contrast, raised $316 million, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. -snip- Expenditures for Crossroads GPS included donations to other conservative groups like Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, and a $538,000 salary for its president, Steven Law.

President Barack Obama opened a day of tributes to former President John F. Kennedy on Wednesday by bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom on prominent Americans, 50 years after Kennedy was assassinated weeks short of the medal’s first award ceremony. Obama presented the medal — the highest award the U.S. gives a civilian — to Oprah Winfrey, former President Bill Clinton...Gloria Steinhem...

<p>Meghan McCain said she’s already defied the odds by not disappearing from the public stage after her father’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, and that part of the reason is some regard her as the new face of the Republican Party.</p>

Sen. John McCain's daughter says the tea party revolution within the Republican Party has left him in a state of emotional distress. "I’ve never heard him this depressed other than maybe after the ‘08 election," Meghan McCain said. "He’s so depressed, so down-trodden. The way he’s talking about it, he's never seen it this bad in his 30-plus years in office." Meghan, who describes herself as a liberal Republican, said she shares his sense of despondency. "We’re both frustrated with the idea that only the hyper-conservative wing of the party is going to represent the masses,” said McCain, 29, who...

The RNC’s “Growth and Opportunity Project,” released in March, .... 14 recommendations intended to attract young voters, including forming a “celebrity task force,” empowering younger voices in digital issues, having Republicans appear more frequently on previously ignored media outlets, and making the party more welcoming. The (College Republican National Committee)'s report, released in June, focused exclusively on young voters and was scathing in its assessment of how negatively young voters saw the Republican Party. Most salient among its findings were the feedback from focus groups composed of potential Republican voters. In addition to noting that they didn’t expect the GOP...

Meghan McCain said she respects the Republican Party, but wants to make clear: Some GOPers are crazy rednecks. She’s just not one of them. In an interview with Politico, she also tried to make clear that she’s not a voice for young Republicans. “I don’t espouse myself to be the voice of young Republicans at all

Orca Spotted with Plastic Bag in Mouth Researchers snapped a picture of a baby killer whale in the Pacific Northwest holding a plastic bag in its mouth, just the latest example of plastic pollution in the world's oceans. Last month, scientists from the Center for Whale Research monitoring orcas in the Salish Sea say they spotted a calf playing with what at first looked like a small scrap of blubber. When the baby whale dropped the item from its mouth, they realized it was actually a plastic bag.

Anthony Weiner’s online paramour took time out from her “15 Minutes of Fame” tour to cool off on a Santa Monica beach — looking more like a frumpy schoolmarm than sultry sext kitten. Sydney Leathers — who sent Weiner a racy, bun-baring shot of herself in a pink thong during their 6-month dalliance — sported this unflattering two-piece halter bathing suit with high-waisted, cover-it-all-up bottoms late last week.

<p>The dolphin was originally part of a small group swimming off the Mexican coast But the others managed to get away - leaving it at the mercy of a whole pod of whales With the setting sun just beginning to turn the sky pink, a killer whale leaps out of the ocean and soars into the air, spray cascading down in its wake.</p>

I haven't been able to write this week here because I've been participating in the debate over the fallout from last week's NSA stories, and because we are very busy working on and writing the next series of stories that will begin appearing very shortly. I did, though, want to note a few points, and particularly highlight what Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez said after Congress on Wednesday was given a classified briefing by NSA officials on the agency's previously secret surveillance activities: "What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today. . ....

The GOP is working with Silicon Valley investors to digitally target voters and donors in a broader effort by the Republican National Committee to revive the party. The venture, whose mission is still being refined, will create an interactive platform available to any GOP campaign to access the party's vast amount of data on voters. This platform will likely work in conjunction with the RNC's efforts to improve its own database of voter information. The venture is being backed by Karl Rove and fomer Bain & Co. executive and private equity investor Richard Boyce. Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy will...

A pod of killer whales appears to be trapped in a small pool of water surrounded by ice in Hudson’s Bay. In a number of videos shot by local residents near Inukjuak, Que., the whales are seen taking turns continuously coming up for air. The first video was posted on Tuesday on Facebook by local residents to try to get the attention of authorities to help the whales who appear to be in distress. It is believed the orcas became stranded on Monday and are still there.

The Obama campaign's technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong. Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else. They were talking with people at Amazon Web Services, but all they knew was that they had packet loss. Earlier that day, they lost their databases, their East Coast servers, and...

Many things went wrong with Romney's campaign for president, but one of the biggest was the epic failure of the campaign's big-data app for getting out the vote, called Orca. When the campaign needed it most, Orca was beached. Politico has an excellent summary of the problems it says that Orca had. Among them were that the Romney campaign kept it secret and didn't beta-test it before it was rolled out on Election Day. That meant that the people who it was designed for -- the thousands of volunteers across the country -- didn't have a chance to learn how...

Mitt Romney's Republican Get Out the Vote system (ORCA) had a meltdown on Election Day leaving some campaign workers wandering around with nothing to do. Now Anonymous has released a video claiming responsibility for jamming ORCA...

Worse still, Ekdahl told Business Insider that the Romney campaign failed to provide poll-watching volunteers in his region — Jacksonville, Florida, a key Republican city in a major swing state — with proper credentials and accurate voter strike lists, rendering them unable to perform their duties even if the ORCA app had worked. In interviews with Business Insider last week, sources close to the Romney campaign confirmed Ekdahl's account, and described a technological undertaking that failed at every level. According to several of these sources, ORCA was developed by a small, isolated tech team working under Romney's political team. These...

I was one of those 30,000 around the country that wasted their day this past Tuesday trying to get Orca to work. Here in central Virginia, it was as bad as everything you've heard. I slugged it out with Boston from 6:30 am to 7 pm, and tried every way I could think of to make it work, probably for no good purpose. The "app" itself couldn't be used ahead of time, I was assigned to go to one precinct on Tuesday, then got contrary instructions on Wednesday (the week before the election), was invited to call into a conference...