Free Republic

For critics of the Southern Baptist Convention, former President Jimmy Carter is the gift that just keeps on giving. Over the last several days, yet another round of news reports has trumpeted the news that the former president has resigned his membership in the Southern Baptist Convention. Almost a decade after he first made this announcement, his repetitive return to this theme set up a new avalanche of news reports. Reports, we might add, that are not news. Adding insult to injury, the reports are about a "resignation" that isn't even a resignation. Try explaining that to the international media....

The sitting Speaker of the House of Representatives has accused the CIA of lying to Congress. She is ensnared in a web of conflicting accounts. Her very hold on power could be under a cloud. Meh. Guess we can find some room on A20. But pot pies need to be heated to 165 degrees to be safe? Hold the presses: put it on the front page! Such is the news judgment of the New York Times. The Morning Joe crowd had a field day with Gray Lady and Pelosi’s travails during the show’s opening half-hour today, Joe Scarborough having great...

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter will switch parties and run for reelection in November 2010 as a Democrat, he announced today, a decision that could have wide-ranging consequences for the Senate and President Obama's agenda. Specter told reporters that he received a "bleak" poll Friday from his advisers that showed virtually no chance of him winning in the GOP primary next spring against Pat Toomey, a former Republican House member who recently led the conservative Club for Growth. He said that the loss of several hundred thousand GOP voters who left the party in 2008 to vote in the Democratic presidential...

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Pedro Pablo slowly folds up his American flag blanket and stuffs it in his duffel bag. With it goes his American dream. "I left my family and lost four years with them. I will ask them to forgive me," he said. Pablo is an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who came to the United States to support his wife and five sons back home. When he arrived, construction jobs were plentiful. Over the last year, he says, he's worked three days. He recently boarded a bus with a one-way ticket home, paid for by the Guatemalan...

DENVER – After going months without a full-time job, Daniel Ramirez has decided it's time to return to family in Mexico. Vicenta Rodriguez Lopez says she can't afford to live in Colorado any more because her husband was deported. Roberto Espinoza is going back, too. After 18 years as a mechanic for a General Motors dealership in Denver, his work permit wasn't renewed and he didn't want to remain in the country illegally.

(ALBANY, NY) Sound the trumpets. Bang the drums. Forgotten upstate New York residents plan massive Bye Bye Bashes in anticipation of Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State. Numerous spontaneous grassroots celebrations have sprung up seemingly overnight after the news broke last week that president-elect Barack Obama might tap Hillary for a cabinet position in his new administration. Although not official until tomorrow, Buffalo, upstate’s second largest city, plans a parade down Elmwood Avenue followed by fireworks over the Niagara River. Meanwhile, Adirondack celebrants plan to ski a pumpkin-headed Hillary effigy off the high jump in Lake Placid’s Olympic Village....

Broken by Radio Equalizer, confirmed by Fox News. In announcing his decision, Colmes said, “I approached Bill Shine (FNC’s Senior Vice President of Programming) earlier this year about wanting to move on after 12 years to develop new and challenging ways to contribute to the growth of the network. Although it’s bittersweet to leave one of the longest marriages on cable news, I’m proud that both Sean (Hannity) and I remained unharmed after sitting side by side, night after night for so many years.” Colmes will continue to have a presence on FNC as he will serve as a liberal...

FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Alan Colmes will relinquish his role as co-host of Hannity & Colmes at the end of the year. In announcing his decision, Colmes said, “I approached Bill Shine (FNC’s Senior Vice President of Programming) earlier this year about wanting to move on after 12 years to develop new and challenging ways to contribute to the growth of the network. Although it’s bittersweet to leave one of the longest marriages on cable news, I’m proud that both Sean (Hannity) and I remained unharmed after sitting side by side, night after night for so many years.” Colmes will...

Kenneth M. Duberstein, Ronald Reagan’s final White House chief of staff and a former political confidant of Senator John McCain, is the latest high-profile Republican to say he will vote instead for Senator Barack Obama for president. Mr. Duberstein’s decision, confirmed in a brief interview, was not a big surprise given his close friendship with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who recently announced on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that he would vote for Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, because he was disappointed that both Mr. McCain and the Republican Party have become so socially conservative and negative.

Ken (liberal) Duberstein to endorse Obama. CNN's October suprise. . . Mark Levin

Professor Charles Fried, an advisor to John McCain's presidential campaign, has announced that he can no longer support the McCain/Palin ticket. In a letter to the general counsel to the McCain/Palin campaign, he cited McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate as too dangerous "at a time of deep national crisis", and has asked for his name to be removed from several campaign committees on which he has served. Fried also publicly stated that he had voted for Obama via absentee ballot. Fried later clarified to The New Republic that he had voted for Obama because he no...

Oh, no! Seal and Heidi Klum join the list of celebrities threatening to leave the U.S. if John McCain wins Tuesday. So far, potential celeb expats include Susan Sarandon, Stephen Baldwin and Michael Stipe. Tina Fey says she's leaving Earth, fer crying out loud. This is getting serious, people. There may not be any celebrities left if the Republicans keep control of the White House. Whose lives will we have to obsess about? More important, whom will I have to write about? Other than die-hard Republican creepy fame-mongers Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt and Elisabeth Hasselbeck? Seal told this month's...

RUSH: I wish to reach around and pat myself on the back. Way back during the Republican primaries -- when the battle was between Huckabee and Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and McCain -- we were told by the Republican Party hierarchy that the only chance the Republican Party had (by the way, we were told this also by some of the intellectualoids in our own conservative media) to win was to attract Democrats and moderates; and that the era of Reagan was over, and we had to somehow find a way to become stewards of a big government but smarter...

Imagine the unimaginable: Todd Palin picking out curtain patterns for the vice-presidential mansion. In such an eventuality, whither shall we flee? Four years ago, Democrats made a lot of noise about Canada, but as political statements go, there's not much sting to "I'm so mad at America I'm going to move a few degrees of latitude northward." Tina Fey has suggested we leave Earth altogether, but at the risk of reviving a discredited rubric, I'd like to propose a "third way." Actually, I'll let sociologist Phil Zuckerman propose it. In "Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell...

Need a good reason (another one, I mean) not to vote for Sen. John McCain and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin? How about to save Tina Fey 's life? "If she wins, I’m done," Fey tells TV Guide. "I can’t do that for four years. And by ‘I’m done,’ I mean I’m leaving Earth." But that will not keep her from continuing to spoof the former beauty queen right up to election day. And with good reason. The New York Post notes that political impersonations can actually do in a politician. "Presidential impersonators do influence elections, and in this one, Tina...

Actress has had fun with impersonation on ‘SNL,’ but can't do four yearsTina Fey is generating big laughs and big audiences for “Saturday Night Live” with her impersonation of Gov. Sarah Palin, but the actress hopes it doesn't last. “We're gonna take it week by week. If she wins, I'm done,” Fey tells TV Guide in the Oct. 20 issue. “I can't do that for four years. And by ‘I'm done,’ I mean I'm leaving Earth.” The “30 Rock” star also said the election season and playing Sen. John McCain's running mate has been a fun and busy time. “Election...

Susan Sarandon has threatened that she will consider moving to Italy if John McCain is elected U.S. president. She told the UK Telegraph earlier that she is worried about the presidential election and called John McCain "dangerous." She added that she might consider moving to Canada as well if Barack Obama does not win in November. When asked if Barack Obama could actually win the election, she responded, "Why wouldn't he be able to win?" She might not be so sure now as all of the polls show Barack Obama trailing John McCain after the Republican Convention and the announcement...

Eisenhower Leaves Republican Party 3:21pm UK, Thursday August 21, 2008 The granddaughter of former US president Dwight Eisenhower says she is officially leaving the Republican Party. Sky News: First For Breaking News Writing for the National Interest online, an internal Republican Party publication, Susan Eisenhower made the announcement. Instead she will be an independent because she said: "The GOP (Republican party) of today bears no resemblance to Lincoln, (Teddy) Roosevelt or Eisenhower's Party, or many of the other Republican administrations that came after that." She said "My decision came at the end of last week when it was demonstrated to...

Although there is no formal tally, Mexican consular sources say a growing number of illegal immigrants across the United States are starting to pack their bags and return home. Illegal immigrants were able to buy U.S. homes during the boom years, either by showing evidence that they pay taxes or by simply presenting false documents. Many of them took out high interest fixed-rate loans or subprime mortgages with a low entry rate that later rose sharply. Experts say language difficulties made them more vulnerable to being offered, and taking, bad deals.

After 30 years, Navratilova's Czech again Tue Mar 11, 3:12 AM ET Tennis legend Martina Navratilova said Tuesday she has regained Czech nationality more than 30 years after fleeing communism in the country of her birth to live in the United States. "I lost it at the time I defected. I got it back on January 9," Navratilova told a news conference on a visit to Tokyo. The 51-year-old former world champion said she was maintaining dual nationality and keeping her US passport. Born in Prague, Navratilova fled to the United States in 1975 at the height of the Cold...