Free Republic

The furor over the cyberattacks injecting turmoil into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign obscures a more pervasive danger to the U.S. political process: Much of it has only lax security against hackers, with few if any federal cops on the beat. No one regulator is responsible for requiring campaigns, political operations and state and local agencies to protect the sanctity of the voter rolls, voters’ personal data, donors’ financial information or even the election outcomes themselves. And as the Democrats saw in Philadelphia this past week, the result can be chaos.

Last night on Politico's live-stream election show, Politico editor-in-chief John Harris highlighted a provocative Politico story about "stupid voters." The Politico article by reporter Alexander Burns examines poll numbers from voters who still think Obama might be a Muslim, believe that the president can change gas prices, and appear to have conflicting opinions about the war in Afghanistan. The article quotes Tom Jensen of the Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling who admits, “The first lesson you learn as a pollster is that people are stupid. . . I tell a client trying to make sense of numbers on a...

This, from Bloomberg News, is the kind of scrutiny that you draw when you start getting taken seriously as a presidential candidate: Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said during a Nov. 9 debate that he earned a $300,000 fee to advise Freddie Mac as a “historian” who warned that the mortgage company’s business model was “insane.” Former Freddie Mac officials familiar with the consulting work Gingrich was hired to perform for the company in 2006 tell a different story. They say the former House speaker was asked to build bridges to Capitol Hill Republicans and develop an argument on behalf...

The Democratic National Committee is launching a new ad campaign Monday to build public pressure on Congress to back President Barack Obama’s job plan. The television spots feature clips from Obama’s jobs speech to a joint session of Congress last Thursday evening. “The next election is fourteen months away. And the people who sent us here, the people who hired us to work for them - they don’t have the luxury of waiting fourteen months… Members of Congress, it is time for us to meet our responsibilities,” Obama says in the clip. One of the ads emphasizes that the Obama...

President Barack Obama’s deficit strategy is a combination of audacity, hope and — in the eyes of Republicans — chutzpah. Obama, vilified by opponents for ducking the debt debate earlier this year, has seized the opportunity to portray himself as the champion of a $4 trillion “grand bargain” on tax and entitlement reform. This, after Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who spent months pushing the president in that direction, pulled out of any attempt to “go big” over the weekend. “Obama wants $4 trillion in debt reduction, while GOP wants only $2-$3 trillion,” wrote veteran Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. “[It] seems...

People know that the MSM despises Sarah Palin. Still, it was shocking to hear the dirty little secret so openly stated . . . Jim Vandehei of Politico, on Morning Joe today: "If you talk to any single reporter at any media organization that we're aware of, I don't think that anyone thinks she can be president or should be president." View video here.

First came the crotch photos. Then came the lying and denial. Now, Rep. Anthony Weiner is seeking treatment for his misdeeds, leaving Washingtonians asking: treatment for what? Based on the New York Democrat’s behavior, which the congressman says includes sending lewd messages and images over the Internet to six women in the past three years, experts interviewed by POLITICO said he could suffer from an array of conditions that could merit treatment, including narcissism, obsessive-compulsive disorder or even some variety of sexual addiction. None of the possibilities comes with a silver-bullet treatment that delivers quick results — meaning that if...

Politico knew they likely wouldn’t get a quote from Sarah Palin for the latest hit piece they published so they made one up. One of the authors is the former chairman of the Democratic Party of Virgina.Politico wrote: Will Sarah Palin’s intensifying rivalry with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) cause the former Alaska governor to run for president?The first female Republican vice presidential nominee clearly believes she is the one who has paid the heavy dues by bearing the brunt of the “liberal elite” attacks to help build the tea party, social conservative wing of the GOP.Palin’s bus tour had some...

Day 2 of Sarah Palin’s bus tour, and the former vice presidential nominee has prompted little more than confusion at exactly what she is up to. Palin started Memorial Day at the National Archives in Washington, but the only reporters who made it to her brief media availability there were those who happened to see tourists posting on Twitter that they had spotted her. SNIP Indeed, Twitter is about the only way to follow the former Alaska governor – unless you’re either Fox News host Greta Van Susteren or her husband, John Coale. The Fox News host is traveling around...

Americans responded with overwhelming positivity to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, two polls conducted after the Tuesday night speech found...

And Politico effectively joins Barack Obama's re-election campaign. Politico's increasingly leftward lean has finally caused it to fall over entirely. The sheer volume of anti-Palin stories over the last week was breathtaking. It's clear that they have targeted Palin. To wit: First they were critical of Palin for not saying anything: Tucson shooting presents 2012 test Their widely divergent reactions — from Tim Pawlenty’s subtle distancing from his beleaguered rival, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin; to her virtual disappearance; to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s feeding of the right-wing base — are telling for what they show about the...

In the span of a single news cycle, Republicans got a jarring reminder of two forces that could prevent them from retaking the presidency in next year. At sunrise in the East on Wednesday, Sarah Palin demonstrated that she has little interest — or capacity — in moving beyond her brand of grievance-based politics. And at sundown in the West, Barack Obama reminded even his critics of his ability to rally disparate Americans around a message of reconciliation. Palin was defiant, making the case in a taped speech she posted online why the nation’s heated political debate should continue unabated...

Sarah Palin is the un-Obama. That’s why she’s a political force, though she’s way beyond her 15 minutes of fame. That’s also why she’s a contender in 2012. Barack Obama is a prince of the meritocracy. Palin is queen of the north woods. Why does this matter? Because in presidential politics, opposites rule. If voters are unhappy with Obama, Republicans have to offer them the un-Obama. That’s a role Palin fits perfectly. Obama has degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Palin attended four colleges in six years before earning her bachelor’s degree from the University of Idaho. Obama...

Long-simmering tensions within the Republican Party spilled into public view Wednesday as the pragmatic and conservative wings of the GOP blamed each other in blunt terms for the party’s failure to capture the Senate. With tea party-backed candidates going down in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada, depriving Republicans of what would have been a 50-50 Senate, a bloc of prominent senators and operatives said party purists like Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) had foolishly pushed nominees too conservative to win in politically competitive states. (snip) Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott put it plainly: “We did not nominate our...

Long-simmering tensions within the Republican Party spilled into public view Wednesday as the pragmatic and conservative wings of the GOP blamed each other in blunt terms for the party’s failure to capture the Senate. With tea party-backed candidates going down in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada, depriving Republicans of what would have been a 50-50 Senate, a bloc of prominent senators and operatives said party purists like Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) had foolishly pushed nominees too conservative to win in politically competitive states. Movement conservatives pointed the finger right back at the establishment, accusing the National Republican Senatorial...

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who will have far-ranging subpoena power in the new Congress as a result of Tuesday’s election, is going out of his way to dispel perceptions that he’s a partisan bombthrower who plans to use his newfound authority to paralyze President Barack Obama’s administration.“I want to prove the pundits wrong. My job is not to bring down the president. My job is to make the president a success,” Issa said on a midnight conference call with reporters, just after House Minority Leader John Boehner’s victory speech. Issa took a restrained view of his likely new post as...

Rove: Huckabee apologized Ben Smith October 28, 2010 Karl Rove told a New York audience today that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee e-mailed him to apologize for a public shot at the former White House adviser. Huckabee, in the course of denouncing "elitism" in the Republican Establishment, told WABC's Aaron Klein that he was "disappointed" in Karl Rove's dismissal of Christine O'Donnell. Speaking to the Heritage Foundation in New York today, Rove was asked about the comment. Per The Nation's Neima Jahromi, whose outlet asked the question, Rove said Huckabee had apologized for the jab. Rove has become a target...

The 2010 election has devolved in its closing days into a battle – familiar in American history and high school alike – over who’s stupid, and who’s a snob. Republican candidates have served up their share of bloopers — humanoid mice, sunspots causing climate change – and Democrats have taken the expected delight in their opponents’ stumbles. But they’ve taken their mockery one step further – contending as a part of their closing argument that the tea party movement, its champion Sarah Palin, and the left’s favorite Republican candidate, Christine O’Donnell, are, frankly, dumb. Palin “has made ignorance fashionable,” the...

From Tea Party activists to “mama grizzlies,” the number of female conservative candidates in this year’s election is unprecedented. This surge in the number of right-leaning ladies has not only caught the Democratic Party’s attention. Several media outlets have jumped on board to lend support to the female democratic candidates who are in danger of losing their seats.  Politico dedicated roughly 1300 words to the subject of female candidates in this year’s election in an Oct. 12 article, but it could only spare about 174 words on the conservative candidates. The article could easily double as a campaign literature touting...

A Justice Department prosecutor defied his superiors by testifying at a U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearing Friday, where he leveled an explosive allegation: top officials in the department gutted a voter intimidation case against a fringe African American militant group because the suspects were black and their alleged victims were white. The prosecutor, Christopher Coates, also said the downgrading of the case against the New Black Panther Party was evidence of a Justice Department culture which discouraged “race neutral” enforcement of civil rights laws, frowned on prosecuting minority perpetrators and folded under pressure from black and Latino rights groups. After...