Free Republic

George W. Bush was elected to a second term by a big majority of Republicans, half of political independents and 11 percent of Democrats. Now, more than two years later, the majority of those voters say they are satisfied with the Bush presidency. But some have lost faith, and those who have say it is because they can no longer back Mr. Bush’s support of the war in Iraq. Fifty-eight percent of Mr. Bush’s voters say their feelings about the administration can best be described as satisfied but not enthusiastic. Nine percent said they are enthusiastic. But 26 percent said...

Four people were indicted Thursday in an alleged kickback scheme that?s at the core of the debate over the firing of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. Former state Senate President Pro Tem Manny Aragon, Toby Martinez, Raul Parra and Sandra Mata Martinez all face charges. The U.S. attorney?s office in Albuquerque says Marc Schiff, Ken Schultz and Manuel Guara had already entered guilty pleas in the case. Investigators say the kickbacks were related to the construction of the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Courthouse in Albuquerque. Iglesias believes he was fired as the federal prosecutor for New Mexico for resisting pressure from Senator...

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has maintained a decidedly low profile following his self-described botched joke in the run-up to the 2006 midterm elections. Many observers concluded that Kerry's silence meant he had given up his dream of becoming the first Democrat since Adlai Stevenson to be renominated by his party four years after losing a presidential race. Wrong. Kerry has recently begun to bolster his Senate and campaign staff in preparation for what some Kerry insiders insist is a likely run for president. Kerry has signed on Erik Smith to serve as a senior adviser to his Senate campaign committee...

MONICA MADNESS BUBBA'S DEM CHIEF BARES HILL TENSION By MAGGIE HABERMAN     (snip)Bill Clinton described that time period as "absolute living hell," McAuliffe said. He uses the book to claim that Kerry, who lost his 2004 challenge to President Bush, had a bumbling and wavering campaign team that was tripped up by a smoother machine. "I thought the decision of the Kerry campaign to back off any real criticism of Bush was one of the biggest acts of political malpractice in the history of American politics," McAuliffe wrote. (snip)McAuliffe says Kerry's aides wanted to oust him as party...

Vice President Dick Cheney Wednesday told a Montana audience the United States is lucky Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., lost the 2004 presidential race. Cheney told supporters in Flathead, Mont., that Kerry's remarks to students at Pasadena City College in California Monday constituted a "swipe at the U.S. military." Kerry said he flubbed a joke about President Bush when he warned students to study hard and be smart -- or they "might get stuck in Iraq." Cheney recalled Kerry last year accused U.S. soldiers of "terrorizing" children in Iraq. He said the senator is always lecturing about "nuances," adding Kerry apparently...

"This November, as dozens of state governors ask for your vote, ask yourself this: Do they deserve it? In states like Wisconsin, Maine and Michigan, NEA members see their governors finding money for programs and salaries, protecting jobs from privatization, and making sure students get what they need. (Can your colleagues in California say the same? We think not.) Yes, governors do make a big difference. And so do you, when you say yea or nay to them on the ballot................... Ohio U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland TWO WORDS: OEA alum THREE ISSUES: 1) WHO HE IS: Strickland is a psychologist...

A couple of days before the 2004 presidential election, an Episcopal clergyman named George Regas delivered a sermon to congregants in Pasadena in the form of a mock debate among Jesus, President Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry over the Iraq war. Regas left no doubt about his anti-war sentiments, saying that Jesus would have told Bush that the war "has led to disaster," but did not specifically endorse anyone in the election. Eight months later, however, All Saints Episcopal Church received a letter from the Internal Revenue Service declaring "a reasonable belief ... that you may not be a...

NEWSWEEK “Isikoffed” the Gonzales Memo Since Christopher Hitchens is correcting old Dowdified quotes, I thought I’d correct one myself. This one, from a 2004 NEWSWEEK article, is a major Dowdification — in my view, every bit as egregious as Dowd’s original. What’s more, it’s still influencing lefties even today. Worse, unlike Dowd’s alteration of a Bush quote, the NEWSWEEK story didn’t even use an ellipsis to indicate what was missing. By altering an Alberto Gonzales quote in this way, NEWSWEEK managed to make Gonzales and the Bush Administration appear unreasonably dismissive of the Geneva Convention. The story was co-authored by...

This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates.

911 Happened on Bush’s Watch As we approach the fifth anniversary of the 911 attacks, it’s time to face some facts. 911 DID happen on President Bush’s watch. He was in charge. The fault for letting the attacks happen rests with the top of the pyramid. The man deserved to be held accountable. Some would have preferred impeachment since it would have offered a partisan chance to avenge the impeachment of President Clinton 8years ago (still perceived by many as having been unwarranted). Lacking impeachment, there should have at least been a national referendum on the Presidency of George W...

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. -- The owner of DataUSA Inc., a company that conducted political polls for the campaigns of President Bush, Sen. Joe Lieberman and other candidates, pleaded guilty to fraud for making up survey and poll results. Tracy Costin pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Costin, 46, faces a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 when she is sentenced Nov. 30. As part of her plea agreement, Costin agreed to repay $82,732 to the unidentified clients for 11 jobs between June 2002 and May 2004. DataUSA is...

BRIDGEPORT — A polling company owner admitted participating in a conspiracy to falsify data in order to meet deadlines for clients, which included the campaigns of President Bush, U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Mayor John M. Fabrizi. Tracy Costin, 46, of Madison, admitted to U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall that she participated in a conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Costin, who owned and operated DataUSA, a survey and polling firm with offices in West Haven and Guilford, faces up to five years in prison when she is sentenced Nov. 30. However a preliminary calculation of...

The owner of DataUSA Inc., a company that conducted political polls for the campaigns of President Bush, Sen. Joe Lieberman and other candidates, pleaded guilty to fraud for making up survey and poll results. Tracy Costin pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Costin, 46, faces a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 when she is sentenced Nov. 30. As part of her plea agreement, Costin agreed to repay $82,732 to the unidentified clients for 11 jobs between June 2002 and May 2004. DataUSA is now known as...

Very funny video. My first montage. I am mostly inexperienced. Most of the photos were obtained of on FR in the last several years.Thanks Guys!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlI0i4A8i6YP.S. While on Youtube, if you have time. Please see my 3 other videos, in one of them I am making an ass of myself. ;-) 

WASHINGTON --Sen. John Kerry didn't contest the results at the time, but now that he's considering another run for the White House, he's alleging election improprieties by the Ohio Republican who oversaw the deciding vote in 2004. An e-mail will be sent to 100,000 Democratic donors Tuesday asking them to support U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland for governor of Ohio. The bulk of the e-mail criticizes Strickland's opponent, GOP Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, for his dual role in 2004 as President Bush's honorary Ohio campaign co-chairman and the state's top election official. "He used the power of his state office...

Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential hopes were sunk when he buckled under to “authoritarian” conservatives hellbent on smearing his military record as part of a larger “proto-facist” movement, says a former top White House aide whose testimony helped sink Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. John Dean, a Republican who served as Nixon’s top counsel, said Kerry slipped up during the 2004 campaign against President Bush by not suing the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth when they published a book calling into question the Bay State senator’s Vietnam service. “What most surprised me is that Kerry never did anything with...

Three Vietnam War veterans who sued over a documentary about Sen. John Kerry's anti-war activities have dropped their lawsuits, leaving just one court fight pending over the 2004 film. Filmmaker Carlton Sherwood says the withdrawal of the lawsuits shows they were frivolous complaints filed by Kerry operatives to try to block the film's release in the final weeks of the presidential race. "We've always believed that Kerry controlled these lawsuits," Sherwood said Monday. The 42-minute film, "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," charges that Kerry's actions as an anti-war activist after his tour in Vietnam harmed American POWs. It also...

In a major national security address Wednesday Democratic presidential contender John Kerry was sounding an alarm about premature U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. “I fear that in the run-up to the 2004 election the administration is considering what is tantamount to a cut-and-run strategy,” Kerry said in remarks prepared for delivery to the Council on Foreign Relations. The Massachusetts senator accused Bush and his aides of a “sudden embrace of accelerated Iraqification and American troop withdrawal without adequate stability,” which he called “an invitation to failure.” He contended that it would be “a disaster and a disgraceful betrayal of principle” to...

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., will this week introduce legislation to pull the majority of U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of 2006, his office announced. Kerry will offer an amendment to the 2007 defense authorization bill. The recent trend in Iraq has been to increase rather than decrease American troops. Earlier this month the U.S. military announced that 3,500 troops -- two battalions of a brigade that was being held in Kuwait as a back up force -- had been deployed to Anbar province, the heart of the insurgency. Those battalions joined another that had already been called...

Writing in Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. assures us that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. This popular conspiracy theory has attracted many Democrats, from the clearly unbalanced to John Kerry himself. (Professor and activist Mark Crispin Miller of NYU says Kerry told him he believes the election was stolen.) Kennedy thinks it's fishy that the recorded vote didn't match the exit polls in four battleground states where Kerry was supposedly ahead. He also thinks the Republicans discouraged voters by creating long lines at voting stations in heavily Democratic areas. But bitter surmise isn't proof. And according to a...