Free Republic

Bachmann signs "values" pledge to oppose same-sex marriage, Sharia law, pornography By Stephanie Condon Social conservative presidential candidate Michele Bachmann ups the ante in Iowa by signing a "values" pledge that other Republican presidential candidates may not support Socially-conservative GOP presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota has become the first candidate to sign a conservative Christian group's pledge to oppose same-sex marriage and uphold "core values." Bachmann's commitment to the pledge ups the ante in Iowa, where the other Republican candidates may now be pressed harder to prove their social conservative credentials. The support of groups like Family Leader,...

Democrats must be in trouble if The Daily Beast is running a headline White Supremacist Stampede, with this opening line: Add to the growing list of candidates considering a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 America’s most famous white-power advocate: David Duke. Ah yes, the David Duke card gets played. Duke is an anti-Semitic kook who is far more likely in recent years to be hobnobbing with anti-Israel European leftists and Islamists than with anyone associated with the Republican Party or the Tea Party movement. Yet The Daily Beast trots out a possible (inevitable?) Duke run for President...

COMMENTARY | The mainstream media is consistently manipulated by Sarah Palin. The same Sarah Palin they criticize for being dimwitted is beating the news media at their own game. The release of more than 24,000 pages of emails by the Alaska governor's office is just the latest incident Palin has orchestrated to once again keep he name in the news without committing to run in 2012. The 24,000 plus pages of emails released to the press Friday were in printed form as reported by Yahoo! News. The release of the emails was an embarrassing feeding frenzy as media outlets loaded...

President Barack Obama is pivoting from diplomacy on the world stage to the intimate and delicate domestic task of acting as healer-in-chief to a devastated community. The president travels to tornado-wrecked Joplin, Mo., on Sunday, a day after returning from a six-day European tour of Ireland, England, France and Poland. After days of focusing on the U.S. relationship with the rest of the world, he'll turn to an even more critical connection: his own, with the American people. The president will visit with survivors and family members of the worst tornado in decades, a monster storm that tore through Joplin...

At a press conference last week, someone asked Chris Christie for his views on evolution vs. creationism. "That's none of your business," the New Jersey governor barked in response. ...it says even more about the current state of the national Republican Party, where magical thinking trumps rationality, and even to acknowledge basic realities about the world we live in runs the risk of damaging one's political future. Christie is not part of the natural constituency for Darwin-denial... (but) he must constantly ask himself the question: Am I about to say something to which a white, evangelical, socially conservative, gun-owning, Obama-despising,...

The White House said it is ending its long-running practice of having presidents re-enact televised speeches for news photographers following major addresses to the country, a little-known arrangement that fed suggestions of fakery when Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden. After Obama's live, late-evening address from the East Room of the White House on May 1, five photographers were ushered in to shoot pictures as the president stood at the podium and re-read a few lines of his speech — a practice that news organizations have protested for years. Even though The Associated Press and other news...

It was just a firehouse chat with the guys of Engine 54 in lower Manhattan. But President Barack Obama delivered a message he hopes will also hit home with every American in this week of national catharsis: "You're always going to have a president and an administration who's got your back." In the denouement to the daring raid that brought down Osama bin Laden, the president has in effect been reintroduced to the nation. While taking care to strike the right tone — trying to savor the success of the dramatic covert operation without appearing to gloat — Obama has...

One thinks of rats scurrying off a sinking ship. Meaning the new exodus of birthers from birtherism. Fox News now says in a blog post that it hardly pushed the birther issue at all. Wonder how folks got the idea Fox did that? Oh yeah: by watching Fox. And Rush Limbaugh says he “warned people this was a dead end.” This is the same Limbaugh who recently said there were “legitimate citizenship questions” about President Obama. Granted, some on the right were starting to distance themselves from this absurdity even before Obama finally released his long form birth certificate last...

What if the biggest mystery surrounding Col. Moammar Gadhafi had nothing to do with his long, brutal reign as the world's most eccentric and violent leader turned pariah? And what if a long-lost letter from a Catholic cardinal who knew Gadhafi's true identity was evidence that could have solved the mystery? To many Libyan people, the biggest question mark about Gadhafi does not involve his repressive and dictatorial rule, delusional statements or brazen lies. Behind closed doors, for years, they've wondered if he is Jewish. Last week the issue came out in the open, as NBC's Richard Engel reported from...

Conservative activist James O'Keefe, whose deceptively edited hidden camera videos have made him a star on the right, is out with a new video targeting National Public Radio executive Ron Schiller - and by extension NPR itself. The video purports to show Schiller speaking to a pair of men posing as representatives of a phony Muslim group called seeking to give $5 million to NPR. The men tell Schiller they are affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist political movement. It shows Schiller stating that the Republican Party and the Tea Party is "fanatically involved in people's personal lives and...

Another young product of Columbia J-school, another typical MSMer . . . Appearing on MSNBC's Daily Rundown today, NBC reporter Domenico Montanaro spoke of "the egregious Lee Atwater." What made the insult particularly . . . notorious is that it was entirely gratuitous, utterly unrelated to the subject at hand. Montanaro was reporting on the fact that Reince Priebus is the youngest RNC Chairman since Atwater. Montanaro first refers simply to "Lee Atwater," but then pauses and rephrases as "the notorious Lee Atwater." So Montanaro went out of his way to swipe at the late Atwater, who at the end...

WASHINGTON -- When President John Kennedy visited Dallas in November 1963, he was greeted by a full-page newspaper ad accusing him of being a communist fellow traveler. To his wife he observed, "Oh, you know, we're headed into nut country today." The city, according to historian William Manchester, was a "mecca" for "the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies." In the hours following Kennedy's assassination, aides assumed a right-wing radical was responsible. When Robert Kennedy informed Jacqueline about Lee Harvey Oswald's leftist background, she felt sick. "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights,"...

EXCERPT- Knowing very well most Americans objected to the "end of life" measure in the new health care legislation due to fears it could eventually give doctors a government financial incentive or even mandate to encourage severely ill patients to make life ending decisions too prematurely, Congressman Blumenauer thumbed his nose to the masses. It must be painfully obvious to Mr. Blumenauer that Americans did not want his end-of-life measure, so the Oregon Congressman decided to run around the will of the people by bureaucratic fiat. Instead, he and his fellow Democrats eventually omitted the measure from the bill only...

UK media U.S. political reporting U.S. media attacking anyone that could challenge they're party with a cue from (I AM SURE, The Axelrod machine currently on record; as out of the WH campaigning for Obama.)

The titans of American industry were all assembled at the White House complex Wednesday. There was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. There was Kenneth Chenault, the chairman of American Express. And there was Barack Obama, the sometimes owner of General Motors, Chrysler, Citibank, Bank of America, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The president's advance team handled it like a state visit. The Secret Service shut down Lafayette Square as the CEOs huddled inside Blair House -- where foreign dignitaries often stay. The U.S. Park Police were mounted, the presidential limousines were idling, and men with scary-looking weapons stood...

Like Dogs to Vomit, Media Matters Cleans Up Liberal Media Messes Just like dogs that merrily slurp vomit to the last chunk, bloggers at the Democratic party front group Media Matters for America follow behind liberal media outlets, lapping up their latest noxious dousing of conservatives. Then with a satisfied smirk, Media Matters gloats "what vomit?" when conservatives complain about being puked on by the press. The latest example of Media Matters' vomit fetish is their defense of the attempted smear of Sarah Palin during her humanitarian trip to Haiti last weekend by the Associated Press and others as a hair-obsessed...

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin traveled to Haiti this weekend as a guest of the Rev. Franklin Graham and Samaritan's Purse to spotlight the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the earthquake and cholera-stricken Caribbean (half an) island nation. Instead she has found herself embroiled in a scandal, accused of bringing a hair stylist on the trip to make herself look good for the cameras and "photo-ops.".The Associated Press transmitted a photo from Haiti of Palin captioned, "Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, center, has her hair done during a visit to a cholera treatment center set up by the NGO Samaritan's Purse...

No bargaining, no deals, no compromise — that's the hard-line stance that Republicans have staked in the days since seizing control of the House. Their prescription for the sluggish economy — lower taxes, huge spending cuts, less regulation, and repeal of the sweeping healthcare law just taking effect — excites the party's conservative base. But a long and ugly fight with President Obama and Senate Democrats, starting with next week's lame-duck session, could end up alienating the large number of Americans more interested in jobs than ideological battles. The midterm vote was "an expression of anger and impatience," said James...

AS a schoolboy in Jakarta, Barack Obama attended Muslim prayer sessions with his classmates against the wishes of his mother. The US President's former grade three teacher said that Mr Obama - who was known as "Barry" when he attended the Menteng One school in Jakarta - studied the Koran and went to classes on Islam, despite the objections of Anne Dunham, a Roman Catholic. The teacher's recollections will add to speculation about Mr Obama's links to Islam during his much-anticipated visit to Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, as part of his ten-day tour of Asia.

US women's groups Thursday were bracing for a fight over abortion rights and gender equality with the new conservative majority in Congress. "We now face an anti-choice majority and a new speaker of the House who will threaten to roll back hard-fought progress for women," said Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest women's group in the United States. Republicans by Wednesday had picked up 60 seats in the 435-seat House of Representatives, well more than the 39 they needed for a majority. At least 49 of the newcomers to the House are opposed to...