Free Republic

A formal complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission Thursday claims Sean "Diddy" Combs violated federal law during the U.S. presidential campaign. The National Legal and Policy Center, NPLC, claims Diddy violated the Federal Election Campaign Act and the Internal Revenue Service Code, when he rallied support of Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, AllHipHop.com reported. The NLPC alleges a Detroit rally conducted by Diddy's non-profit group, Citizen Change, included speeches from actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick urging the crowd to oust President Bush from office. The complaint asks the FEC to investigate whether Diddy used his...

Do you think it’s easy being Teresa Heinz Kerry today? This is a sad weekend for the Beautiful People of Louisburg Square. Yesterday was the first anniversary of Sen. Liveshot Kerry’s grudging concession speech at Faneuil Hall, after he was narrowly defeated for the presidency by a mere 4 million votes. It’s been a sad year for the Kerrys and all their get-a-life, trust-funded supporters who refuse to remove the fading Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers. This week, New England Cable News reporter Alison King interviewed 67-year-old Mama T about life since the tragedy of Ohio. (They were robbed in the Buckeye...

The tan-colored home in Shoreline shows signs of the times. A blue sign near the window reads, "Bush-Cheney." A large one near the front walkway declares, "Elect David Irons -- King County Executive." Ken Potts, a Vietnam War veteran and Shoreline resident, has become the target of vandalism aimed at his politics. An electronic display in an upstairs window scrolls these words in red: "Liberalism is a mental disorder." "That's a quote from Michael Savage," Ken Potts, the owner of the home, explains, referring to the strident talk radio personality. "He's a little right of me, but he comes up...

October 5, 2005 -- THE producer at the center of last year's "Memogate" scandal at CBS News says she was derailed by a vast right-wing conspiracy. The producer, Mary Mapes, is one of four CBS staffers fired last January in the wake of the scandal. She is convinced she was the victim of a group of loosely associated Internet bloggers "with a harsh political bent" who pounced on CBS News minutes after the airing of the now-infamous Texas Air National Guard story on "60 Minutes 2" in September 2004... "Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Websites I had...

As many of you might remember, the DUmmie FUnnies blog began with coverage of the DUmmie reaction to the forged Texas Air National Guard Memos presented on a the CBS 60 Minutes II show hosted by Dan Rather. At the time of the exposure, Dan Rather insisted the memos were really authentic. Rather kept INSISTING on the authenticity of those obviously forged memos even when it was proven beyond a shadow of doubt that they were fake. After Dan Rather retired was fired from CBS News, he changed his tune a bit by saying that even though the memos...

The new documentary “Inside the Bubble” a look at the 2004 presidential campaign of John F....ng Kerry. CAUTION THERE ARE A LOT OF PROFANITY WHICH HAS BEEN BLEEPED OUT! http://www.xchangestudios.com/Video/Promo4Beeped.wmv

I will vote against the nomination of John Roberts to serve as Chief Justice of the United States. I refuse to vote for a Supreme Court nominee who came before the Senate intent on demonstrating his ability to deftly deflect legitimate questions about his views, opinions and philosophy. If he is confirmed – and he may well be – the Roberts Court will shape the course of constitutional law for decades to come. It will decide dozens of cases that will define the depth and breadth of freedom in America – our commitment to civil rights, our dedication to civil...

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather said Monday that there is a climate of fear running through newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career. Rather famously tangled with President Nixon and his aides during the Watergate years while Rather was a hard-charging White House correspondent. Addressing the Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, occasionally forcing back tears, he said that in the intervening years, politicians "of every persuasion" had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks. He called it a "new journalism...

The Ohio secretary of state announced yesterday that a series of election-related constitutional amendments had qualified for the November ballot, including one intended to strip Republican elected officials of their control over drawing legislative districts. The amendments are sponsored by Reform Ohio Now, a coalition dominated by Democrats, unions and watchdog groups. It celebrated the announcement and said a statewide campaign to win approval in November had begun. "It's not like we're posting yard signs yet, but we're close to that," the campaign manager of Reform Ohio Now, Scarlett Bauder, said. "Right now the time is ripe for reform." The...

Many liberals stated that they wished the South was obliterated from the United States. Well, they got their wish last week.

Ten Good Reasons to Believe that the 2004 Presidential Election Was Stolen The question of what role election fraud played in determining the results of the 2004 Presidential election can be validly approached by consideration of either the total U.S. popular vote or the election results in Ohio. Ohio, because the addition of that state alone to John Kerry’s column would have given him an electoral victory. And the popular vote, because it is inconceivable that there was enough election fraud to switch the popular vote from Kerry to Bush without switching Ohio as well – given the relatively close...

AIR ENRON: NO LETTING UP By Michelle Malkin · August 10, 2005 01:49 PM Al Franken is laughing it off and the elite media is still blowing it off, but the Air America/Air Enron financial fiasco continues to unfold. Ed Morrissey and his legal consultant/reader Eric Costello shine renewed light on the Piquant buyout shell game here and here, previously explored by Leon H. at Macho Nachos. The Washington Times pounds the MSM and race hustlers' blackout in a new editorial today, "Air Scamerica." And in a fascinating little side development, a former Clear Channel official has been hired by...

The American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund (“ACVR Legislative Fund”) is proud to present the following report as the most comprehensive and authoritative review of the facts surrounding allegations of vote fraud, intimidation and suppression made during the 2004 presidential election. Using court records, police reports and news articles, ACVR Legislative Fund presents this “after action report” which documents hundreds of incidents and allegations from around the country, notes whether a factual basis for the charge exists and assesses what actions, if any, were taken by the responsible party, law enforcement or the courts. Most importantly, ACVR Legislative Fund...

Canadians can put away those extra welcome mats -- it seems Americans unhappy about the result of last November's presidential election have decided to stay at home after all. In the days after President Bush won a second term, the number of U.S. citizens visiting Canada's main immigration Web site shot up sixfold, prompting speculation that unhappy Democrats would flock north. But official statistics show the number of Americans actually applying to live permanently in Canada fell in the six months after the election. On the face of it this is not good news -- Canada is one of the...

A meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council on Monday cast harsh light on the current crisis within the Democratic Party. It has at least four problems. One is that it lost the 2004 elections badly. The second is that its primary support organization, the labor movement, has just split. The third is that it has no obvious presidential candidate for 2008 and isn't showing much flair in trying to find one. The fourth is that, even though the Republicans don't have a presidential candidate yet either, they still present a relatively smooth phalanx in the field, based largely on their...

Many music-minded viewers of the MLB All-Star Game earlier this month were shocked, astonished and disillusioned at the newest truck commercial Chevrolet unveiled. I know I was when I saw it a week or so later -- there were the standard shots of Chevy trucks sending up billowing clouds of dust as they thrummed down rutted dirt roads, crashing and splashing through rocky streams, and burly, flannel-shirted rednecks tossing bales of hay around -- but what was that music playing in the background? It was infinitely familiar yet, given its surroundings, completely out-of-place and exotic, like running into your spinster...

BALTIMORE, (AP) -- Sinclair Broadcasting did not violate federal election law by running portions of a documentary critical of John Kerry's Vietnam-era anti-war activities, the Federal Elections Commission announced Friday. Suburban Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., owner of 62 television stations that reach a quarter of all U.S. households, was criticized for what the Democratic National Committee said was a plan to order its stations to show the documentary, "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 2 presidential election. The DNC filed the FEC complaint on Oct. 12, contending that showing the film...

The old media, with their documented and demonstrable liberal bias, have lost much of their clout. But through the networks, the major papers, and the White House press corps, they continue to set the national agenda. And that means there are some things you just don't write about if you want to remain "in" with the liberal media. Newsweek senior writer Charles Gasparino, appearing on Tina Brown's now-defunct CNBC show, made the following admission. "We sow the seeds of our own demise. Journalists have been advocates of the liberal attitude for way too long, and now we're paying the price....

TONIGHT President Bush will discuss the situation in Iraq. It's long past time to get it right in Iraq. The Bush administration is courting disaster with its current course - a course with no realistic strategy for reducing the risks to our soldiers and increasing the odds for success. The reality is that the Bush administration's choices have made Iraq into what it wasn't before the war - a breeding ground for jihadists. Today there are 16,000 to 20,000 jihadists and the number is growing. The administration has put itself - and, tragically, our troops, who pay the price every...

-SNIP-What is presidential intelligence and how much does it really matter? We can all recite the lists of ostentatiously brilliant presidents who faltered (Wilson, Hoover, etc.) and apparent plodders who triumphed (Truman). When I was covering the Reagan White House in 1981, all his top aides were wholesaling Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous comment about Franklin Roosevelt's possessing "a second-rate intellect, but a first-rate temperament." In the end, Reagan confounded scholars, journalists and voters alike. In an obituary essay, his biographer Edmund Morris referred first to Reagan's "intelligence" and later to his "ignorance." To be fair, innate intelligence has to do...

It has long been understood that the Spanish socialists shamelessly exploited the March 11, 2004, terrorist attacks in Madrid’s train station for political advantage. They did so with palpable disregard for a frightening fact: The far-reaching geostrategic repercussions of that incident...gave those seeking similar results elsewhere every incentive to engage in violence against other democracies’ electoral processes. But what if the perpetrators were neither Islamofacists, as the winning socialists immediately asserted, nor the Basque terrorist organization known as ETA, as the government of José Maria Aznar initially (and fatally) assumed? On May 16, the Madrid daily El Mundo published a...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- During the 2004 presidential elections, the mainstream news media frequently engaged in bias -- especially on pro-life issues such as abortion and stem cell research. As with previous polls, a new survey confirms most members of the media voted for Democrat John Kerry over President George W. Bush. The University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy found journalists picked Kerry over Bush by 68 percent to 25 percent. The college sampled 300 journalists, from both newspapers and TV. The poll also found that Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1 and twice as many self-identified themselves as...

Two arrest warrants were issued Wednesday alleging election fraud by two voter-registration workers employed last year to sign up new voters. According to warrants filed by the Milwaukee County district attorney's office, Urelene Lilly, 48, and Marcus L. Lewis, 23, both admitted to authorities that they filled out multiple voter-registration cards using fictitious information to earn money from Project Vote, which paid workers such as them $40 per day plus $1.75 for each registration above the daily quota of 24 new voters.... Lilly and Lewis were charged with five felonies each: three counts of forgery, one count of election fraud...

The investigators found hundreds of fraudulent votes in all and counted 4,600 more ballots than registered voters in Milwaukee — but did not uncover any proof of a plot to alter the outcome of the hotly contested presidential race in Wisconsin's largest city. They also found ballots cast using the names of dead people. Prosecutors have not filed criminal charges in the probe. "There is not the evidence of an overriding conspiracy in all of this," U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic said. The task force, however, did find evidence of sloppy record-keeping and poor training for poll workers, who were overwhelmed...

There is an undeniable fury building among Republican voters coast to coast. It has now been almost six months since that euphoric day last year -- November 2nd -- when Republicans stunned Democrats across the board. Not only did President Bush handily beat John Kerry, but the GOP did what few predicted -- it managed to pick up four seats in the Senate. John Thune's victory over Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle in South Dakota was extra sweet. That seems like six years ago, not six months ago. Talk to your average Republican voter today and you will find a...

SAN MARCOS, Calif. (AP) -- Filmmaker and Michigan native Michael Moore has established a scholarship for students who defy the administration at California State University, San Marcos - the same school that canceled his talk last year. The Michael Moore Freedom of Speech Scholarship will award two $2,500 annual scholarships to Cal State San Marcos students "who have done the most to fight for issues of student rights by standing up to the administration," according to a news release issued Wednesday. The first scholarships will be awarded in the 2005-2006 academic year. Winners will be announced in June. Cal State...

BALTIMORE -- The 11 News I-Team has obtained the rest of the story about what Joe Steffen, an Ehrlich appointee, said on a Web site concerning Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley's personal life. I-Team reporter David Collins said the Democrats have used the postings to portray Steffen as a Republican dirty trickster and republicans said he was set up. Steffen communicated with a mysterious Web site user calling themselves MD4Bush and we have both sides of the conversation that was originally done in private. The summer of 2004 sizzled with rumors surrounding the personal life of O'Malley and Steffen got caught...

It is almost three months AFTER the Inauguration and the DUmmies are still reliving the agony of their November defeat. They STILL can’t get over it as you can see in this DUmmie THREAD titled, “kerry crap and the election.” According to DUmmie theology, Kerry ran a better campaign than Bush and actually won the election. So I guess Teh-RAY-suh is now our first lady, right? Perhaps in the DUmmie alternate universe where they have created their own reality. In any event, it is quite hilarious to watch the DUmmies relive and agonize over the 2004 election. Nothing like...

ohn Kerry, the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam*, showed up yesterday at a Boston event, where he was "using crutches as he recovers from knee surgery," reports the Associated Press. He was also using emotional crutches as he recovers from last year's election: "Last year too many people were denied their right to vote, too many who tried to vote were intimidated," the Massachusetts senator said at an event sponsored by the state League of Women Voters. . . . Kerry also cited examples Sunday of how people were duped into not voting. "Leaflets...

Coloring by the NumbersThe Blue and the Red, part 2 By Chris Shugart, Mar 31, 2005 I can't recall a time when Democrats got so many things so wrong. The DNC 2004 election cycle was a series of miscalculations and faulty assessments that caught them flat-footed; like unsuspecting creatures frozen in the headlights, leaving them flattened like so much political road kill. And then their wild explanations for how and why they lost only confirmed just how clueless they were.One of their earliest explanations was also one of the most foolish. Liberal analysts jumped to the flimsy conclusion that people who...

Free and Honest elections are the very foundation..... Those who would work counter to this principle should be held to account and appropriate safeguards should be adopted to protect votes of all citizens.

Only 59 of the Nation's 435 Congressional Districts Split Their Vote for President and House Political polarization intensified during the 2004 elections, continuing a trend that has defined voting behavior for most of the past decade and that has left the two major parties increasingly homogenized and partisan. Only 59 of the 435 congressional districts went in different directions in presidential and House elections last year, according to newly released data from the political analysis firm Polidata. In the remaining districts, voters either backed both President Bush and the Republican House candidate or John F. Kerry and the Democratic House...

John Kerry is on the road again, listing excuses for losing in 2004 and looking like a 2008 campaigner. Monday, Mar. 28, 2005 It seemed as if the campaign had never ended. There was John Kerry standing on a chair in a blue neighborhood of Atlanta, in the Democrat-friendly tavern Manuel's, speaking to 100 folks, many of them wearing Kerry-Edwards T shirts. The Massachusetts Senator insisted that he wasn't "one to lick wounds," but then he did: he noted that Bush had won with the smallest percentage margin ever for an incumbent and complained that the Republican team had six...

The Truth About Fascism There's been a lot of dishonest comparison of President Bush to Mussolini and Hitler. Personally I think the people that make these statements make them out of a combination of ignorance of what Fascism really is and their own blind hatred of anything and anyone conservative. So I did a little digging and came up with a definition of what Fascism is and what it stands for. Here is what I found: The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini's, that * exalts nation and sometimes race above the individual, *...

King County names 99 felons who voted illegally No way to tell for whom they cast ballots in gubernatorial race Gregory Roberts Seattle Post-Intelligencer 3/9/05 The King County prosecutor yesterday identified 99 convicted felons who voted illegally in the November election that gave Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire a reed-thin victory. He said he'll move to revoke their voter registrations. But there's no way to know for whom the 99 voted, or even if they made a choice in the race between Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi, said Dan Satterberg, chief of staff for King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng. Republicans nonetheless...

George W. Bush is a transformative president. Bill Clinton skillfully adapted to circumstances. George W. Bush -- clumsily in the view of his critics, but with confidence self-evident to those who watched his State of the Union with clear eyes -- sets out to transform America and the world. And is succeeding. Consider Social Security, the centerpiece of Bush's domestic policy this year. The conventional wisdom is that change is impossible. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid says he has 45 votes lined up to filibuster any change. But Bush is working to change public opinion. The first polls taken after...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - The banishment of chads helped lead to the lowest level of invalid ballots ever measured in a presidential or gubernatorial election in Florida, said a report released Tuesday. Floridians cast about 1.5 million more votes in the 2004 presidential election than they did in the disputed 2000 contest, yet the combined number of overvotes and undervotes fell by about 83 percent from 179,855 to 31,453, according to the report prepared by the Department of State. George W. Bush carried the state by nearly 381,000 votes. Overvotes are ballots on which more than one candidate is selected;...

Primary Colors, The Blue and the Red, Part 1By Chris Shugart, Jan 28, 2005It's not going to take a psychic soothsayer to predict that one of the most overused sets of words we'll encounter in political discussions for the next few years will be variations of the "blue states" versus "red states" distinction. Analysts will assess issues by determining their impact on "red" states compared to "blue" states. Pundits will frame political topics as "blue state issues," or "red state issues." And just about anyone with a political opinion will find it hard to resist occasionally breaking down the American...

Two sons of prominent Democratic polticians and three paid party activists will face felony charges as a result of a widely-publicized attempt to keep Republicans from voting on Election Day in Milwaukee. The charges will be filed on Monday, highlighting the other unrelated issues of voter fraud in Wisconsin's largest city and Democratic stronghold:

Expect tire-slashing charges Monday Sources say politicians' sons, 3 other Democrats will be hit with felonies Posted: Jan. 22, 2005 Spivak & Bice Cary Spivak &Dan Bice E-MAIL  |  ARCHIVE   The investigation into the Great Tire-Slashing Caper will end Monday with felony charges against the adult sons of two prominent Milwaukee politicians - U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore and former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt. Sources close to the 83-day-old probe said Sowande Omokunde, Michael Pratt and three other paid Democratic activists will each be charged with a single felony count of criminal damage to property, legalese for vandalism. Omokunde, also...

Democrats will never win elections without better people and better ideas. BY DAN GERSTEIN Saturday, January 15, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST When John Kerry ripped defeat from the jaws of victory last November, losing to a wounded president with a failed record, a few of us Democratic outliers took some solace in thinking that his campaign's dismal performance might actually force the party to own up to its mortal electoral weaknesses. Turns out we grossly underestimated the national Democrats' capacity for self-delusion and self-defeat. Yes, it's only been two months, and it's not realistic to expect the party to remake...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) County election officials plan to ask Ohio's secretary of state to reconsider requiring the statewide use of paper ballots. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the state's top election official, on Wednesday ordered Ohio's 88 counties to use optical scan machines, which read the marks voters make on paper ballots. If the cash-strapped counties do not purchase the machines from two state-approved companies, they forfeit their share of the $106 million in federal Help America Vote Act funds allotted to purchase voting machines and would have to pay for the conversion themselves. Michael Sciortino, president of the Ohio...

Democrat Christine Gregoire will be sworn in as Washington's Governor today, possibly thanks to voters such as Mary Coffey, James Courneya and Rosalie Simpson. Why do we mention them in particular? Because, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently reported, they're all dead... Revelations of the formerly living casting ballots in elections isn't new to American politics, although it's something most of us thought was a relic of the late Richard Daley's Chicago. But this isn't the only jaw-dropper to have come out of Washington's gubernatorial race, which Ms. Gregoire claims to have won -- on a third recount, by 129 votes...

Report just issues, mapes finally fired

(From CCN article 1/06/2005) ...The move was not designed to overturn Bush's re-election, said Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones and California Sen. Barbara Boxer, who filed the objection. The objecting Democrats, all of whom are House members except Boxer, said they wanted to draw attention to the need for aggressive election reform in the wake of what they said were widespread voter problems. (From USA Today Article 11/06/2002)... But Mondale conceded that the full-throated partisanship of an Oct. 29 memorial service for Wellstone may have contributed to his defeat by energizing Republican voters. The three-hour memorial, attended by 20,000 people,...

I've got some audio sound bites that I want to share with you from yesterday. And to get into this, there's just a tremendous piece today in the Tallahassee news. I'm not sure what the name of the newspaper is, but I've got their website here. It's Tallahassee.com. It's by Bill Cotterell or Cotterell. He's the Capital Curmudgeon and this is a great fun little piece here that illustrates -- I don't know if he intends it to be fun -- but it illustrates the problems the Democrats have. The headline of his piece: "Democrats in Congress Must Walk a...

Guess What Kids, We Have a Senator Now January 6th 7:24 PM Our rally in Upper Senate Park at Constitution Avenue and the U.S. Capitol was a breathtaking event and brought together almost every relevant faction in the opposition to Bush with the notable exception of Rev. Jackson and Rainbow/PUSH, who did not attend as Rev. Jackson had promised me on the telephone. He was nearby so he must have made a decision that he did not wish to cooperate with us, which is regretable but not unexpected. Jesse Jackson is a dynamic speaker and powerful voice, but at the...

Christopher Dodd, the senator from Connecticut, is now speaking on the floor of the Senate about election irregularities. Notice again that they never do this when they win elections, and they only do this when Republicans win elections in battleground states, Florida or Ohio. Many other states had much closer results this time around. You remember Christopher Dodd. There used to be, I don't think the restaurant's open anymore, I can't remember the name of the restaurant -- (interruption) -- that's right, what a fitting name, La Brassiere in Washington, Chris Dodd was one half of a technique he and...

The bipartisan legislation was the result of findings by a commission headed by former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Only two senators voted against the measure: New York Democrats Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, who opposed requiring voters to identify themselves. In New York, anyone can "prove" his identity by merely signing his name – or anyone's name.

Apparently there are some Democrats in the house that have put together a plan to 'protest' the 2% 118,000 vote Bush victory in Ohio... They have apparently come up with 102 pages of whine that includes such things as long lines, confusion, and misinformation. It doesn't take a mental giant to conclude that it really isn't about any issues specific to Ohio, but rather about the fact that Ohio was the closest state that mattered in a not so close election. Democrats simply wouldn't be Democrats if they didn't protest something during a lost Presidential election. So in this case...