Free Republic

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 Romney campaign spent an estimated $356 million between January 1, 2011 and October 17, 2012 in its unsuccessful effort to defeat incumbent President Barack Obama. According to Federal Election Commission documents, as reported by OpenSecrets.org, $33 million of this amount was paid to two consulting firms with ties to key staffers at both the Romney campaign and the RNC. Targeted Victory LLC, a Minnesota company with executive offices in Virginia, was paid $17 million for digital communications by the Romney campaign. FLS Connect LLC, an Arizona corporation with headquarters in Minnesota, was paid $16 million for voter contact and...

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...

In too many posts to count, I’ve argued that the reason Romney was the overwhelming choice of the Washington campaign consultant class since the day after McCain lost in 2008 was that he was their dream candidate. He possessed the two qualities most prized by this insular population of political parasites who occupy the D.C. beltway: An enormous amount of money and an equally enormous dearth of core convictions. For this reason, they correctly recognized Romney as someone who could easily be fleeced for a virtually limitless amount of money. He’d shower them with tens of millions of dollars in return for their sage “advice” on...

If Election Day is about picking winners, the morning after is for post-mortems. That's when we slice open the losing campaigns, set aside the hundreds of millions of dollars that gush out, and pick apart the cause of death. Why did the Romney campaign fail? Maybe the country is now GOP-proof. That is, maybe a Constitution-guided, free-market, limited-government candidate no longer can "appeal" to the majority of the electorate. It could be that the death knell rang early this year once 67.3 million of us, or one in five Americans, had come to depend on federal assistance, formerly known as...

When Republican fundraisers solicited the party’s big donors on behalf of Mitt Romney this year, the centerpiece of the pitch was a state-of-the-art campaign to identify the party’s likely voters and make sure they came to the polls on Election Day. Political pros call these county-by-county, block-by-block campaigns the ground game. And while most of the media attention focuses on candidate speeches, debates, and ad buys, it’s the ground game where elections are won and lost. On Tuesday, Republicans lost the election on the ground. As the Republican Party picks up the pieces from overwhelming defeat, the first fingers are...

If you spend your time watching politics and haven’t been hiding in a deep depression since Tuesday, you’ve probably been hearing a lot about “ORCA.” According to the Washington Post, ORCA “was designed as a first-of-its-kind tool to employ smartphones to mobilize voters, allowing them to microtarget which of their supporters had gone to the polls.” There is now widespread condemnation of the program as being sloppy and poorly deployed.

Get out the vote is one of the most important things a campaign does to win an election. With 8 days to go before the election, this effort matters more than convincing the few undecided voters out there. Winning is now all about who has the best ground game and you can be a part of that vital effort. To help with Romney's get out the Republican vote effort go to his website and sign up to make get out the vote calls into the swing states using your free cell long distance. They provide the numbers, the names of...

Get out the vote is one of the most important things a campaign does to win an election. It's actually going to be more important in a lot of ways in the presidential race than convincing the few undecided voters still out there to come Romney's way. You can help with Romney's get out the vote effort by going to his website and signing up to make get out the vote calls into the swing states using your free cell long distance. They provide the numbers, the names of the voters and a script, currently focused on getting people to...

By Mr. Curmudgeon:A reader once asked if I ever considered running for public office. "No," I told him, "because I would ignore my political opponent, questions from the press, and spend the bulk of my campaign attacking voters for transforming our Founder's well-conceived government into the world's largest criminal enterprise. An organization, led by community organizers, that exists for the express purpose of committing organized theft. People say they like it when someone "speaks truth to power," but in American politics, that corrupting power is the people.Americans that voted for politicians who built an intrusive authoritarian administrative bureaucracy, engineered a...

Political reporters on Twitter are saying they are standing by for a Romney media availability on the video released today by Mother Jones of Romney at a May fundraiser speaking frankly of his thoughts on Obama's base voters and their entitlement mentality, aka the 47% who pay no federal income taxes.The media and GOP-E have jumped ugly on Romney tonight.Steve Holland, Reuters: Romney at press avail to respond to video says his comments weren't "elegantly stated," and "could have said it in a more effective way."

During a private fundraiser earlier this year, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a small group of wealthy contributors what he truly thinks of all the voters who support President Barack Obama. He dismissed these Americans as freeloaders who pay no taxes, who don't assume responsibility for their lives, and who think government should take care of them. Fielding a question from a donor about how he could triumph in November, Romney replied: There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who...

Former Democrat Alabama Congressman Artur Davis stepped to the stage and seconded Obama's 2008 presidential nomination. He served as Obama's campaign co-chair in 2008. Today Davis is a Republican and in Virginia campaigning for Mitt Romney. He served in Congress from 2003 to 2011. He was the first Congressman to endorse Obama, and the first from the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to demand that Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) surrender his gavel as head of the House Ways and Means Committee in the wake of his many-tentacled scandals. He is the only member of the CBC to vote against ObamaCare, and as...

Former Democrat Alabama Congressman Artur Davis stepped to the stage and seconded Obama's 2008 presidential nomination. He served as Obama's campaign co-chair in 2008. Today Davis is a Republican and in Virginia campaigning for Mitt Romney. He served in Congress from 2003 to 2011. He was the first Congressman to endorse Obama, and the first from the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to demand that Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) surrender his gavel as head of the House Ways and Means Committee in the wake of his many-tentacled scandals. He is the only member of the CBC to vote against ObamaCare, and as...

It’s a testament to the phenomenal excitement that greeted Palin’s selection in 2008 that Team McCain raised $8.8 million in just 48 hours after she was named VP. As for Ryan, Ed noted on Sunday that Team Mitt collected $3.5 million on 41,000 donations during the first day after he was introduced, which tells us two things. One: As you might expect, the bigger donations from more ardent Ryan fans came flooding in right away. Over the first 24 hours, the average contribution was north of 85 bucks. Two: Although it took them two more days to raise just a...

After Mitt Romney addressed the NAACP on Wednesday, CNN's Jim Acosta focused on the boos he received from the audience without mentioning the crowd's standing ovation and their applause scattered through the speech. Acosta simply reported a "very negative" reaction from the audience.

The Obama campaign's dishonest attack ads portraying Mitt Romney as a "corporate raider" and a "pioneer" of shipping American jobs overseas have been debunked by multiple independent fact checkers.  WaPo called the first such spot "misleading, unfair and untrue," and FactCheck.org found "no evidence" to support Obama's allegations.  Undeterred by facts and unconstrained by truth, Chicago has produced a second ad on the very same subject, repeating the very same discredited claims.  An NBC News affiliate in Florida examined the new spot and reached the same conclusion as the other truth-seeking entities: The ad is false Truth-Test: Obama's Bain Attacks...

Ohio storm victims in the Columbus area are more than likely welcoming the extension of help and assistance from the Romney presidential campaign, as they recover from the recent devastating storm which pummeled the area. This assistance comes on the heels of Governor Kasich State of Emergency declaration which covers the state of Ohio. Will Obama campaign join Romney campaign to assist Ohio storm victims? Although many in the Obama presidential camp may be cynical enough to label this a campaign ruse, for the many hundreds of families that were left battered and in need of emergency relief items like,...

As Mitt Romney puts the South Carolina primary in his rear-view mirror and hits the accelerator in a bid to win Florida, he may discover himself crashing headlong into the bitter legacy of Charlie Crist, the former Florida governor who defected from the GOP and was soundly defeated for the U.S. Senate by Marco Rubio. Romney’s “Charlie Crist” problem is this: Romney’s chief campaign strategist and several of his most senior campaign staff were Crist’s top political advisers — the same ones who crafted Crist’s moderate, ignore-the-tea-party strategy epitomized in Crist’s famous “hug” of President Barack Obama. That strategy led...