Free Republic

Sarah Palin's belief that the House health-care reform bill would create "death panels" might be particularly extreme, but she's hardly the only person to wildly misunderstand the section of the bill ordering Medicare to cover voluntary end-of-life counseling sessions between doctors and their patients. One of the foremost advocates of expanding Medicare end-of-life planning coverage is Johnny Isakson, a Republican Senator from Georgia. He co-sponsored 2007's Medicare End-of-Life Planning Act and proposed an amendment similar to the House bill's Section 1233 during the Senate HELP Committee's mark-up of its health care bill. I reached Sen. Isakson at his office this...

U.S. Senate candidate Kay Hagan said she came to talk about issues, but it wasn't long after arriving at an early voting site in Charlotte that a few voters brought up what's become the focal point of the race -- the "godless" ad that Sen. Elizabeth Dole is running against her. "What a nasty campaign this has turned into at the last moment," Doug Gubbins, a retired computer programmer from Charlotte, said to Hagan as she worked the voting line at Marion Diehl Recreation Center.... The backlash against Dole continued with a church leader sending the senator a sharply-worded letter....

Sen. John McCain and the Republican National Committee will unleash a barrage of spending on television advertising that will allow him to keep pace with Sen. Barack Obama's ad blitz during the campaign's final days, but the expenditures will impact McCain's get-out-the-vote efforts, according to Republican strategists. McCain has faced a severe spending imbalance during most of the fall, but the Republican nominee squirreled away enough funds to pay for a raft of television ads in critical battleground states over the next four days, said Evan Tracey, a political analyst who monitors television spending. The decision to finance a final...

North Carolina knows from sad experience about negative election campaigns and misleading, untruthful advertising. In the 1950 campaign, opponents of the late UNC President Frank Porter Graham used a doctored photo of his wife with a black man to inject race into a Senate campaign and help defeat the revered educator. In 1990, Sen. Jesse Helms used the infamous "white hands" ad, blaming the failure of a white person to get a job on a minority and "a racial quota" to help defeat former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt. When Helms retired in 2002 and Salisbury native Elizabeth Dole was elected...

Gov. Sarah Palin charged the state for her children to travel with her, including to events where they were not invited, and later amended expense reports to specify that they were on official business. The charges included costs for hotel and commercial flights for three daughters to join Palin to watch their father in a snowmobile race, and a trip to New York, where the governor attended a five-hour conference and stayed with 17-year-old Bristol for five days and four nights in a luxury hotel. In all, Palin has charged the state $21,012 for her three daughters' 64 one-way and...

Full breakdown here.

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia. "These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military...

A disturbing trend may be on the rise at Republican rallies. It is one thing to state that your opponent may have character issues or may not be the best choice to serve as President of the United States. It is something else entirely to stoke a fire that may incite violence against a sitting United States Senator who is the other party's nominee for President. Today, in a rally in Clearwater, FL., at a speech given by Governor Palin a man reportedly said "Kill Him" in reference to Barack Obama. We have a little less than a month to...

In the land of instant television punditry, at least, the ayes had it when it came to the second debate between Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain last night. It was summed up perhaps most directly by George Stephanopoulos of ABC: "Obama is two for two, he definitely won tonight." Where the night of the first debate between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, and the debate last week between Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Gov. Sarah Palin, seemed to bring initial mixed reviews – which eventually evolved over time to largely favor the Democratic ticket — this one...

John McCain would pay for his health plan with major reductions to Medicare and Medicaid, a top aide said, in a move that independent analysts estimate could result in cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years to the government programs. The Republican presidential nominee has said little about the proposed cuts, but they are needed to keep his health-care plan "budget neutral," as he has promised. The McCain campaign hasn't given a specific figure for the cuts, but didn't dispute the analysts' estimate. In the months since Sen. McCain introduced his health plan, statements made by his campaign have implied...

Alaska Attorney General Talis Colberg announced today that seven state employees will now honor subpoenas to testify in the legislative investigation of the Troopergate affair. Colberg said the decision comes in light of a judge's ruling last week rejecting an attempt to quash the subpoenas.... The Legislature's investigator, retired state prosecutor Steve Branchflower, is expected to complete his report by Friday into whether Gov. Sarah Palin abused her power by trying to force the firing of a state trooper involved in a child custody battle with her sister.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday will launch a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer. Pushing back against what it calls “guilt-by-association” tactics by McCain, the Obama campaign is e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, that will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The overnight e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends. The Obama campaign,...

Remember how conservatives had their undies in bundle over Gwen Ifill moderating Thursday's Veep debate? Well, some on the left are worrying about Tom Brokaw as moderator of Tuesday night's throwdown. There's already a Boot Brokaw online petition. The suggested replacements? Charlie Rose or Bill Moyers. Why? Some are ticked because he led the effort internally at the Peacock to remove Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann from both commentating and anchoring big election events. And he has served as what some call "shuttle diplomacy" with the McCain campaign, promising them they could get fair coverage from NBC. And MoveOn started...

Virginia Republicans are warning that John McCain's prospects for winning a state that has been in the GOP column in every presidential election since 1964 could be in jeopardy. With Barack Obama treating the Old Dominion like a battleground state and reliable polls showing a margin-of-error race there, some are cautioning that McCain is making a critical mistake by allowing the Democratic nominee to outpace him in terms of visits and resources committed.... Together, McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, have held just one campaign event in Virginia. And the campaign has taken its ads off the pricey Washington,...

Amid growing concerns about the economy, Ohio Democrats are coming home to Sen. Barack Obama, giving him a 7-point advantage in a new Dispatch Poll as the volatile presidential campaign swings into its final month. The Illinois senator's lead of 49 percent to 42 percent over Republican Sen. John McCain comes at an especially opportune time for Obama because thousands of Ohioans already are casting ballots in the state's first presidential election allowing any registered voter to vote absentee. The new setup takes away some of the heft from the adage "the only poll that counts is the one on...

Justice Department officials released new guidelines Friday that empower FBI agents to use intrusive techniques to gather intelligence within the United States, alarming civil liberties groups and Democratic lawmakers who worry that they invite privacy violations and other abuses. The new road map allows investigators to recruit informants, employ physical surveillance and conduct interviews in which agents disguise their identities in an effort to assess national security threats. FBI agents could pursue each of those steps without any single fact indicating a person has ties to a terrorist organization.

Early in last night's vice-presidential debate, Sarah Palin said that she might not answer the questions as moderator Gwen Ifill posed them. This was the Alaska governor's way of saying she was going to stick to the talking points she had stuffed into her head, no matter what the subject. When Palin described John McCain's health-care plan, she talked about his offer of a $5,000 tax credit so families could buy insurance. She failed to mention that McCain would pay for the credit by taxing existing insurance benefits. Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden -- politely -- pounced on her omission,...

Sarah Palin has committed yet another political blunder after claiming she had held talks with a British ambassador - talks that never actually took place. In an answer to questions about her foreign policy experience ahead of tonight's make-or-break vice presidential TV debate, her aides listed numerous contacts with foreign officials - including Britain's ambassador to Washington, Sir Nigel Sheinwald. However the meeting never occurred....