Free Republic

If voters had been aware last year that they might lose their health-care plans when Obamacare went into effect, Republican President Mitt Romney would be sitting in the White House today, according to a poll released Friday. A Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research survey conducted from Nov. 18-20 asked voters who supported President Barack Obama in 2012: “As you may know, millions of Americans have lost their insurance plans despite President Obama’s promise that, quote, ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it.’ If you knew in 2012 that this promise was not true, would you still have voted...

THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG THE BLOG TUESDAY, AUGUST 4TH, 2009 AT 6:55 AM Facts Are Stubborn Things Posted by Macon Phillips Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things." Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions. In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to...

In October 2013, American Principles in Action (APIA) released an analysis of the 2012 election titled, “Building a Winning GOP Coalition: The Lessons of 2012″. This analysis stands in sharp contrast to the Republican National Committee’s report, “Growth and Opportunity Project”, popularly known as the “autopsy.” “Building a Winning GOP Coalition: The Lessons of 2012″, takes a hard-headed, skeptical, and primarily political look at the lessons Republicans must learn from 2012 in order to build a winning national GOP coalition. It challenges the conventional wisdom that the national GOP’s loss in 2012 was a result of a focus on...

According to excerpts from the book Double Down, Mitt Romney seriously considered choosing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as his 2012 running mate. But he didn't, in part because Christie is overweight. Cool leadership, Mitt. The Washington Post got an early copy of the book, and notes several not-very-subtle ways in which the Romney camp made an issue of Christie's weight. For example, according to the Post, Romney's VP vetters engaged in the age-old tradition of blowing their work way out of proportion by pretending it was a high-level intelligence operation. But, man, did they do a lame job of...

President Obama is expected to nominate former Pentagon lawyer Jeh Johnson as the next Homeland Security secretary, ABC News has learned. --SNIP-- Johnson has called working for the Obama administration "the highlight of [his] professional life." "I have been on an incredible journey with Barack Obama ... going back to November 2006 when he recruited me to the presidential campaign he was about to launch," Johnson said in a speech at Yale Law School last year. "I remember thinking then, 'This is a long-shot, but it will be exciting, historic, and how many times in my life will someone personally...

Man-made climate change contributed to some of 2012's most extreme weather, including the spring and summer heat waves that baked parts of the United States and Hurricane Sandy, which devastated coastal communities along the eastern coast of the country, according to a new report. The study, which includes research from 18 different teams from around the world, examined 12 extreme weather events from last year and found that human-caused global warming increased the likelihood of half of the incidents, while the others were dictated by natural weather variability. "We've got some new evidence here that human influence has changed the...

The Justice Department and FBI have quietly acknowledged they grossly overstated the scope of a mortgage fraud crackdown, which the administration heralded with much fanfare a few weeks before last year's presidential election. According to a memo circulated by the FBI and a correction posted online by the Justice Department, the number of defendants, the number of victims and the size of the losses are, in reality, a fraction of what officials claimed last October. Attorney General Eric Holder and other law enforcement officials claimed in early October that the initiative charged 530 criminal defendants on behalf of 73,000 victims...

Blue honey. A literal fork in the road. A text-messaging fox. The strangest stories of the year that are worth another look. 20. Car lands on roof 19. Stolen cash returned… to bank robber 18. The fork in the road is taken [paging Yogi Berra] 17. How do you re-home homing pigeons? 16. Blue honey traced to M&Ms 15. Scottish village gets a "sister city" — on Mars 14. Why the tortoise wouldn't eat [it took him years to decide not to] 13. German civil servant did nothing for 14 years [...is now a congressman] 12. Wanted man turns himself...

In his latest book, Collision 2012, Dan Balz, a Washington Post writer, expresses his incredulity over “the inability” of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign to “humanize” its candidate. This is one reason why, in Balz’s estimation, Romney lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama. Yet there are two other reasons that he supplies to account for Romney’s defeat. The one pertains to the “technically superior” character of his rival’s campaign. The other is in regard to Romney’s “ambivalence” concerning his bid for the presidency. The first thing that should be noted is that if Romney’s consultants had difficulty in “humanizing” their...

The GOP strategist says he tried to signal to the Romney campaign that it should change course, but they didn't follow his lead. A lot has been said about why Mitt Romney lost the presidential election, from his failure to turn out more white working-class voters to his failure to win more of the Latino voters who did turn out. Republican strategist Karl Rove offered the latest take Thursday in remarks detailing how he tried, from his perch at an outside group forbidden by law from coordinating with the campaign, to signal to Romney's team that they should make changes...

In 2008 the American Issues Project released an ad tying Barack Obama to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. “Barack Obama launched his political career with the direct assistance of Bill Ayers.” (VIDEO-AT-LINK) The Obama camp used the DOJ to demand an investigation and prosecute American Issues Project That’s not all… Obama goons threatened 10,000 GOP donors with legal trouble and public harassment if they continued to support Republican candidates. The Wall Street Journal reported, via Jammie Wearing Fool: On Aug. 21, 2008, the conservative American Issues Project ran an ad highlighting ties between candidate Obama and Bill Ayers, formerly of the...

See for yourself. Issa’s committee was told last year that the report would be ready in September, two months before the election. Eight months later, the bomb finally dropped. Why? Did the IG initially underestimate the volume of malfeasance and how long it would take to dig it up? Or are there other, more cynical reasons?Even if the report wasn’t ready, Issa claims the IG had a statutory obligation to keep Congress updated on its findings as they were made. He didn’t. Why not? Issa is referring to part of the Inspector General Act that requires watchdogs to report serious...

The fateful question came from a tax lawyer, in a room filled with dozens of them. It came at the end of a Friday morning panel, on the second day of the American Bar Association tax section’s big annual meeting at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Washington D.C. The moderator had announced that it would be the panel’s last question. “Lois, a few months ago there were some concerns about the IRS’s review of 501(c)(4) organizations, of applications from tea party organizations,” Celia Roady, a veteran tax lawyer, asked Lois Lerner, head of the IRS’ tax-exempt organizations division, a few...

“The day after it happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.” — President Obama, remarks at a news conference, May 13, 2013 Once again, it appears that we must parse a few presidential words. We went through this question at length during the 2012 election, but perhaps a refresher course is in order. Notably, during a debate with Republican nominee Mitt Romney, President Obama said that he immediately told the American people that the killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Libya “was an act of terror.” But now he says he called it...

With each passing hour, it becomes more and more clear that the truth was concealed from the American public prior to the election about two major Obama administration scandals. Benghazi was very much in the news prior to the election. The concealment went to the culpability of the Obama administration in failing to heed warnings about security at the Benghazi consulate, the nature of the pre-planned al-Qaeda attack, the scrubbing of the talking points used by Susan Rice, the failure to go to the aid of Americans in trouble, and the claim that the attack was a result of a...

The State Department, under Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, created an arrangement for her longtime aide and confidante Huma Abedin to work for private clients as a consultant while serving as a top adviser in the department. Connect with NYTMetro Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for news and conversation. Ms. Abedin did not disclose the arrangement — or how much income she earned — on her financial report. It requires officials to make public any significant sources of income. The disclosure of the agreement that Ms. Abedin made with the State Department comes as her husband, former...

The worst possible outcome of the IRS scandal would see it growing large enough to call the legitimacy of the 2012 election into question. Some people reading this might think it’s already reached that point. Others would say it could never reach that point. There is a case to be made that the American system would resist such an outcome, in a much broader sense than merely partisan Democrats in Washington and the media protecting Obama. Among other questions that would give us all pause: what would we do? Hold another election on short notice? Hand the Administration over to...

IRS officials refused to grant tax exempt status two pro-life organizations because of their position on the abortion issue, according to a non-profit law firm, which said that one group was pressured not to protest a pro-choice organization that endorsed President Obama during the last election. “In one case, the IRS withheld approval of an application for tax exempt status for Coalition for Life of Iowa. In a phone call to Coalition for Life of Iowa leaders on June 6, 2009, the IRS agent ‘Ms. Richards’ told the group to send a letter to the IRS with the entire board’s...

It’s becoming quite clear that there’s a new McCarthyism ruling in America. If you’re a conservative or oppose Obama, you can face scrutiny by the IRS or have your information given to George Soros-funded political groups. It’s all meant to keep you in line. In 2012, Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and Al Franken, D-Minn., and five other Democrats signed a letter demanding the IRS target conservative groups or face legislation forcing them to do so...

Responding to a flurry of complaints from conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, the Internal Revenue Service admitted Friday it made "mistakes" in the last few years while trying to process those requests. Multiple tea party groups reported significant delays and excessive questioning from IRS officials while trying to obtain 501(c)(4) status. ,,,, Asked when the IRS began looking into complaints, Lerner said she could not give a time frame. Pressed further on when senior IRS officials became aware of the situation, Lerner said she "did not feel comfortable answering."