Free Republic

Subtitle: Machiavelli on the Greatest Sedition - Whisper Campaigns As opposed to formal charges from a prosecutor, in which the accused has constitutional protections at his disposal, the accused in whisper campaigns typically finds little relief. High school girls are notorious for their vicious whisper campaigns against other girls. Long before social media, these terrible women, terribilis mulieres, made life so awful for their victims that even in old age, few forget the misery. [snip] Niccolo’ Machiavelli, in his Discourses on Livy, believed the Roman grand jury, with its power to indict and to clear names and reputations, regularly saved...

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said Thursday that his office is exploring whether disinformation tactics deployed against Republican Roy Moore during last year's special election violated state campaign laws and said he was worried that the operation could have affected the closely fought Senate race. "The information is concerning," Marshall, a Republican, said in a phone interview. "The impact it had on the election is something that's significant for us to explore, and we'll go from there." Moore lost the election to his Democratic rival, Sen. Doug Jones. Marshall, who said he learned of the disinformation campaign called Project Birmingham...

Trump strategist Roger Stone tells NJ 101.5 radio that even if Donald Trump wins a majority of pledged delegates to the Republican convention, Cruz will utilize "Trojan horse" delegates (who are bound to vote for Trump only on the first RNC nomination ballot) to vote on "procedural" matters in the Rules Committee or Credentials committee to block or disallow certain votes. ROGER STONE: Unfortunately just because Donald Trump gets the 1,237 [delegates needed to win], doesn't mean we aren't going to have a brokered convention. My sources, who are pretty good in the Republican Party, indicate to me that Ted...

TEXAS senator Ted Cruz is embroiled in a sex scandal befitting the bizarre nature of the current the Republican race for the presidential nomination. An angry Cruz has accused “Donald Trump and his henchmen” of feeding the National Enquirer a salacious story claiming the conservative Christian politician has had extramarital affairs with five different women. “This National Enquirer story is garbage. It is complete and utter lies,” Cruz snapped after a campaign stop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin on Friday. “It is a tabloid smear, and it is a smear that has come from Donald Trump and his henchmen.” The supermarket tabloid...

(From Raw Story, via Fark) Some people in Georgia are worried about voting issues after being erroneously given Republican ballots, when they were registered Democrats... ...An Austin radio station Tuesday was flooded with callers complaining their votes for candidate Donald Trump were changed to rival Marco Rubio.

The senator's comments also marked a sharp reversal for his support of Roberts in 2005, BuzzFeed reports. The report cites Cruz's support for Roberts' nomination in a 2005 op-ed piece for the National Review and an internal memo he wrote as Texas Solicitor General praising Roberts' skill as a litigator. "I’ve worked with John and seen him argue numerous cases, and, to my mind, there’s not another appellate advocate who’s even close," Cruz wrote.

Southwest Missouri Congressional candidate Scott Eckersley blames the campaign staff of his Republican opponent for issuing a hoax that he had suspended his campaign. An e-mail sent to news media outlets and a "tweet" issued by a fake Twitter account announced that Eckersley had suspended his campaign due to personal reasons. Eckersley blames his opponent, Republican Billy Long, for sending out the hoax days before the election. "You know this is dirty politics. This is Jeff Roe style management. That's who Billy's retained. That's who he writes the big checks to," Eckersley tells Missourinet affiliate KTTS. "This is Kansas City...

I've been seeing this fake Cruz "news story" making the rounds on Facebook and it's already bamboozled some of my less-sharp pals. There's a fake USATODAY website out there (usatoday.com.co), with the look of USATODAY, that claims Ted Cruz stated that U.S. Military veterans should "self-fund via sales of cookies, like the Girl Scouts."

Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) alleged that the Tea Party wants to bring back segregation and make women “secondary citizens” at an event that on Saturday.

A new documentary makes the controversial case that a political cocktail of big corporate money and racially charged sentiments has helped fuel the rise of the tea party. And squarely behind that movement, the film argues, are the Koch brothers. Co-Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin sat down with “Top Line” to discuss their film, “Citizen Koch,” and why they say the GOP’s deep-pocketed donors, the Koch brothers, are such figures in American politics today. “Money – $100 billion now,” Deal said in explaining the Kochs’ influence. “When we started out making this film, their net worth was about $68...

A new Facebook meme paints two leading Republicans as anti-science because of their alleged views of the age of the Earth. The Facebook group Being Liberal posted a picture March 10, 2014, featuring side-by-side images of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., looking somewhat sheepish. Bolded text under the images describes the senators’ views on the age of the Earth and the extinction of the dinosaurs. According to the meme, Rubio "believes Earth (is) 9,000 years old," and "humans hunted dinosaurs to extinction." Paul, the image proclaims, says the Earth is 10,000 years old and believes "God...

<p>On Friday a producer and former CBS reporter named Itay Hod put up a Facebook post intended to out Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock. The tabloid media, for years, has played a game with the young Republican—wink-wink stories about his photoshoot for a men's health magazine, the sexy celebrities he follows on Twitter, stuff like that.</p>

A&E knew all about "Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson feelings toward gays when it hired him -- because the guy openly preached that gays were going to hell years before the series started. Take a look at the video (above) of a 2010 sermon at Berean Bible Church in Pennsylvania ... it's pretty much your typical bible-thumping drill. Phil calls gay people shameful, perverse, heartless, faithless, senseless God haters ... destined for the burning pits of hell. snip

The fired chief of staff for U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander was expected Thursday in federal court after the aide's arrest on probable cause for possession and distribution of child pornography, authorities said.

I've tried my level damndest to ignore the latest Richard Cohen column controversy, because life is short and Cohen will stumble into another racial contretemps within six weeks or so. And I don't like the idea of a columnist being Mau-Mau'd out of a job because he's a casual bigot. The smarmy-sounding Fred Hiatt defense—that Cohen "isn’t afraid to take on subjects where culture and politics and emotion overlap"—isn't entirely wrong. Past-their-prime white guys have opinions, too. No, the problem with Cohen's column was that he made an assertion about an entire class of people being racist, and did no...

Why, three weeks prior to one of the most hotly contested presidential elections in modern history, does America’s Evangelist need to suddenly declare Mormonism no longer a cult? Has there been an unreported change in theology or practice? My maternal grandmother thought Billy Graham was a saint above all others. You simply could not say anything negative about the evangelist in her presence. She held the same regard for Jimmy Carter, because she considered him a godly man and a faithful Sunday school teacher -- even if not an effective president. She also was convinced Henry Kissinger was the anti-Christ,...

When the Obama campaign released its much-anticipated Dashboard platform last May, it was touted as a potentially revolutionary organizing tool that would connect supporters, and merge online activism with real-life grassroots campaigning. It can also be used as a platform to launch whispering campaigns, as one user proved this week. On Monday, a "team member" named Laurence De Palma, who lists his location as East Nashville, presented volunteers with some talking points to convince Southern Christian voters they shouldn't vote for a Mormon. The message was available under "Resources" and tagged "persuasion." "I'm thinking that even though we don't LIKE...

In an effort to rebuff demands that he cite his source for making the claim that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney hasn’t paid taxes in ten years, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) says he is invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. “We all know that Mr. Romney’s request that I name my source is a trap,” Reid complained. “Unauthorized disclosure of a person’s filings with the IRS is a felony. I’m not going to further blacken the name of my extremely credible source just to assuage someone’s out-dated notions of integrity.” Speculation is that Reid’s “extremely credible” unnamed...

In advance of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s speech Wednesday to the NAACP, a liberal group headed by a former New York Times reporter and ex-Media Matter executive have produced a video “satire” that claims blacks don’t like Romney, who they dub so white he makes “Wonder Bread look like pumpernickel.” The YouTube from “The Message,” an online “media hub,” is described as a satirical video of Romney getting advice on what to say to the civil rights group. Or, as they said in a release, the video “lacerates Romney and his advisors as they prepare for his speech to...

A group calling itself "The Women of the 99 Percent" is making robocalls across the United States in an attempt to link Republican members of the House of Representatives to "the war on women led by Rush Limbaugh". The automated calls are illegal because they do not state who they are from (there is no known group called The Women of the 99 Percent) or provide a callback number, as required under the US Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991. ...snip... Telephone calls and emails to the DCCC and the Democratic National Committee asking whether either organisation was connected to...